14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has been on a roll lately when it comes to partnerships. It signed a deal with Bing to provide the search engine with real-time results, and barely a few hours later Google made its own announcement of a similar deal. Now, Twitter and LinkedIn have announced they've reached an agreement and a partnership has been put in place. Unfortunately, it's not exactly what everyone was hoping for from the world's largest professional social network and Twitter, but it's a good first step.
“The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool,” LinkedIn cofounder Allen Blue wrote about the announcement. “Why? Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and LinkedIn to work together. Like peanut butter and chocolate!”
The “peanut and chocolate” deal is pretty straightforward and not particularly imaginative. Users who have both a LinkedIn and a Twitter account can now cross-post tweets on both social networks. They can post a status update on LinkedIn and it will also be pushed to Twitter, or they can tweet something and have it show up on their LinkedIn profile as well. Twitter users can choose if all of their tweets will be pushed to the social-networking site or can select to publish only those using the #li or #in hashtags.
This is all very nice, but it's not what everyone was expecting to hear. A much more interesting opportunity would have been to find a way to make the two services work together for the business folk. LinkedIn is the premiere professional-oriented social network, while Twitter offers some very interesting opportunities for businesses. In fact, there's been a lot of talk about Twitter's upcoming premium services for business users. There is no deal of this sort at this moment, but it looks like it is very much in the plans and it wouldn't be too surprising if the companies announced something like this very soon.