Twitter continues to spread its wings across the Web.
On Tuesday, LinkedIn and Twitter announced a partnership to bring tweets to LinkedIn, the social networking site for professionals. This comes on the heels of announcements by Microsoft and Google that they would incorporate tweets into their search results.
The partnership with LinkedIn affirms Twitter’s role as a network for professional conversation. More than social sites like Facebook, people use Twitter to keep abreast of professional news and share links to articles about their industries.
“Twitter is not only a massively open platform, but also it’s a place where there’s a tremendous amount of professional information already being shared, and we wanted to be sure that was coming to our LinkedIn user base,” said Allen Blue, LinkedIn’s co-founder and vice president of product strategy.
LinkedIn’s 51 million members will now be able to send status updates — such as the fact that they are looking for an analyst on a certain topic, or posting a job opening — to Twitter on a case-by-case basis, and vice versa. People will also be able to add a section to their LinkedIn profile that contains their most recent tweets and view other people’s tweets when searching LinkedIn.
Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn’s chief executive, said that he wants LinkedIn to be the hub for all professional conversation. Integrating tweets into LinkedIn will help them find a home where they will become part of someone’s professional identity, and conversations will develop around them, he said.
What does the partnership mean for Twitter? It will have broader reach, particularly in the professional sphere, which is important because Twitter plans to make money by helping businesses make the most of the service. But whether and how the partnership will be an immediate source of revenue for Twitter is unclear. Like Microsoft and Google, LinkedIn would not share the financial details of the deal.