Below is the transcript from the video “How to Export your Contacts and Email Addresses from LinkedIn.”
“Hello my name is Greg Hyer, cohost the Linking in Sales Social Selling Podcast. Today is Monday, July 27th 2015 and today I’m going to show you how to export your LinkedIn connections.
“Last week LinkedIn actually pulled the ability for you to export your connections. And through reaction from the community both on Twitter and via an email barrage into customer support, LinkedIn has actually reversed their decision and has turned on the ability for you to export your connections.
“Now, it is important to keep in mind that LinkedIn is a platform that you don’t own and you should know how to take and export your contacts, your first degree connections from LinkedIn in the event that they decide to pull the plug on this in the future. Which it’s pretty likely that they will because they are looking for faster ways to make information available to users but also they want to limit the amount of misuse of LinkedIn.
“Anyways, besides that LinkedIn has a very incredible strategy. It is still one of the best b2b marketing platforms and selling platforms that are out there. So I strongly recommend to continue to use it but at least understand how to export your connection. So that’s where we’re going to do today.
“Right now you’re looking at my profile page. If you click on profile you will actually be able to see your profile page as well. So, let’s go over to the menu bar and click on “Connections.” And from here you’ll see a list of all of your recent connections that you’ve had if your Facebook and Twitter accounts and Gmail accounts are all connected into your LinkedIn account. Then you will also see your most recent interactions here first.
“So, what we’re gonna do is go over to the “Settings” gear button, which is on the right hand side, and click on that button there. And you will see a list of all the API connections that are coming in and out of your LinkedIn account. For example, you have your LinkedIn connections, your Gmail account, your Google contacts, Google Calendar Yahoo accounts going all the way down to other applications and such. Okay? So look over the right hand column. Click on, underneath “Advanced Settings,” click on “Export LinkedIn Connections.” Alright. You’ll be taken into an option to export depending on a file format that you want.
“Your options are going to be Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo Mail, Mac OS Address Book and the vCard file format. The first three, the two Outlook formats and Yahoo Mail are all CSV file formats. Those will open up in Excel. The vCard format is very easy to import into Mac address book on your Mac OS as well the file will open up in Excel. If you’re importing into Outlook I suggest using the Microsoft Outlook format.
“What it does and what each of these formats do is actually put the correct headers at the top up the spreadsheet so that way when imports it can properly map the fields correctly in your address book. If you’re using Gmail or Google Apps, the mail application there or Google Contacts, I recommend using Microsoft Outlook CSV file format because it will matchup those fields automatically too.
“Alright. So, go ahead and click on Microsoft Outlook and hit export now. I when I first did this when I was running through this before recording this video, it did come up with a captcha screen which wanted you to verify that you are not a robot. It had a little image and it said to type in the numbers that you see here. Just enter in that information and go. That’s a security feature to help prevent the bots from going into somebody’s account and downloading that information automatically.
“What you just saw here is my file was downloaded and if I open it up in Excel, which I am not going to do here for the demo, because it shows people’s email addresses it will actually give you five pieces of information from the LinkedIn contact record those five are first name, last name, email address, company name and their job title. Things like their location, our country there in, what industry that there in or anything like that does not come out of your LinkedIn account. That is very unfortunate but that’s why there are third-party tools like Nimble.com for you to take and capture that information when you’re viewing the person’s profile.
“So, what you do for example is taking a CSV file imported into Nimble. Just goto Nimble.com. It’s about fifteen dollars a month. Go into Nimble and import your connections and then go back out to your LinkedIn account and as you’re interacting with with folks as reaching out to folks, you can synchronize information using the Google Chrome extension. Which you can see, I have here on my Google Chrome toolbar. I’m not signed into it right now but take a look at that. It’s a very, very cool tool. I think you get a quick trial of the software before signing up.
“You can also take and import, like I said, import into Microsoft Outlook. I believe Outlook has a Social Connector where it can pull in some additional information there for you too. I recommend taking a look at information because as someone who is in social selling having that additional information is always very handy when having a conversation was somebody new somebody trying to develop a professional relationship with.
“Once again, my name is Greg Hyer, co-host of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast. Please subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube and Stitcher, Tunein and Player.FM. We also welcome all of your emails and questions and things that you like to see, anything here on the podcast. Head out to LinkingIntoSales.com and fill out the Contact Us form and we’ll get that information right back to you.
“Thank you very much and have a great day.”
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