LinkedIn Account Dilemma: One or Two Profiles?

Andréa Jones (00:00):
Should you have one LinkedIn account or two. In this short sweet podcast episode, I'm going to lay out the facts and lots of my opinion. Let's get into it.

(00:12):
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(00:58):
For those of you who are new to the show. Hi. Hello, my name's Andréa Jones. I'm a social media strategist. I love building community on social media and I love LinkedIn. I am actually in the middle of my LinkedIn challenge right now that I do every year. It's my sixth year running this challenge, and I noticed something this time around. I had three different people reach out to me and say, Hey Andréa, here's my situation. And basically it boils down to they're trying to decide if they should create a second LinkedIn account. Now, sometimes this can pop up if you have a job, let's say like a nine to five, your employee somewhere, and then you're starting your business and so you're thinking about how to leverage LinkedIn or maybe you have multiple brands, so maybe you own a yoga studio and you also are a photographer.

(01:52):
So do you have both of those on the same account? We're going to talk about how you navigate those situations. The long and short of my answer is no. You should have one account. If I say that and you immediately go, oh, I can't do that. This episode may not be for you specifically, those of you with a nine to five job, and you have that in your employment contract. So because LinkedIn still is very professionally focused, even though it's no longer a resume, sometimes people look there for potential recruitment opportunities, things like that. You may want to think of a different platform. So if this is a huge legal issue or if it makes you deeply uncomfortable to share both topics on the same platform or on the same LinkedIn account, you may want to create something else. Maybe it's an Instagram account that's the name of your yoga studio or your other company, whatever the case may be.

(02:51):
Okay, so maybe it's like a completely separate social media tool that you use. If however, you're like, okay, Andréa, I'm listening, why should I have one account instead of two? Let's talk about it. So first up, the cons of not having two accounts or the cons of having two accounts, it is against LinkedIn's terms of service. So in their account, if you go to LinkedIn help, they have a note here that specifically says creating multiple profiles is not allowed, and they go on to say that it's against their professional community policies and user agreement. Okay, so straight from LinkedIn, you cannot have two profiles, sorry, you just can't do it. It's against their terms to service. Now, of course, most of the time LinkedIn's not paying attention. So if you're sneaky, sneaky, you could set up a different email and create both of those accounts.

(03:48):
But then now you're managing two accounts, two separate accounts, and you're going behind LinkedIn's back here. So you're trying to be sneaky. Two different emails maybe, but it's still your name, right? It's your professional name. And so if someone searches for you, like they type in Andréa Jones, they could see you twice. Depends on how unique your name is. But if they see both my picture on two accounts, that could be confusing. And again, if it's against something else happening in your employment, they can still find you. Okay, you're findable by name. Pretty much anything you put on the internet is findable, okay? So you're not tricking anyone. Also, now you have two accounts to manage Who wants to manage two accounts? I know I don't, I talk about this a lot in episode one 12 of the podcast where I talk about whether you should have two Instagram accounts or not.

(04:42):
Now it's not against Instagram's policy to have two accounts, so I get that question a lot more, but go back and listen to that episode. I'll put the link in the show notes, that's episode one 12 because it's a question that comes up a lot as you're trying to determine your place in the world. I also think having two profiles really doesn't show the depth of your experience as a professional. It kind of misses the point of that. So I want you to think about some of the people that you admire out here in this great world, and I like to use celebrities as an example, simply because we have a very public history of what they're up to. We don't really get the BTS of everybody, but with celebrities, we have a very public and trackable history of what they're up to. So I like to think of someone like Rihanna.

(05:37):
Rihanna is this musician. I love her music. I listened to it back in the early two thousands, which feels wild to say That was my jam man under my umbrella, Ella. Ella, okay, I won't serenade you today. However, I love Rihanna, but Rihanna today does a lot of other things other than make music. In fact, she's very popular makeup line, Fenty Beauty. Now, Rihanna still is her own person. She's an individual, and if Rihanna came to me for LinkedIn strategy, I would say Rihanna, you have your page, you have your LinkedIn profile that you use, that is your personal brand, and if you have new music drop, great. We're going to talk about the music, but if you're talking about Fenty Beauty, we're going to talk about that, probably going to talk about life as a business owner and how you navigate it all and then your other brands will have their own LinkedIn pages.

