Listening to LinkedIn Contacts

LinkedIn has been accepted and embraced by business while Twitter has been blocked by many IT departments as a security risk. CIOs and CEOs may not have noticed that LinkedIn has two direct connections to Twitter. The twitter handle listed in your profile and the Application Tweets. What I am proposing is using Twitter to listen. You can have a Twitter account and not post to it. This might loosen the noose that IT has imposed on the enterprise.

For those that list their Twitter handle in their LinkedIn profile, Tweets extends the ability for you to listen to those you follow. It also has a tab for your LinkedIn contacts. The tab aggregates all your contacts that list a Twitter handle and provides a handy follow button.

Why is this important? If you are keeping in touch with your contacts, it stands to reason you can achieve a closer business relationship by knowing what your contacts tweet about. This also holds true with contacts that blog. These creators of content are using social media to share their expertise and often provide gems to improve productivity, enhance relationships and display thought leadership.

Now if you can’t get IT to change their minds about Twitter then start reading the blogs your contacts write by using the LinkedIn app BlogLink. It aggregates all the blog posts of your contacts and you can set it to display on your LinkedIn Home and not your profile. This can build trust and stronger relationships quickly. This is business development basics! You notice when someone takes the time to comment on your blog or mentions the topic you blogged about in a phone conversation.

I shared this information as a guest speaker for the AZ Entrepreneurs group in Scottsdale this morning(Yes they are a LinkedIn group) and I’m sure some of them have already added the apps. I know a few have already invited me to join them on LinkedIn (still waiting to see a few Twitter followers).

After you try Tweets or BlogLink tell me you wished you knew about how to use these LinkedIn apps sooner. I’d also liked to hear about your success stories, so bookmark this page to come back and comment.

Please also consider sharing this with your business contacts too.