LinkedIn and Twitter announced an integration today that should be interesting.

Starting sometime today, LinkedIn users can automatically feed their Twitter status updates to their LinkedIn status updates. While LinkedIn’s status update feature is right there for all to use, my experience is that people don’t use it nearly as much as they should – or certainly not like Twitter. (Even though LinkedIn has more members than Twitter.) This should be a real shot in the arm to LinkedIn from an exposure standpoint, but it may shake things up a bit too as the volume of status updates skyrockets.

The partnership is significant for another reason. I think this update is a further move towards positioning Twitter as the central content distribution hub for business. Facebook Fan Pages now offer easy Twitter integration and Bing and Google have established official ties with Twitter as well.

The ability to cross post goes both ways.

On LinkedIn

You can post from LinkedIn status and have it update twitter or the other way around. On LinkedIn you will change some setting and then click the Twitter box to have a LinkedIn status update post to Twitter.

On Twitter

The Twitter integration works very much like the popular Selective Twitter App for Facebook, when you post on Twitter and add the hashtag #li or #in the twitter update will also post to LinkedIn.

Here’s the update announcement from the LinkedIn blog: LinkedIn works with Twitter, and vice versa