Today I’ve just stumbled upon the following situation. One of my connections in LinkedIn works at Island Holiday Rentals but when you move the mouse over the current position she appears to work for TinyURL. You can see this in the attached picture. I tried to figure out what happened and why LinkedIn decided that she works in some other place and here are the results:
1. Her company site is a Facebook page. The link to that page was shortened with TinyURL. The link to her page is
2. I went to the TinyURL company profile from LinkedIn and I found that there are 285 other people that are in this situation: they appear as working for TinyURL but they are entrepreneurs.
3. There are others that appear to have worked at TinyURL but in their profiles appear other companies names.
4. I’ve gave a look to the bit.ly (another URL shortening service) and here I found other 253 “employees” that have in their profiles other companies. I even found somebody that appears to be working at Google when in fact his profile says he is a freelancer. Luckily for Google there are a lot of people that work really for them.
5. I did also a search for Facebook. The first results were people that used their company Facebook page instead of their site. I total there are just 89 results for Facebook.
In conclusion it seems that if you enter a web address for the company you work for and this is shortened with an URL shortening service you may appear as working to that web service instead of the one you work for. It will also index your profile based on that service name. LinkedIn looks at the domain name of the company URL and trims everything that is after the domain name. For the example above the link http://tinyurl.com/yfl55cr gets trimmed to http://tinyurl.com and this is the employer that will appear when you go with the mouse over your current position.
My advice is to take some time and create your company profile in LinkedIn (even if you are the only employee) and buy your own domain and use it as your company address.
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