Can I automatically tweet my LinkedIn updates on Twitter?

You're in luck, actually. It used to be that each of the social media services was its own little world, what people called the "walled garden", and while that term was most often applied to Facebook, LinkedIn really was pretty unplugged too. In fact, it wasn't that long ago that the only way you could post a status update to more than one of the major social networking services was to use a third party app like Seesmic Desktop or Tweetdeck to inject it into their datastreams.

Nowadays, fortunately, things have eased a bit and the companies that run these popular services recognize that none of us want to live exclusively in one little world, but instead seek what you do: ways to bridge and connect them together.

Even better, LinkedIn has its own LinkedIn -> Twitter application and it's not that hard to find either. :-)

Jump on to LinkedIn and when you go to enter a new status update, you'll find that there's a tiny little Twitter icon and a check box adjacent:

(I've highlighted the Twitter checkbox with a red box in the picture above)

Click on that little check box and *poof* a big new window shows up:

Enter your Twitter credentials for your account, then click on "Allow". It checks with Twitter to ensure you have entered a valid account and proper password...

Now you have a chance to tweak what it's going to show and what information it can pull from your Twitter stream and use as automatic status updates on LinkedIn too (a neat feature: it's a bidirectional gateway!):

I strongly recommend against having every Twitter update (aka "tweet") show up as a LinkedIn status update too. It's a matter of community best practices: on Twitter it's a good idea to have multiple updates during the day so you can stay in the visible stream, but on LinkedIn, even an update a day is pretty active in that world. Don't drown your LinkedIn connections with too many updates.

When you're done, click on "Save Settings" and you're back at the LinkedIn status update where you started out. Enter a status, click on "Share" and you'll get the usual status update:

This time, though, it's a tweet too:

That's all there is to it. As long as you ensure that the little Twitter check box is checked when you enter your subsequent LinkedIn status updates, they'll show up as tweets too. Nice, simple and easily implemented.

Tip: Looking for me on Twitter? I'm @DaveTaylor and I'd be happy to have you follow me, dear reader.