Are You at Risk of Losing Access to Your LinkedIn Profile?

Now, that I have your attention, please allow me to explain.

BTW I’m not talking about violating LinkedIn’s Terms of Service (ToS) agreement, if you do that then you’re on your own. (Although, someday I may revisit this topic in an article.)

What I’m referring to happens a lot to many, otherwise, careful, prudent people.

It’s fixable in most cases and, believe it or not, LinkedIn has this less of an arduous process than it once was.

Let’s discuss this!

The problem arises from which email address you use with your LinkedIn profile.

Which email address do you use?

Is it your employer’s?

OK, ask yourself what happens if you’re suddenly terminated?

(And, don’t give me that, “It’ll never happen to me! I’m indispensable! Sister/brother, trust me, better than you have been let go for no good reason at all!)

Another wrinkle with this problem is do you have at least one other secondary email address associated with your profile?

Something that’s yours like gmail?

(Please don’t tell me that you’re still using AOL or Compuserve! Definitely neither cool nor recommended!)

Here’s your worse case scenario.

You either lose or change your position neglecting to change your email access to your LinkedIn profile from your old one with your employer.

You then proceed to forget what that old email address was and only realize this when you are in desperate need of that great network of connections that you spent years building.

And, maybe you’ve compounded your error by setting up multiple LinkedIn profiles.

(I’m not making this stuff up, it does happen.)

Fortunately, except in extreme cases, you can get access back to your original profile and merge duplicate ones.

LinkedIn does have a process and clients of mine have used it and it works.

But, you have to do this yourself!

Here’s how!

Select the Help Center option from underneath your profile pull down menu on the command line.

This will take you here.

Under Popular Actions select either Change or add email address or Merge Connections from Two LinkedIn Accounts depending on your circumstances and follow LinkedIn’s directions and you’ll be fine.

It’s that simple!

Oh, that extreme case where you probably won’t get access to your LinkedIn profile back?

That occurs when you only had one email address associated with your profile and you both lose access to it and can’t remember it.

I recommend trying the above process, I just can’t give any guarantees of success.

Good luck!

How do you avoid getting into this type of fix in the first place?

First, have a primary and at least one secondary email address associated with your LinkedIn profile.

(Please remember to write these down somewhere in a safe place with their passwords.)

Next, your primary email address should be one that you either own or can’t lose. (e.g., gmail or your own domain)

Gmail is great for secondaries.

Remember, should you leave an employer (Or, they leave you) you lose access to all your emails!

Finally, never set up more than one profile on LinkedIn.

Doing so confuses people and it isn’t worth the trouble to correct it down the line.

Check your LinkedIn profile out!

Are you in danger of losing access to it?

Follow my recommendations and you won’t be!

That’s it for now!

Please check-out my 8 step approach for developing a social media program to get some more ideas on how to use social media.

Also, never forget to reach out to either ask questions or to ask for help from someone like myself!

In the meantime, thank you for following and reading my blog!

I look forward to any and all comments that you may have. I will reply to any comments made to this blog post as promptly as I can.