Over 84% of C-level B2B buyers are influenced by social media when considering a purchase – meaning social engagement is as important as ever. This trend has not gone unnoticed and in the past few years, a bunch of third-party apps have emerged to safely automate LinkedIn lead generation.
LinkedIn automation tools are hot. The popularity of LinkedIn automation tools has been growing rapidly despite the fact that these tools violate Linkedin’s terms of use. Why?
Simply because marketers who use LinkedIn automation tools feel that the rewards outweigh the risks. That’s why B2B growth hackers, sales, business development, and marketing professionals are increasingly using and recommending automation tools.
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What are LinkedIn Automation Tools?
LinkedIn automation tools can help you save time and streamline your LinkedIn marketing efforts by automating repetitive or time-consuming tasks.
Some common tasks that LinkedIn automation tools can perform include:
- Sending connection requests and follow-up messages
- Endorsing skills and leaving comments on posts
- Automatically messaging your connections on their birthdays or work anniversaries
- Analyzing LinkedIn data and providing insights to help you optimize your marketing strategy
By using LinkedIn automation tools, you can automate your outreach and marketing efforts, allowing you to focus on more high-value tasks such as building relationships and engaging with your audience. However, it’s important to use these tools ethically and within LinkedIn’s policies and guidelines to avoid any negative impacts on your account.
Is Using LinkedIn Automation Tools Risky?
LinkedIn is cautious about automation apps when they encourage spam or undermine the integrity of the platform by automating tasks that were designed to promote digital networking by humans. Also, these tools can eat into LinkedIn revenues. That’s why LinkedIn may restrict your account if they can detect that you are using automation – here are the official guidelines.
In this post, we’ll explain how you can mitigate the risk of getting your LinkedIn account restricted and how to safely automate Linkedin lead generation. We provide you with 12 safety tips to follow as best practices for using automation.
Best Practices for Safe LinkedIn Automation
Here are the 12 most important things to keep in mind when safely automating LinkedIn lead generation.
1. LinkedIn Profile – Age and Connections are Important
Don’t start using automation on a Linkedin profile you just created. Give it some time. Build at least a hundred 1st level connections before you start using automation on that profile. We recommend using the “people you may know” feature to build your network by connecting with people.
Of course, there are a few ways to bypass LinkedIn’s connection limits – you can read about them here.
2. Scale Up Slowly
Start slow with automation and scale up gradually. Instead of starting by configuring your automation tool to send 100 invites/day, it is recommended that you start slow – maybe with just 20-30 invites per day. Develop a pattern of network growth for a few days and then scale up 50, 75, or 100 invites a day. We always recommend using a tool with inbuilt safety limits that can cap your automation activities if you accidentally exceed the usage limits.
Once you’ve scaled your LinkedIn invites, you can start mass messaging. Here are a few tips of ours for getting the best results out of your LinkedIn messaging.
3. Avoid Simultaneous Logins from Multiple Locations.
Avoid accessing your LinkedIn account from multiple locations and devices while the automation is active. Make sure that you only access your LinkedIn account from trusted devices and avoid logging in from multiple devices simultaneously (ex: laptop and mobile) while the automation software is active.
5. Simulate Human Behavior
Overactive accounts will also prompt suspicion that your LinkedIn account is using automation. Too many actions in a short period will increase the chances of your account getting flagged for possible automation. Some examples of these actions can include:
- Posting or sharing too much content on LinkedIn in a short amount of time
- Commenting too much in a short amount of time
- Performing two actions at once
Replying to incoming messages is OKAY. In fact, you should look for automation tools offering inbox and reply management features. That way you will not need to log in to LinkedIn to check your messages and send replies.
5. Avoid Saving Multiple Searches
Many LinkedIn automation tools allow you to create and save contact lists. These tools crawl the data from LinkedIn based on your search parameters and save the search results as lists. That means the crawler bot has to visit each contact profile programmatically. LinkedIn has a commercial use limit in place and can detect if there is unusual activity.
Limit yourself to saving a single list of 1,000 contacts a day if you are a free LinkedIn member. If you have a LinkedIn premium subscription, you can save a list of 2,500 contacts a day. Saving multiple searches simultaneously can be detected as if you are scraping the data. Create lists for the purpose of running lead generation campaigns and not for scraping data from LinkedIn.
