Imagine this, you go to log in to LinkedIn and your account doesn’t respond.
Has it been banned?
Have you just forgotten your password?
Have you been hacked?
All there of these things will cause a headache beyond headaches, especially if LinkedIn is your core social channel and you are in a growth, marketing, or sales role.
And this was the reality for one marketing support caller recently, their LinkedIn account had been hacked.
Getting control of your account is outside of our control, you need to contact LinkedIn directly, and the process to do that is here.
What you need to do before
While recovering your account / taking back control, you are at the mercy of LinkedIn and their support channel, there is something that you can do to stop some of the stress though, and that is…Backup Your Data.
You have two options, partial backup, and you can select which element you want to backup, or full, for this example we are going to be focusing on the full backup, because you should be doing that on a regular basis.
The data that comes back includes:
- Profile information,
- Connections,
- Posts,
- Job history
- Job applications
- Conversations
- pretty much every single piece of data that you have in LinkedIn
How To Backup Your LinkedIn
1. Go to LinkedIn
2. Click on “me” on the banner of your LinkedIn
3. Go down to “settings and privacy”
4. Select “Data Privacy” on the left-hand side
5. Now click “Get a copy of your data”
6. And finally, Select the large option (first radio button) and press “Request Archive”
It will take up to 24 hours for the full archive to come through to your email with the data to download, do this monthly or more frequently, and if you ever lose access to your LinkedIn and need to rebuild it when you get access back, you’ll have the raw materials to work with.
What else can I do with your LinkedIn Data
Now you have the data you can run analysis on your audience, your conversations, posts, and start to create a bigger picture of what is working for you on LinkedIn and what isn’t.
Main thing is, don’t panic, if you are taking backups, it will be okay, worst case scenario you have to rebuild your account, and you have everything you need to do that.
What you won’t have is your old photos, PDFs etc. Typically if somebody takes control of your account they don’t wipe out your feed content, just your profile. If you want help running an analysis and implementing a marketing strategy using data, get in touch.
Prefer to hand this over? See how our demand generation works.
