By now, we’ve all heard about Twitter’s little break-up with LinkedIn – and discovered the consequence in our now tweet-free LinkedIn timelines.
As social media marketers, this adds a new wrinkle to our already hectic days of trying to juggle multiple social media channels.
LinkedIn may not be the sexiest social network, but it’s still an important one. It’s part of the Big Three (behind only Facebook and Twitter in popularity) and used by 73 percent of marketers, according to a recent study.
So while we wait on LinkedIn’s new update, life goes on — as do social media updates. What do we do now that our handiest shortcut to keeping our LinkedIn presence active has been taken away?
I dug around a little to uncover 10 ways to stay active on LinkedIn that are nearly as simple and painless as our gone-but-not-forgotten-Twitter connection. Check them out and then share your favorite shortcuts in the comments (seriously, I want to steal hear them.)
1. Share Your Blog
Frequent blogger on a professional topic? Tap into a targeted audience for your blog posts and connect your blog to your LinkedIn account. A widget will appear on your profile and new posts will generate a news item in your timeline.
Two different apps from LinkedIn’s Applications Directory make this process seamless for any blog platform. The WordPress app takes care of the most popular blogging software, or use Bloglink for any other platform.
2. Add Presentations
Sharing presentation slides is a great way to build authority in your industry, and LinkedIn makes this simple. Activate their Slideshare app to pull presentations into your profile. Slideshare allows you to customize the look of this widget and even offers LinkedIn-specific analytics about your contents’ views, comments and favorites.
3. Comment On Articles
One of LinkedIn’s newest points of pride, LinkedIn Today aggregates top news for a variety of industries and categories of your choosing. What’s brand new is the ability to like, comment on and share specific stories. It’s a quick and easy way to keep your stream lively and catch up on industry news.
4. Curate Content
Build a reputation for sharing great stuff with your professional network. Using the wonder tool IFTTT.com (If This, Then That) it’s a cinch to activate a trigger that sends items from your Google Reader stockpile to LinkedIn. Even shorter: use this already-created recipe.
5. Join Groups
Did you know LinkedIn lets you join up to 50 groups? Choose wisely and you’ll be hooked into great resources, conversations and new relationships.
Check out the full Groups Directory or choose “Groups You May Like” from the drop-down menu to get plugged in. Just make sure you customize your settings (Settings > Groups, Companies and Applications) to make sure you aren’t getting more emails than you bargained for.
6. Share Your Reading List
The Reading List application via Amazon helps you find out what other people in your industry are reading and lets you recommend great industry books you love.
7. Share Events And Travel
If you’re often traveling for industry conferences and events, two apps can keep your LinkedIn presence hopping. Add My Travel, powered by Tripit, to let your connections know where you’re headed, and the Events app to hook up with others from your network or groups you might want to meet up with at conferences and the like.
8. Show Off Your Portfolio
Those in creative industries or working with creative clients will get a lot of mileage out of Behance‘s partnership with LinkedIn. Connecting the Behance app allows you to pull portfolio pieces into your profile and news feed.
9. Send Posts To Twitter and LinkedIn
If even after all these shortcuts, you just can’t bear to live without duplicating Twitter in your LinkedIn, here’s one way around the ban.
The post-scheduling tool Buffer allows social media marketers to add multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. When you line up a new post, simply choose both Twitter and LinkedIn for the posts’ destinations. Read more on Buffer for LinkedIn.
10. Bring Back The Tweets!
But for a true replication of what’s now missing from LinkedIn we can once again enlist IFTTT, where this (slightly passive-aggressive) premade recipe restores order to the universe and tweets to your LinkedIn profile. Just don’t tell Twitter, OK?
What LinkedIn shortcuts did I miss, and what are your predictions for the new LinkedIn? Let’s discuss in the comments!
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