One of the best things you can do when trying to grow your following on a new social network is to find and connect with any existing friends or followers that you have already on other networks.
As I've learned over the past couple weeks, many people think that it isn't possible to import their Facebook friends into Google+, but there are actually a couple ways that can be done. In this tutorial I show you how I do it using Circloscope.
To get started you’ll need the following:
Step 1 – Import Facebook Friends
What we’re going to do in this step is import your Facebook friends into your Yahoo Mail contacts and then we’ll export them into a format we can use for the following steps. A Yahoo Mail account is needed since it’s the only way to get access to the contact information of your Facebook friends.
Import your Facebook Friends
To import your friends, log into your Yahoo Mail account and locate your contact list. You'll find it by clicking the contacts icon just below the Yahoo Mail logo in the upper left of your account. Once on your contact list, select the Facebook option in the left-hand menu to bring up the Facebook import option.
Click the Import button to begin the import process, you'll be prompted to log into Facebook if you're not already logged in.
When the process is complete you should get a success message like the one shown here on the right. Simply click the View Contacts button to see all of your Facebook friends that we just imported to your Yahoo Mail contacts.
Step 2 - Export your Facebook Friends
Yahoo Mail provides a couple options to export your contacts but the only one that will export all your Facebook friends in a format we can use is the Print Alloption.
The Print All option is located on the Actions drop down menu that appears just above your contact list. When you select the Print All option, Yahoo will launch a new window with your Yahoo Address Book ready for printing.
It should look a lot like the below image, but longer since it contains all of your contacts. We are not printing the address book however, what we need to do is extract the email addresses from the print document for use in Circloscope.
Step 3 – Extract Email Addresses
To extract the email addresses from the Yahoo Address Book what we need to do is copy the entire document to our clipboard and then paste that content into a tool that will allow us to extract just the email addresses.
Copy the document to your clipboard
To copy the text I clicked within the document and selected all the text with the keystrokes CTRL+A (the blue in the above image is showing that I've selected all the text) , I then copied all the text to my clipboard using CTRL+C. You could also click and drag with your mouse to select all the text, and then right click within the document and use theCopy menu item.
Extract the email addresses
The simplest way to extract the email addresses is to use an email extraction tool.
If you are uncomfortable using a free web based tool for this, it is possible to extract the email addresses using programs like Excel or Microsoft Word, but I won't be covering that in this tutorial for simplicity sake.
To use the extractor, load the extractor and click within the top box labeled "Enter text with e-mail addresses to be EXTRACTED" and paste all the text from your Yahoo Address Book that we just copied to your clipboard.
Once you've pasted the text within the extraction box, click theExtract E-mail Addresses button to run the tool and you'll receive a nice list of just the email addresses in the box lower on that page labeled Final Filtered Result.
As you can see in the image to the left, I was able to extract 260 email addresses for my 314 Facebook friends. There are only 260 emails because not all of my friends have their email addresses available on Facebook.
Now you should select all the email addresses and copy them to your clipboard so you'll have them available for the next step.
Step 4 - Paste Email Addresses Into Circloscope
Circloscope is the only tool that allows you to locate Google+ users from a list of email addresses so you'll need to have either the Free or Premium version installed.
Either version will work, except that Free won't allow you to add all your friends to a circle in bulk, you'll have to add them one by one (it's still pretty quick unless you have a ton of friends to add).
To paste the email addresses into Circloscope, you'll need to open Circloscope and from the top menu go toDashboard > Profiles > Emails / Google+ IDs as you can see in the image to the right.
That will launch a popup window where you can paste the list of your Facebook friend's email addresses that you copied from the extraction tool in the previous step.
Once you've pasted in your email address list, click the Ok button to start the search. After a moment or two you should see some results like those in the below image.
As you can see in the upper right of the results, Circloscope found 136 of my Facebook friends out of the 260 email addresses I used in the search.
Circloscope won't find a friend for every email address because not everyone has their email address publicly available on their profile (and some people just have not joined Google+ yet) but it's still a massive timesaver over trying to find 136 people manually! This is especially useful for those of you that have more Facebook friends than I do, as I know many of you do!
Step 5 - Add Facebook Friends to a Circle
In this step we'll add all the Facebook friends on the results page from the previous step to a circle so we can connect with them on Google+. To select everyone on the results page you use the Select menu that appears just above the results on the left side.
You'll want to Select All as you can see in the image to the right. Note thatSelect All will only work if you are using Circloscope Premium, if you are using the free version you can add people to a circle one by one by hovering over their profile card and clicking the plus sign that will appear in the upper right of their card.
Once you've selected everyone, the Action menu will appear to the right of the Select menu as you can see in the below image.
To launch the Add to Circles popup select Action > Circles > Add to Circles.
You'll then be presented with a popup that allows you to add your Facebook Friends to one of your existing circles or a new circle. I chose to add my friends to a new circle labeled Facebook Friends as you can see in the image to the right.
When the process completes you'll get a success message for Circloscope indicating that your friends we're added to your new Google+ circle. You should then log into your Google+ account and check your circles to ensure everything worked as it should. As you can see below, mine worked out perfectly!
Next Steps
Once you have your Facebook friends in Circloscope and Google+ there are a few other things you may like to do.
Filter
Using Circloscope's filtering options, I split my Facebook Friends into two different circles - active on Google+, and inactive. I also added all of them to my white list so that I won't be at risk of inadvertently unfollowing them in the future.
Reach out
I also used Circloscope's filters to find my Facebook friends that were not following me back on Google+. I put them all in a special circle and sent them a brief "Hi, Facebook Friend" message mentioning that I just found them here on Google+ and thought we should connect here as well (about half of those have already followed me back).
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