With the announcement yesterday that LinkedIn and Twitter have inked a deal, the gradual meshing of your digital footprints continues. 140-character tweets can now appear as status updates on both LinkedIn and Facebook pages. (Note that you can control which tweets appear on Facebook and LinkedIn by tagging them, respectively, with #fb or #in.) Impressively, an @TwitterName in your tweet is also an active link on LinkedIn, meaning that you can click and go directly to that Twitter page.

That's a bit of technology that's ever so clever, as it makes the language of these different platforms seamless. As you may already know, Facebook now makes a clickable link to a friend's page when you start typing a name with @ in front of it.

If the preceding paragraph is gibberish to you, let me translate: say it once online, and it will appear in multiple places. Keep it concise and interesting (140 characters allows more room than you think). Start on Twitter where an increasing number of solopreneurs, small businesses and brands appear and your digital footprint will magically reappear on your LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

And yes, the days of saying, "but I / we really don't need to be on one of those time-wasting social networking sites" are fast drawing to a close. If you can't provide a link or URL defining yourself online, then you basically don't exist. Another way of saying that is, "If you can't be found on Google, you don't exist." Really.

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