Twitter too noisy on LinkedIn

After LinkedIn announced Twitter integration in November, many LinkedIn users jumped straight in and connected their LinkedIn account to Twitter. Today many happily mix professional and personal tweets and broadcast it all onto LinkedIn – effectively reducing LinkedIn’s value and usefulness.

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn and liked it when status updates were added in 2008. Perhaps an obvious attempt to mimic Facebook, but it added value to me as a useful way to keep in touch with business contacts.

Unfortunately today when I log onto LinkedIn, it ruins my experience to see that 9 out of 10 status updates are coming directly from Twitter. Retweets in particular are totally meaningless without the context. At least the Twitter interface itself often offers me the chance to click the “in reply to” link to get more details on the conversation.

Tweets directly on the LinkedIn interface

 

Sharing that you have been promoted with your LinkedIn contacts makes sense, but all those Bob Dylan tweets from the pub should really remain away from LinkedIn. Some might prefer Twitter – or perhaps even Facebook for this – but not LinkedIn.

To make matters worse, some LinkedIn users have even installed a Twitter widget displaying all recent tweets on their LinkedIn profile. That’s just total overkill for me. I could opt to click on the Twitter link if I were really that interested.

If you are a LinkedIn user, my recommendation would be to tailor your status updates to the LinkedIn audience or only display selected tweets, e.g. using the #in hashtag.

If you are working at LinkedIn and reading this: You have a great service, but I’m hoping that your 2010 product innovation will refrain from further attempts of copying Facebook and Twitter.