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How to Find Someone’s Phone Number Online

Finding someone’s phone number online is tricky. Cell phone numbers are private—there’s no public directory of cell phone numbers to replace those old paper phone books. However, there are a few ways you can find someone’s phone number (and business phone numbers are still easy to find).

There’s no good, perfect way to find someone’s phone number online. If you’re friends with someone on Facebook, you may be able to find their phone number there. Just sign into Facebook, head to the person’s profile page, and click About > Contact and Basic Info. Under Contact Information, you’ll see their phone number if they’ve chosen to share that information with their Facebook friends.

So you can’t find the person’s phone number on Facebook, where do you turn? Well, there’s still an online version of those heavy paper phone books! But, like the physical books, it only covers landlines. However, that’s nothing to sneeze at. For example, I could personally find my parents’ and in-laws’ phone numbers on these websites with a few quick searches.

Simply head to the White Pages website and plug in a person’s name (or just last name) as well as their city, state, or ZIP code. If that person’s name and phone number would appear in a paper phone book in that geographical area, you’ll see it on this website. It’s just like looking through paper phone books, with all the limitations—but it’s faster to search all those phone books, and all at once.

What if you can’t find a phone number on Facebook, or in the White Pages? Well, then it becomes a lot tougher. This kind of information is generally kept private and is closely guarded. People don’t often post their phone numbers online and there’s no massive database of cell phone numbers and names you can access. Sure, you could try heading to Google or Bing and searching for a person’s name along with “phone number”, but that will almost certainly not work.

How to Find a Business’s Phone Number

Most businesses place their phone numbers in an easy place to find on their website. You can generally just head to the business’s website and click something like “Contact Us” or “Customer Service” to find it. Some smaller businesses—like that little local restaurant—may not even have websites, but will usually have Facebook pages. You’ll often find their phone number on their Facebook page, which many businesses just use as their main website.

For a business that has multiple locations, you may need to use the “Locator” feature on the website to find your local branch. It’ll usually show you a phone number where you can reach that specific location. If not, you can always just plug the name and address (or just the address) of the business into a service like Google Maps or Yelp and you’ll usually see a phone number.

How to Find Someone’s Email Address for Free?

If your budget is tight, here are three quick ways to find emails for free:

• Clearbit Connect is a Gmail and Outlook add-on that looks for a person’s email from a variety of sources as well as their own database.
• GetProspect is a Chrome extension that allows you to find someone’s email address by their name and domain.
• RocketReach can quickly find emails for you, especially if your target is fairly high profile. Just sign up for a free account and start email hunting.

Use “@domainname.com” on DuckDuckGo

This little-known trick is a great way to find email addresses simply by using an alternative search engine.

Running an exact match search for “@domainname.com” in DuckDuckGo will give you results for any email addresses attached to the domain that are publicly available.

You can include the name of your prospect in the search if you’re looking to contact someone in particular, or just keep it generic.

My two go to sites are Pipl & Radaris. The most common reason I tend to use these sites is to find information that assists me in figuring out someone’s email address. The information I may try to find is their middle initial, perhaps a woman’s maiden name for example. I also use these sites to find current or former home addresses so I can cross reference with Melissadata to find possible current or past email addresses or phone numbers (past email addresses can be helpful too! Some people use the same screen name with a different mail service). I have found that both of these sites reveal the most information about an individual including:

• Possible addresses where they live or have lived
• Current or past phone numbers (try using Truecaller that Kameron Swinton mentioned in his video blog to see if the number is registered to that person)
• Other people in their immediate family (siblings, parents, children and/or spouse)
• Alternate names they may have gone by (great way to find someone’s maiden name or random nicknames!)

In addition to what I mentioned above, Pipl also finds and/or suggests other possible social media profiles. Sometimes these are confirmed profiles, other times they are just suggestions based on the individual’s name. Of all the sites that try to aggregate people information or match up an individual’s social media footprint, I find Pipl does it the best. In addition to what I mentioned above, Pipl also will show you:

• Known User names
• Possible profiles from social media sites (most common places they suggest are from Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Google+, twitter) They pull from 300 sources.

How-to Find Brand Contacts

The most successful influencers are the ones that actively seek out brands to work with. Many of our favorite large influencers still spend significant time researching and reaching out to brands they want to work with. As you get bigger, the brands you aspire to work with get bigger too. Why wait for them to come to you when you can go to them.

• Instagram DM – The tried and true way to find brands to work with is to look them up on Instagram and then DM them. Depending on the size of the company, you may or may not get a DM back. It never hurts to ask. If the company is larger, you might want to inquire who to direct collaboration inquiries too or where they have an active brand ambassador program.
• LinkedIn – Many influencers forget that LinkedIn is an incredible source of information about brands. When you find a business you like on Instagram, go to LinkedIn and find them there (usually searching on their Instagram handle works). You can then look through the titles of the employees at that company. Larger companies might even have employees with “influencer” in their title. If not, look for high-level folks in the marketing department. For small companies, you might want to look for the owner. Once you find the best contact (or two) – connect with them on LinkedIn and send them a message!
• Company Websites – Many companies put links to their brand ambassador programs on their websites in the footer. This may take you directly to a place you can apply to work with them.
• Press Releases – A great tip we got from an influencer was to set up Google News alerts about all the brands you want to work with. You’ll get a daily summary of news from and about those companies. Sometimes that news will include press releases that have email addresses of who to contact on their PR team. Many companies think of influencer marketing as PR so the PR teams are very connected to influencer activities. It’s a quick and easy way to get to the right person sometimes.
• Other Influencers – if you see other influencers posting about brands you want to work with, and especially if you see them tag the post with #spon, #sponsored or Instagram’s built-in sponsored post tagging feature, you can simply ask them. Many influencers are starting to become more collaborative and share their tips about how they have found collaborations.