How to Transfer Your Facebook Friends to Twitter & Other Networks [Bookmarklet]

Jul 16, 2012 19:02 | Social Media, How To, Social Media | 33 Comments

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One of the most popular articles on my blog has been “How to Migrate your Facebook Friends to Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn”. It showed a way to export your Facebook friends to other social networks such as Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my previous post, Facebook doesn’t have a good history of making it easy for you to export your data. Yes, Facebook does had an export data tool for a while now, but it doesn’t allow you to get your hands on your friends’ email addresses, even if they are visible to you. Your and everyone else’s data is incredibly precious to Facebook. It’s what makes Facebook so valuable, because with it they can make a huge amount of money from targeted advertising.

The Problems

In my article, I highlighted a way to export your friends to Twitter by first exporting them to Yahoo! Mail, before then exporting them to Twitter. Although it was a bit of a pain, it worked brilliantly for many months, until it stopped without warning.

Firstly there were issues with the Yahoo! tool to migrate your Facebook contacts into Yahoo! Mail. Apparently, Yahoo! were aware of this as stated in this help article, but certainly from my experience, it does seem to work now.

Secondly, not all contacts were being imported from Yahoo! to Twitter. My post was awash with comments saying that it didn’t work. After many weeks trying to figure out what the problem was, Yahoo released a “help” article on the subject– Why can’t I export my Facebook contacts?. So now, Yahoo tags each contact that it has imported from Facebook so that you are then not able to export it. How ridiculous! Call me cynical, but I expect this has happened due to Facebook breathing down their neck.

A Solution?

So, what do we do now? How do we export our friends from Facebook to Twitter, or indeed any other social network? Well, all is not lost– I have found a way for you! Unfortunately it does still involve Yahoo! Mail, and is more involved. However, I have gone out my way to make this as simple as possible for you!

How to Export Your Facebook Friends to a CSV file

Like in my previous article, it is important to be aware that this only exports your Facebook personal profile friends– not your Facebook page’s friends. I’m hoping that Adam Loving will update his Facebook Page Hack for this! (Any update on this, Adam?!)

Also, it will only export friends who have shared their email address with you, and they will obviously need to have a Twitter account!

Please note, the bookmarklet only works in Google Chrome. You can try this in other browsers but you may encounter problems.

STEP 1: Get a Yahoo! Mail Account (Or Sign in if you already have one)

Head on down to Yahoo! Mail and create an account or sign in if you’ve already got an account.

STEP 2: Import Your Facebook Contacts

Sometimes the Yahoo! Mail Facebook importer can be a bit temperamental. If it fails, try it again. In my experience it does work, but you have to be a bit patient.

a) Click on the Contacts tab at the top, and then click the button “import contacts” on the right. (If you’ve just signed up for a new Yahoo! Mail account, you’ll get this option as soon as you create the account.)

b) Click on the Facebook icon to proceed. (if you have an Adblocker on your browser you may need to disable it to see the Facebook icon)

c) You’ll get a Facebook permissions box. Click OK to say that you are happy for your contacts information to be shared with Yahoo!.

d) Yahoo! Mail will then try to retrieve your Facebook friends’ contact information from Facebook.

e) Congratulations, your Facebook contacts have been imported! Click the Done button.

Step 3: Convert your Facebook Contacts to a CSV File

So now we have all our friends contacts in Yahoo! Mail, but they are all tagged with that nasty Facebook tag. We could edit each contact individually to remove the tag, but if you have a lot of contacts, that is going to take a LONG time.

With the help of a rather wonderful StackExchange user, biziclop, the process has been made much easier– with the help of a bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a piece of javascript code that you can drag on to your browser’s bookmark bar. You can run the code on any web page by clicking the bookmarklet.

This special Bookmarklet converts all your Yahoo contacts into a CSV file. A CSV file is a very versatile file format and can be opened in Excel, Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird and many webmail services. Just in case you didn’t know (and care), CSV stands for comma separated values– because, each value in the file is, well, separated by commas…!

The Bookmarklet.

First of all, drag the following button to your browser’s bookmark bar:

Yahoo to CSV

Make sure you are doing this in Google Chrome for PC. If you are having problems, then it’s probably because your browser hasn’t stored the bookmarklet properly. To do this, copy the contents of this javascript file to your clipboard. Then edit the bookmarklet, delete anything in the URL field paste the code into the field. Your bookmarklet should work. Please let me know how you get on in the comments below. Thanks to Alex Hall in the comments for help here.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to go to Print View in Yahoo! Mail

a) Select Print All from the actions button in Yahoo Contacts.

b) Select the Facebook category and Basic View.

c) Once you’ve got the screen of all your contacts, click the Yahoo to CSV bookmarklet in your browser. You’ll see a window pop up with all your contacts highlighted. Copy this and paste it into your favourite text editor (for example Notepad). Save this file as contacts.csv. You may need to change “save as type” to “all files” so you can set the correct file extension.

So now, you have all your Facebook’s contacts as a CSV file! This will enable you to import them into many other social networks such as Google+ and Twitter.

Unfortunately, you can’t just upload your CSV file into Twitter, you have to import them into either Yahoo! Mail (again!) or I’d recommend Google Mail.

Thanks again to biziclop who made this hack possible. Please do leave a comment on the StackExchange page.

Import to Twitter

So now that you have your glorious CSV file, how do you get the thing into Twitter? These things are never easy, for reasons that escape me and many others, Twitter doesn’t allow a way for you to upload a CSV file. This is just annoying, because it assumes we all use a webmail service such as Yahoo! or GMail for our contacts. Although I do have a Yahoo and GMail account, I use Thunderbird and Outlook for my email and contacts.

The easiest way for you to import your CSV file into Twitter (and so your Facebook friends) is to import your CSV file into either Yahoo! Mail or GMail. I know this sounds silly, since we’ve only just exported them from a webmail service, but this is very easy to do. I’m going to go through the steps for GMail since that is the service I recommend.

Log into GMail and go to your contacts (click on the “GMail” dropdown on the left column and select contacts)
Click on the “More” dropdown and then click on “Export”
Select the CSV file you saved before and upload by clicking the import button. Your contacts will be imported straight away.
Now you need to head on down to the Twitter importer. You can find this by clicking on the previous link, or by clicking on Discover then Find Friends on the left navigation. Click on the Search Contacts button by the Yahoo! Mail option.
Once the Yahoo! Mail permissions window loads, click on the Agree button. This gives Twitter permission to import your Yahoo! Mail contacts.
Import Complete! Congratulations, you have successfully migrated your Facebook friends to Twitter.

Adding your Facebook Friends to Google+

Another cool thing you can do is migrate your Facebook friends to Google+. It works in a very similar way. Firstly, import your Facebook friends into Yahoo! Mail as shown above, then go to your circles page on Google+ and link your Yahoo! contacts. You can then drag all your FB friends to a circle of your choice. The advantage here is that your Facebook contacts don’t have to be Google+ users. You’ll have the option of sending posts to their email address instead.

Adding your Facebook Friends to LinkedIn

LinkedIn make it easy for you, there is an app for that. Check out the LinkedIn app to import your Facebook friends to LinkedIn.

Adding your Facebook Friends to Pinterest

As Pinterest naturally connects to your Facebook friends, it’s very easy to do this. Just make sure you connect your Facebook account with Pinterest and then click on “Find Friends from Facebook”. Obviously none of my Facebook friends are Pinterest users though, so this wasn’t very helpful to me!

Final Word

Well, I hope that helps. I know it is far more complicated than it should be, but at least you should only ever have to do this once. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Shaun O’Reilly

For those web developers out there, all you have to do is compose a new message, click on the “to:” button, and get the html of the UL element listing all those contacts (make sure you scroll to the bottom), and use something like Google Chrome tool to copy the html of the UL element.

