Staff Profiles Pointing at a Duplicate Company Page

Three versions of one employer

Open the LinkedIn profiles of the people who work for you and look at the line where each one names an employer.

On some, your logo sits beside the name and links to your company page. On others the name is typed slightly differently, with a grey square where the logo should be, and leads nowhere.

On a few it leads to a second company page: the same name, no logo, a handful of followers and an address you left years ago.

Anyone checking who works for you sees three businesses, and only one of them looks as if it is still trading.

How staff end up in three places

As someone types an employer's name into a profile, LinkedIn suggests matching company pages. Whether they pick one, and which, decides where the profile points.

• Typed, not chosen: the name was saved without picking from the list.
• Joined before the page existed, so there was nothing to choose.
• A page made by someone who left, which nobody can now edit.
• An old business name, kept from before a rename or incorporation.
• Short forms and punctuation: initials, Ltd. or an ampersand, each a separate entry.

The third does the most harm. A duplicate page looks official, with a name and a page of its own, and LinkedIn keeps offering it to the next person who types something close.

What a buyer sees from a profile

People look up staff before they deal with a business: a client before a first meeting, a buyer before trusting someone with a job, a candidate before an interview.

From a profile, the natural next click is the employer's name. If it opens a duplicate with no logo and no website link, or goes nowhere, the trail to your business ends there.

The real page has a quieter problem. It shows how many people on LinkedIn list it as their employer, and a firm of fifteen showing four looks smaller and less settled than it is.

Find every page with your name

Search LinkedIn's company pages for your business name, any former name, the short form staff use and the likeliest misspelling.

Note each page you find: whether it has a logo and a website link, how many followers it has, and how many employees list it.

Then open your staff profiles and note which version each points to. For a business of a dozen people that takes twenty minutes, and it shows the size of the job.

Claim the page you keep

Keep the page most of your staff already point to, which is usually the oldest. Moving a few profiles is easier than moving everyone.

To create a company page, LinkedIn asks for a profile listing a current position at the business and a confirmed email address on the company's own domain. An existing administrator can then add others.

If the only administrator has left, LinkedIn's help pages explain how to ask for access. Once you have it, add a second administrator, so the page never again depends on one person.

After a rename, change the page's name rather than starting another, and mention the old name in its description.

Fill it in before anyone links to it

Staff asked to point their profiles at an empty page will reasonably wonder why, and customers who click through will find little more than before.

Add the logo, fitted to a square so nothing is cropped, and a banner showing real work. Describe what the business does, for whom and where, and add the website, location, industry and size.

Use the same logo you use on your other accounts, so someone moving between them knows they have found one business.

Then post an update now and then. A page with nothing on it since the day it was made looks nearly as abandoned as the duplicate.

A worked example

A lighting rental house for film and television works from a warehouse in an industrial park. About a dozen staff prepare lights, stands, cable and generators for productions and deliver them to set.

Gaffers, who head lighting crews, and production managers look up the people they deal with. One mentioned that a rental agent's profile led to a page with no logo and an address the company left years ago.

The owners counted three versions. Five staff had chosen the original page, four had typed an abbreviation and showed grey squares, and three pointed to a duplicate a former warehouse manager had made.

LinkedIn suggested that duplicate whenever anyone typed the short form of the name, so each new hire who used it was steered there.

One owner, with his company email confirmed, completed the original page: the logo, a photograph of a truck loaded for a shoot, what they rent and where they deliver, and the website.

At the next staff meeting everyone edited their current position on a phone and chose the page from the list. The duplicate was reported to LinkedIn, with a note naming the page to keep.

Asking staff to choose it

A profile belongs to the person, not the business, so ask rather than instruct, and say why: customers look, and a link to the right page helps them find the business you share.

Give them the steps in three lines: edit your current position, clear the company name, start typing and choose the entry with our logo. It takes a minute on a phone.

Add the same steps to the checklist for new hires, beside setting up their email, so the next person starts in the right place.

The counter-case

For some businesses this is a small job rather than an urgent one. A restaurant or a two-person trade whose customers never look at LinkedIn can stop once the page is complete.

Some employees prefer not to name an employer at all, for reasons of their own, and that is their choice to make.

And a duplicate that LinkedIn is slow to remove does little harm once your own staff have moved off it.

Still, one complete page, chosen from the list by every employee willing to name you, is an hour's work that lasts for years.

Before the next staff meeting

1. Search LinkedIn for every page using your name.
2. Note which page each staff profile points to.
3. Keep the page most staff already use.
4. Complete it with logo, description and website.
5. Add a second administrator who works for you.
6. Ask staff to choose it from the list.
7. Report the duplicates to LinkedIn.

Step four has to come before step six. Staff will happily link to a page that looks like their business, and reasonably hesitate over one with a grey square and no description.

Matching the picture across every account is covered in a different profile picture on every network.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.