How to Export your LinkedIn Contacts

Exporting your LinkedIn Contacts is just a good business practice. After returning from the 2010 National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) Convention it became apparent that every professional needs a few tips on LinkedIn. Since LinkedIn accounts can be suspended and even the best systems can fail at anytime, it’s smart to have a backup plan in place and export your contacts from LinkedIn occasionally. So how do you extract all your contacts from LinkedIn?
Be logged into your account and then either navigate to your contacts (found under the Network tab) then select Settings by clicking on the gear on the right. There you can select the Export Connections option as seen above:

or you can go directly to http://www.linkedin.com/addressBookExport where you’ll see this screen:

LinkedIn gives you options to export to Outlook, Yahoo Mail, MAC or a vCard format and also provides directions of how to import too. I realize that you probably don’t have your entire Outlook Address Book as contacts in LinkedIn but I hope every contact is in your Customer Relationship Management System. Many products are integrating LinkedIn into their email systems and there are plug-ins for outlook like Xobni and LinkedIn for Outlook, a social networking connector that your firm may want to consider. It helps improve your relationships by having the ability to access status updates and activity efficiently in whatever application you are working in.

The more connections you have the more valued investment you have in LinkedIn. I’d like to hear from you. How many of my readers have ever exported their contacts? More importantly how many will?