LinkedIn automation can be categorized into two distinct approaches: push and pull actions.
Push-type automations focus on streamlining individual user activities within LinkedIn, like posting content, messaging, and making connection requests.
On the other hand, pull-type automations are designed to extract substantial amounts of LinkedIn profile data (both companies and people).
These two LinkedIn automation approaches can be used to accomplish several tasks for you with little to no human effort.
I plan to explain more about that later, but first, let me ask you a question:
Could you benefit from any of the following LinkedIn automations?
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I'm willing to bet at least one of the following benefits of LinkedIn automations might catch your eye...
1. Get rid of general repetitive tasks
This one is kind of a given, but it needs to be said: You can automate most LinkedIn tasks that you're doing right now.
All the boring ones, like scheduling posts, sending connection requests, sending messages, and beyond.
That saves you lots of time that can be invested in other, more profitable tasks.
2. Generate lots of high quality leads
By using LinkedIn data extraction tools like Proxycurl, you can tap into a practically endless amount of high-quality prospects that you have an impressive level of insight on.
Also, LinkedIn data extraction automations can be integrated into your sales/marketing processes and sales funnel, allowing for a more streamlined process from lead generation to conversion.
3. Streamline your recruitment
For businesses looking to hire, LinkedIn automation can streamline the recruitment process.
From automatically finding candidates who match specific criteria to initiating first-level interactions, LinkedIn automation tools can save significant time and effort.
4. Increase your online presence and brand awareness
LinkedIn automation tools help maintain a consistent online presence, keeping your brand visible and your audience engaged.
LinkedIn profiles can be a great source of high quality traffic.
5. Monitor competitors
LinkedIn automation can be used to monitor competitors' activities, such as their posting frequency, funding, growth rates, engagement rates, and content strategy.
This information is invaluable for benchmarking your own performance and staying ahead in the market.
6. Improve your advertising/sales personalization, automatically
LinkedIn automation can help in personalizing the experience for your connections and outreach messages.
By being able to access enriched data on just about any B2B prospect, you can tailor your content, messages, and outreach strategies to meet the specific preferences and interests of your prospect, leading to more meaningful engagements, and ultimately higher response and conversion rates.
7. Help secure both funding and investment opportunities
LinkedIn contains tons of data on both VC firms, angel investors, and beyond. On the flip side, it also contains tons of data for startups (employee count, current funding data, employee growth rate, revenue growth).
This means you can scrape this data and use it to both secure funding for your new startup, or if you’re looking for your next unicorn, you can use it to find prime investment opportunities before anyone else.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn't provide official automation means
The reason LinkedIn is worth automating in the first place is the fact that it’s the single largest business-related social media platform. It contains vast amounts of B2B data. There is simply no other larger B2B database than LinkedIn.
Unfortunately for us, Microsoft fully understands the value of the B2B data it has with LinkedIn and charges a pretty penny for it, in many cases hardly providing access at all.
When it comes to trying to buy data from LinkedIn officially, their API (application programming interface, the ELI5 definition is essentially like a fast food menu for data) is super limited, and for all intensive purposes probably off-limits for the use case you want it for.
They generally only allow very boring use cases and there’s been a history of harmless third-party applications and LinkedIn integrations that have had their entire business shutdown overnight by relying on LinkedIn’s official API.
Outside of that, they do provide tools like Premium and Recruiter, but they're pretty limited in what they'll let you automate and extract for the most part.
Thus, the need for third-party LinkedIn automation solutions.
What kind of risks are associated with LinkedIn automation?
Technically, any kind of automation is more or less off-limits for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn especially doesn’t want you to be extracting any kind of data from their platform at scale because then they can’t sell you the data (though they can’t really prevent the extraction of the publicly available data, they must display a certain amount of information publicly if they want to be able to index on Google, which they do).
So, while the enforcement of “no LinkedIn automation” varies, you should assume any LinkedIn automation activity can get your account banned.
Only use automation tools on LinkedIn accounts you don’t care about.
