Email received from LinkedIn regarding their new Twitter policy

I received an email today from LinkedIn letting me know that they are changing the way that Twitter integrates with LinkedIn. I have to say it’s about time.

LinkedIn is an interesting place. Unlike Twitter and Facebook, it lacks the sort of social conventions that make a community feel like a cohesive space. Some LinkedIn users are there to sell. Others are there to share their professional wisdom. Still others are there to network and make connections. Reading your stream on LinkedIn can sometimes make you feel like you’re reading an aggregator of disperate content rather than the output of a single community.

The previous Twitter integration lead to a stream of stuttered, inconsistent posts. Theses posts, written for twitter, included hashtags, @usernames, broken english and other conventions of the network they originated on. Worse, Twitter users post far more frequently than LinkedIn users, so these posts dominate LinkedIn feeds.

So in my mind, this is a wise move on the part of LinkedIn. It will encourage content on LinkedIn to be written in the style of a LinkedIn post. Furthermore, it will encourage developing what that style is and allow the community to come a little bit closer to being on the same page.