One of the nice features of LinkedIn is its status (or network) updates. These appear in your profile just below your profile picture and name and title, so they’re highly visible to your profile visitors. 

Up until today, the only way to update your status in LinkedIn was to visit your page and type it in. Now, LinkedIn and Twitter have joined forces, so you can now tweet your status updates directly from Twitter (or your Twitter app of choice). You can also update your Twitter timeline from LinkedIn.

It worked seamlessly when I tried it. On your home page is your status update box with a checkbox next to the Twitter icon.

LinkedIn profile status update with option to update your Twitter timeline

Click this and you are taken to the Twitter app page where you sign in with your Twitter user name and password. Back on the LinkedIn page you have a couple of options, such as including all tweets in your LinkedIn profile, or just those with the #in hashtag.

It took a minute or two for my first tagged tweet (from Twitter to LinkedIn) to appear, but thereafter the update was right away. 

Likewise, posting from LinkedIn to Twitter was seamless and took no time at all to appear in my Twitter timeline.

This will greatly enhance the value of the LinkedIn status updates, and will probably boost use of Twitter by LinkedIn users who are not completely sold on it.

Here is a screen shot showing the new feature in action on LinkedIn.

Your tweets can now be fed to your LinkedIn profile.

Instructions on configuration and options are available on the LinkedIn blog. 

I put together a nuts and bolts guide to launching your business into social media space: where to start, and how to evolve your presence. It doesn’t have all the answers, but it distills some of the key principles, do’s and don’ts.

I loaded it onto SlideShare where it got more than 1,000 views in three days. Here it is for my fellow TwitterThinkers. (Click the link if the presentation doesn’t load.)

For details about Hootsuite, including a screenshot of the dashboard, see the introductory post. Here’s today’s recommended step:

8. Manage multiple users
As a small business owner or as leader of a communications team, you want to harness the power of Twitter. But that requires commitment of time that you just don’t have. So you need to delegate. If you want a variety of posts at different times, you can allow selected people to have access to the account. 

But it can soon get out of hand. What if you let someone go, and they still have access? Or what if you have several Twitter accounts that each have several users? Ta da! Hootsuite to the rescue.

If you have more than one person managing your Twitter accounts, Hootsuite allows you authorize each user on separate profiles as needed.

1. Click the “Settings” button.
2. Click the “Users” tab.
3. Click “Add a New User.”
4. Enter the person’s name and email address.
5. Click “Add User” button

Hootsuite will send a password to the user. The user follows the online instructions and is then given access to the account.

Step 7. Embed columns into your website
A powerful feature of Twitter’s API that has been incorporated by Hootsuite is the ability to create content you can embed in your own website. If you embed Twitter’s RSS feed, you’ll need to style it yourself. But if your CSS skills are a bit shaky, that can be more effort than it’s worth. Enter Hootsuite! Within Hootsuite you can style the column feeds more or less to your liking and then just copy and paste the code into your website where you want to embed the feed. Here’s how:

1. Create your column using the Create column function. You can create a new column with the Search function (#5 above)
2. Click on the <> symbol (rollover text says “Create embeddable column”).
3. A pop-up appears allowing you to specify the title, box size and basic colors. You can also specify the refresh mode, whether streaming or various time intervals.
4. Click “Grab code” and copy.
5. Paste the code into the HTML of your Web page.