Video from Social Media Keynote in Boston, (first 60 seconds with Mom are awesome):

LinkedIn Speaker & Trainer for Sales, Marketing, and Job Hunters - Patrick O'Malley

How do I fix it if I have to merge 2 LinkedIn accounts/profiles?

How did this happen?

It's not your fault. Many people create 2 LinkedIn accounts. The key is that each profile is associated with an email address, so if people invited you with two different email addresses that you have, you may have created two profiles.

How do I fix it?

You should keep one profile, and delete the other, BUT you should make sure you collect all of the email addresses of the connections that you've made with the second account. Here's how:

Log in to that second account.

If you just have one or two connections,

Click on the name of one of the connections

Look at the bottom of their profile. You will see their email address. Copy it into a file.

Do the same for the other connection(s)

Delete that second account (if you want) by doing the following:

Go to "Account & Settings" in the upper right hand corner

Look at Personal Information on the right, and the 4th element in the list says "Close Your Account". Follow the links.

If you have too many to do using the technique above, you must do the following, which is a little convoluted, and exposes some more of the buggy code in LinkedIn:

export your email addresses to a file by doing the following:

Click Contacts, then Connections on the left hand side of your profile

At the bottom, click Export Connections

Export to a CSV file

it won't do it immediately

you will get a yellow bar on top of your browser, and you must click it in order to download the file

SAVE the file, but save it as a .csv file instead of a text file

open the file in Excel

delete all columns other than the email address column

save the file as a .txt file

look at the video

Give LinkedIn a list of email addresses in a text file

and use the .txt file that you just created as an input file

yeah, it's way more difficult than it should be

Now you want to invite your connections to your original account. I have a 3 minute video which shows you how to do this at

LinkedIn - giving LinkedIn a list of email addresses in a text file

To prevent this from happening again in the future, add that 2nd email address to your original account. I have another video (80 seconds) that shows you how to do this.

LinkedIn - adding alternate email addresses for yourself

To delete the obsolete account, do the following:

Log into that account

yeah, you have to hope you can still remember the LinkedIn password for the account

Otherwise, email customer service at cs@linkedin.com

At the top of the Home page, on the right, click Accounts & Settings

On the right, under Personal Information, click Close Account and follow the instructions

Good luck, and if this is unclear or could be improved, email me at patweb@patrickomalley.com

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