Why a Backup of your LinkedIn Connections is Important
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LinkedIn being a professional community and a great platform for networking, B2B lead generation, Job search and recruitment, it is always a good practice to backup your LinkedIn connections since you’ve spent years to build your network and engage with the right audience.
You will have to backup your LinkedIn connections for two reasons.
- To connect outside of LinkedIn – It is important to create new business opportunities. So it is essential that you export LinkedIn connections, take them offline to meet in person or connect via phone call or email.
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- Unannounced Account Suspension – LinkedIn might delete your account without any prior warning, on any particular contract breach or ignorant violation of LinkedIn professional community policies. When you backup your LinkedIn connections, it not only helps you to have control over your data but also to prevent the risk of losing access to your data.
Therefore, it is always advisable to take a few minutes and backup your LinkedIn connections once in a while if you have a rapidly expanding network.
How to Extract Data from LinkedIn
To extract data from LinkedIn, click the drop-down from your profile icon and click on Settings & Privacy
In the Privacy tab (This tab is displayed by default), click on Getting a copy of your data option.
LinkedIn allows us to download a larger data archive including connections , contacts and your account history or something in particular like Articles, messages and etc..
Select the desired option and click Request archive button.
Your archive will be ready for download in a few minutes. The data is exported as a zip file with many .csv files.
The .csv file of your connections includes the following information:
✔ Name
✔ Title
✔ Company
How your Exported LinkedIn Connections can help your business
Now that you have exported your LinkedIn connections, the next step is to leverage them. Your LinkedIn connections are more likely to respond to your email message since they are familiar with you. Therefore, taking these connections offline to another medium can help you to increase your sales & marketing engagements. Hence, you can kick start your own marketing initiatives.
However, to initiate your marketing activities, you need the email address and phone numbers of your connections in your CRM or email marketing software. But the catch is LinkedIn doesn’t provide the email address & phone number of your connections.
Until 2018, when you export your connections, LinkedIn was providing Name, Company, Title & email address of your connections. But now, LinkedIn has stopped providing email addresses. Many people having large number of 1st degree connections are upset about this. However, you still have access to your contact’s direct personal email/phone when you open their profiles one by one.
Even though you manually extract data from LinkedIn (copy-paste the email of your prospects), you end up only getting their personal email addresses. This is because people sign up with their personal email address as they also see LinkedIn as a job site. But reaching your prospects via a business email address has far more benefits than reaching them via personal email address.
Why work email address is better than personal email?
If you are in B2B business, it is better to get work email addresses than the personal (Gmail/yahoo..) emails because of the following reasons:
✔ Unlike personal email, business email inbox is not often bombarded with unsolicited or promotional emails.
✔ Reaching out to your prospect’s business email address helps you to stay out of spam.
✔ Helps you to maintain good email sender reputation
✔ Increases credibility and makes you look more professional
If you have a list of potential prospects with name and company, we can help you to get their work emails & phone# in no time.