But to be specific, here is LinkedIn’s full official terms on LinkedIn automation:
"LinkedIn is committed to keeping its members' data safe and its website free from fraud and abuse. In order to protect our members' data and our website, we don't permit the use of any third party software, including "crawlers", bots, browser plug-ins, or browser extensions that scrape, modify the appearance of, or automate activity on LinkedIn's website. We also don’t permit the use of fake accounts or fake engagement on LinkedIn’s website, including any tools or services that try to manipulate LinkedIn’s content algorithms. All of these tools violate the User Agreement, including, but not limited to, the following prohibitions listed in Section 8.2:
- Develop, support or use software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins and add-ons, or any other technology) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services;
- Use bots or other automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages;
- Overlay or otherwise modify the Services or their appearance (such as by inserting elements into the Services or removing, covering, or obscuring an advertisement included on the Services);
- Copy, use, disclose or distribute any information obtained from the Services, whether directly or through third parties (such as search engines), without the consent of LinkedIn;
- Override any security feature or bypass or circumvent any access controls or use limits of the Service (such as caps on keyword searches or profile views);
- Deep-link to our Services for any purpose other than to promote your profile or a Group on our Services, without LinkedIn’s consent.
- Interfere with the operation of, or place an unreasonable load on, the Services (e.g., spam, denial of service attack, viruses, gaming algorithms).
Any member who uses tools for such purposes is in violation of the User Agreement. This means that they risk having their accounts restricted or shut down. They also risk the possibility that any prohibited tools they’re using may become non-operational without notice. In order to maintain LinkedIn as a safe and trusted platform to facilitate authentic interactions between professionals and to keep our members' data safe, we're constantly working to improve our technical measures and defenses against the operation of scraping, automation, and other tools that abuse LinkedIn's platform."
Is it legal to scrape data from LinkedIn?
Providing that you respect the individual privacy settings of any given user on LinkedIn, you should be okay.
Past US cases have cemented the legality of scraping public data from LinkedIn. You can learn more about that here.
Now that we've covered the basics, let's explain the difference between push vs. pull LinkedIn automations and how they work.
Push vs. pull LinkedIn automations
Push LinkedIn automations
As I mentioned earlier, push automations accomplish things like posting on LinkedIn, sending messages, sending connection requests, etc.
Tools like PhantomBuster, and LinkedHelper help with this:
They allow you to automate the process of pushing information. Some are cloud-based solutions, but some are also desktop or browser-based solutions.
Push automations will always require that you provide your own LinkedIn account, because you'd obviously be specifically automating actions on that said account.
When using push automations, there is always a chance you can get said account banned.
Pull LinkedIn automations
This all focuses on the action of pulling data from LinkedIn’s vast B2B database.
The primary benefit is that you can use the massive amounts of B2B data in the various use cases mentioned above.
Practically every sales or advertising initiative could be improved with the kind of B2B data you can extract from LinkedIn.
However, like push automations, pull automations tend to work differently depending on the product.
There are a few different options, namely APIs, like Proxycurl, but there are also desktop applications and browser extensions as well.
There are even some free and open-source scripts like the pretty well known LinkedIn Scraper project on GitHub, which we sponsor, that could assist with this.
Why self-hosting LinkedIn pull automations can be a pain
The biggest con about using any self-hosted, desktop, or browser-based LinkedIn scraper or alternative pull based LinkedIn automation is that you'll constantly be rotating accounts.
You will get limited, and your accounts will hit authwalls. Eventually IPs can get blocked entirely.
It's complex to automate pulling data from LinkedIn (particularly at scale), because quite frankly Microsoft engineers are very smart. It takes a combination of several different things like proxies, changing browser fingerprints, CAPTCHA solving, rotating accounts and so on.
That's why many opt for a service like an API, because you can just pull LinkedIn data without any of the headaches required. All of the data is already scraped.
You can easily integrate a third-party LinkedIn API into your workflow, and flawlessly access data pulled from LinkedIn.
Let me explain how:
Pulling LinkedIn data by profile with Proxycurl
Our API offers several endpoints, but the main endpoint you’ll use to pull data from LinkedIn is our Person Profile Endpoint.
Using some simple Python (or your language of choice), you could extract data from any LinkedIn profile you’d like.
Here’s an example:
import requests
api_key = 'Your_API_Key_Here'
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + api_key}
api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/v2/linkedin'
params = {
'linkedin_profile_url': 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/colton-randolph',
'extra': 'include',
'github_profile_id': 'include',
'facebook_profile_id': 'include',
'twitter_profile_id': 'include',
'personal_contact_number': 'include',
'personal_email': 'include',
'inferred_salary': 'include',
'skills': 'include',
'use_cache': 'if-recent',
'fallback_to_cache': 'on-error',
}
# Making the GET request
response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)
# Printing the status code and response content
print(f"Status Code: {response.status_code}")
print("Response Content:")
print(response.json)
Using the LinkedIn profile URL, that would then return an enriched contact (me, in this case) with several data points, including email and phone number (if it was available). You can also do this for LinkedIn companies as well.
