Ping.fm + Twitter + LinkedIn (Be Careful)

I just wanted to quickly share an example of why it’s so important to keep track of (or have someone keep track of) how your social media profiles are interconnected.

You may have noticed that most websites are social media websites or connected to social media websites to some degree or another (this is the essence of what we are calling Web 3.0, by the way). And if you’ve been using multiple social media services you may have had difficulty keeping up with them at times. Well, that’s why Twitter and Facebook allow other social media websites to plug into them.

Case in point, LinkedIn will grab your tweets and display them in your LinkedIn feed if you connect your Twitter account with it. Some social media services specialize in this, such as Posterous and Ping.fm which allow you to post your status updates to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. Super AAWHmazing! Heck, why don’t we combine them (as we wander past the “Wet Floor” sign)? Well, you can, to an extent. But what happens when, for instance, you tell LinkedIn to pick up your tweets, and Ping.fm to post to your LinkedIn account as well as your Twitter account.

Because it’s not a perfect world yet, LinkedIn currently doesn’t check to make sure you are not posting the same update twice. The moral of the story, don’t run on the wet floor (or be careful).

Actually I currently use Twitter for everything because Twitter can post to most of the other social media services I use. And since Facebook now allows you to enable it to post to Twitter, you can actually use Facebook the same way, posting all of your updates with Twitter via Facebook. There are subtle differences between using Facebook, Twitter, Ping.fm or any other service to centralize all your posting, and even more when you start to deal with images. But those are best discovered through trial and error (ideally with test accounts).