LinkedIn recently announced a way to allow you to tie your Twitter status updates to your LinkedIn status.  That’s great news!  (Except for those of us who spent hours figuring out the best way to make that happen 6 months ago, of course).

With that capability from LinkedIn, you no longer have to use Ping.fm and a Ping-capable Twitter client (Twhirl ruled for this very reason, and Tweetie for iPhone did as well, but has recently dropped Ping.fm integration in their newest version).
Here is my thoughts on why you would not want to link your Twitter status to LinkedIn:

The audience and messaging is completely different!  The very conversational style of Twitter does not exactly trasnslate to the more static and less-interactive status updates on LinkedIn.  I personally struggled with this for a while before deciding to turn off the old system that I used to achieve this (using Ping.fm).   Many times I didn’t even think about it- but then I would login to LinkedIn and see that my last update was a picture at dinner or something from the previous night.  That wasn’t the kind of content that I wanted people to see on my profile, so I killed it.

This has a lot to do with our discussions in class this week on using Social Media for Business: the importance of maintaining your professionalism on social networks if your goal is to promote/use for your business.

One other thing we covered is the TweetDeck, which recently released an update that solves many of these issues for you.  The latest version (v0.32.0) eases these issues by allowing you to pick and choose which networks you would like to post to:  Multiple Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook (both personal profiles and pages you administer), and even MySpace.  Very cool – check it out!

Now that you know how to create URLs that can be tracked and measured, let’s get into a little more about how you can use them, and ways to streamline the process.

I use Bit.ly links for every single thing that we post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and also in email newsletters.  The majority of this activity is posting on Twitter, so let’s start there.  That is, after all, why these shorteners became so popular in such a short amount of time.

Twitter has that glorious 140 character limit, so we need a way to post succinct links to blogs that have long, SEO friendly URLs (like the one you no doubt see in the address bar of your browser if you’re on this blog).  But wants to go back to the actual Bit.ly site?  That takes too long!  You need a Twitter client that has Bit.ly integration so that it will short the links for you, using your previously created Bit.ly account.

I personally use Twhirl as my desktop client since it has such great multi-account support, but there are other clients out there as well.  Bit.ly has a list of tools you can check out to find something that suites you.

The thing on that list that I want to point out is the Bit.ly Bookmarklet.  This might be really useful for you, since some say that the Web is still the most popular Twitter client.

Bookmarklets

According to the Wikipedia, a bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page.

That means you can add this to the toolbar in your browser, and create shortened, trackable URLs with no effort at all!

So now- I hope that sufficiently explains it.  I have been getting a TON of people asking about this!  We’ll get back to the more esoteric stuff in the next post =)