LinkedIn Pet Peeve

Do you let LinkedIn post your tweets automatically as your LinkedIn updates? Here is a reason why that might be a bad idea: If you tweet too much, I may just hide your status updates in LinkedIn completely – not just your tweets, all your status updates!

In my opinion, when LinkedIn tried to get on the Twitter band wagon, they made a big mistake: When you connect a Twitter account to a LinkedIn account, you have a choice of either automatically posting every tweet to your LinkedIn status, or just the ones that are tagged with the #in or #li hash tag:

For the latter case, a Twitter user who tweets something that might be appropriate for LinkedIn can tag the tweet with #in and have it show up on LinkedIn automatically. That’s not a bad idea, and I’m fine with that. It gives the user control over what gets shared, and what not. Twitter and LinkedIn (or in general, all the social media platforms one uses) serve a different purpose, and in general it’s not a good idea to post the same message to all these platforms -but sometimes, there is something that should be shared across all services. The hash tag approach gives the user that control.

The “annoy all my LinkedIn connections with my most trivial Twitter drivel” option however really annoys me. One of the most attractive features of Twitter is that tweets have a limited life time. When they don’t show up in the small window of the Twitter timeline that I’m looking at, they don’t exist – unless I’m using search. I don’t have to read them, I don’t have to deal with them, I can safely ignore them. And I do! When they show up in my LinkedIn status updates however, I can no longer ignore them, and even more annoyingly, they push real status updates off the end of that page.

I wish LinkedIn would give me an option to hide all Tweets (or at least those that don’t have #in or #li in them). Because I don’t have that control, I do the next best thing: If your tweets on LinkedIn annoy me, I will hide your status updates.