Have run into this lately at my company where the parent company has acquired multiple other companies in the past few years.

In a perfect world, you would have the overarching company/brand with a company page and the sub-brands organized via spotlight pages. Spotlight pages function exactly the same way a company page does, but ladder up heirachically to the parent company’s company page. One major, if not THE major, benefit of this is that if the organization uses Sales Navigator, your reps can identify which of the spotlight pages an individual has followed beneath the overarching company page, which can allow messaging/outreach tailored to those interests and even cross-selling opportunities.

In reality, if the family of companies was built through acquisitions and mergers, the pre-existing sub-brands probably already had their own own, pre-acquisition company pages which will not be able to be converted to spotlight pages, so the Sales Navigator heirarchy point is probably moot.

As far as the employees go, which company they list as their employer likely depends on the long-term goals for the company. Will the sub-brands remain as distinct companies? If so, the employees can keep that brand listed as their employer. If the goal, long term is to merge the sub-brands into the parent brand, then a strategy and timeline for changing up how they list their employer can be developed.

Are you sunsetting the other brands or keeping them around?

In a past life, we kept the brands and it was a nightmare because we were cross posting or employees identified with the wrong company.

You can change the information on the old brand to mirror the parent brand, and then merge the page.

Then, the parent brand retains all of the followers, and then the employees profile should automatically say they work for the parent company.

You can submit a LinkedIn ticket for this and they’re super helpful. 

I went through this a couple of years ago with a Dental Group. There was a Parent Dental Company than individual offices. 

We looked into the organizing with Spotlight pages but employees who worked at the individual weren’t able to say there were employees at their own Dental Practices just at the parent company. This didn’t make sense because dentists couldn’t align themselves with their own practices. 

So we went the sub-brand route. 

It was easier for the employees to identify that they works for the dental practices A or B. While only the accountants and insurance specialists who truly worked only for the parent company could align themselves with them.

Plus the patients didn’t really even NEED to know the parent company exists. The content for the practice pages was targeting patients while the parent page was targeting dental practice owners. This also helped decide that this was the best route for us.