In today’s world, connections are everything. Whether for work, business promotion, or personal inquiries, most people come to a point when they need to contact someone they don’t know personally or reestablish a connection with someone they have been out of touch with for years.
In both cases, the main stumbling block is the contact info – how do you access new information that might have changed over time or get contact info you never had in the first place? Google search is generally useless in both cases, but there are other fully or semi-automated means to help with that. Below are the simple step-by-step instructions one could use to find someone’s contact with automation.
Popular networking sites
Social media is the first go-to place after Google anytime you’re looking for information. In the case of contact info, it tends to be more efficient – in most cases, at least. Often, navigating to a user profile section is all it takes to access relevant contact info – provided the user has not made that data private. Here’s how it works on the most popular sites.
On LinkedIn, navigate to
- View Profile of the user you want to contact,
- Click on Contact Info near the top of their profile under their name and headline.
On Facebook, go to:
- About in the menu under their cover photo,
- Contact and Basic Info in the About tab.
On Instagram, click on
- The user profile,
- Search for Contact or Email button.
On X, head to
- The user profile,
- Bio section,
- Look for Contact in Bio.
Note that in most cases, you will need to be connected to the person to see their contact details. If you’re not, you can always send a connection or a friend request first. In that case, it’s best to apply some extra effort and drop a few lines about who you are or why you’re writing. But don’t bury the lead here because most social networks show only a short preview of your message, and if you really need to boost your chances of a quick response, it’s best to get to the point as quickly as you can.
Company websites and online directories
When searching for contact info on LinkedIn, you may not get the actual email or a phone number, but at least you get to discover the person’s current place of work. Then, there is a chance of reaching them via their current work email – unless, of course, you have a strictly personal matter in mind or want to offer the said professional a position in another company. Both cases are clear examples when using a current work email is a huge faux pas. If none are your case, you could always try corporate channels.
So, you can check the company website – usually, contact information, including those of employees, will be listed in the About section. However, this typically works with small companies, who can also list their staff in the Team section or something of the kind.
If none of that worked, official company directories like Yellow Pages could help. But again, they either list the information of decision-makers or public relationship reps. So, this approach will not work when looking for the contact info of an average employee who is not tasked with public outreach on a daily basis. But no worries, there is another, way more functional method we are about to discuss below.
Professional contact databases
Professional contact databases analyze and collect legally available contact information and store it in one place. As a result, you get millions of verified contacts neatly sorted by profiles that, besides access to emails and phone numbers, often include links to social media accounts, personal blogs, and other outreach channels when available. The main downside is that such databases usually run on a paid basis, but most of them have free trials that support a limited number of monthly lookups. In this category, one of the best examples is SignalHire, with five free lookups per month, so here is how it works on this platform:
- Sign up using email, LinkedIn or Facebook, or register from scratch;
- On sign-up, you will be redirected to the main page with Quick Profile Search in the top left corner;
- Fill in the name of the person you are looking for to get quick results.
- If more details are necessary, you can use advanced search filters, such as location, company name, industry, and more.
- After you’ve run the chosen search parameters, all matching results will be displayed in the middle section of the website, to the right of the left-handed search tabs.
- Choose the profile you need and click on the Reveal Contact button under the person’s name.
Another huge bonus of using professional software like SignalHire is that you can look up contacts directly from social media. To do this, you will need to install a browser extension available on the official website. It will then be added to the list of your Chrome plugins, and a single click on the Get Contact extension button when viewing someone’s profile on social media will open a database window with all the relevant contact information on that person.
Web Scraping Software
Should you decide against professional contact databases, there is another solution you could try. Web scraping tools like Import.io or Octoparse can automatically extract data from specified websites, so if you’re sure the contact info you need is located on specific websites, you can try to scrape these with automation. For this, you will need to:
- Choose a tool you can use (they vary in technical detail and pricing),
- Specify the websites you want to scrape for contact information.
- Run the scraper to extract the desired data fields.
The main benefit of using web scrapers is that they can access hidden information, but the major downside is that such an approach may violate privacy laws in some regions. Besides, there is no guarantee that the contact info you need is on the sites you are scraping – and they always have to be specified manually.
Contact analyzer tools
If you would like to try out some automated guesswork, you could opt for contact analyzing tools like EmailGenerator.io. They can generate possible email addresses using the parameters you specify, such as name, company, domain, etc. Note, however, that this is all about automated guesswork, and there is no guarantee that the generated results are valid. And that leads us to the next and final point on this list.
Additional email verification
Even though contact analyzing tools can give pretty accurate predictions sometimes, they aren’t 100% reliable – in fact, not even close to a hundred. So, it’s best to additionally verify their email guesswork with specialized tools. Some of the best examples in this category include NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, Email List Verify, and MailTester.com. The logic is pretty simple – you run the emails you generated in the search tab, the system runs the check and returns the results. However, with common names and lots of generated results, that could mean a lot of copy-paste work.
All in all, searching social media and professional online databases is your best shot when looking for someone’s contact info. Both methods are 100% legal, and, unlike other approaches described above, they guarantee high accuracy for the provided info. And even though most professional databases run on a subscription basis, you can always opt for a free version, which is usually enough for a couple of monthly searches. For regular professional use, you could subscribe to the paid plan because the pricing is generally moderate and often flexible.
