LinkedIn is the premier professional networking site. It’s invaluable for building professional connections, establishing yourself as a leader in your field and for getting answers to business-related questions.

One of the nice features of LinkedIn is its status (or network) updates. These appear in your profile just below your profile picture and name and title, so they’re highly visible to your profile visitors. 

Up until today, the only way to update your status in LinkedIn was to visit your page and type it in. Now, LinkedIn and Twitter have joined forces, so you can now tweet your status updates directly from Twitter (or your Twitter app of choice). You can also update your Twitter timeline from LinkedIn.

It worked seamlessly when I tried it. On your home page is your status update box with a checkbox next to the Twitter icon.

LinkedIn profile status update with option to update your Twitter timeline

Click this and you are taken to the Twitter app page where you sign in with your Twitter user name and password. Back on the LinkedIn page you have a couple of options, such as including all tweets in your LinkedIn profile, or just those with the #in hashtag.

It took a minute or two for my first tagged tweet (from Twitter to LinkedIn) to appear, but thereafter the update was right away. 

Likewise, posting from LinkedIn to Twitter was seamless and took no time at all to appear in my Twitter timeline.

This will greatly enhance the value of the LinkedIn status updates, and will probably boost use of Twitter by LinkedIn users who are not completely sold on it.

Here is a screen shot showing the new feature in action on LinkedIn.

Your tweets can now be fed to your LinkedIn profile.

Instructions on configuration and options are available on the LinkedIn blog.