Episode 331: Here’s How to Export Your LinkedIn Connections

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:00 – (Brynne Tillman): But it’s really important that we take inventory of our existing connections. And while you can absolutely do searches and LinkedIn with your first-degree connections, we actually recommend downloading and exporting those connections.

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, Stan Robinson Junior, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. Enjoy the show.

0:00:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Hello. Hello and welcome to making sales Social live. I am Brynne Tillman and I am here with my friend and partner, Stan Robinson. Hello, my friend.

0:00:56 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Howdy. Good to see you.

0:01:00 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, excited to see you, too. We have a very valuable but also very quick show today because we are going to talk about exporting our connections and taking inventory of the people that we are connected to so we can identify who are we ignoring and whom we should be having conversations with. This is going to be a quick two-partner. I’m going to hand it to you to talk about the technical side. How do we export our connections into a CSV file?

0:01:33 – (Brynne Tillman): And then I’ll talk about a little bit of strategy and tactics to start those conversations.

0:01:39 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): In terms of the why, fantastic. Yes. So this is one of the many features of LinkedIn. That’s great, but it’s also easy to overlook. So you want to do it, Brynne, do you do yours about twice a year or once a quarter in terms of downloading?

0:01:58 – (Brynne Tillman): Because I showed it all the time in training, it could be three times a week. Generally. Yeah. If you are an active connector, I would say once a month. If you’re not really active, once a quarter is great.

0:02:14 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Super, super. So now to get there, you will go to your settings. So just click on your thumbnail in the upper right of your LinkedIn and you want to open up your settings and go down to data privacy. And second, from the top, you’ll see the option to get a copy of your data. Now, the data does give you some options just in terms of how you want to download it. You can select download the larger data archive, which basically includes all the information.

0:03:01 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Or if you just, for example, want to make sure that you have your connection saved just in case the LinkedIn world comes to an end. And you want to make sure that you have your connections locally. You can select connections, you can select articles and messages. So you have the option to select from different types of data within the data archive. Now, one thing to be aware of is you do need to be a little bit patient, especially if you select the big one, the large data archive, because LinkedIn will say, I forget how long it says to allowed to get it. I’ve always gotten mine the same day, but it is not 4 hours.

0:03:47 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): But yeah, I think they say to allow 24 hours but you’ll get it sooner. Just be aware that it’s not instantaneous at all. But it is, as Brynne mentioned, super helpful to have it. It’s something you want to put a tickler in your calendar to do, because it is one of those things that’s easy to look up 18 months later and say, you know, I never did this. So Brynne, any additional thoughts just from the strategic.

0:04:19 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’ll clarify my answer, which is what you just said in downloading everything I do twice a year, so 100% accurate on that. The connections, however, I do more frequently. But here’s the challenge with us using LinkedIn is we connect with hundreds if not thousands of people, and we tend to really ignore folks we should be having conversations with. So then we’re out net new connections. But it’s really important that we take inventory of our existing connections. And while you can absolutely do searches in LinkedIn with your first degree connections, we actually recommend downloading, exporting those connections based on Stans.

0:05:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Very good. Step by step there. If you just choose connections, you’ll get that within ten minutes. You download it into a CSV file and you can open up in a Google spreadsheet or an Excel spreadsheet. And we tend to recommend to take inventory by creating a column on the left hand side. And we have a little fun with this and we say categorized by CPR. So we’re breathing life back into our clients prospects and referral partners.

0:05:44 – (Brynne Tillman): So when we look through this, you’re going to have some aha moments. There are going to be some moments like, I didn’t know that she moved to this new company. I had no idea that he worked here. Right. And you’re going to get first name, last name email column, mostly empty, because they have to opt in for that position company and the date you connected. So the most recent connection is at the top, your very first connection is at the bottom.

0:06:17 – (Brynne Tillman): And because it’s in an Excel spreadsheet, you can actually format it by CEO’s if you want, or alphabetized by job title. And so you can take a look at and take inventory of all those folks that you’ve been ignoring. I’m just going to quickly talk about two or three ways that you can reach back out to them. The first thing is you can send because they are a first degree connection. A video message from your phone.

