LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking platform with over 800 million members. As such, it offers great opportunities for businesses to connect with professionals and promote their company brand. One way businesses do this is by creating LinkedIn Company Pages to increase awareness and engagement. However, to properly analyze and optimize the company’s LinkedIn presence, it can be helpful to export the list of followers.
Many businesses want to know if it’s possible to export a list of their LinkedIn Company Page followers. The ability to download a list of followers enables further analysis and segmentation for targeted marketing campaigns. In this article, we’ll explore whether LinkedIn allows users to export company page followers and alternative options to achieve similar results.
Can You Export LinkedIn Company Page Followers Directly?
Unfortunately, LinkedIn does not provide a way to directly export the list of users who follow your Company Page. Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, LinkedIn does not have a built-in tool to download your followers list.
This is likely due to LinkedIn’s focus on building professional connections rather than amassing followers. The platform is oriented more towards making meaningful business connections than broadcasting content to as wide an audience as possible.
So out of the box, there is no LinkedIn tool to export your Company Page followers list for further analysis. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t workarounds to still access this data.
Workarounds to Export LinkedIn Company Page Followers
While LinkedIn doesn’t directly enable exporting followers, there are a few alternative options to extract your LinkedIn Company Page follower data:
Use Third-Party Tools
Several third-party social media management platforms integrate with LinkedIn Company Pages and provide follower export capabilities. Some popular options include:
- Hootsuite – Social media management platform with LinkedIn integration and follower export tools.
- Sprout Social – Social media software enabling follower data exports.
- Rignite – LinkedIn analytics tool allowing follower data downloads.
- Followerwonk – Social analytics platform with LinkedIn data exports.
The advantage of using one of these tools is accessing all your follower data in a single CSV/Excel export for easy analysis and segmentation. The main downside is the additional software costs.
Use the LinkedIn API
For developers or those with more technical expertise, the LinkedIn API provides programmatic access to Company Page data including followers. By using the right API calls, it’s possible to export your list of followers.
The LinkedIn API uses OAuth for authentication and providing access to user data. Companies could build custom scripts to leverage the API and output their followers list. However, this requires more technical resources.
Manual Download of Followers List
For smaller followings, some brands manually compile their list of LinkedIn Company Page followers. This involves viewing the page followers and recording details like name, position and company for each one.
Obviously, this becomes extremely laborious at scale. But for pages with fewer than 1,000 followers, it may be manageable if done incrementally. The list can be recorded in a spreadsheet or CSV format.
Plugins for Web Browsers
There are browser plugins and extensions like LinkedIn Follower Extractor that integrate with LinkedIn to help export followers. These tools still have limitations around how many followers you can extract at once. But they provide a simpler way vs. manual downloads or API scripts for individuals to get their follower data.
Alternative Approaches to Analyze LinkedIn Followers
If exporting a full list of LinkedIn Company Page followers remains challenging, here are a couple alternative approaches to glean insights about followers:
Sampling Data via LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn Pages include some built-in analytics with demographic data on followers. Under the Followers tab, LinkedIn provides a sampling of top follower locations, industries, seniorities and more.
While not comprehensive, analyzing this sampled data can uncover useful insights into follower segments. These insights can still inform content strategy and targeting.
Surveys and Polls of Followers
Companies can also learn more about their followers right within LinkedIn by using polls and surveys. This provides a way to directly ask questions to engage followers and gain first-party data.
Polls let you poll followers with multiple choice questions. Meanwhile, surveys allow for more elaborate questionnaires to be sent to all followers. The data is automatically aggregated within LinkedIn, providing valuable intelligence.
Should You Export LinkedIn Company Page Followers?
Here are some pros and cons to weigh when considering exporting LinkedIn Company Page followers:
Potential Benefits
- Enables segmentation and targeting of followers.
- Provides data to identify influencers and evangelists.
- Allows integration with marketing automation and CRM.
- Gives insights to optimize content strategy and engagement.
Potential Drawbacks
- No native LinkedIn tool for data exports.
- Requires technical expertise for API scripts.
- Third-party tools add software costs.
- Data only provides a snapshot, not real-time accuracy.
Overall, the ability to export followers comes with notable benefits for brands investing in their LinkedIn presence. But it does require using workarounds lacking with the native LinkedIn platform. Companies should weigh the pros and cons to determine if exporting followers aligns with their current business needs and capabilities.
Conclusion
While LinkedIn doesn’t have built-in functionality to export Company Page followers, there are still methods to extract this data through third-party tools, custom API scripts or manual downloads. The follower list enables further marketing analysis and segmentation for LinkedIn content and campaigns.
However, brands need to evaluate if the benefits are worth the additional effort or costs required relative to alternatives like LinkedIn’s sampling data and polling capabilities. As LinkedIn continues evolving its Company Pages product, they may eventually add native follower export features to fill this gap in capabilities. But for now, brands have to tap workarounds to access the full list of their B2B followers on LinkedIn.