Automation tools for your LinkedIn profile look shiny and exciting, and promise to save you many hours of poring over LinkedIn manually to send out large volumes of connection requests and messages. They are cheap, but are they really worth it?
“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 (also called “add-ons”), that scrapes, modifies the appearance of, or automates activity on LinkedIn’s website. Such tools violate the UserAgreement.“
Using any form of automation for your LinkedIn account goes against the best practices in LinkedIn’s terms and conditions. If any suspicious activity is detected on your account, you may be suspended, have your activity restricted, or even have your account shut down completely. LinkedIn are not simply being difficult. Using software can have data protection issues as well as ‘spamming’ outputs which fall outside of normal use and therefore flag up in their systems.
Rules aside, using automation for your LinkedIn lead generation has other risks and downsides. The main one being that automation obviously lacks the human element, which is paramount when you’re communicating with other people. Whilst you can set up automated tools with parameters and demographics to target, there will still be accounts that ‘fit’ the criteria without actually being a suitable target. For example, you may search for people with the title Marketing Manager. Someone may appear who is currently a manager in a different department, with a history of a marketing position. Automation software would not detect that this person is not someone who you can work with, and therefore would begin to target them. This can damage your reputation and brand image, when they (correctly) tell you this is absolutely not something they would work with. Alongside this, its very common that your competitors appear in searches of people you are trying to target, and the last thing you want to be doing is revealing your marketing strategies to your competitors, as well as the fact it doesn’t reflect well on you that you can’t do your research before contacting someone!
Having a real human oversee the activity is key to success when using LinkedIn as a source of leads. Having a real eye oversee all of the work means that as you work through your list of prospects, you may come across someone for who you can slightly tailor their message and pitch to increase their engagement with you. A computer can’t do that.
We understand this is a lot of work, and takes a serious number of hours of input every week to be successful, but that’s what we do. Packages start at just £289/month, and takes this branch of your business development off your hands. To learn more about what we do, or to chat to us about your growth targets and how we can help you, give us a call on 0161 504 1475, or click below to get in touch.
