Jane Harrell, co-owner of Working with Dog and founder of ’cause Digital Marketing, holds Office Hours with Jane twice a month, and members of Working with Dog can ask any burning questions they have about business or marketing.
Question:
Hi Jane. I just discovered that I have THREE LinkedIn profiles. How do I delete the two I don’t want any longer? Can I still have my old contacts on the new profile that I want to keep?
Expert Jane Harrell responds:
For LinkedIn, is there a reason you want to delete the other two accounts? If it’s a different business, industry, or significantly different target audience, you may want to have more than one. (Note: This is technically against LinkedIn’s TOS, but I’ve found it an effective strategy for entrepreneurs who have feet in two very different careers – like human big pharma and pet products.)
LinkedIn does its best to understand who you want to connect to and tries to facilitate that. So, if you have a lot of photographers on your contact list, LinkedIn will assume you want to know more photographers. Same goes for retailers, small business owners, etc. So, ultimately, you want to keep a narrow focus for who you really want to work with.
Ask yourself: Is there a reason you need to delete the other two? If not, consider focusing on the one and growing your audience there while just keeping the other two quiet for now.
If you do decide to delete the other two accounts, you can download your contacts by following these instructions.
Keep in mind that this will not download profile links or emails, so you’ll have to do a little legwork to add and preserve those.
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