If you’re like most people, you have a pretty good idea of who your friends are and how to reach them. But what about the people you work with or meet through your social media accounts? If you’re looking for an easy way to add social elements to your Gmail contacts, Rapportive is the app for you. Rapportive lets you connect with people based on their LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts. Once connected, Rapportive will show you all of the people in your contact list who are connected to those social media accounts. You can then choose to follow or email each of them individually. Rapportive is a great way to keep track of the people who are important to you and make it easy to reach out and connect with them. ..
Setup Rapportive on Your Gmail
Browse to the Rapportive site (link below), and click install to add it to your browser. Rapportive currently only supports Firefox and Google Chrome. In this test, we installed it on Google Chrome. Notice that Chrome warns Rapportive may access your private data from Gmail, though Rapportive says that they only use this data securely on your computer or their servers.
Next time you log into Gmail, open a message to see the new Rapportive sidebar. Click Log in to get started.
Choose if you want to let Rapportive to access your data.
Finally, choose whether to stay logged into Rapportive or to log out when you log out of Gmail.
Using Rapportive
Now, when you open an email, you should see more information about your contact on the right side of the message where you usually see Google AdSense ads.
You may see an avatar, short bio, and links to their social networks. You can add notes about a contact also, which lets you use Rapportive as a CRM.
You may see more information on some contacts. Here we see a contact that shows recent Tweets and links to several social networks.
Take Rapportive Further
You can add more features to Rapportive with Raplets, which are small extensions that add more information or CRM functionality. To add these, click the Rapportive button on the top of Gmail, and select Add Raplets to Rapportive.
Find a Raplet you want, and click Add This.
A popup will open to give you more information about the Raplet; click the Add button at the bottom if you still want it.
And, if you’re wish to close Rapportive without logging out of Gmail, click the Rapportive link in Gmail and select Log out.
Conclusion
Whether you want to find out more about your contacts or keep track of notes about them, Rapportive is a great way to do this from Gmail. With tools like this, Gmail gets a bit more powerful and feels more like a desktop application. If you would like this type of functionality in Outlook, check out our article on how to power up Outlook’s search and contacts with Xobni.
Add Rapportive to Gmail
