LinkedIn is great for building connections with people and growing your business. You can use it for content marketing or for approaching decision-makers who can help you grow your business.
But, what happens when it all goes wrong and you don’t know why you have lost access? Here is a brief guide on how to recover your LinkedIn account in an emergency.
How You Can Lose Your Account
False Identity
This should be a no-brainer, but if you have a false account for company purposes and nothing malicious, you could still be at risk. LinkedIn favours total honesty when it comes to profiles as its purpose is to build a community of people. Having multiple accounts could potentially impact whether your account is taken down. Think about it like this, you are less likely to connect with someone who doesn’t have a profile picture, for example, so why would you want to connect with someone who you don’t really know on LinkedIn?
Using Bots
Similar to the point above, automated methods of using LinkedIn to send connection requests or direct messages is not okay. This violates the term of service and you will be penalised. LinkedIn advocates real connections between people to build businesses and their networks.
Excessive Sales Messages
You may think that sending the same template to multiple people to promote your business is fine, but if you bombard people with sales messages it will harm your account. No one likes to receive pushy sales messages as soon as you connect with someone or an impersonal one from an automated system. People can report you and it’s just not worth it. We advise businesses to build rapport with their connections before promoting their services. There’s a right and wrong way to market your business!
Harmful Code
Sadly, people will try this method to try and hack other accounts or push their marketing strategies. You cannot post anything that has harmful code or software viruses on your LinkedIn. You must also not support or develop the use of software to copy data or profiles for your own use.
Opening PDFs or Other Links in Direct Messenger
If you are doing well on LinkedIn or you clearly use it as a sales funnel or your business, you could be at risk from people wanting access to your account. You will get a message along the lines of:
“Hi, I would love for you to take a look at this proposal and give me some costs for a project.”
But don’t open it! These people prey on your desire for new business and they can also be found in the fake “R.e” or “follow up” emails. For more information regarding LinkedIn’s terms of service see the help pages here.
How To Recover Your Account
Password Issues
Sometimes you forget your password. This is the simplest way to lose access to your account. Thankfully, if you can access your email account you should be able to reset your password easily. Once you have got back into your account, why not add a phone number or another email address to prevent you from losing access to your account in the future?
From Hacking
If you notice anything suspicious on your account and your password has been changed, you could have been hacked. This is very likely if you opened any suspicious PDFs or links in your messages. (These people can access your account through your last cookie history on your session.)
Go to: LinkedIn’s hacking recovery page to recover your account.
If You Still Can’t Access Your Account
LinkedIn also has the ability to verify your identity through technology that processes encrypted scans of ID. This normally takes 14 days to process and you will need a smartphone or computer with a webcam, a government-issued form of ID, an email address and access to a desktop computer. Look at LinkedIn Help to find out what photos will be denied or processed.
