LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 722 million users worldwide. With such a large user base, LinkedIn is a goldmine for collecting professional contact data and building a leads database. Whether you want to build a database of potential customers, recruit candidates, or connect with industry experts, LinkedIn is an invaluable resource.
Collecting contact data from LinkedIn does require some strategic planning and effort. LinkedIn has strict rules against scraping and spamming so you need to use ethical tactics. The good news is there are effective ways to methodically build up your database with relevant, verified contacts on LinkedIn.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover step-by-step how to properly extract a database from LinkedIn.
Why Collect a Database from LinkedIn?
Here are some of the top reasons to extract contact data from LinkedIn:
– Build a customer database – LinkedIn’s advanced search filters make it easy to identify your ideal customers based on parameters like job title, industry, company size, and location. You can then extract their contact data to reach out.
– Recruitment database – LinkedIn is the #1 platform used by talent. Build up a database of qualified candidates by job title and skillset.
– Event/webinar outreach – Use LinkedIn to create an outreach database to promote your upcoming events, webinars, and content offers.
– Market research – By extracting specific contact data from LinkedIn, you can conduct customized market research surveys with targeted demographics.
– Identify influencers – Build a database of thought leaders, bloggers, and publishers in your industry who you can connect with to grow your brand.
– Sales prospecting – Identify key decision-makers at companies to create a sales prospecting database.
The bottom line is that the depth of professional data on LinkedIn allows B2B companies to segment and collect highly relevant contact databases they wouldn’t be able to find elsewhere. Executed properly, this becomes an invaluable asset.
How to Extract Contact Data from LinkedIn
Here is a step-by-step process on how to properly source and extract contact data from LinkedIn to build your database:
Step 1 – Use Advanced Search
The LinkedIn advanced search function contains over a dozen filters to narrow down your target database. This includes filters for:
– Job title
– Company
– Company size
– Industry
– Location
– School
– Skills/expertise
– Groups/interests
– Language
– Relationship (1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections)
Combining filters will allow you to get very targeted with the profiles you want to extract data from. For example, you may want to target “Directors of Sales at Fortune 500 apparel companies located in New York City”.
The more targeted your search, the higher quality your database will be. Avoid too broad of search criteria that will return irrelevant contacts.
Step 2 – Apply Additional Profile Filters
Once your advanced LinkedIn search returns a list of profiles, you can further filter by:
– Profile completeness – Only extract data from profiles that are 100% complete to ensure accuracy.
– Years of experience – Filter to an appropriate seniority level.
– Presence of phone number and email – Only extract contacts that have this critical contact data needed for outreach.
– Activity level – Focus on currently active profiles rather than inactive ones.
– Size of connections network – Profiles with 500+ connections signal an engaged user.
– Skills listed – Confirm they have relevant skills listed matching your needs.
Applying additional filters before extraction will refine your database even further to the most qualified prospects.
Step 3 – Extract the Relevant Data Fields
Once you have filtered your target profiles, it’s time to extract the key information into your database.
Some of the profile data fields you may want to extract include:
– Full name
– Job title
– Company
– Location
– Email address
– Phone number
– Profile summary/background
– Skills
– Education history
– Groups
– Languages
– Number of connections
– Profile photo
Avoid extracting the entire public LinkedIn profile. Only extract the fields relevant to how you will use the database. This keeps your database clean and focused.
Step 4 – Download and Organize in a Spreadsheet
The easiest way to collect extracted LinkedIn data is in a spreadsheet format such as Excel. The spreadsheet should contain columns for each data field you are extracting.
This keeps all the data organized in one shareable document that can be accessed by your team.
Pro Tip: Ensure the spreadsheet has proper data filtering and search functionality to easily analyze and sort the database.
Step 5 – Verify Accuracy and Completeness
It’s important to verify the accuracy of the data you have extracted from LinkedIn. Here are some best practices:
– Phone number validity – Any invalid or blank phone numbers need to be removed.
– Email completeness – Verify the email format looks complete and valid.
– Profile photo – Check that low quality or generic photos are removed. Only keep professional headshots.
– Title and company – Verify these match across fields and look accurate. Remove any unclear or ambiguous entries.
Doing a round of verification ensures your database is cleaned up and actionable.
Step 6 – Enrich with Additional Research
To take your extracted LinkedIn data to the next level, consider further enriching it with outside research.
You can enrich records with:
– Email verification – Use an email verification tool to clean out invalid email addresses.
– Social media links – See if you can find associated Twitter or Facebook profiles for additional outreach channels.
– Current company intel – Pull up their company site to grab phone numbers or titles if missing.
– Personal intel – Conduct quick Google searches to find backgrounds, education, publications etc.
Adding complementary data will enhance what you’ve pulled from the LinkedIn profile directly.
Step 7 – Manage and Maintain Database
Your LinkedIn sourced database will require ongoing maintenance and management. Be sure to:
– Back up and securely store the database – Don’t lose all your hard work!
– Remove outdated or inactive records – Continue filtering to keep only the most relevant contacts.
– Update incorrect data – If you catch inaccuracies, update promptly.
