Don't Treat Your LinkedIn Colleagues Like Also-Rans

Apps like TweetDeck and Hootsuite have made it incredibly easy to post to all of your social media pages at the same time. Unfortunately, this leads to laziness and can expose you as someone who doesn't care what their audience thinks, or even who their audience is. Your goal simply becomes "updating" for the sake of "updating," and you want to get it done as quickly as possible.

A key indicator of this is hashtagging on LinkedIn. LinkedIn stopped using hashtags a long time ago. On LinkedIn, they're just spelling mistakes. So why do you still see headlines and posts like this:

How to #win at the #game of #LIFE by #writing hashtag stuff on #Twitter.

The reason you still see posts like that on LinkedIn is because a) the person doesn't know that LinkedIn stopped using hashtags or b) more likely, the person is flicking a switch to send it to LinkedIn at the same time as their Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ accounts. While they've saved a few minutes of time, they've also managed to insult their entire following by telling them, "I haven't signed in here in ages. I'm just broadcasting stuff so you'll see my name every day. I actually don't even know who's reading this."

Craft a Different Message for Each Platform

Different platforms have different audiences and call for different messages. While apps make it easier to send the message to your different social media accounts without having to open them all, you should still be crafting a different message for each.

I saw this comment on one of the forums:

I connect to Twitter and LinkedIn using Hootsuite. I want hashtags to be a part of my tweet but not carry over onto LinkedIn, is there a way to do this?

Yes, there is. Write a new message for your living, breathing LinkedIn audience.