I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while now, so here’s my potted list of reasons that point to why I was delighted when it was announced late last year:

1) Use the ‘reply privately’ button to reignite relationships with those LinkedIn contacts that you’ve been neglecting. It’s sometimes easy to forget the amazing network of relationships that you have on LI, and Twitter is the ideal way of warming up that channel of communication. Send some retweet love.

2) Get better tweets.  The most talkative people on your stream may not be the people sharing the best information – the Status Updates summary of a LinkedIn page allows you access to your ‘inner circle’ of Tweeters; you can also reply to tweets so they land in your contacts’ LinkedIn message box (I’ve had too many experiences with people that never check their DMs!) which means it’s more likely to be pushed their work, rather than personal email inbox.

3) Hunt down Twitter contacts to add on LinkedIn. I wish there was a ‘LinkedIn connect’ function that allowed you to add followers on LI, but the nature of the relationships are very different, so that probably won’t happen. It would just be useful to me as I have good online relationships with quite a few of them! The next best option is just to look your most valuable Twitter contacts up and adding them, ideally after a good DM exchange.

4) Get more visibility for your blog posts. Do you auto syndicate your blog to Twitter? Because the WordPress blog integration tool is so far down my LI profile page that I’ve never got any clickthroughs from it (so says Analytics) you’re more likely to grab readers off LI by syndicating your posts to Twitter instead.  As an aside, be sure to add those posts to ‘news’ pages in groups, if relevant!

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