Over the last few years many of the social media platforms have been attempting to introduce successful aspects of their competitor’s sites, and today I heard about another example of this – Signal from Linkedin.
Signal lets you search the status updates of Linkedin users for key words. You can then filter these results using the same terms as other searches on linkedin – by industry, time, connection level with you. Watch the video below for examples:
What I like most about this system is the crossover with Linkedin. Of course you can search twitter already, and most sane business users use search more than browse. Twitter, being wide open to google and visible to all users, has its advantages over Linkedin. But what Linkedin has done is to bring search benefits to your linkedin network, and that is added value solely for Linkedin users.
For example, you can now find out who in your network is talking about a specific event and opportunity in real time using their status updates (whether they come from Twitter or not). The video gives several good examples of how this might be useful.
Now that Linkedin has integrated Twitter, has encouraged twitter users to post their status updates on Linkedin and has a search mechanism, is my advice not to update wholesale from Twitter to Linkedin changed?
Previously I advised that non Twitter using Linkedin users may switch off your status updates, and I still think this is a risk. But as Linkedin seeks to educate its users on how to take advantage of search, perhaps we are reaching a tipping point. What do you think?
G8 integration as sometimes LinkedIn can feel a tad flat and just people connecting – I often have people just asking me to connect but with no reason why – numbers over quality disease? But in the case above, I still would not like to receive wholesale updates, only work/business related ones, I don’t’ post all my twitter chats on LinkedIn, I am more choosy about what I post.
I liek the search element, thanks Su.
I think your original advice not to post your Twitter updates to LinkedIn is still valid.. personally I just end up “hiding” the updates from anyone who does it as I can’t be bothered reading that volume of stuff (especially when I probably seen it on Twitter already).
I do think it will increase the incentive to post more targetted, informative LinkedIn status updates (and unfortunately probably a lot more “spammy” ones too) – for example, it might be useful to promote blog posts via LinkedIn as well as Twitter if the titles are going to be picked up in search.
Thanks John.
I always saw twitter’s status update as a good place to ask for help, because for me this is what good networkers do. It allows other good networkers to help them.
However some enthusiastic searching for ‘help’ ‘problem’ and similar search terms on linkedin’s new system didn’t reveal very many. Plenty of ‘look at me’ posts though.