(06:41):
Okay, so I'm talking about your LinkedIn personal profile here, which is one we use the most. It's one that shows up in the feed the most. It's what I recommend all business owners start with, okay, your LinkedIn profile, the main thing you sign up for, and then for each brand you can create a page. So Rihanna would be Rihanna as her profile, and then maybe Rihanna Music would have a page, maybe Fenty Beauty would have a page, and then the future if she wanted to launch a health drink that would also have its own page and then her team would manage those pages. But Rihanna, the entity, the person, the personality would still have a profile and there is a depth to this that is completely missed. When you create two separate profiles, you're missing the history behind your work. As I'm going through this LinkedIn challenge right now, I showed my profile and online, Andréa Inc is my company, so I have a company page for that that's connected to my personal profile, Andréa Jones, but I also have a company page for the Savvy Social School, so that's a totally separate page.

(07:53):
To me it's its separate thing. I don't post either very much. It's more of like a Yellow Pages landing page experience, but they're there to show my history when I started them both, and I post there occasionally. I also have other things like side projects I've done. I used to run a side business almost called social media for podcasts, and I own social media for podcasts.com, and you can see that. You can see it lasted from, I think it was 2018 to 2020. Then I shut it down. It's still there. It's on there. It's its own entity. You can also see my history from when I worked at Spa Sydell all the way back to the school. I went to Georgia State University, go Panthers, is it Panthers? As I'm saying that, I'm like, wait, is it Panthers? That was 15 years ago. All right. I feel so old now.

(08:55):
Anyways, I have my whole history there. I have my experience working at Marriott in hospitality in Del my internships at marketing agencies. Now we're going back, yeah, 15 years. That is all there. So it shows my depth as an individual, and that's the purpose of a LinkedIn profile. We don't want it to be surface level. We don't want it to be only reflective of where you are currently. That's actually not a great representation of how to use LinkedIn. Perhaps other platforms, when you think about Instagram, for instance, your bio, you want it to look like where you are currently. Some people even go back and delete their old posts. If you want to do that, good for you. I don't recommend it, but good for you. Go ahead. Go on ahead. Most of us like the journey. I'm not less of a fan of Rihanna because she now has a beauty line.

(09:54):
I am not less of a fan. I just understand as a person, as a business owner, she's creating new things. Okay, so when you're thinking about LinkedIn and having these two profiles, I'm saying no have one. And now you're probably like, okay, Andréa, but how do I talk about all of the things that I want to talk about on one profile? Well, there are two ways that you can go about this with a third that's tertiary. I'll say, okay, the first one is campaign-based content planning. So campaign-based content planning. That means your content cycles will be cyclical and you'll go through them as you go through different campaigns and moments in your business. I can almost guarantee you you're not simultaneously spending the exact same amount of time on both projects that you have or all of the projects that you have. You go through seasons, right?

(10:46):
Sometimes let's take the yoga studio for example. Someone who owns a yoga studio. Sometimes there is a period of growth in the yoga studio and sometimes maybe they're focused on wedding season for photography or sometimes they know they can speak on a certain topic from the framework of owning the yoga studio, and sometimes it can speak on a topic from the framework of being a photographer. So we go through the cycles of content planning, and I promise you it's not confusing. That's the biggest thing people tell me is like Andréa, but if I post about different things, people be confused. Are we confused that Rihanna was a musician and she has a beauty line? Is that confusing to you? I don't find it confusing. There's lots of ways that we can do this, and it just comes with educating from your perspective as a business owner, and now you're a business owner with multiple businesses, so you have multiple perspectives.

(11:42):
I think about one of my favorite business owners who I follow online, her name is Myleik Teele, fantastic human being, very interesting founder of Carl Box, also has a podcast, has done retreats. She has a community for black moms that I'm a part of that I love. I'm not confused by all of the things that she does. In fact, I am more impressed with her. I have a lot of admiration for what she does because of it. As another business owner, I'm like, yes, tell me more. I want to hear how you're doing all of this. And she has two kids. It's a similar situation to me, and I'm like, tell me more please. And when she puts out stuff, I'm like, I really want to buy this because I admire you and I love what you're doing. So I think sometimes we feel like it's confusing because we want to be one note on social media and hammer that in, but the complexity of it actually adds such a dynamic to your content that other people do not have.

