Is LinkedIn growing at the expense of Twitter? The answer may be yes and LinkedIn may have Twitter to thank. Recently people have noticed and reported that LinkedIn is having more “shares” than Twitter has tweets. This is especially true with news stories regarding business and the economy.
It all began with greed, Twitter’s greed. In July Twitter stopped allowing users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. The reason would seem to be that only tweets contain ads that generate revenue for Twitter. While social media aficionados might not appreciate this, from a business standpoint or at least Twitter’s, it seemed to make sense.
Straightforward greed did not work. Faced with posting tweets to an uncertain audience on Twitter v. known connections of LinkedIn, more have chosen to post on LinkedIn instead of Twitter.
Additionally, without the automatic feed from Twitter the quality of LinkedIn shares has improved immensely. Will LinkedIn send Twitter a thank you note? That remains to be seen.
At Applied Interactive we are increasing our clients use of LinkedIn while maintaining the level of posts we do on Twitter. Applied Interactive clients can benefit from exposure on both social networking sites, but my bets are on LinkedIn ascending. LinkedIn is getting it right, adding value, and building community. Twitter may play to the TMZ crowd, but I don’t see that having equivalent value.