LinkedIn & Twitter Join Forces

Yesterday LinkedIn announced the formation of a new partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter. In the following video, Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, gives a run through of why the partnership is so important to both companies, and what uses can expect to get out of it. Joining Stone, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, describes the partnership like peanut butter and chocolate. For those of you who don't like peanut butter, the rest of us think this sounds delicious!

In the last year the adoption of Twitter by businesses and marketing agencies is well documented and the number of case studies starting to come out of the woodwork shows numerous highly profitable ways for Twitter to add real value to campaign activity. Moving on from this, Twitter has spent a considerable amount of time in the last year looking for different avenues to integrate Twitter with other platforms and services, and it looks like this might be the one. Stone remarks, "[Twitter is used on a] personal level in business and that Twitter has essentially become part of your resume". He adds, "The general idea of putting a little twitter in everything is being able to inject into LinkedIn a little bit more of this fresh here's what's going on with these other things, but with a little bit of a curated sense in terms of your professional life."

So what exactly does this partnership mean?

When you change your LinkedIn status you can now tweet it too. Simple really. Over the next few days LinkedIn will rollout the service and it will be available through two touchpoints:

1. On LinkedIn
First you need to connect your Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, allowing them to share articles you’re reading and alerting people. Doing this will be fairly easy by ticking the Twitter box on the LinkedIn homepage.

2. On Twitter
When setting up your connection you can choose to either send all tweets or selected tweets to your LinkedIn profile as a status update.