(12:42):
They do not have that perspective. So think about campaign-based content planning. You can go through the cycles of maybe this month I'm talking about this, or for the next six weeks, I'm talking about that, if that works for you. I also really love a multilayered content planning strategy. So you can do a campaign based content strategy. So talk about certain topics. My preference and what you'll see in my marketing is a multilayered content planning strategy. So there are some times I have campaigns. So for instance, when I was hosting the Savvy Social Retreat this past year, there was a period of time where that's all I talked about y'all. That retreat had nothing to do with social media despite the name. It had nothing to do with social media and nothing to do with marketing. It was a business retreat. It was completely different from anything I've ever done before.

(13:34):
It was one of my favorite moments in history and the marketing of it had, it was multilayered. There was small campaigns, but most of the time I talked about it as I was talking about other things. So you can mix it in and add vibrancy. I like to think of this as a chili, and that could be because I'm making chili for dinner tonight, but we don't just put beef in the chili, right? I like to add beans and corn and tomatoes and a little bit of salsa. It's the whole combination of it that makes it chilly. Maybe I'm just hungry, but when I think about your multilayered approach, that's what you are on LinkedIn. You're showcasing yourself as a business owner and you're connecting with other people, human being to human being. And as humans, we are very multilayered. It's just the way that we are.

(14:26):
Now, if you want to have your content in silo, so you're like, this is a way too different. I can't put this all in the same profile, that's where your pages will come into hand. So the pages that you have, you can post about your yoga studio page on that page. You can post about your photography business on the photography page. The downside is pages are very challenging to grow, very challenging to grow, not impossible, but challenging because now we have an entity instead of a person, a human being, and most people on LinkedIn, they want to connect human to human. It's how the platform is developed. They don't necessarily want to follow a page. There are some pages that are great, but most of the time we go, we'd rather hear from the owner, the founder, the creator. I think pages are great for as you grow.

(15:20):
So for example, I do follow the Marriott page because I am a Marriott Marriott employee, so I see all of their posts and I go, that's nice. Good for them. I don't interact. I don't engage. It's just like keeping up with a place I used to work with at one point in history. I think that's how most people think of pages on LinkedIn. There are a few pages I follow that are industry related. The marketing millennials or millennials marketing one comes to mind where I follow their content. They post a lot of memes, and it's funny and I like it. And so mostly that's how people will view pages. It's good to have a page. I will say the one exception is one of my clients was a virtual paralegal company for lawyers, and that page actually grew much faster than a personal account because of law firms really enjoying the content that was there.

(16:19):
And so that could be an exception to the rule, and you're more than welcome to try it out. I actually find that as people grow teams, pages can be managed by those team members. So you would still manage your personal profile, but then your team can come in and manage the entity, the business page itself. I hope you guys find that helpful. I had so many questions about it. Like I said, during the LinkedIn challenge, so many is three to me, and so I wanted to address it. I will leave you with this little tidbit, which I talked about a few episodes ago on my LinkedIn 2024 episode, which is take a look at Snoop Dogg. Okay, he's on LinkedIn. He clearly has a team posting for him, but he's there and he is a multilayered business owner. So yes, in the past he's known for his rap, but right now he's a celebrity, an entity he invests.

(17:14):
He has a cooking show with Martha Stewart or something like that. He just did this whole campaign about a fricking fireplace that I got upset about over social media. So when we think about our presence as a business owner, it goes beyond what we're doing here now and today, and it's building out a multilayered channel that can grow with us as our business grows shifts and changes.

(17:38):
All right, I'll see you back here soon with a new episode soon. Thank you for listening to the show. If you like it, head on over to Apple Podcasts. Leave us a five star review, Spotify, well you can do that. Helps keep us in the top 100 marketing shows. I'll see you all next time. Bye for now.