Now let me show you another option for pulling data:
Pulling LinkedIn data by searching with Proxycurl
The second option is if you’re not actively pulling specific prospects, profile by profile, and enriching them, you can search through our massive LinkedIn dataset (we call it LinkDB) via our Person Search Endpoint.
While we do sell our entire LinkedIn dataset via LinkDB, our Person Search Endpoint is powered by that same data set. It includes hundreds of publicly scraped profiles on people and companies.
It provides probably the most convenient way to access LinkedIn’s data without having to do any scraping at all. This time you don’t even need LinkedIn profile URLs either. You can search with specifying parameters that would identify your ideal prospect.
Let’s say you’re looking to reach out to software developers. The following Python would search our entire database for “software developers”:
import json, requests
headers = {'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + 'Your_API_Key_Here'}
api_endpoint = 'https://nubela.co/proxycurl/api/search/person/'
params = {
'country': 'US',
'enrich_profiles': 'enrich',
'page_size': '10',
'past_role_title':'(?i)software developer',
}
response = requests.get(api_endpoint, params=params, headers=headers)
result = response.json()
print(json.dumps(result, indent=2))
If you wanted to narrow this down further, there are additional parameters you can use, for example, adding the following:
'past_company_linkedin_profile_url': 'https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe',
Would then search for software developers working at Stripe.
There are dozens of other different ways you could customize your search, just view all the search parameters on our documentation here. You can also search for companies as well.
Either way, between our respective endpoints, you have several ways to pull LinkedIn data into your workflow and systems.
Combining pull and push actions
By combining pull and push LinkedIn automations, you can come full circle and automate very valuable and time intensive tasks. An example of combining pull and push automations is something like an AI-powered outreach tool, because you're pulling data from LinkedIn, and you're also pushing new data at the same time. Both actions are integrated.
Something like LinkedIn Recruiter and Premium could potentially be considered for this (Recruiter more so than Premium), but if you intend to do off platform outreach like via email or phone, you’ll have to use a third-party tool.
Other third-party tools like Reply.io would then replace the built in LinkedIn marketing tools (which is actually one of our customers, by the way).
Reply.io, for instance, puts more of an emphasis on allowing you to set up automated marketing/sales campaigns:
There are a few other variations similar to Reply.io, many of them incorporating LLMs like ChatGPT in some fashion nowadays in an attempt to further automate the outreach process.
(Note: We actually interviewed one of these outreach AI tools that uses us here, the tool is called Salesforge.ai – you might find value out of it.)
Of course Reach.ai doesn’t provide automated on LinkedIn outreach like the official LinkedIn tools do, but it’s still powered by LinkedIn data and using that data you can create outreach campaigns to their email, etc.
Some tools like PhantomBuster, mentioned above, allow you to do a combination of on LinkedIn and off LinkedIn outreach automations.
Are you starting to get the value of LinkedIn automation yet?
I think you are. After all, you made it to the end of the article, so you’re clearly one of the smart ones.
Push and pull LinkedIn automations are incredibly valuable in their own right, but they're even more so valuable when you combine the two actions.
At that point, you're automating a large portion of your required work in many use cases.
While Proxycurl can't do things like sending messages, emails, etc. we will gladly work in the background as a way to flawlessly pull LinkedIn data into your workflow or application, and then the world is yours at that point to do whatever you'd like with the rich B2B data on people and companies.
How we can help
If you’re looking for a lot of LinkedIn data immediately, LinkDB is probably the right choice for you. It consists of over 494,520,624 (and counting) publicly scraped LinkedIn profiles.
However, as mentioned above, we also provide access to LinkDB via our different API endpoints.
Namely, some commonly used ones are:
By utilizing our different API endpoints, you can integrate a lot of B2B data into your workflow seamlessly. No scraping headaches required, like proxies or a rotating list of LinkedIn accounts. None of that.
Does that sound good to you? If so:
Create your Proxycurl account for free today
Click here to sign up for Proxycurl for free.
You’ll start with 15 free credits, which are enough to test out a few simple queries with our API and get a feel for it.
After that, we use a fair credit-based usage system, so you can pay-as-you-go for access to our API. You can also save a bit by signing up for a monthly subscription, too.
You can view our API pricing here.
P.S. Thanks for reading! Hopefully, you’re walking away with a better idea of how LinkedIn automation works and how it can benefit you.
If you have any questions about anything in the article, or you have any questions about Proxycurl, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at “[email protected]”.
