In James Burnes’ talk on Using Social Media Effectively the other week he made the point of having separate profiles for yourself and your business, even if you have a sole proprietorship, in any social media platform. I’m familiar with Facebook enough that creating a fan page was rather easy. I’m not, however, as familiar with LinkedIn. After the luncheon (and after we again had power) I created the Facebook fan page and then went to LinkedIn to attempt to create something there.
I’ve been using a computer since before I could formulate complete sentences, so I tend to be rather tech-savvy. I’m not going to venture to say that LinkedIn’s method of creating a company profile is not up to usability standards, because now that I know how their methodology makes perfect sense. However, if it was difficult for me to discover, I can guarantee that others have run into the same issue.
I started out by creating a separate profile for Point Brake. That is, I signed out of my personal account and signed up as “Point Brake”. Just from the set-up of the registration page I could see that I was not on the right track, so I moved on to more pressing matters and decided to contemplate it later. Just yesterday I went back to LinkedIn to read up on one of the topics in the AIGA group and finally stumbled upon the correct method in which to create a company profile.
Create Your Company Profile
These steps I am recalling from memory, as once you have created a company profile the appearance of certain things will change. There should be enough detail to guide you through things, but please forgive me if certain phrases are not verbatim or details are omitted.
Step 1: Click on “Companies” (top navigation)
Step 2: Click on “Create Company Profile” (to the right of Search Companies)
Step 3: Give the company name and your email at the company. If you have already created a separate profile and log in for the company such as I noted above, you will need to delete that profile if there is only one email address for the company.
Step 4: Complete the information fields. It rather annoys me that LinkedIn requires 250 characters for the company description, and once you put that many in and save you cannot change the description to anything less than 250.
That’s It!
There are a few other steps, such as uploading your logo and such. Hopefully this helps any of you who struggled to find this on your own.
Note: You cannot delete the profile once it has been created, even if you are the only member of the company. You must first contact customer service. They refuse to delete any company profile unless it is no longer in business.