Bad Idea: Companies creating Personal Profiles on LinkedIn

Lately I noticed a fast growing trend that companies are creating personal (user) profiles on LinkedIn and start connecting with people and joining groups. As an owner of a large Recruiter group on LinkedIn, Recruitment Consultants with over 64.000 members, I’ m getting 100+ requests per day to join. More […]

Lately I noticed a fast growing trend that companies are creating personal (user) profiles on LinkedIn and start connecting with people and joining groups. As an owner of a large Recruiter group on LinkedIn, Recruitment Consultants with over 64.000 members, I’ m getting 100+ requests per day to join. More and more of these requests are from companies (like NAME .COM) and not from a natural person. Last year I saw 1 out of 200+ requests like that, today it’s approximately 1 out of 50!

But don’t that. It’s a bad idea. I understand that you are trying to build a network around your company but this is not the way. First of all, LinkedIn is a PERSONAL and SOCIAL network and its members expect to connect with real people. People want to connect with people. For this reason it’s not allowed by LinkedIn to “Create a user profile for anyone other than a natural person” (see 10.B.5 of the User Agreement). So all the effort you are putting into it now is a waste of time. When LinkedIn Customer Service notice that you are breaching their terms and conditions, your account will be suspended. And personally I hope they start proactively act on these kind of profiles as it devaluates LinkedIn as a professional network.

Looking for alternatives? Ask people to follow your LinkedIn Company Page. Nowadays you can add or change a Company Page to provide more information about your company culture, products and services (free) and job opportunities (paid option). Any LinkedIn member can follow a company to get updates on key developments. For example, see my Recruit2 Company page on LinkedIn, which includes 3 tailor made banners with links to my websites. Check also my step-by-step guide to enrich your LinkedIn Company page with information about your products and services. The disadvantage of a LinkedIn Company Page is that it’s static and you cannot communicate with your followers directly.

If you are looking for more ways to communicate with your audience, you may want to create a Group on LinkedIn. Here you can post discussions and jobs for free, send weekly announcements to all members, see full profiles and send direct messages. LinkedIn Groups, run by companies, are great for connecting alumni or special interest groups.

But the best option really is to let your employees do the communication, using their own personal profiles. Yes I know that’s scary… but people buy from people, not companies.

 

About Jacco Valkenburg

Jacco Valkenburg is an international recruitment expert, trainer and author (5 books). He has more than 20 years experience in global recruitment strategies and execution spanning numerous countries for leading companies. As founder of Recruiter University and Recruit2 he provides companies with recruitment training and consultancy. His mission is helping companies ‘from good to great staffing’.

2 Comments

  1. Hung Lee

    Great point Jacco,

    I think this is a defensive response from companies (recruiters mainly) who see the threat LinkedIn has in mobilising their consultants’ network, and essentially making their client / contact data ‘portable’, with that consultant.

    I would imagine by creating ‘Company/Personal profile’, the thinking behind it is that they can get around the problem by trying to ensure that they still have the connection’s data on a profile that indisputably belongs to the business. How successful this is idea is remains to be seen – for example, how many connections does the avg Company/Personal Profile account have? Not many, I’d guess.

    Instinctively, it feels like a bad idea(!), if not for no other reason other than it runs foul of LinkedIn’s usage terms. And though LinkedIn doesn’t seem to be as active as Facebook is in blocking / disabling these accounts, I’m sure they will become more so once complaints about these are increasingly registered by real-person users.

    Anyone own one of these accounts care to comment?

    Best wishes

    Hung

  2. Dem

    I agree with you Jacco.

    I’ll add something very important. If you were paying for posting jobs or another premium service, and you were using your company as a user profile, get suspended it’s not the only problem. The biggest problem is that your recruiters that were posting jobs or searching talents using this profile, will feel that all the efforts they were doing were in vain. And you don’t want that… i guess.


    Dem!