LinkedIn is stupid. Get used to it.
Some time ago we changed our name. Companies change their names, for various reasons. It seems everyone understands that, except the biggest “business” social network, LinkedIn.
Update: After we published this article, LinkedIn resolved our case. Read at the bottom.
When a company changes its name, it has to change profiles on social media. No big deal, you need to change the name, URL/username, descriptions, cover and profile photos… Recently, we needed to do the same thing. And we had (almost) no problems with that. Instagram, Twitter, Dribble, Behance… everything went well. We just had to wait 3 days for a Facebook to change the name of our page.
But LinkedIn proved to be a real pain in the a*s. Here is a excerpt from Company Name Change Requirements:
Company names can only be modified if the change is minimal, otherwise the profiles of LinkedIn members who are currently listed as employees of your company could be affected.
For example: Company Name Inc. can be changed to Company Name LLC. However, it cannot be changed to something completely different such as Business Name Inc.
If the company is being rebranded and you require a completely different name, we recommend creating a new Company Page. Before creating a new page, make sure you meet our requirements to add a Company Page and make sure that your new company name doesn’t already have a page that exists.
Important: It is not possible to move Followers between different pages, so we recommend posting a company update to let your existing Followers know that a new page has been created.
What this basically means is you have to create new LinkedIn page for you business and you loose all your previous followers. WHAT?! But it’s the same company, same people, same services, same everything… except we have a new brand. No matter what, you have to create a new page name and start from scratch.
OK, let’s create a new page
When googled a little bit and realized we can’t do much, we need to create a new page name. We tried, but we got an error:
I searched for Kontra and found this page, for an organization from different country. This is the email I sent:
Hello, we have a company page https://www.linkedin.com/company-beta/2401089/ . After 5 years, we changed the name of a company to Kontra http://www.media-marketing.com/en/news/akcija-becomes-kontra-full-service-digital-agency/ . I cannot say how stupid is not to be able to change the page name, so we have to create a new page :-/. But even when I try to create a new page and start all over, I get an error message attached. This Kontra has nothing to do with us, it is completely possible that two organizations from different countries have the same name. What should we do?
This is their reply:
Hi Ilija,
Thanks for your interest in our Company Page feature. Because different companies may share a common name, a unique company name is required to set up each Company Page. If a page already exists using your company’s name, alter the name slightly by adding something like a town, state, “INC”, “LLC” or “by owner”. This will help to clarify a difference between the two companies and should allow you to create your Company Page.
Ilija, if you’re still unable to create a Company Page using my recommendations listed above, please let me know.
Long story short, we ended up creating a new page called Kontra Agency. We use Kontra everywhere, but not on LinkedIn, because nobody thought two companies from different countries might share the same name. Now, there are couple of more questions we have:
- What to do with old company page? Do we delete it?
- What about founding date of this new brand, is it 2011. when we started our agency or 2017. when we rebranded ourselves?
- What about our personal profile, am I CEO at Kontra from 2011. or from 2017.?
I can’t believe nobody at LinkedIn thought about this. Microsoft, you paid $26.2 billion for this network, is there someone smart enough to realize they need to change this?
Update March 3rd, 2017.
After we published this post, things got escalated quickly. We got an email from one of the Senior Executive Escalations Specialists at LinkedIn offering her assistance. After a couple of emails, we got what we wanted (and what is “normal”): our old page name has been changed to Kontra and we kept all our followers. Follow us here.
Good thing: We got what we wanted, LinkedIn listens to its customers.
Bad thing: This could be a lot easier.
