Automate Notion: Autofill Contacts from LinkedIn

(Grab the template here.)

One of the best use cases for Notion is a single source of truth for your contacts.

With automation tools like Zapier and Make, you can sync Google Contacts and other contact managers with a master People database.

And for even more efficiency, you can automatically fill the properties of your contacts from their LinkedIn profiles.

But because you need to sign in to LinkedIn to view those profiles, Zapier and Make can't access them from their servers.

But Bardeen can. And that's because, unlike Zapier and Make, it's a Chrome extension that pretty much controls your browser as if you were doing it yourself.

So I'm going to walk through a simple system where you can right click on your People database and choose "Auto-Fill Notion Contacts" to pull in information from their LinkedIn profiles.

Two Pillars

We'll use two primary components:

1. a master People database in Notion; and
2. a Bardeen automation.

If you haven't installed Bardeen, access it here.

And I've also bundled the preconfigured database and automation as a template. You can use it directly or reference it as you configure the system yourself.

That's also linked within the description and post. And of course, it's already available to members of Notion A-to-Z, along with all my other templates and resources for maximizing Notion.

People Database

The People database has a URL property called LinkedIn, where we post the contact's profile. That's the only value we need to populate manually, and the automation will reference that LinkedIn profile for the:

• Name
• Email
• Company
• Current position at that company
• Headline
• About section, which in LinkedIn is a short bio
• Location, which can be a city, region or whatever area the person chooses to list on LinkedIn
• The school they attended
• Their birthday
• Phone number
• A link to their profile photo
• Their Twitter or X profile

Now in the Bulletproof framework and other Notion workspaces, many of these properties would be Relations or other advanced property types. But Bardeen needs them to be Text properties, or a URL, Email or Phone property, which it treats as text.

But if you're proficient with Zapier or Make, you could easily "hand off" the automation from Bardeen with the scraped data in a webhook, and they can update all property types.

But what's most important here is getting that information from LinkedIn, so we'll stick to Bardeen.

And then we have one other property, a Select property called Auto-Population, where we can indicate which people we'd like updated.

Bardeen Automation

And then we have the Bardeen automation. I like to open Bardeen with the keyboard shortcut Opt + B.

Before creating the automation, you'll want to be sure Notion is connected from Bardeen's settings, and that Bardeen has access to your People database.

1. Right-Click Trigger — The first step of the automation is that right-click trigger. I name the menu item "Auto-Fill Notion Contacts" and make it visible from every right-click.
2. Find Notion Pages — Then we want to find all Notion pages within the People database with the Auto-Population value set to "Triggered."
3. Loop — And we want to perform all of the following actions for each of those pages, so we loop through them and use their LinkedIn value.
4. Open Link — Then we open that link.
5. Wait — And wait 5 seconds to ensure it fully loads.
6. Scrape — Then we scrape the page. And Bardeen already has a template that's preconfigured for LinkedIn profiles.
7. Get Tab — And once the data's collected, we can focus on the tab containing the URL for this iteration of the loop.
8. Delete Tab — And close it.
9. Find Notion Page — Then we want to find the Notion page specifically for this iteration of the loop. So within the People database, we find the matching LinkedIn URL.
10. Update Notion Page — Then we populate the page with the content from LinkedIn. So we map each database property to the corresponding value from the scraper. And at this point, we can update the Auto-Population property to "Complete."

And that's it. It'll complete the process for each item that's "Triggered."

So once you enable the automation, you'll have the option available in your right-click menu.

LinkedIn Limits

And as you use it, keep in mind that LinkedIn has mechanisms for detecting content scraping that could be used for malicious reasons, so avoid triggering too many contacts for a single run, and add some space between executions. To be extra safe, you could replace your right-click trigger with an hourly schedule and limit the number of pages per execution.

Feel free to comment on the video with any questions. And like I said, the People database and Bardeen automation are available as a template on Notion VIP and to all member of Notion A-to-Z. If you're not yet a member, consider joining us to make the most of Notion.

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