  LinkedIn is the largest professional network in the world. As such, it can
serve to build bridges between practitioners, whose daily work is software
engineering (SE), and researchers, who work to advance the field of software
engineering. We know that such a metaphorical bridge exists: SE research
findings are sometimes shared on LinkedIn and commented on by software
practitioners. Yet, we do not know what state the bridge is in. Therefore, we
quantitatively and qualitatively investigate how SE practitioners and
researchers approach each other via public LinkedIn discussions and what both
sides can contribute to effective science communication. We found that a
considerable proportion of LinkedIn posts on SE research are written by people
who are not the paper authors (39%). Further, 71% of all comments in our
dataset are from people in the industry, but only every second post receives at
least one comment at all. Based on our findings, we formulate concrete advice
for researchers and practitioners to make sharing new research findings on
LinkedIn more fruitful.