6. Avoid Getting Restricted from Sending Invitations.
LinkedIn can temporarily restrict your account if you have invited a lot of people who do not accept your invite or clicked to report that they don’t know you. Add a personalized message with your invitation to the recipient to explain how they can benefit from your connection. It is very important to build credibility with an interesting profile.
Here’s what we recommend:
- Add a profile photo that clearly shows your face (make it professional).
- Add a meaningful headline with a summary that can clearly says how you can help your prospects
- Update your work and education history making sure it’s completely up-to-date
Select an automation tool that offers you features like message personalization, filtering the saved lists, tagging, deleting, blacklisting contacts, and monitoring your connect rate.
7. Withdraw Pending Invites
LinkedIn sees a lot of unaccepted invites as a sign that you are inviting people whom you do not know. And, that is a violation of their terms. There is a lot of misinformation regarding what is a safe number of pending invites. So far, LinkedIn has not published such an official number. We recommend deleting invites that have been pending for more than 30 or 45 days.
If someone has not accepted your invite in 30 or 45 days, chances are they will not accept your invite. Select an automation tool that offers the ability to automatically withdraw pending invites based on the number of days it has been pending. Some tools also give you the ability to bulk withdraw pending invites. Such a feature can come in handy as LinkedIn does not offer a bulk withdrawal feature.
8. Get a LinkedIn Premium Subscription
Whether or not you use automation, LinkedIn Premium membership has a number of benefits for sales prospecting. Advanced search filters are an excellent way to filter and target prospects much more accurately and ensure that you reach out to relevant people.
Premium members get higher commercial use limits for sending messages and InMail, they can view up to 2500 contacts per search instead of only 1000, among other benefits. LinkedIn also seems to be more liberal with premium members.
9. Do Not Use Browser Extension based LinkedIn Automation Apps
In early 2020, LinkedIn cracked down on a host of automation apps that operated as Google Chrome extensions. Their usage can be easily detected by LinkedIn. Instead, we recommend that you use a cloud-based automation service that takes the safety of your LinkedIn account very seriously.
10. Use Software that Randomizes Campaign Actions
Many LinkedIn automation software apps send invites and messages at preset time intervals. Some automation apps can mimic human behavior – i.e. they can send invites and messages at random time intervals just as a real person would do. Random delays between actions can not be picked up as patterns of robotic behavior and are hence difficult to detect.
11. Use Automation Tools that Provide a Dedicated IP Address
Having a dedicated IP address from where the software accesses your LinkedIn account to send invites and messages is extremely helpful in avoiding detection. It ensures that the bot always logs in from the same IP address. Use automation software that assigns you a dedicated country-based IP address closest to the location from where you access your Linkedin account.
12. Don’t be Aggressive With Automation
It does not pay to be overly aggressive with LinkedIn automation campaigns. Do not run campaigns 7 days a week. We recommend running automation 5 days a week and not more than 8 hours each day. Make sure you have optimized your campaigns for sensible daily quotas and use software that provides automatic daily timeouts from automation.
What LinkedIn Automation Tool is Best For You?
Relationships matter more than ever before and to scale your LinkedIn social selling, you are going to need to develop a well-calibrated automation approach. The right tool can help automate your relationship-building, networking, and prospecting on Linkedin.
Out of all the tools for LinkedIn automation, We-Connect is the safest and most productive tool available. Some of its features include:
- Automated lead generation: WeConnect automates the process of sending connection requests, follow-up messages, and endorsements, making it easier to generate leads and build your network on LinkedIn.
- Personalized outreach: With WeConnect, you can create personalized templates for your outreach messages, which can help you stand out and increase your response rates.
- Advanced targeting: WeConnect allows you to target specific industries, job titles, and locations, so you can focus your outreach efforts on the people who are most likely to be interested in your services or products.
- Safe and compliant: WeConnect is designed to comply with LinkedIn’s terms of service and best practices for automation, so you can use it with confidence without worrying about getting your account penalized.
- Comprehensive analytics: WeConnect provides detailed analytics on your campaigns, so you can track your progress and adjust your strategy as needed.
You can take a 14-day free trial and explore the safety features of We-Connect right now. Or, if you want to learn about other lead-gen tools, we’ve compiled a list of our 15 favorite lead-gen tools.
