With over 722 million users worldwide, LinkedIn has become an invaluable tool for networking, job searching, lead generation, and staying up-to-date on industry news. As a professional, having access to your LinkedIn data can provide key insights into your network, skills, and experience. By extracting your LinkedIn data into an Excel spreadsheet, you can easily analyze your connections, endorsements, profile views, and more. This data can help guide your career decisions and optimize your LinkedIn strategy.
Why Extract LinkedIn Data to Excel?
Here are some of the key reasons you may want to download your LinkedIn information into Excel:
- Perform in-depth analysis of your network – See summary stats on your 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections along with details on how you are connected.
- Identify influencers and decision makers – Excel makes it easy to filter your connections by company, job title, location to find key targets.
- Understand your reach and impact – Analyze your profile views over time and compare with actions taken to optimize your activity.
- Review your skills and endorsements – Evaluate which of your skills are most endorsed and identify gaps to improve your profile.
- Clean up your contacts – Easily identify inactive connections, duplicates, and contacts you may wish to remove.
- Track your job search progress – Keep detailed records of applications submitted, contacts made, and follow-up activity.
- Manage tasks and leads – Use Excel to create task lists and track leads from networking emails and messages.
With the ability to sort, filter, organize, and calculate data, Excel gives you full control to analyze your LinkedIn presence in ways that are not possible directly on the LinkedIn platform. Whether you want to refine your profile, revamp your network, or further your career, extracting your data into Excel makes LinkedIn insights accessible and actionable.
How to Download Your LinkedIn Data
Downloading your LinkedIn data is a simple process that only takes a few minutes. Here are the steps:
- Go to your LinkedIn Account Settings.
- Under the Data privacy tab, click on Get a copy of your data.
- A new window will open. Select the data types you want to download. At minimum, select Profile and Connections to get details on your network.
- Choose the file format. Excel format will allow the data to be organized into spreadsheets once downloaded.
- Enter your account password and click Request archive.
- You will receive an email once your archive is ready to download. This usually takes less than 24 hours.
- Save the ZIP file containing your LinkedIn data to your computer. Be sure to note the password LinkedIn sends you to access the files.
- The ZIP file will contain CSV files that can be easily imported into Excel for analysis.
One thing to note is that LinkedIn limits how often you can request your archive. You are only able to download your full data once every 30 days. However, you can download your connections more frequently, so if you only need your network data, you can get it every week.
What LinkedIn Data Can You Export?
When downloading your LinkedIn data, you have the option to select some or all of the following data types:
- Profile – Includes information you provide in your profile such as work experience, education, skills, accomplishments, interests, and demographic details.
- Connections – Your 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree connections along with how you are connected.
- Ads – Details on advertisements you’ve clicked on, reacted to, or commented on.
- Groups – Groups you have joined or are following.
- Follows – Companies, Schools, or Influencers you follow.
- Interests – Your listed interests used to personalize feed content.
- Job applications – Record of jobs you’ve applied for through LinkedIn.
- Messages – Details of conversations with your network including InMail.
- Notifications – Feed of notifications you’ve received from LinkedIn.
- Invitations – Pending invitations you’ve sent to connect with others.
- Skills – Skills you’ve added to your profile and endorsements you’ve received from others.
This data will all be provided in CSV file format that can easily be opened in Excel. The most insights can be gained from extracting your profile, connections, job applications, and skills data.
How to Analyze LinkedIn Data in Excel
Once you’ve imported your LinkedIn CSV files into Excel, there are many ways you can analyze and visualize the data to generate insights. Here are some recommendations:
Profile Views
- Graph total profile views over time to identify trends and spikes.
- Segment views by 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections.
- Overlay major profile updates or activities against views to see impact.
- Analyze which sections receive the most views.
- Compare views to industry averages.
Connections
- Categorize connections by company, location, position, industry.
- Identify connections who work at target employers.
- Segment connections by strength of relationship.
- Graph the growth of your network over time.
- Calculate the percentage of connections by department, seniority, and function.
