How Should I Utilize LinkedIn Differently than Twitter?
Many of my LinkedIn contacts have started sending me emails asking me to “follow” them on Twitter, so I thought this was a good time to take a look at what you should be doing differently on each site.
Let’s start with LinkedIn. The LinkedIn demographic is 40 million mainly professionals with large incomes. I remember reading on the LinkedIn site that the average income of a LinkedIn member was near six-figure. But LinkedIn is also very strict on privacy and spamming, and there are many restrictions as to how many connections you can have, groups you can join, et. al. LinkedIn is not a garden that you can freely roam about and do as you wish; you need to adapt yourself to its environment in order to thrive.
Twitter, on the other hand, while having what I believe a similar demographic to LinkedIn at this point, probably still only has about 15 million members (I have yet to see the official number, would love your comment if you know). But compared to LinkedIn, with the exception of the limit of adding 1,000 followers per day, is a place for free-thinkers to thrive and for anyone to do as you wish. That being said, what you can do on Twitter is inherently limited to 140-character tweets.
Regardless of your LinkedIn or professional objective, it makes sense to have a presence on both sites customized for each platform. How to customize?
In LinkedIn you should be emphasizing your own professional brand, establishing credibility, and be primarily using it to socially network with other professionals for whatever your objective might be. CONNECT ON LINKEDIN.
Twitter should be about building out your brand and special subject matter expertise and leading people somewhere else, whether it be to your website or blog or even to your LinkedIn and/or Facebook profile. GAIN MINDSHARE ON TWITTER.
This subject could be a topic for a much longer post, but hopefully this will provide you some quick and easy-to-undertsand insight.
Neal Schaffer is recognized as a leader in helping businesses and professionals embrace and strategically leverage the potential of social media. An award-winning published author, frequent speaker at social media events, and an avid blogger, Neal is President of 
Comments
Well said, Neal. A concise summary of these two complementary networking tools!
Thank you Elyse! I try to be pretty thorough in my blog posts, so I will work on expanding my thoughts in future posts, but hopefully this is enough to get people thinking on how each social networking site needs to be used differently.
RT @nealschaffer: How Should I Utilize LinkedIn Differently than Twitter? Some quick advice. http://budurl.com/neal32 #linkedin #twitter
“Connect on LinkedIn. Gain mindshare on Twitter.” That’s the best summary I’ve seen about how to use these very different social networks.
Thanks for the comment JL! Glad it made sense to you.
RT @nealschaffer How Should I Utilize #LinkedIn Differently than #Twitter? Some quick advice. http://budurl.com/neal32 #socialmedia
[...] This post was Twitted by JeffreySummers – Real-url.org [...]
I think the biggest difference is (which is also summarized well in the end) – Linkedin is professional networking VS Twitter (even FB) is social networking.
It’s the basic purpose of joining these two networks is different; however for sourcing candidates – it’s the same. But also, the way you find, connect and engage your potential leads is very different.
Thanks for your contribution Sarang! That’s another good way of differentiating the two sites, professional vs. social, at least in their environment.
[...] How Should I Utilize LinkedIn Differently than Twitter? Many of my LinkedIn contacts have started sending me emails… [...]
Reading: "How Should I Utilize LinkedIn Differently than Twitter? | Windmill Networking" ( http://bit.ly/1deRU1 )
I agree with this philosophy re social media http://bit.ly/fOZ4g Connect on LinkedIn – Gain mindshare on Twitter. They are different things.