LinkedIn tip - find people who are "out of network" without paying $25 to LinkedIn
Sometimes, you search for someone in LinkedIn, but it says "out of network" because they aren't a first, second or third level connection, and LinkedIn won't give you the person's name. You assume you have to pay LinkedIn $25 in order to see their name. Not true, because you know me.
Here's a real life example
I was talking to a potential client (for social media consulting) at Connecticut Plastics, and she mentioned to me that the owner would be calling me. I
didn't hear his name clearly, and it would be awkward if I didn't know him by name when he called.
I did an advanced search on LinkedIn for
Connecticut Plastics owner
and it showed that he had a LinkedIn profile, but he was "out of network", so LinkedIn wouldn't give his name.
Cough up 25 bucks? Not yet.
Look in Google using a fancy trick
Realize that Google has most LinkedIn profiles, so the trick is to somehow find them on Google. If you pick some unique string from the info that LinkedIn does show you, and use a special feature of Google called the "site:" feature, (which allows you to just search one site on the Internet), you may find the name and full profile through Google.
I saw the string
Engineer at Alinabal
in his profile and figured that very few other people would have that string in their profile. Therefore, I put it into Google, along with the word owner, using the following magic search string
Engineer at Alinabal owner site:www.linkedin.com
and found the profile in the Google results. I clicked on the link, and LinkedIn showed me the LinkedIn profile page, with name and all.
See a 2 minute sample video
If you want to see a 2 minute video that shows exactly how to do it, go to my web site at
This technique doesn't work in every case, but it works in a lot of cases. If it works for you, please send me $25 each time.
Pretty cool, huh?
An agreement between you and I
I give these tip to my email audience first, and will publish it in a blog in a couple of months, but you get a head start. You also get to be cool by telling your friends how to save $25. I do ask that you don't publish this on the Internet until I put it in my blog at
617-PATRICK Social Media Blog
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.
No comments:
Post a Comment