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.