A lot of people these days using social media have a LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account and increasingly they are linking the two.  This means that every time they tweet it will appear on their LinkedIn connections’ news feed.  It’s a great way for people without a lot of time to get a message out  to different audiences, but there’s the problem.  The two platforms have different audiences and different purposes, and what is appropriate for one audience is not necessarily relevant to the other. 

Personally I am finding that my home page is being inundated with more tweets than LinkedIn updates these days and increasingly they are not about  business.  That’s what I use LinkedIn for and I find myself getting ever so slightly irritated when I have to trawl through lots of updates about people shopping in the supermarket, waiting for a bus or reporting their baby’s first words to find relevant updates. 

Those are entirely appropriate tweets and I would enjoy them in the right context, but I maintain that LinkedIn is not the right place.  My solution is to hide their updates from my news feed and that solves the problem.  The downside is that  when they may post a relevant update on LinkedIn I won’t see it.

So before you decide to link the two take a moment to decide whether your tweets are going to be relevant to your LinkedIn connections, because if not they may decide to hide you from their feed and you won’t reach them with the important messages.