Generating leads on LinkedIn has become a crucial way to professionally network and grow your business. If you want to maximize your effectiveness on this platform, automation tools can be a major highlight – when used correctly. You’ve probably heard about the controversial effects of automating LinkedId network parsing for lead generation. But you just need the right automation tool to start your lead generation safely and effectively.
Does LinkedIn Allow You to Use Automation?
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LinkedIn itself offers several native tools for automation, such as Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite. These are safe to use and generate a nice profit for LinkedIn as a business while coming out quite expensive for users. They are safe, but have serious drawbacks, which we’ll cover below – and that’s why there is competition in this market.
To protect the overall user experience, the platform doesn’t allow you to send too many invitations in a short period of time or keep too many pending invitations. Otherwise, your LinkedIn account may be temporarily blocked. However, it’s not that simple: if automation were completely banned, there would be no competition, and neither would this text. And now we will discuss professional tools competing with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Zopto.
MeetAlfred
MeetAlfred, formerly known as Leonard, is a decent LinkedIn automation tool with a broad profile that mainly focuses on all phases of social media promotion campaigns. Alfred can help you organize better team management, build LinkedIn campaigns, and automate sequences of actions aimed at networking. Some of the main features offered are:
- Campaign Manager – create and manage your LinkedIn message sequences using traditional personalization tags and action limits;
- Alfred CRM – manage your leads and first-level contacts within the tool using LinkedIn’s built-in CRM;
- Alfred email marketing campaigns – go beyond LinkedIn, connect your GSuite account, and communicate with your potential customers via email;
- Using MeetAlfred, you also get a dashboard with real-time data analytics to track your progress and gain useful insights.
Expandi
Currently, this platform is the most attractive Zopto alternative. As a cloud-based platform, Expandi appears to be one of the most secure LinkedIn automation tools with many additional features to grow your prospect list. Grant Aldrich, founder and CEO of Online Degree, considers this tool to be the most reliable solution. Because it’s cloud-based software, it uses a dedicated IP address, works on-premises, and gives access to advanced personalization, which increases conversion rates. Here are the main benefits of the platform:
- A dedicated IP address is tied to the country, which allows you to use the tool wherever you are, keeping the same virtual location;
- Numerous accounts that can be managed;
- Advanced dynamic personalization, allowing you to pull images from potential customers’ profiles and include them in your messages;
- Integration with CRM and other marketing tools.
How you can deal with LinkedIn limits and restrictions with Expandi: You can use the automatic warm-up feature that gradually increases daily limits by mimicking human behavior. The tool offers intelligent limits that ensure you don’t exceed the number of connection requests and messages per day required by LinkedIn. Its functionality involves a random delay between actions, which helps to trick LinkedIn’s algorithms. In addition, instead of sending connection requests, you can utilize Expandi’s open InMail campaigns
Octopus CRM
This is an all-in-one CRM for LinkedIn automation aimed at improving prospecting and generation on the platform. It is essentially a Chrome extension that you need to download and integrate with your LinkedIn account. The main features of the tool are:
- Automated (personalized) connection requests that you can send to second and third-level connections on LinkedIn;
- Mass messaging to first-level connections;
- Automatic endorsement of up to 7 skills on your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles;
- Automatic visits to hundreds of profiles;
- Personalized LinkedIn lead generation funnel for prospect management.
Legality of Data Scraping
As you may know, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has recognized the legality of web scraping – the collection of data from web pages. The court ruled that the social network LinkedIn has no right to prohibit companies from collecting public data about its users. Linkedin scraping is a way to automate the collection of information. The main purpose of scraping is to speed up sourcing. But scraping is also used in other cases when you need to pull and structure information from some resource.
Conclusion
We hope you found this article helpful and are ready to start generating leads from LinkedIn “on autopilot”. It’s important to note that regardless of the tool you choose, you should always consider the security practices used when automating LinkedIn.
