My journal’s out. It’s totally confession time.

When I first got wind that sharing policies had changed on LinkedIn and that tweets were no longer going to be displayed, I blamed LinkedIn. Either I completely missed the part in the notification email that read “Twitter evolved it’s strategy,” or my brain twisted the information because my love for Twitter blinded me from being able to compute the information properly.

Whatever the case, I owe LinkedIn an apology or two.

So, Sorry Linked. Super sorry.

This whole thing is a bit of Social Media Marketer’s nightmare. And, if we’re honest, it’s a big of a cluster eff for everyone. And I mean everyone. AMIRITE? I am. Here’s why:

Twitter looses value. A lot of Twitter’s value is in how it integrates with other services. You take that value away, you upset the customer base. Twitter, almost unlike any other product is built and driven by its customers. To think otherwise is to have momentary brain failure. Twitter takes big risk to rock the customer boat. Ballsy. Major ballsy.

LinkedIn looses value. LI profles have big ties to personal branding. They are an extension of blogs and personal websites. Sometimes they are the stand alone piece of the personal portfolio - although for those who that is the case for, I would suggest it may be time to reassess - but that’s another blog for another time. Sharing tweets is part of that experience and is important to users. 

More work for users. For everyone who wants to make the most out of LinkedIn and build community there, well, you have more on your plate now.  And it’s sad. None of us need more work to do. Where it stands now, you’ll either have to go into LI or schedule an extra message through a social media dashboard like Hootsuite. In a way, I like this. It’s going to cause more careful content curation and I’m always a fan of that. Less spam, more good content. However, I see such obvious alignment between Twitter and LinkedIn messaging. Cross posting the two makes so much sense. 

Content is king. Who said content is king? Oh yeah. Bill Gates. Psshaw. Well. I’ve argued this, but here we are bowing down to the content gods again. Twitter houses our content, in a sense, and they are taking this all in-house. They’re preparing for something. They want all hands on deck. “Why?” is the real question. What are they about to throw at us? I am not without my ideas. Ask me and I might tell you.

I’m darn interested to see how this cookie crumbles. Until then…

Grace and Peace on your tweeting hearts. Confession time is over. Cue the disappointed the “awww’s.”