Any recommendations for automating cold LinkedIn outreach?

Alright, so I used to run a company doing exactly this, so I am happy to share my experience.

First things first: LinkedIn is cracking down on this, hard. Any form of automation they suspect from you will first result in a warning (which you'll get by email), then if you continue doing it they will ban your account.

That means that, whatever tool you are using, needs to be built in such a way that it cannot be obvious that you are automating things. How? Well some things you want to do are:

• Do not send 100 invitations at a time
• Do not send X amount of invitations at a specific time every day
• Use LinkedIn Premium as you can send more invites
• Switch up your first message often
• Do not use any tools that change your IP address - or use a proxy that sends it through an IP near you
• Do no use URLs in the first message
• Get a high connection rate - so reduce SPAM
• Be active on LinkedIn outside of connection requests. If you're not, that's suspicious
• Visit the profiles automatically first, then send a request
• And respond to messages people send you
• Also try to make the first message something that's not commercial, such as "Hey {first name}, love to connect with fellow startup founders. - Your name"
• From my personal experience getting tons of invites a day: using the previous template looks suspicious if your main bio title says you work for a company providing services. If you say "Looking to connect with entrepreneurs" and your bio says you work as the "Sales Assistant at company X - we provide business loans for new companies", then most people are not going to accept your request

So, what tools are great for this? Well, there were a ton of tools doing exactly this. And they were closing down. Some got letters from LinkedIn telling them to stop providing their service. Others shut down because it's hard to scale this to 1000s of users and you also don't want your users to get banned because of you. I've seen tools come and go, come and go, for around 2-3 years now, and fewer people are building them.

The best tool I have found was PhantomBuster. But it takes manual work (and that's what you want because fully automating your LinkedIn will 10x the odds of getting banned).

It's pretty simple, you basically use their pre-made recipes to do specific actions on LinkedIn, such as scraping the results for a specific keyword, visiting profiles from a list, sending connection requests from a list, etc.

It does not automatically send a message after X days though. There was a tool that did this, but they shut down (and it keeps happening to other tools as well).

So you will have to send those messages yourself. And, honestly, just taking 10 minutes a day using copy-pasting will be enough, even when you're sending 60-80 requests a day.

Now, it takes a bit of time and effort to set it up, but once it's running you'll be good for a while.

Some extra information:

• Do not send the limit of requests each day, that's a trigger for LinkedIn, keep it to a number between 50-80.
• Set specific times for the tool to run (you can do this in the settings of PhantomBuster)
• Make sure you do a random number of new requests each time it launches
• Spread it out through the day
• Skip days, such as weekend days
• And again, be active on LinkedIn yourself, don't just run this in the background

The price point is $0 if you set it up right. There's a pro plan, but you can manage with the free version. But, you will need to use LinkedIn Premium while doing this since it will be less of a factor for LinkedIn to trigger your account for sending a lot of requests (also you need the premium function to scrape more results in LinkedIn since the free version of a LinkedIn account doesn't give you a lot of results when using the search function).

To scrape a lot of accounts, I recommend doing a scrape every week instead of daily. If your search has more than 1,000 results, filter your search based on location. Since LinkedIn only allows you to scrape 1,000 results (that's because they won't show you any more results after the first 1,000 accounts), any account after that 1,000 won't be on your list. Filtering on location will make it easier to get a lot more leads, so filter on city, area, etc.

CC @harrydry

Let me share my experience that may help the marketers who look for easy and automated LinkedIn automation tool.

All tools in the market have their own functions and features but I have found LeadConnect (https://leadconnect.io/) helpful to me.

It automates LinkedIn marketing activities such as, sending invitations, personalized messages, follow- ups. It replace lots of manual efforts by automated system to collect information in easy way to get more prospects details and utilize to them to grow LinkedIn outreach.

Some of the features:

It uses your IP address to send messages and connections request
100 Invites per day
Unlimited Auto Replies
Works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Smart Automation to avoid repetitive request from same Team.
Generates Performance Reports
Message Templates
Hubspot Integrations
Zapier integration

Additionally it offers free trial to check all pro features before buying, so why not trying and increase business leads from this smart tool?

Check out LINKDRA . www.linkdra.com . Good assistant than risky automation. Gets the job done and well within budget.

One friend of mine did that :
1- Create Fake Account on linkedin
2- Make it look real (add experiences, photos)
3- Use a plugin to automatically go on other users pages,
4- Add connection

Do all the dirty job from the fake account !

I won't lie to you this may seem like a good idea but it probably won't be effective in getting great connections. It may seem old fashioned but the best way I found to do this is to use OneNote Generate/organize some generalized approach verbiage and then send it as part of your individual networking campaigns.

https://linkedhelper.com?

I'd also be intersted in a similar tool. Let me know if you find anything Andy.