From the category archives:

Twitter

Pulling your Tweets into your LinkedIn Profile

by Sue on July 21, 2010

in LinkedIn,Twitter

If you hang around Twitter-land long enough, you’ve probably noticed people including the “#in” hashtag in their tweets. And you might be wondering what on earth does #in mean?

It all has to do with LinkedIn’s ability to automatically pull your tweets into your LinkedIn profile.

If you want a particular tweet – one that shows how marvelously smart and employable you are – to appear in your LinkedIn profile, you add the #in hashtag to the tweet.

For the tweets where you talk about your love of cheese steak sandwiches, please DON’T pull them into Linked In and leave off the #in tag.

But that’s not all there is to it.  First you have to configure your LinkedIn profile to pull in your Twitter feed:

1. Log in to LinkedIn

2. Click on the “Profile” tab, and then select “Edit My Profile”.

3.  On the Edit Profile page, there is a light blue box on the left of the page, with fields for your name, current job, photo, etc.  Toward the bottom of the box is a field called “Twitter.”  Click on the “Add Twitter account” link next to it.

4. A browser window from Twitter will pop up.  Provide your Twitter username and password, and click “Allow”.  This will let LinkedIn access your Twitter account.

5. Next, you’ll be asked which tweets to share in your LinkedIn Status. Select “only tweets that contain #in”, then Save Settings.

6. At any future time, you can change these settings by editing your LinkedIn profile, and then selecting “edit” for the Twitter info in your LinkedIn profile.

Ta-da!  That’s it.  Your tweets are seamlessly pulled into LinkedIn – on display for anyone who cares to view your LinkedIn profile.

If that magic isn’t enough for you, you can create a  spaghetti like mess of integrations between your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr, and so on.  You can also automatically pull your blog posts into LinkedIn and Facebook. When you create a new blog post, you can automatically send a tweet with a link to all your followers. You can pull your Facebook status updates into Twitter and vice versa. You can pull your Facebook status updates into your blog. And so on, and so on, and so on, ….

{ 0 comments }

Don’t Be Promiscuous on Twitter

by Sue on April 16, 2010

in Twitter

When most people start with Twitter, they get really focused on the number of followers they have.  Makes sense, right?  You want your message to reach as many people as possible, and followers are people who are saying they want to listen to you…

But take it from me, this is NOT what you should focus on.  Instead you need to focus on QUALITY of followers – you need followers that are actually going to read your tweets, that are genuinely intersted in what you have to say, and might ultimately buy from you or refer you to other buyers.

It is EASY to get tens of thousands of low-quality followers on Twitter.

Why (how)?

Well, a lot of Twitter people automatically follow anyone who follows them (they use tools to automate this).  So, if you follow 1000 of these people, you’ll instantly gain 1000 followers. You can even pay a service to do this for you – they keep a list of Twitterers who are known auto-followers, and when you purchase the services use your Twitter profile to automatically follow all these people.  You can become an auto-follower yourself, which will result in even more people following you, and then you get more followers for yourself, …. you get the idea.

So, voila! within a few days you’d have 10,000 followers.

Thing is, these followers are “low quality.”  Anyone who automatically follows anyone who follows them is NOT READING your tweets.  And anyone who is following more than 500 people is NOT reading your tweets.

So, great.  You have 10,000 followers who don’t read your tweets.

And what’s worse is you don’t want to read any of their tweets either (remember, you’re following all 10,000 of them in return!). They’re all out there tweeting about weight loss plans, viagra, “make money fast” schemes, “how to get 100,000 followers on Twitter” schemes (which I already detailed above!), their radical political and religious views, etc.

So, while there might be people that you REALLY do want to follow – thought leaders in your field, people who always post interesting things — well, you can’t even find their tweets because you are constantly inundated by nonsense tweets from all those low-quality followers.

Instead of worrying about your number of followers and participating in one of these crazy auto-follow schemes, be judicious about who you follow on Twitter.

1) Follow people because you are interested in what they have to say.  Strike up Twitter-sations with these folks via “replies” and “retweets”.  They might follow you in return if you tweet about things they find you interesting. And then they might retweet your content to their broader audience of genuinely interested followers.

2) Do not follow anyone just because they followed you.  This used to be considered “good manners” when Twitter was in its infancy, but now it is just insane.  Look up who this person it – if they post things you are interested in or are in your field, follow away!  But if they post about current events in Kentucky (assuming you don’t live there!), gossip about The Hills, and Twitter money making schemes, stay away.  You don’t have to block them from following you, but don’t follow back.

Be VERY cautious about following anyone who has tens of thousands of followers and follows tens of thousands.  This is a sure sign of an auto follower.  And tweets from auto-follower people tend to be quite spammy and self-promotional (although not always – use your judgment).

{ 0 comments }

wordpress hit counter