– Expand to new prospects – Continuously add qualified prospects to grow your database.
– Segment for targeted use – Divide database into lists and campaigns.
– Monitor engagement and metrics – See open rates, click rates, unsubscribes etc. to optimize your outreach.
Following best practices for your LinkedIn database will ensure you maximize its value.
Tools to Extract Data from LinkedIn
Manually extracting LinkedIn data profile-by-profile is highly time consuming. Leveraging data extraction tools will save enormous effort.
Here are some top software tools for extracting LinkedIn data:
1. Linked Helper
LinkedHelper is a leading LinkedIn extraction tool that allows you to quickly export contact details from LinkedIn to an Excel spreadsheet. After running your search, LinkedHelper will extract data fields like name, title, location, company, email, phone number, and more.
The tool also has productivity features like sending automatic connection requests and InMail messages. Overall, LinkedHelper makes professional data extraction simple.
2. Dux-Soup
Dux-Soup is a web scraping tool that can parse data from LinkedIn based on your customized queries. It allows automated scraping of LinkedIn profiles according to specific filters like keywords, location, company, job title etc.
This makes it possible to scrape thousands of LinkedIn profiles and output the extracted data into a structured format. Dux-Soup is very fast but requires some coding knowledge.
3. Octopus CRM
For larger databases, Octopus CRM is an enterprise solution that offers robust LinkedIn lead generation capabilities. It provides an AI-powered LinkedIn prospecting engine to identify your ideal prospects using sophisticated filters and Boolean searches.
Once target LinkedIn profiles are identified, Octopus CRM will automatically extract key data fields into organized lead lists ready for outreach. This automation makes building a scaled database from LinkedIn much easier.
4. Phantombuster
Phantombuster is another capable web scraping tool for collecting data from LinkedIn. It allows you to parse profile information, connection networks, company pages, posts, and more. Phantombuster can scrape data using search queries as well as LinkedIn URLs.
The data is exported in a structured JSON format ready for analysis. Phantombuster also offers handy lead enrichment capabilities to append additional attribute data to your scraped leads.
5. Hunter.io
Hunter.io is an email finding and verification tool that partners with LinkedIn. It gives you the capability to take LinkedIn URLs as an input and extract key information like full name, job title, and email address.
This data can then be compiled into lead lists and opted into Hunter’s email verification which cleans and checks for accuracy. The combination of extraction and verification makes Hunter.io a powerful option.
How to Use Your LinkedIn Database
Once you’ve built your robust LinkedIn database, how will you actually put it to use? Here are some of the best ways to generate value from your LinkedIn contacts database:
Sales Prospecting
A LinkedIn sourced database works extremely well for targeted sales prospecting and lead generation. You now have accurate contact data to conduct email outreach, phone calls, social selling, and ad campaigns.
Make sure to carefully segment your database by parameters like industry, company size, tech stack etc. so your outreach is highly personalized. This drives up prospect engagement and conversions.
Recruitment
Your database can serve as your personalized candidate pipeline for open job roles. Segment contacts by specialty, years of experience, location, and other relevant hiring filters.
Then reach out to qualified candidates introducing them to open roles. A warm outbound message with a job that matches their background will beat applying blindly online.
Events and Webinars Promotion
An event or webinar needs a targeted audience to promote to for attendance and registration. A LinkedIn sourced database filtered to your event’s theme provides the perfect outreach list.
Email the list with a personalized invite explaining why attending would add value based on their role and interests. This drives event sign ups.
Influencer Outreach
Identify key influencers, thought leaders, bloggers, and journalists in your space using LinkedIn database extraction. Build an organized spreadsheet of their contact info.
Then reach out with pitches to get content posted, secure backlinks, land guest contributions, and build partnerships. This is invaluable for PR.
Market Research
Your LinkedIn database can provide the sample set of contacts to survey for customized market research. Use filters to isolate the segments and buyer personas you want insights on.
Survey this target database to gain feedback on new products, pricing, competitors, pain points etc. Powerful for product development.
In summary, a targeted, high-quality LinkedIn database offers no shortage of potential uses. Approach it strategically based on your unique business goals.
Conclusion
Sourcing professional contact data from LinkedIn and compiling it into an organized database is a proven B2B marketing and sales strategy.
With 722+ million members, LinkedIn’s depth of segmented data creates huge potential to extract customized prospect lists. Following the best practices outlined in this guide will allow you to build a powerful LinkedIn database to drive real business results.
The key steps are:
1. Leverage LinkedIn’s advanced search and filters to isolate your ideal profiles. Avoid a spray and pray approach.
2. Carefully extract only the most relevant and complete data fields into spreadsheets.
3. Verify and enrich the raw data with supplemental research and tools.
4. Maintain and continually expand the database to maximize its impact over time.
5. Strategically segment and utilize the database for precise sales prospecting, recruitment, events promotion, influencer outreach, market research, and more.
While proper extraction takes a concerted effort, the long term dividends make it well worth the investment. A customized, targeted, and organized database sourced from LinkedIn profiles can take your marketing and sales efforts to the next level.
