Social Media integration just got better - Twitter and Linked-In

Good news for Social Media followers is that Linked-in and Twitter have now announced a long overdue integration between the two sites.

For some while it has been possible to post your content to one Social Media web site and then feed it through a number of others via a network of integrations and data feeds. What matters to the business owner is that they can achieve coverage through more networks and to more people, while minimising the workload on themselves - after all why post the same thing 10 times, when you can post it once and have the machine do the work?

Twitter and Linked-In are perhaps two of the most useful Social Media tools for a business owner, but for totally different reasons.

But first Facebook - why not? Well Facebook may be the biggest network in the world and don't get me wrong, it certainly has its place in your marketing and PR lexicon, but its very nature tends to move it towards its intended groupings - friends and family, and restrict your ability to build and distribute to large and well targeted groups of people. Its great for friends and family however, and pretty good if you don't mind sharing the same information with friends as you do with business contacts.

Linked-In is better for business, mainly because it is for that, and that the right kind of Social Media communications on Linked-In are far less likely to look like an infringement on someone's leisure time. It actively encourages you to form business groupings, inform about your business activities, refer, recommend, and ask and answer business related questions. Linked-In really is the par-excellence business Social Media platform today.

So what of Twitter? Well that is totally different again. It gives very short news updates which keeps everything succinct, but it also allows you to "follow", or be followed by anyone in the world. No precious selection of friends here and turning down requestes from people that you don't know - the ethic of Twitter is very much a free-for-all. This lets you talk to and be heard by a variety of people that may previously have been far out or your easy reach.

Twitter's immediacy is also very refreshing, and it has already become, on a number of prominent occasions the first source of important breaking news anywhere in the world.

But for a Social Media Marketing there is something more prosaic about Twitter - it helps you to distribute your content (or "Tweets") to a large number of other sources. Hence you have for a while been able to send your Tweets to Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, your web site, and a wide variety of other sources. So it really does act as the "Glue to Web 2.0", and a piece of your Social Media toolkit that you really don't want to do without.

So with the announcement of the Twitter / Linked-In integration the circle is complete.

You can now feed your marketing communications (learn to do it nicely please - only the very very slow are still bashing everyone over the head with their sales message) from your web site or blog, via Twitter to Linked-In, Facebook, and pretty much every other Social Media site work their salt - or your precious time!