Could a lost connection be the best thing that ever happened to LinkedIn?

In an effort to gain control over the spread of their content, Twitter recently started clamping down on competing social networks that that pulled heavily from their API (Application Programming interface). The first target? LinkedIn, the rapidly-rising professional social network that had used Twitter’s posts to populate its own news feeds.

But maybe this was a good thing.

An opportunity, created

Writing for VentureBeat, guest blogger Cameron Yuill, the CEO and founder of AdGent Digital, argues that, by Twitter effectively blocking LinkedIn from importing tweets onto their platform, it created an opportunity for LinkedIn to woo users over in their direction — so, rather than posting on Twitter, they reach their business peers on LinkedIn’s news feed.

Instead of stifling LinkedIn, Yuill argues, “Feeds are now full of relevant engaging posts because LinkedIn users post stuff they think will be relevant to their audience – that is the personal connections they have as a result of belonging to an industry.” In fact, Yuill argues he was inspired to write his piece after seeing a business post that had many more LinkedIn shares than Twitter shares.

Dangers to watch out for

@jeffhurt thanks for the tweet! STILL trying to get issue resolved by LinkedIn…shockingly they’re seemingly in no hurry to fix it.

@jeffhurt thanks for the tweet! STILL trying to get issue resolved by LinkedIn…shockingly they’re seemingly in no hurry to fix it.

— maggielmcg (@maggielmcg) September 12, 2012

 

But LinkedIn may be no saint either: As with any third-party community platform with conflicting business interests, there is danger in giving a social network control over your community, as Maggie McGary, Online Community & Social Media Manager of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), recently wrote on her Mizz Information blog. Last month, she made her frustrations with LinkedIn known:

“So what happens when you disable discussions for a group of almost 10,000 people and they no longer are spending that time on the site and no longer clicking through from digest emails? Linkedin doesn’t like it and overrides your group preferences,” she wrote in response to frustrations she had over moving her community to a private network.

Which begs the question: Do associations need contingency plans when dealing with social networks? It’s not unheard of for free networks to start charging, or well-known social platforms to shut down entirely.

What’s your plan for dealing with the wobbly changes of social media?