In Texas, there is a saying: “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” It is not uncommon for the temperatures to swing 30 degrees in one day. The volatility of the weather teaches you to be flexible and prepared. If you are smart, you learn to dress in layers and keep a jacket in your car just in case.

Those lessons in flexibility and preparation I learned in Texas serve me well as I deal with the ever-changing nature of social media.  Just when you think you know the rules, something changes– Facebook announces new features like promoted posts, or Twitter suddenly stops pushing content to LinkedIn.

This latest change may or may not help Twitter, but it is just terrific for LinkedIn. I am a long-time LinkedIn user and I actually log in every day. I post an update and try to check up on my friends. I have always enjoyed knowing when someone changes jobs, is promoted, hires a new employee or wins an award.

We had seen a lot of positive interaction when we shared content good content LinkedIn, because the people coming to LinkedIn are coming for business information. Not much fluff, just very specific business updates. Unfortunately, in recent years visits to Linkedin became less and less productive as people started pushing their Twitter updates to LinkedIn. The information I really wanted to find or share was buried under a steady stream of meaningless updates.

As  if they were personally answering my prayers, LinkedIn and Twitter severed their relationship on the 1st of July and I have high hopes now that the business information we want to share, which will no longer be buried under a pile of crap, will actually get noticed. So far, the change in clickthru traffic to our website have been astounding.  The very first Monday after the split, the content I shared from LinkedIn generated almost five times as much traffic as my best previous update. This was a very popular post, performing well on all platforms. Even so, in the days that followed we continued to see better then average traffic almost every day.

Quite unintentionally, Twitter has made LinkedIn more valuable to its core users like me, people who actually log in and look around to interact with others. I love the new change, but I don’t know how long it will last since this is social media. I am sure  if we wait a minute, something else will change.