Link Your LinkedIn and Twit­ter Accounts Together

Back in July I pos­ted a “How to” art­icle which walked you through the steps needed to update your LinkedIn status with your Twit­ter Tweets.

The art­icle has proven to be one of the most pop­u­lar ones on my blog judging by the stats in Google Ana­lyt­ics and as a post; ranks well in Google for search terms such as “How to update LinkedIn from Twit­ter”.

The ques­tion of “How do I update my LinkedIn status every time I send a Tweet through Twit­ter?” is a com­mon one asked by attendees of my Twit­ter work­shops and sem­inars, so I thought I’d update you with another post on the same sub­ject which also gives you an altern­at­ive method; all be it one that still uses the same concept as the one described in my pre­vi­ous post.

So here goes…

Update Your LinkedIn Status Everytime You Tweet

Under­stand­ing The Principal

The mech­an­ism of how this works is:

1. You post a Tweet in the nor­mal man­ner either dir­ectly through the Twit­ter site itself or through the myriad of third party Twit­ter cli­ents and applic­a­tions that are avail­able. For example Hoot­suite and Tweet­deck are too of the most com­mon Twit­ter clients.
2. Your Tweet appears in your Tweet timeline and more import­antly for this exer­cise, the RSS Feed of your Tweets. (In my case, this RSS Feed looks like this)
3. This RSS Feed of your Tweets is piped through to Ping.fm using a Twit­ter RSS feeder tool such as Twit­ter­feed. Ping.fm is a free web based ser­vice that allows to update mul­tiple social media accounts from a single location.
4. Ping.fm then updates your LinkedIn status with your latest Tweet which has been sent to it via your Twit­ter RSS feeder tool such as Twit­ter­feed.

So in simple terms the path a Tweet takes is this;

1. Twit­ter Cli­ent (optional)
2. Twit­ter
3. Twit­ter RSS Feed Tool (e.g. Twitterfeed)
4. Ping.fm
5. LinkedIn Status

Do You Need the Twit­ter RSS Feed Tool?

Fol­low­ing my last post on this mat­ter, some people have asked “What pur­pose does the “Twit­ter RSS feed tool serve and is it needed?”

It is pos­sible to ignore the Twit­ter site and it’s asso­ci­ated Twit­ter cli­ents and simply post Tweets dir­ectly through the Ping.fm web­site. Con­fig­ur­ing Ping to work in this man­ner is straight­for­ward enough and can, at the same time, be used to dis­trib­ute the Tweet dir­ectly to your LinkedIn status. This method neg­ates the need to have a Twit­ter RSS feed tool such as Twit­ter­feed. How­ever I find Ping.fm to be a prim­it­ive Twit­ter cli­ent with lim­ited Tweet man­age­ment fea­tures. But because you can Tweet dir­ectly from Ping.fm — for those that choose to, there’s no need for the Twit­ter RSS feed tool.

What the Twit­ter RSS feed tool does in this pro­cess, is that it allows you to con­tinue using your favour­ite Twit­ter cli­ent. As such, you don’t have to sac­ri­fice func­tion­al­ity for the sake of post­ing your Tweets to LinkedIn by using Ping.fm as your primary Twit­ter client.

How­ever if you like Ping.fm, then fair enough!

Using Hoot­suite to Feed Tweets through to LinkedIn

If you use Hoot­suite as your Twit­ter cli­ent tool of choice as I do, then you can use this great tool as the Twit­ter RSS feed tool in the path I describe about. In oth­er­words Hoot­suite has the dual prop­er­ties of being your Twit­ter cli­ent and RSS feeder tool into Ping.fm

In which case the route your Tweets will take to LinkedIn are:

1. Hoot­suite
2. Ping.fm
3. LinkedIn Status

Step by Step Instructions

You will need…

1. An act­ive Twit­ter and LinkedIn account (obviously)
2. A Hoot­suite account con­figured with your Twit­ter account
3. A Ping.fm account

Step 1

1. Login to your Ping.fm account. If you don’t have an account sign-up for one free at http://ping.fm
2. Add LinkedIn as a ‘Social Net­work’ mak­ing sure that the ‘Status Updates’ box is ticked dur­ing the process.
3. Whilst still logged into your Ping.fm account, go to http://ping.fm/key and copy the long Applic­a­tion Key num­ber that is given to you.

Applic­a­tion Key in Ping.fm

Step 2

1. Login to your Hoot­suite account at http://hootsuite.com
2. Click on the “Set­tings” but­ton in the bot­tom left next to the “Streams” and “Stats” buttons.
3. Click on the “Ping.fm” tab near the top of the page.
4. Paste in the Applic­a­tion Key copied from the Ping.fm site in Stage 1.3 above, into the space provided on the page.
5. Select the Twit­ter profile(s) for which tweets will be sent to Ping.fm
6. Click the “Save Ping.fm Set­tings” button

Adding your Ping.fm Applic­a­tion Key to Hootsuite

That’s it you’re done!

Now, every time you send a Tweet to Twit­ter through Hoot­suite, it will also be set as a status update in your LinkedIn account.

Note: This method will not post the other RSS feeds you may have set up in your Hoot­suite account or Dir­ect Mes­sages (DM) through to your LinkedIn status.

Let me know how you get on by post­ing your com­ments below.

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