The modern era is a world where many of us live with two or even multiple separate career characteristics. Many people have multiple jobs and since modern social conditions make it necessary for them to show it to everyone on social networks for career success, a lot of us might have this question: Can I have more than one LinkedIn account?
The answer is yes. You can create as many accounts as you want. But is this necessary at all? Many of us may say yes, we should have an account for our full-time job, which is, for example, as a criminal lawyer, so that we can easily interact with professionals in this field and clients all over the world, and on the other hand, our second job is professional photography. Since these two businesses have nothing to do with each other, we need two separate accounts. Is that right?
No, it is not true. As I said, you can have as many accounts as you want on LinkedIn, but this actually takes you away from the main purpose of this social platform. LinkedIn was founded on the premise of bringing people in every profession and industry as closer together as possible.
This is exactly why we always say that connections are your most important asset on LinkedIn. This platform is the only job-oriented social network and therefore it is always recommended to keep your focus on managing self-branding your LinkedIn profile.
When you create two accounts for this purpose, you are actually acting against this advice. You are dividing your attention and focus into two or more categories, which will definitely decrease the self-branding power of both accounts.
If I still could not convince you, keep in mind that having two personal accounts is a violation of the original LinkedIn agreement you agreed to. This means that if users notice that you have two accounts and report this issue to LinkedIn support, LinkedIn has the right to disable both of your accounts without any warning. So, no, you cannot have two LinkedIn accounts at the same time.
If you still insist on having two accounts, I can only offer you one suggestion. Do not use the same name and photo.
This advice may not seem very professional, but at least it will save you from deactivation.
But instead of doing this, I can suggest you to create two separate company pages so that you can use your account for your main job and expand your network to use your connections to progress in your second job.
Let me tell you about an experience I had with a client of mine. One of my former clients had worked as a marketing strategist for almost ten years and at the same time had a great interest and talent in pottery and sculpture. In order to be able to earn money from his second job, he made the mistake of having two accounts, and this caused LinkedIn to deactivate both of his accounts.
He asked me for help to solve this problem. After several emails to LinkedIn support, we managed to reactivate his original account that he used to interact with the market.
Since he was still insisting on developing his art career through LinkedIn, I suggested creating a company page for his pottery brand instead of having a separate account.
This was more logical, better and effective in every way possible. Marketing with a company page is much more effective than a personal account. When he mentioned that people might not trust a company page that is administered by a strategic marketing expert, I asked him to include pottery as her second job in the experiences section and also include it in the title and summary section.
If someone visited His profile through the company page, they would definitely see that he is not just a marketing expert and they would also realize that pottery and sculpting are the second jobs of this person and something that he does out of interest and with love.
Thankfully the idea worked perfectly. Needless to say that he started advertising his sculptures on other platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest as well, but the brand got so popular that he quit his marketing job after a couple of years and focused on this so-called second job.
Of course, he still works as a marketing consultant freelancer and has these marketing courses every now and then, but that company page works like a charm.
Final thoughts
Can I have more than one LinkedIn account? You can always have multiple accounts on LinkedIn for your different jobs, but not only is it against this platform policy, but it also stops you from the ultimate purpose, which is focusing on the connections you made.
First of all, when you add any new position to your LinkedIn profile, the platform automatically adds it to the broadcast, so everyone will notice that you have a second job, when you add it to your experience section.
So instead of creating another account, it is better to add your second job to your profile’s different sections, have a company page for it, and start branding your jobs at the same time. It won’t be easy to make people trust you but we can always try.
Comments