You Ask, I Answer: LinkedIn Contact Export Data Details?

In today's episode, Keiko asks, is it possible to download LinkedIn contacts with city or state location? Thank you. Uh out of the box, the answer is no. In the official LinkedIn export, which you get from your uh if you go to your profile settings, go to account, um, I think you go into it, manage your data. Uh, you can request an export of your LinkedIn connections, and what you get in that file is first name, last name, title, company, and connection date.

That's what's in the file. Uh, you no longer get any form of contact information except for those very, very few people who consent to having their email address listed publicly. LinkedIn took that away. Um November 2018, I believe it was, because way too many marketers uh were exporting their LinkedIn connections and then just adding every single person on their to their email list, and well, that's A, it's against the terms of service, but B, it just irritated a lot of people. So that's no longer available.

Uh, and that would have been the easiest way to do that. So there are um third-party options. There are a number of vendors that have created tools that will uh against the terms of service, scrape LinkedIn profiles, uh your first degree connections, and assemble a download with all the relevant information. Those tools will likely get you banned. Let's put that out there.

Those tools will likely get you banned, and the reason for that is they they're against the terms of service. They by crawling the LinkedIn website at speed, uh, they are a resource drain on LinkedIn. And here's the funny thing: each of them, because they are all paid services, uh they have certain API calls, they have certain things of their own that the LinkedIn engineering team has sensibly built tools to identify to ping them. And if they're installed in your browser, you're in violation, your your profile gets flagged, and uh you get banned from LinkedIn, which is kind of against the point, whole point of LinkedIn. You don't want to get banned.

So, uh, how do you do this? The simple, straightforward, long-term play that requires time, requires effort, requires resources, but is a valid workaround that obeys the terms of service, is this on a regular frequent basis, share content on LinkedIn that people go to your website, fill out a form where you can ask them these questions, like your city, your state, your country, all that stuff. And as long as the content is sufficiently compelling enough, a certain percentage of people will do it. So that requires having content that people actually want, um, and that they're willing to fill out a form for, and it requires your time and effort over a long period of time to consistently share this thing, to give it away, um, collecting that information. So it's gotta be great, it's gotta be free, it's gotta be something that you promote on a regular basis, and it has to be valuable to your connections, and you will get a percentage of your connections to convert.

It's no different than any other lead generation program. And you can absolutely run ads uh to your connections, your company's connections, all that stuff to promote this thing, and you'll get that data. Now, the question is is that data valuable? It can be, especially, especially if you're on the form you're collecting email addresses. I would also suggest that all of your form pages.

Well, I would suggest that you create a landing page specifically for LinkedIn, you only use it on LinkedIn, right? So that it is likely not guaranteed, but likely that the traffic going to that page is from LinkedIn. And I would strongly encourage you to encourage to install some ad cooking software on there, uh, ad tracking software that allows you to enrol the people who visit that page into a tracking audience. Um I use a company called Stack Adapt, which you'll find uh link in the show notes below. Uh and when you do that, you can further refine your city and state, but then you can reach out to those people by who visit that page with ads, retargeting them, and uh get them to come back or get them to participate in a different offer of some kind.

Uh Stack Adapt is terrific, but there are obviously a million different ad services out there. Uh, I like Stack Adapt because they have a very low minimum for uh advertising 300 bucks per campaign, which if you're creating something of value and is driving your business, you should be able to find 300 bucks. Now, if it's like for your personal email newsletter or your or something like that, then yeah, it's a little steep. But for a uh a business, you should be able to find 300 bucks. If you can't, you have bigger problems.

So that's the strategy. Create content people want, share it on LinkedIn, get them to fill out that form, and then enroll them in your ad systems so that you can continue to target them, identify them, um, make sure obviously things like Google Analytics are installed on that page. Make sure that you are uh capturing the first three uh sections of someone's IP version 4 address. Uh you'll always want to anonymize the last uh octet because of uh GDPR and CCPA compliance, but those first three digits will give you uh city state for sure, uh, or right province. Um but yeah, the easiest way, ask people.

Ask people for that information with the understanding that obviously every additional field you put on a form is reduces that form's conversion rate. But if it's important to you, do it that way. I would say if you get the exporter f of that first last title company, then you can do first last match on first last, uh, so first last email and uh on the form and then match that to your connections to get title of the company so that someone doesn't have to fill out the form for that, uh, and then get the location data that way as well. Um, postal code is probably the easiest thing to capture, and then you can reverse engineer that based on uh you know zip databases in the US, uh post service in the UK, etc. etc.

Each of these countries has a database for that sort of thing. So that's the strategy. Um it's not guaranteed it won't get 100% of your connections, but it will get the connections that are interested in you and interested in the content that you share. The other thing is you need to be creating content of value all the time on LinkedIn over a long period of time so that people trust you, like you, engage with you, and then are likely to engage with that ask. So make sure that you spend a year or two doing that first.

So, uh good question. Used to be a lot easier in the old days, but as always, marketers ruined everything. So uh please leave follow-up questions in the comments below. Get that link to StackAdapt below, and uh subscribe to my YouTube channel and my newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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