LinkedIn is the most popular social networking site for professionals and businesses and is a great resource for lead generation and marketing efforts. It can help companies find highly targeted businesses and individuals in one place. Attempting to reach them all manually, however, is a Herculean task and, where there are a very large number or prospects, next to impossible. LinkedIn automation bots can help with this process by automatically assessing LinkedIn profiles, sending connection requests and then following up with specific marketing messages.
A LinkedIn automation bot can be used to perform a wide array of functions on LinkedIn automatically that are defined through a script. These include functions to auto-follow, follow back, unfollow, like, unlike, comment share, send messages and so on. In effect, a bot mimics a human user’s interactions with the platform and can automate contacting and following up with LinkedIn users so that it can be done on a large scale.
Bots automate the messaging process to prospects and enable sending personalized messages and follow-ups to specific prospects so that they are not marked as spam. Cold emails are no longer a good approach to this since they are often seen as impersonal and intrusive. Lists of prospects are uploaded to the bot in the form of CSV files that specify the target audience for the marketing effort. Through scripts that the user creates, personalized messages can be sent to these prospects as well as performing other functions on the site.
It is possible, however, to be placed in so-called ‘LinkedIn jail’ (temporarily prevented from sending invites) or to be banned altogether if a LinkedIn bot sends too many invitations to prospects. This can occur if the bot’s connection requests are rejected by too many users. When this happens, LinkedIn removes the ability to send these types of requests. The company does not, however, make clear how many is too many.
There are limits on the number of invites that a given user can send per day (though a user can request more) and sometimes Captcha tools are used to check for the presence of bots. The way to avoid this is by not ‘spamming’ prospects – invites should only be sent where there is a good chance they will be accepted. Some bots also provide functions for customizing the messages that are sent to specific types of users to avoid this. Most restrictions are removed after a few days and for a first infraction, it should go away after a few hours.
