Last week I was looking to comb my LinkedIn connections for everyone that had the title of marketing, social media, digital, or something in their job function or bio. Anything that might be relevant to hit up about some new SocialRank stuff. I got to the second page of the first query (all of my connections with the word “marketing” in their job function or bio) when I got a message saying I hit my commercial use limit for the month.
This is for my OWN connections. This isn’t me trying to look at mutual contacts or for people to recruit or anything. My connections. This blew my mind, and not in a good way. I looked at all the upgrade options and none of them fill a bucket of what I actually use LinkedIn for. This commercial limit is a new thing and very foolish for LinkedIn to limit your ability to see your own connections that fit a criteria. I’m not against paying for access to searching people I’m not connected to, but for my own followers - terrible.
Anyway, after a little digging I figured a way around it. Porting your data out of LinkedIn and into a Google Spreadsheet. Here is how you do it:
Go to Connections in LinkedIn. Click the Settings wheel.
Click “Export LinkedIn Connections.” Open the file in Numbers or Excel. Clean up the spreadsheet (lots of extra columns), then copy and paste the results in a Google Spreadsheet.
Now that your contacts are in Google Spreadsheets it is time to play around with filter views. I created one for each word: Marketing, Digital, Social Media and more.
Here is a quick screenshot walkthrough of filtering views.
I hope LinkedIn changes the limits on looking through your OWN followers, so I spend time on LinkedIn rather than in a google spreadsheet but in the meantime, this is how you can (legally) hack around LinkedIn’s stupidity.
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