Skills
- Tally endorsements received for each skill.
- Highlight skills not currently on your profile that connections have endorsed.
- Compare endorsed skills to requirements in job postings.
- Identify skill gaps to improve upon.
- Segment endorsements by industry.
Experience
- Calculate months or years of experience for each position.
- Identify experience gaps in your work history.
- Categorize each position by industry, company size, job function.
- Compare positions and tenures to other profiles in your network.
- Cross-reference skills gained at each job.
Beyond standard filtering, sorting, formulas, and pivot tables, LinkedIn data can be mined even deeper using Excel plugins for data analysis and visualization. Here are some additional plugins to consider:
- Power Pivot – Add Data Model and advanced calculation tools.
- Power Query – Pull, shape and clean LinkedIn data.
- Power View – Create interactive data visualizations.
- Power Map – Plot geographic data for connections or companies.
The ability to mold LinkedIn data with Excel’s robust functionality allows for next-level insights that can drive real results in advancing your career or business objectives. The data is available at your fingertips – the real opportunity lies in analyzing it for patterns, trends and outcomes that would otherwise be hidden.
Use Case Examples
To make LinkedIn data analysis more concrete, here are two examples of how you could extract value from your downloaded LinkedIn information:
Job Search and Application Tracking
- Compile a list of target companies for jobs based on your connections data.
- Build a tracker to log jobs applied for, connections at the company, follow up activity, and status.
- Use Excel formulas to calculate days elapsed since application.
- Auto-highlight next follow up steps based on application date.
- Segment applications by job type, industry, location to identify focus areas.
- Identify contacts who have switched companies that could provide referrals.
- Graph job application volume over time.
Network Analysis
- Map 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections by location using Power Map.
- Build a network health score based on indicators like inactive connections, connectivity gaps.
- Analyze connectivity by industry, position, company to identify weak areas.
- Create a priority list for outreach based on company, position, shared connections.
- Identify contacts with many shared connections but no direct connection.
- Cross-reference connections against target companies you want to work for.
These examples demonstrate how LinkedIn Excel analysis can deliver real, tactical benefits beyond just high-level review. The ability to filter, sort, calculate, and visualize connections and activity drives meaningful productivity.
Best Practices for LinkedIn Data Analysis
Here are some top tips to maximize effectiveness when analyzing your LinkedIn data in Excel:
- Focus your analysis on 2-3 key objectives – don’t try to tackle everything at once.
- Clean and shape the raw data before doing in-depth analysis.
- Combine LinkedIn data with other sources – CRM contacts, social media, etc.
- Automate repetitive analysis tasks through formulas or Power Query.
- Visualize the data through charts, graphs, and geo-mapping for insights.
- Segment and filter by categories like industry, title, company, location.
- Statistically analyze things like views, growth rates, engagement levels.
- Identify outliers, anomalies, and patterns through statistical analysis.
- Use conditional formatting to visualize insights and trends.
- Regularly refresh the data – don’t let it go stale.
Following structured best practices allows you to continually gain value from your LinkedIn data vs. just doing a one-off analysis. Pairing the richness of your LinkedIn presence with Excel’s customizable features enables ongoing optimization and advancement.
Conclusion
Turning your LinkedIn data into Excel provides expanded possibilities for exploitation, enrichment, and engagement with your professional network. While LinkedIn alone establishes connections, importing your profile information into Excel allows for intricate relationship analysis, skill evaluation, and network insights that drive strategic action.
With robust filtering, automated formulas, statistical modeling, data visualizations, and customizable organization, Excel helps convert your LinkedIn activity into tangible opportunities. Whether your objectives are sharpening your profile, revamping your network, job searching, or lead generation, Excel enables maximum impact through your LinkedIn presence.
So don’t let your LinkedIn data sit idle. A regular cadence of extracting your profile analytics into Excel gives you an evolving understanding of your personal brand, network health, and career direction. By combining your real-time LinkedIn insights with Excel’s flexibility and analytical power, you gain a performance booster for professional success.