Be glad Twitter broke up with LinkedIn

You date a girl for all that time, you give her all that great stuff, take her on dates to see those sappy girl movies, and then she dumps you for Steve McStud-o-bicepts because he has the really cool hair that has the swooshie thing at the front.  Well that's the situation with Twitter giving the old heave-ho to LinkedIn this week.  What does this mean to you as a small business owner?  In the past, if you created a Twitter post thingey (called a tweet), you could add "#li" in your tweet and that little code gizmo told Twitter to also post your tweet as an update to your LinkedIn profile.  This was looked at as a time saving measure whereby you could update both Twitter and LinkedIn at the same time (oh, and by the way, on your LinkedIn profile, there's also a place to post updates, for those of you that don't know).

Twitter has decided to bite the hand that feeds it by canceling this ability.  Not a smart move in my opinion, but it's no dumber than those nimnods at Netflix who decided it would be a good idea to separate their DVD vs streaming services.

Anyway, I'm really not that upset with this Twitter/LinkedIn spat.  Why?  Because you shouldn't be using the same text to post on Twitter as you post on LinkedIn (or any other social network) in the first place.  The reason I say that is because the viewers of  your different social networks have different expectations of what they want to see from you on each social platform (click the link and look for "The Social Breakup").  Twitter followers expect one type of post, Facebook fans expect another, and LinkedIn users a third.  The short of this is that you need to customize each post you place on each different social platform.  So, loosing this functionality isn't really much of a loss.

If you want to help streamline your control over posting to each different social network, try installing the Shareaholic plugin  in the Google Chrome browser.  It will at least help make the process somewhat easier and faster.