Twitter, LinkedIn sync status updates to hone in on the professional market

Twitter and LinkedIn are syncing status updates as the microblogging network looks to serve a growing number of users who are tweeting for business purposes. In many ways, Twitter has become like a living resume — people use it to promote their ideas, to build relationships or to do research by asking their followers questions.

Sending status updates to LinkedIn also fits in with Twitter’s distribution strategy. Rather than trying to keep status updates within their network, they’ve syndicated them out to others like MySpace and AOL. (Twitter can also publish tweets into Facebook’s stream, but Facebook will not allow its status updates to go the other way into Twitter.)

So how does it work? The deal will allow LinkedIn users to tweet directly through their status updates on the professional social network’s site (see below).

Going from the other direction, Twitter users can either send all of their tweets to LinkedIn or they can selectively send a few by including the hashtags #li or #in. (See below.)

In this video (with terrible music), Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sits down with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman to explain the partnership: