FAQ – Can I Download A List Of My Connections?

  (or my Followers, or my Subscribers) 

For the most part, no. Here’s why, and here’s the best way to handle these roadblocks

LinkedIn™  doesn’t want us to, as obtaining a list of your connections is the first link in a chain that inevitably ends up with a spam campaign. Spam makes LinkedIn™ look bad and disincents people from using it. That’s LinkedIn™ ’s noble reason for not allowing us to download these names. 

If you have a Sales Navigator Advanced Subscription, you can integrate your LinkedIn™  account with your CRM. This works for connections and leads, but I don’t see how you could automatically designate your, say, four hundred followers or subscribers as leads unless you did them one by one. So Sales Navigator can be  an expensive solution at $125-150 per month. 

While you can’t directly download lists, there are things you can do with your connections, followers and subscribers and they broadly fall into two areas: how can I sort them to make better sense of them and how can I see who the new ones are?

For Connections

You can specify first level connections in searches and then apply further filters to them. This applies to both free LinkedIn™  and paid subscriptions such as Sales Navigator. Using the available filters you can turn your connections into manageable subsets. I have over six thousand connections and do this often. 

And if you click on the “My Network” tab and then click on connections, they are shown with the newest ones at the top of the list.  

For Followers

A lot of people don’t know this, because this feature is kind of buried. If you go to search for people in free LinkedIn™ then click on “all filters”, and scroll down, you will see an option to look for followers of a “Creator.” Type your own name in (and no, you don’t seem to need to to be a creator of anything for this to work). 

You can now apply the same filters you could have applied to connections. 

Similarly, if you want to see who your latest followers are, go to your “My Network” tab, choose “Followers and Following”, click on Followers and your newest Followers will be shown at the top of the list. 

With the anticipated (rumored? already here for some people?) changes to Search, I do not know if these types of Searches will be possible in future. 

For Newsletter Subscribers

This is the really frustrating one. I get asked about this just about every week. You can see a list of your LinkedIn™  Newsletter subscribers but you can’t do anything with the list except scroll through it. However, you can still be proactive and make use of the list. 

Here’s what I do:

Every Wednesday morning I note who my latest subscriber is (like followers and connections in the My Network tab, your subscribers are listed in chronological order, newest at the top) and write that person’s name down. 

The following Wednesday morning, I go to the list and scroll down to that person’s name. These days I typically get twenty new subscribers per week. 

In reviewing the list of new subscribers, I look for people that could be prospects or of interest to one of my connections or clients, and go review their profiles.

Depending on what I find there, I may contact them on LinkedIn™ , thank them for subscribing, connect with them or invite them to subscribe to my email newsletter. 

Then I write down the person’s name at the top of the list, and repeat this process next Wednesday. 

If you’re wondering why I do this Wednesday it’s because my LinkedIn™  newsletter goes out Tuesday and that is the day I get most of my new subscribers. 

For anyone who is objecting that they can’t send messages to non-connections as they are free LinkedIn™  users, I suggest you use one of three methods to contact interesting people: 

• The Open Profile message. Good for people with Premium subscriptions. I am Open profile myself. I want it to be easy for people to contact me.
• The Group Message. If you share a LinkedIn™  Group with someone you can send them a free message.
• Connect with them. Use the message you can include with your invite to thank them for subscribing. 

While you can’t download the lists of these people that doesn’t mean you can’t use these lists productively.