I’m begging you. Please, please stop pushing your tweets to LinkedIn.

“But Allison!” you cry in consternation, “I don’t have time to post on both networks! By pushing all my tweets there, everyone can keep up with the endlessly fascinating things I’m doing without my having to sacrifice a moment of my time! It’s a win-win for everyone.”

So wrong.

Let me be clear what I’m talking about: this post is not about people who occasionally push well-thought out tweets to their LinkedIn pages. No, this is for all of you who push every brain fart, Foursquare check-in, and one-sided conversation to the ultra-professional LinkedIn network.

You know who you are.

Why is it so bad to push all of your Twitter updates to LinkedIn?

  • You will flood the stream. On average, most people visit LinkedIn once or twice a week to catch up and see what’s new with their contacts. When an avid tweeter pushes all of their content to LinkedIn, they dominate your update feed, making it nearly impossible to see anyone else’s updates. When someone does this to me, I hide their updates on LinkedIn. This means that all of your status updates become invisible to me.  Which means you’re essentially invisible to me.
  • You will bury your best content. When you post every tweet, no one on LinkedIn will read them. This means that you’ll force people to hunt for your best blog posts and your biggest news in  between the noise
  • You will confuse people. There are many, many more people using LinkedIn than Twitter. So when they start seeing random @s and #s in your LinkedIn status updates, they won’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

So now that we’ve established that pushing tweets to LinkedIn is bad, you have three choices:

  • Continue pushing tweets to LinkedIn even though you see how annoying it can be (not recommended)
  • Stop posting any tweets to LinkedIn at all (not recommended, but better than pushing tweets)
  • Post unique posts to LinkedIn once or twice a week (recommended)

That’s all it takes. 30 seconds twice a week to post your best blog post, your biggest news. Your connections will thank you. LinkedIn will thank you. I will thank you.