The social web can feel very cluttered and overwhelming. We get too much information, from too many networks, too often. Sometimes by taking information away, we can actually gain more.

So it seems with LinkedIn, the network that now has over 10 million British users. Since removing  Twitter syndication, Facebook page referrals from the site have increased by 1000%.

PageLever do analytics of Facebook page data, and conducted this research, producing the following graph:

Twitter’s decision to cut off its ecosystem and API to third party apps now seems to have backfired, as significant traffic is going to its major rival. They want people to come to the Twitter website, but this still requires some referals, not just cutting ties between Twitter and other sites.

LinkedIn users can still manually post things between the two networks, but cross posting is no long automated in the same way as the three year deal has come to an end.

As a caveat PageLever founder Jeff Widman does point out:

“To be clear, LinkedIn wasn’t driving a lot of traffic in the first place, so it’s not that hard to spike by 10x.”

However, such a spike can change peoples usage of social networks. They may become more accustomed to getting information, particularly from brands, no from pages not Twitter, which would have a negative effect on Twitter’s stature.

Widman also goes on to say that  the findings “imply that more people read the LinkedIn newsfeed than I expected,” and “when I compared LinkedIn traffic to Google and Bing, LinkedIn now drives more traffic than the two of them combined.” A significant result for LinkedIn, which can sometimes be ignored in the social web.

In the age of the social web, a web that Twitter helped create, shutting of sharing just simply doesn’t work.