Has anyone had experience with “sunsetting” a company page that was acquired?
My firm acquired another firm last year. We have posted about the acquisition on both pages and kept up regular posting but their brand will officially be under our name. So I will be running a campaign reminding people to follow the parent company.
If you have experience in this, what is your best advice and/or what was your process?
You can request an acquired banner be placed on the page that’s being sunsetted. LinkedIn won’t delete that page, out of respect for all the folks who have listed that page as a job in the experience section. Here’s some details: https://www.linkedin.com/help/lms/answer/a565259
Also consider pinning a post at the top of the feed of that sunsetted page that points to your new page. You may even go as far to update other sections, such as name, cover photo, About Us description, etc., to further reflect the acquisition. Every little bit helps!
We’re going through this too and we did multiple posts on the page going away to encourage folks to follow us at our go-forward page, and on that go-forward page, we welcomed new folks and integrated their content into our publishing cadence so that new followers would see relevant content and give us that follow. Included in that was asking CEO to record a video to help personalize the brand change and frame it in a positive light.
We also put some $$ behind it with a paid campaign targeting the followers to add another layer of awareness to the change. And asked all facets across marketing support, such as a mention in email newsletter, a banner on home page of website, notification pop-ups in our software tool and app. And then there’s the internal awareness to line up employees to help get the word out, such as getting the update mentioned on company all-hands and an article in our internal sharepoint site.
I looked at contests and giveaways, but was too much to take on. I worried about any yahoo just liking the page to be entered into a contest and I’d rather have quality followers over quantity, who are going to engage with the content long-term.
In addition to the most of the ideas above, we added an internal campaign encouraging these new associates to make the change on their personal profiles. If you can get the page to under 100 associated employees, you can deactivate it. Most of our acquired pages were much higher than that so in working with our rep and doing the posts noted above and internal communications, the hope is they eventually go pretty dormant. And in the mean time, we continue to monitor what comes in. It’s slowed down for sure, but we still get the occasional notifications.
Hi mvasquez
Instead of Sunsetting I would ask LinkedIn to merge the accounts. This way you keep the followers, as they will be automatically transferred to the new account. (LinkedIn offers this service) I suggest to inform the followers and communicate about the change before.
https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a554310?hcppcid=search
Sofi
mvasquez - LinkedIn changed the policy and acquisition pages could not be merged anymore. I am sorry, in the past it was possibe. But you can move the profile under your company page as subsidiary and they can add a banner when not in use.
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