0:06:47 – (Brynne Tillman): Just checking in, and I don’t want you to just check in, so I take that back, but you need a purpose, so it might be, hey, Stan, it’s been a while since we last connected. Your name came up, and I wanted to reach back out and see how things are going. And you can, if you know them really well, do that. If you don’t know them, you need to have a little bit more purpose, right? So, hey, Stan, I’m not sure if you recall, but we connected. And you could see when you connected, so you could say we can.

0:07:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Cause it’s in the download. So, hey, Stan, I’m not sure if you recall, but we connected in October of 2012, probably. I don’t know when we connected, but we connected many years ago. And I’ll start that one over so people can follow. Hey, Stan, I’m not sure if you recall, but we connected back in October of 2017, and it looks like we really haven’t had a conversation yet. When I checked out your profile, it knows that you’re following Mark Hunter, and I recently came across a podcast by him. If you’re interested, let me know. I’ll send a link.

0:07:56 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s not about me. It’s not about. You can personalize all of these, but when you do it in a video or even a voice message, you will stand out above the rest of the noise that’s coming through. The other thing is you can send a poll to your first degree connections. Another great way to engage. So you take inventory, and you’ve identified 127 CEO’s that you’d like to get a conversation going. You can create a poll specifically for CEO’s and whatever industry that is and just say, hey, we put out a poll.

0:08:30 – (Brynne Tillman): Your one click vote would be very valuable. Once that poll closes, I’m happy to share the insights we glean from you and your peers, and you can start a conversation. So those first degree connections are very powerful because you can message them directly, all of them. But we want to make sure that we’re doing it in a way that’s valuable to them.

0:08:51 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep, yep. One small.

0:08:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, yeah.

0:08:57 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Just one small thing so I don’t forget. And speaking of forgetting, the link is only valid. Valid for, I believe it’s 72 hours. So when they send you the data archive, remember to check your email and open it, because if you wait for four days, you’re going to have to start over again.

0:09:18 – (Brynne Tillman): Very good point. And, yeah, and I would find some folder, whether it’s in your Google Drive or your, and whatever your personal drive is. So this is, would not necessarily upload this into your company drive, but in your personal, you know, store this information somewhere and there are times where, you know, you’ll want to access that, even for search purposes. And I know you can search on LinkedIn, but the idea that, you know, I just want to see who am I connected to that I’ve been forgetting about, it’s just such an easy way to do that and just save it somewhere. I have exports going back, oh gosh, 15 years probably, so.

0:10:08 – (Brynne Tillman): And that’s not even just, you know, so it’s full data exports, but it’s just contacts, even just PDF’s of my own profile. They’re all stored in one folder that I could go back and get to if I need it. Okay, any final thoughts, Stanley?

0:10:25 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Now, if you’re a ChatGPT user, you can start to experiment with asking questions of ChatGPT about your data export. Haven’t gotten super far with it, but like invitation connection Ray did, came back with that. So if you’re into that, give that a try, because as Bren mentioned, it does come to you as a CSV file which chat GPT likes. It likes that better than excel files and play with asking some questions about your own data.

0:10:59 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. So how many CEO’s am I connected to in the last two years?

0:11:07 – (Stan Robinson, Jr): Yep.

0:11:08 – (Brynne Tillman): And who are they? And download those into a CSV file. Oh my gosh, you have just put fire in me to go figure all that out. I haven’t even been thinking about it. Mic drop moment. I love it. I love it. So now we just have to figure out all the things that we can gather from that data. Oh, it’s brilliant. You’re brilliant. I love it. So I know this was a quick one, but I hopefully this is one that you will all take seriously. You will go out and absolutely export those connections and start taking a look at who have you been ignoring and reengage them either with video polls, inviting to an event, asking them to quote for a blog post. I mean, there’s so many ways to reengage them and we hope that you do.

0:12:00 – (Brynne Tillman): So thank you, Stan. Thank you to everyone that’s here live. And to those of you in listening on the podcast, when you are out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social. Oh, we did pretty good.

0:12:17 – (Bob Woods): Don’t miss an episode. Visit socialsaleslink.com podcast, leave a review down below, tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next, register for free [email protected]. you can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Play. Visit our website, socialsaleselesslink.com for more information.

Outro:

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