Changes at LinkedIn May Require Revisiting Your Automatic Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Feeds

As Adam Nash explained in the May 25th LinkedIn blog post, a significant new application has been added to LinkedIn’s Twitter integration feature launched November 2009.

The new module – “Connections to Follow” – recommends “new people for you to follow [on Twitter] based on your LinkedIn connections.”

I have now gone to my LinkedIn profile, clicked on the nav button “More,” then clicked on “Applications Directory” and clicked on “Tweets” to add that application to my profile.

(And what I found surprising – if I understand this new application correctly – is how few of the people I’m connected with on LinkedIn (I currently have 4597 connections) have Twitter usernames that they’ve included in their LinkedIn profile.)

I clicked “follow” next to the names of people I’m connected to on LinkedIn who have included Twitter usernames.

But now the effective use of integrated Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn becomes even more murky than it already was:

If we start from the premise that we do NOT want duplicate tweets or status updates on any of these three social media sites, how do we ensure that whichever automatic info exchanges we’re using don’t duplicate each other?

Let me give you an example with the assumption that you have a WordPress blog whose feed you wish to share on social media sites:

If you have an automatic blog feed into Twitter (through twitterfeed.com) and an automatic blog feed into Facebook through the Facebook blog feed application and an automatic blog feed into LinkedIn through the LinkedIn WordPress blog feed application, then you should NOT be using an automatic tweet/update function between your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.

If you are using the automatic update function among these three sites, each one will have the blog feed link at least three times because of the automatic sharing. (I say “at least three times” because the more I think about this I realize it could be more than three times, depending on how the automatic software actually works.)

Are you totally confused? I am. Because it is totally confusing – and a possible solution also depends on which of these three sites you use as your “primary” site – the one you interact on most frequently.

Thus, because my favorite site is Twitter, I use the selective tweets function for both Facebook (#fb) and LinkedIn (#in or #li). Also, I use the automatic blog feed for Facebook and LinkedIn, but not for Twitter (particularly because twitterfeed has a weird way of bringing in the blog post feed).

If you look at my Twitter account (@ZimblerMiller), when there’s a new blog post from the Miller Mosaic company site, I publish the link myself on my Twitter account but do NOT add #fb or #in because my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts will get the feed automatically (although the feed into both Facebook and LinkedIn can take many hours.)

If it’s a tweet not connected to my blog post link, I’ll usually add #fb and/or #in (depending on what the tweet says) in order to send the tweet through to my Facebook account and my LinkedIn account.

And FYI: My tweets with #fb automatically go to three places on Facebook: my profile page, our company’s page www.facebook.com/bookmarketing and our company’s page www.facebook.com/powermarketing

Here’s my question:

Does anyone know of a software application that “maps” out all these automatic and selective connections in a clear presentation so we can figure out what we’re doing?

© 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic Power Marketing. Learn about the new Miller Mosaic Inner Circle monthly membership program at www.millermosaicllc.com/join-miller-mosaic-inner-circle/

Tagged as: Adam Nash, blog feeds, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

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