LinkedIn Twitter App Review… Maybe or Maybe Not!

Last week, LinkedIn, announced some new updates that let’s users connect their LinkedIn connections with their Twitter connections.

In theory, the application sounds great.

You’ve done all the work at building your LinkedIn Connections.

You jumped on Twitter, to start building your personal brand, or keep up to date with companies and news, etc.

The only problem, you have all these contacts in LinkedIn, and you don’t have the time to find and follow them on Twitter.

There are 2 specific new functions that I think are Excellent…

1. You can quickly see which of your LinkedIn connections HAVE¬† added the Twitter app to their LinkedIn Profile. This is really important when you are trying to make contact with your connections, or possible employees in companies during a job search. Having a quick link to find their Twitter account, and then connect with them is great. (Note, the app will only show your connections who have added the Twitter Application to their LinkedIn Profile, NOT all of your connections who use Twitter. It does not search Twitter and find your connections, and their twitter accounts… that would be cool, but probably not going to happen any time soon.)
2. Create Dynamic Twitter Lists, based on your LinkedIn connections. This makes a lot of sense, especially if you are actively building your brand with LinkedIn and Twitter. If your connections are on LinkedIn, it’s a pain to find them all and then try to add them to a specific list on Twitter, and then maintain that list. The new LinkedIn Twitter app upgrade will do this for you… That’s what’s so cool about it… at least I thought.

This Sounds great… but it doesn’t seem to work.

Granted, I have over 10,000 LinkedIn connections, and over 5,000 Twitter followers, and this might have been part of the problem.

However, you would think that they might do a little alpha or beta testing with some LinkedIn and Twitter power users, and then say the App is in Beta, and give users a way to send specific responses about how the application is working (or not).

I keep getting a response saying: An error occured. Please check back later or try refreshing.

Problem is, I tried it at least 10 times, at different times through the day, on both low usage times and more moderate usage times, for both Twitter and LinkedIn, and from servers on multiple continents. The results were the same..

My suggestions to LinkedIn: “Try Refreshing, or Check back later”...

I’ll keep you posted on how good their customer support is… especially for a power user, who teaches people how to use LinkedIn, and have over 10,000 connections.

You can also follow along, by connecting with me on LinkedIn, or by following me on Twitter:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/JonathanDuarte
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanDuarte