How to download and export your LinkedIn posts

To download your LinkedIn posts, open Settings, go to Data privacy, choose Get a copy of your data, and request your archive. LinkedIn emails you when it is ready, and your posts are in a file called Shares.csv inside it, one row per post with a date, a link and the text.

That is the whole route. There is no button that exports posts on their own, and no app can fetch them for you, for reasons covered below. The rest of this page walks through each step, what is in the file, and what to do with it once you have it.

Step by step

1. Sign in to LinkedIn on the web and open the Me menu under your photo.
2. Choose Settings and privacy, then Data privacy in the side menu.
3. Choose Get a copy of your data.
4. Pick either the larger archive of everything, or tick the specific files you want if your posts are listed as an option.
5. Choose Request archive and confirm with your password.
6. Wait for the email from LinkedIn saying your archive is ready, then come back to the same page to download it.
7. Unzip the file and look for Shares.csv.

LinkedIn changes the labels on these screens from time to time. If a name above does not match, search your settings for 'copy of your data'.

The full archive or only some files

LinkedIn offers two choices: a larger archive with everything it holds about your account, or a smaller set of files you pick. If you only want your posts and they appear in the list, the smaller request is enough. If you are unsure which file holds what, request the full archive. It is more to unzip, but you will not need to ask twice.

How long it takes

LinkedIn says preparing the archive can take some time, and the larger archive usually takes longer than a few chosen files. You do not need to keep the page open. Request it, carry on with your day, and download it when the email arrives.

What is inside Shares.csv

Shares.csv is a spreadsheet with one row per post you published. The three columns that matter are a date, a link and the text: the date you posted, the permalink to the post on LinkedIn (in a column called ShareLink) and what you wrote (in a column called ShareCommentary). There are a few other columns about attached links, media and visibility.

• Dates carry no time zone label. They are in UTC, so a post from late evening may show under the next day.
• Reshares where you added no words appear as rows with an empty text cell.
• Post text contains commas, quotes and line breaks. Open the file with your spreadsheet's import tool instead of pasting it, or rows will split in the wrong places.

Why there is no API for this

Reading a member's own posts through LinkedIn's API needs a permission LinkedIn has closed to new applications. There is no route to your post history for a new app, at any price. Any tool that works from your past posts has to get them some other way, and the archive you download yourself is the one route LinkedIn offers for every post you have written.

What to do with your posts

Once you have the file, it is the best research material you own. It is your writing, in your voice, with the dates attached.

• Check your real cadence. Count the posts per month for the last year. Most people find the gaps are longer than they remembered.
• Audit your themes. Tag each post with what it was about. If one topic takes most of the rows, or a topic you want to be known for is missing, you know what to write next.
• Find your best openings. Read only the first line of every post. Copy the ones that made you want to read on into a list you keep beside you when you write.
• Reuse what still holds. An idea from two years ago may be worth writing again with what you know now. Update the numbers and the examples; do not repost the old text word for word.
• Collect your own rules. Notice the words and habits you like in your best posts and write them down as voice rules for the next ones.

A one-hour audit

1. Open Shares.csv with your spreadsheet's import tool and sort by date, newest first.
2. Delete the rows with empty text.
3. Add a column for theme and fill it for the last 50 posts.
4. Add a column for the kind of post: an opinion, a framework, a result with a number, or a finding.
5. Count each column. Write two sentences on what you want more of and less of next quarter.

How GoodSocials handles this

GoodSocials imports Shares.csv from Settings. Your browser reads the file before anything is sent, skips reshares with no text, and keeps the most recent 300 posts. Re-importing a newer archive six months later adds only the posts since, because each post is matched by its permalink.

Your past posts then appear on the calendar as background, beside the new posts on your board, so you can see what you wrote last spring while you approve next week. They are reference only: never republished and never touched by the publishing schedule.