LinkedIn and Twitter: an acrimonious split?
Twitter’s decision to cut the apron strings with regards to LinkedIn throws up a whole host of possible motives, as well as a handful of potential challenges for the latter.
Users may have noticed, when logging on in the past few days that the usual feed of tweets from connections, or personal Twitter posts on the side of a LinkedIn profile have disappeared.
The loss of Twitter could present a problem for LinkedIn, a view expressed by Mike Isaac in All Things D: “Losing Twitter could hurt LinkedIn’s user engagement, as much of the content flowing through users’ feeds was integrated tweets.”
With this in mind, why has Twitter decided now to take such bold action and potentially damage its former partner?
A logical step?
Isaac goes on to argue that we should really have expected this: “As Twitter matures, tightening the reins makes sense. LinkedIn’s deal, and other syndication deals like it, essentially works against the entire aim of what Twitter has been trying to accomplish over the past eight or so months.”
Pointing to the extensive redesign of Twitter, and its growing influence in the bulging social media marketplace, this begins to make sense. Why spend time enhancing the visual impact, ease-of-use and internal development of your website if all the content can be hosted elsewhere?
This begs the obvious question: who is next to be cast adrift? There are a host of websites that are heavily linked to Twitter, including HootSuite, TweetDeck and Flipboard.
The company certainly appears to be serious about monetising its user experience and making the most of the service, which now has 10 million users in the UK, according to industry estimates.
Not only this, but it is believed that around 80% of users access Twitter through their mobiles.
The advertising potential here is something Twitter will undoubtedly want to grab with both hands: why offer a service to others if it either makes less money, or doesn’t generate any significant revenue at all?
What about LinkedIn?
It ought to be said straight away that those neat feeds you were used to seeing won’t be coming back. There is now an opportunity for LinkedIn to move away from direct integration with social networking – it also should be emphasised that users can still post to Twitter from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn won’t be expecting to suffer too heavily, however. The company has already taken the time to sweep away concerns over the LinkedIn Today service, which was at one point partly-powered by Twitter.
A spokesperson said: “Tweets have not been powering LinkedIn Today for some time.”
Very matter-of-fact, and reassuring for the professional networking website, which according to its own data had 161 million registered users worldwide – and nine million in the UK – as of 31 March this year.
What do users think?
Convergent media specialist Graham Lovelace, director at Lovelace Consulting said: “I tweet largely on the future of media and principally the future of TV.
“My Twitter and LinkedIn accounts were synced and all was fine until a few months ago when Twitter first removed the LinkedIn feature. For a while I used the #in hashtag to get content into LinkedIn, but then gave up.
“A year ago this would have been more of an issue. Back then most of the people I wanted to talk to or reach were just on LinkedIn. A lot of them have since migrated to Twitter and most of my interaction now comes via Twitter and not LinkedIn. I no longer scroll my LinkedIn timeline as a result – Twitter is the place to be.
“That said, I like the group interaction on LinkedIn – the ability to start a conversation on a specialist, niche subject, or respond to a query. That’s something Twitter hasn’t cracked, and this doesn’t appear to be on their radar, so the two can live side by side for a while yet!”
Friends, frenemies and rivals?
Does this move by Twitter to safeguard the interests of its own software and development, as well as protect its potential and existing income, herald yet another marker being put in the ground by one of the new breed of major players, coming soon after Apple appeared to strike Google off its Christmas list?