Then use some jQuery like in this example, to generate a list:http://jsfiddle.net/webwarrior/ZP5MA/1/

You could replace the html in this example with your own list, to test it.
Jonathan Camp

It’s funny because I was solving this same issue at the same time as you and I didn’t even know it. I wrote a python script on July 3rd, and I think your scriptlet looks like it was written the same day. Anyway, it’s not as clean as a scriptlet, but if you want to check it out, I wrote a blog post on this too.
http://campkludge.org/?q=yahoocontactexport.

Glad you were able to figure out the same thing.
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  That’s really weird. I had been thinking about finding a solution to this for months, because there were loads of comments from people on my other post who were not able to export their Facebook friends out of Yahoo because of the tagging. I was trying to find an easy way for non-techie people to achieve this. My solution isn’t perfect and a bit more complicated than it should be, but we have Facebook and Yahoo to thank for that.
  
  It’s cool we came up with similar ideas. I don’t know Python, but I can see your solution would work well.
  
  Thanks for getting in touch!
- http://twitter.com/kewlfuzz ross smith
  
  thanks Jonathan Camp Ilike a few in these comments have been having trouble with the bookmarklet on chrome in windows 7 but your script did it for me. thanks for the post Ian Anderson Gray I am sure it has been working for you and others. 5 more being followed on twitter now. One step closer to maybe shutting down my facebook.
Rachel Bonness

I exported my contacts from yahoo to a CSV file and put them into my gmail account and I can see my contacts in there but when I go onto Twitter and try to add them it says no one found in my address book for Yahoo and for Gmail, Arghhhh!
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Oh dear. They really don’t like making things easy for us do they?
  
  I am assuming you have been able to import your contacts into GMail and that they are all imported correctly (with names and email addresses)
  
  I was having some issues last week with connecting my GMail contacts with Twitter. It kept on giving me errors, but I worked out it was Twitter that was just under strain. I tried again later and it was successful. Could you check and see if you can try it again?
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r0cb0y

whenever i would click on bookmarklet nothing happens? why is that?
- r0cb0y
  
  i mean on yahoo to csv on my bookmarks bar
  - http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
    
    Sorry for delay, I’ve been away on holiday.
    
    It’s difficult to troubleshoot without knowing more information. Presumably you are on the correct screen (i.e. simple print view). Which browser are you using?
    - Lucy
      
      It doesn’t work for me in chrome either, unfortunately
      - http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
        
        Hi Lucy. In order for me to troubleshoot, can you tell me what is happening. Is the popup not appearing? Are you using a Mac or a PC?
      - Lucy
        
        Hi, no there’s there’s no popup when I click the bookmarklet — it just seems to scroll to the bottom of the page instead. I’m using a mac.
      - mark
        
        you have to manually put the url in the bookmark
  - http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
    
    Another commenter (Cathryn) confirmed that it didn’t work on Firefox. I have just tried and can confirm it only works in Chrome. Can you try again using Google Chrome?
Cathryn

Thank you for taking the time to write this post. I’m also having issues with the bookmarklet. I have imported my contacts into Yahoo and have followed the instructions to the Print View in Basic Mode, but when I click on the bookmarklet there is no popup window. I’ve attemped using both Safari and Firefox. Is there something else I can try?
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Thanks, Cathryn. I’ve tested the above in Firefox and I can confirm that it does NOT work. Sorry about this, to be honest I had only tested this in Google Chrome. I’m not sure what is making the code not work in Firefox (and presumably Safari). May I suggest you try it in Chrome– as it should work here. Sorry!
  - Stephanie Fitzgerald
    
    Hiya, it’s not working in Chrome for me at all.
    - http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
      
      Stephanie. Sorry to hear that. What’s happening, is the popup overlay not appearing? I’ll have a check next time I get access to a Mac.
  - Stephanie Fitzgerald
    
    Im using a mac… not sure if that has anything to do with it…
- mark
  
  you have to manually save the url in the bookmark
http://twitter.com/aliceinsanfran Alice Debois-Frogé

