Do you have two or more LinkedIn Profiles?
DUPLICATE LINKEDIN PROFILE // Do you have two or more LinkedIn profiles? 🤔
As I say in my📘 book, ⭐LinkedIn for me, you should only have one LinkedIn profile because you can only be one person.
You can still do different things and list them separately, but you should only have one LinkedIn profile.
Now, how could have this happened?
You have probably created a LinkedIn profile with one email address and one password, couldn’t necessarily log in or forgot the password.
So, you created another one with a different email address and a different password. 🤭
Now, the good news is if you can reuse that old email address and sign into the account, you can merge the accounts and I’ll put the link below.
But if you can’t remember the password from that original account, you will need to reidentify yourself with LinkedIn. That could involve using a third party app to scan your passport, which is not that great.
✅ So, if you need some extra help, please reach out. Thanks and bye for now.
#sueellson #linkedin #duplicateprofile
Two or more duplicate LinkedIn Profiles
If you have two or more duplicate LinkedIn Profiles in your name…
1. Visit each LinkedIn Profile and copy/paste the LinkedIn URL into an email to yourself so you have the details of each LinkedIn Profile.
2. Visit each LinkedIn Profile and from the More or Resources button, left click on your mouse and choose ‘About this profile’ and write down the date each profile was created and add that to your email to yourself.
3. Hopefully, you know the email address and password for each profile! Each profile will have been created with a different email address so it could be an email address you used a long time ago.
4. Let’s assume you can sign in to one of these profiles because you know the email address and password for that one profile. Please respond to any invitations to connect and messages and then request a full archive of all of your LinkedIn Data at this link https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data. Then sign out of that profile.
5. Let’s assume you know the email address and password of the duplicate/s profile/s. Sign in to each profile and respond to any invitations to connect and messages and then request a full archive of all of your LinkedIn Data at this link https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/download-my-data. Then sign out of that profile.
6. Wait a couple of days to receive an email/s from LinkedIn with a link to download your data and as soon as you receive the email for each LinkedIn Profile, click the link and download the data. Make sure you have done this for all of your LinkedIn profiles.
7. Now ideally, I recommend keeping the ‘oldest’ LinkedIn profile or the LinkedIn profile with the most Connections. If you choose to merge the two LinkedIn profiles, it will only keep the profile information from the ‘keeping’ profile and you will lose the profile information entered on the ‘merging’ profile but your Connections will be merged and added to the keeping profile. So before you do this task, copy paste any of the content you need to keep from your profile you are merging in the email to yourself.
8. Now, assuming you can login to both profiles and you have your backup of your content entered on your profile and you have a full archive of your data from LinkedIn for both LinkedIn Profiles, you can merge two LinkedIn profiles via this link https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/ask/MDA. If you have three or more LinkedIn profiles, you may need to repeat this step and be very careful about which LinkedIn profile you are keeping and which one you are merging.
9. If you do not have the password for your other LinkedIn Profile/s, you can sign out of the account you are in and try signing in to the other LinkedIn Profile with the email address that was used to create it and choose ‘forgot password.’ Hopefully, you still have access to the other email address and you can go through and reset your password.
10. If you do not have access to your old email address and cannot reset your password, you may be asked to download a third party app to re-identify yourself by scanning a government approved document. I would only do this as a last resort if you had a lot of Connections on that account.
11. Your alternative option is to create a Help Ticket with LinkedIn and let them know what email address was used to create the duplicate account and ask them to merge or delete it (but I can’t guarantee this will work) https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/solve/contact (you would also lose any data from that other account).
You could also try this option if you have more than two LinkedIn accounts but you will still need to give LinkedIn as much detail as possible about the accounts including email addresses used to create it, date of opening (see 2. above) and they may still reject your request.
Your final option is to ‘keep using’ the one LinkedIn Profile that you do have and forget about the duplicate LinkedIn Profile/s. Personally, I think it looks unprofessional if you have more than one LinkedIn Profile in your name and people may accidentally try and connect with the wrong LinkedIn profile as well so you could be missing multiple opportunities. I realise this is a time consuming task…but it is necessary ‘housekeeping.’
How to prevent this
To prevent this from happening again, please sign in to your retained LinkedIn Profile and add all of your email addresses, current and past, to your account at https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/manage-email-addresses (even if you can’t verify each email address but don’t add an email address if the organisation’s social media policy prevents you doing this – for example, you work for a government department) and don’t ever remove an email address from your LinkedIn profile.
This will mean that you cannot accidentally create a duplicate profile again because the email address will already be associated with your main LinkedIn Profile. I also recommend turning on two step verification at https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/two-factor-authentication.
These instructions were current at the time of publication.
You can access free LinkedIn Help at https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin.
If you would like my professional assistance on a paid basis, please contact me directly for an appointment.
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