Revisit Social List & Contact Finder in 2020

booleanstringsBoolean, OSINT 4 Comments

Developed by “Sourcers Who Code,” Social List is worth your attention in 2020. Especially so, given how poorly LinkedIn is serving us (growing prices, reduced functionality, confusing UX, endless bugs, irresponsive and unknowledgeable customer support).

Social List is a sourcing tool that lets you instantly generate lists of target social profiles based on your requirements The tool searches for public profiles on LinkedIn, Github, Meetup, HackerRank, Research Gate, Google Scholar, XING, and more. You do not need any (paid or free) accounts anywhere to search. Run a filtered search – by job title, company, location, and more – and collect results precisely matching the search filters; enrich results with contact email addresses on request.

Basically, this is a structured search for the web. That is what makes the tool unique.

Designed with Sourcers and Recruiters (initially, just us) in mind, the tool can also serve Business Development and OSINT professionals.

Social List is complementary to other tools you already use for Sourcing. It is simple to use, and affordable, yet provides a productivity boost and surfaces new results, specifically, compared to LinkedIn Recruiter. It works in any location or industry. I use Social List daily in sourcing projects. We have used it in competitive intelligence searches as well (ask me how).

The technology Social List utilizes in the back-end is Google Custom Search Engines APIs. Through the APIs, Social List fetches precisely matching profile pages from Google’s index. We don’t keep any databases with information; we get results from Google, format as an Excel table, and deliver them to you (the tool is GDPR compliant).

An additional advantage in using APIs is that you won’t be “touching” LinkedIn in your searches and contact info look-ups (unless you start reviewing results, of course, which is a small volume and shouldn’t matter), so you are guaranteed to have no problems with LinkedIn.

Social List offers exporting lists of profiles that it finds. Many of our users start their sourcing here, by generating lists of prospects to explore (which can be done in seconds). Note that exporting gives you an additional way to filter through Excel, making reviewing results faster.

The 2019 addition to Social List was its Contact Finder, which looks for emails, phone numbers, and social links for a person based on his/her LinkedIn profile URL. (I use Contact Finder quite a bit when sourcing). Compared with others, the Contact Finder is competitive in the % of matches and pricing; it queries several databases, providing you with the best result. Note that it is not a Chrome extension and therefore LinkedIn cannot track it.

And here is a story from our development team. In the last few months, the CSE APIs have stopped working for LinkedIn profiles; nobody (including Google support) knows the reasons. (Feel free to inquire on technical details; it is a mystery). We went through a brief scare: since LinkedIn Agent is by far the most popular, we were facing closing the service down. Today I am happy to report that we have found workarounds, and LinkedIn Agent is now working fine! Whew.

Please note that we ask new users to provide a credit card when you sign up. (This is due to past issues with people misusing the Contact Finder, for which we pay). But then, you have a full seven-day trial and see how you like the tool. Ask me if you need help searching (also check out help pages for users). After the trial, Social List is subscription-based, month-to-month, and affordable.

A piece of advice: to get better results, search simply.

If you would like me to run a sourcing query for you, please ping me, and I will be happy to forward the results.

 

Comments 4

  1. This is so great! I’m looking forward to using this! Does it interfere with going into LinkedIn jail? I had a little bit of a scare this week. I was looking at profiles too quickly….

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