Hello there! Thanks for such an helpful post. However, like other Mac users, nothing happens when I click on the bookmarklet, even though I am using Chrome. Any ideas on how to make it work? Or is using a PC the way to go? Please advise! Thank you!
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Hi Alice. I still haven’t had the chance to check on a Mac as unfortunately it’s out of action at the moment. There is a possibility that Chrome for Mac is not saving the correct link in the Bookmarklet. Would you mind checking to see? If you could edit the bookmarklet by right-clicking and editing. Then delete what is there and pasting the following code in from this file: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=H8ZDDdU6
  
  Please let me know if that works.
http://www.facebook.com/aaronjtrigg Aaron James Trigg

I got it to work on Mac OSX Google Chrome by copy & pasting the Java script to the bookmarklet. It does not save correctly on Mac. You must edit the bookmarklet, copy the new script into the URL field first. Then make sure you print using the Basic View. Then and only then, when you click on the bookmarklet, it will work. Works like a charm though.
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Thanks, Aaron! That’s good news, although a real pain that you can’t just use the bookmarklet. I’ll update the article accordingly.
http://twitter.com/R_Alex_Hall Alex Hall

Ian,

This bookmarklet can work in Firefox with a few more steps. If you right-click the bookmarklet in Firefox (after you have dragged it to the bookmark toolbar), click “properties”, then select and delete all the text in the “Location” field, and paste in the javascript code which you’ve shared at this pastebin link–

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=H8ZDDdU6 –

and click “save”, then follow all the other steps you give here to ready a printout screen of the contacts, and click the bookmarlet, *it works!* It pops up a window of csv-formatted text, and you can select all the text, copy it, and paste into a text file and save it on your computer.

It seems to me that somehow the bookmarklet code can become mangled when dragged to a toolbar (I found that it was mangled in Chrome, and had to follow this procedure in Chrome (per your suggestions in comments) to get the bookmarklet working, which led me to wonder if that’s what’s happening in Firefox, which I found it is, which led to this fix). I don’t know how that’s getting mangled.

I suggest you update the post with a note about the possibility the bookmarklet code can be mangled, and how to fix it.

Thank you so very much for putting this information together and posting it. It was a tremendous help. After importing the saved .csv to google, and having twitter search for matches in my google contacts, I just found and “followed” 60 of my friends on twitter.

Jonathan,

Python is great, isn’t it?
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Thanks so much Alex. What you say makes perfect sense. I don’t know why all browsers can’t behave correctly, but tell me something new! I’ll update the post. Thanks!
Mark

—Incase someone didnt really understand what to do after the cvs file part—
after you get your cvs saved full of contacts most likely in a notepad on your desktop..you have to import it back to the yahoo account..to do that you need to delete all the contacts from the yahoo account..then import the cvs file using the yahoo account..finally all should be fine using twitter and the yahoo account! Hope this helped
Zohra

Thank you for this article, super helpful!
- http://iag.me/ Ian Anderson Gray
  
  Thanks for your kind words– so glad you found it helpful!
http://twitter.com/adamloving Adam Loving

Stil no update on the Facebook fan export front, I’m afraid. I *have* been working on exporting people that comment. http://linksy.me/social-media-marketing

May 24, 2013: Seriously Social News Episode 24 - The New Flickr, The Xbox One and Twitter 2 step authentication

Like this Post? Like the Seriously Social Facebook Page!

The Problems

A Solution?

How to Export Your Facebook Friends to a CSV file

STEP 1: Get a Yahoo! Mail Account (Or Sign in if you already have one)

STEP 2: Import Your Facebook Contacts

Step 3: Convert your Facebook Contacts to a CSV File

The Bookmarklet.

Import to Twitter

Adding your Facebook Friends to Google+

Adding your Facebook Friends to LinkedIn

Adding your Facebook Friends to Pinterest

Final Word

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May 24, 2013: Seriously Social News Episode 24 - The New Flickr, The Xbox One and Twitter 2 step authentication

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