Twitter, LinkedIn Get Together: How to Get Started

LinkedIn and Twitter announced a partnership on Monday that will allow you to tweet your LinkedIn status or stream your tweets to your LinkedIn profile. Twitter cofounder Biz Stone called called this “bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination.”

This partnership cuts down on your time spent visiting multiple sites to post status updates and allows you to reach a broader audience. Have a question about open source? Now both your LinkedIn connections and Twitter followers can weigh in at once.

Do be wary of your two audiences, though. Remember that LinkedIn is a professional network, so share your tweets accordingly.

This feature will roll out to everyone over the next few days, so you may not see the feature immediately. Here’s how it works.

How to Add Twitter to Your LinkedIn Profile: Log in to your LinkedIn account and click “Edit My Profile”. Choose “Add Twitter account”. Once you verify your Twitter username and password, choose whether or not you’d like your Twitter account visible on your profile. Note that your Twitter account must be public and not protected.

How to Share Updates from Twitter to LinkedIn: Visit your “Twitter Settings page”. You’ll see an option to share only tweets that contain the hashtags #in or #li, or not share tweets at all. Including these hashtags will allow your tweets to auto-update on LinkedIn.

How to Share Updates from LinkedIn to Twitter Check the box next to the Twitter icon on the LinkedIn homepage. You’ll be asked to verify your username and password. Whenever the Twitter box is checked, that update will publish to your Twitter feed.

Kristin Burnham covers consumer Web and social technologies for CIO.com. She writes frequently on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can follow her on Twitter: @kmburnham.