Top 20 automation tools for LinkedIn 2023
With more than 57 million companies and 800 million professionals on LinkedIn, it remains the most popular social hub for B2B marketers, recruiters and salespeople. The demand for LinkedIn automation is equally high.
As a pioneer and long-standing market leader in the niche, Linked Helper has long been recognized as the safest LinkedIn automation tool. What started as a simple tool to auto-connect with people from LinkedIn search 7 years ago, has since grown into a serious technical solution for every possible task on LinkedIn — from sending bulk messages to group members to exporting full profile data.
So just put all these processes on autopilot and enjoy new leads, right?
Hold on a second…
First, LinkedIn is laying more traps for people who prefer to automate manual work, like the infamous 100-per-week invitations limit.
Second, people are turning to other platforms to do outreach and lead generation. They seek to do e-mail campaigns and integrate with various sales CRMs as well. For many, LinkedIn becomes one of the many stages in the lead generation and sales process rather than a one-stop solution.
Third, you need to cut through the noise: warm-up your leads and deeply personalize your messages for better response rate.
So, what does the best automation tool look like in 2023?
Well, the recipe is simple: safety, integrations with 3-rd party tools, usability, and deep level or personalization.
Here’s an overview of most powerful and safe automation tools for LinkedIn in 2023.
BEST TOOLS for LINKEDIN OUTREACH:
- Invite 2nd and 3rd level
(and bypass the LinkedIn weekly invitations limit)
2. Auto-accept invites
3. Message to 1st connections
4. Message to Group members
5. InMail to 2nd and 3rd contacts
6. Message Template Editor Pro
7. Sent invites canceller
8. Campaign templates
WARM-UP and ENGAGEMENT TOOLS for LinkedIn
9. Follow profiles
10. Like posts and articles
11. Invite to Group
12. Endorse my contacts
13. Invite person to LinkedIn Event
DATA SCRAPING and COLLECTING tools
14. Visit and Extract
15. Email Finder
16. Organizations extractor
17. Collect likers and commentators
18. Upload profile URLs
CRM and CROSS-CHANNEL OUTREACH tools
19. Send person to webhook
20. Inbox & Check for replies
21. CRM
#1 Invite 2nd and 3rd level contacts
Number #1 tool to grow your network on LinkedIn. With this tool, you can send hundreds of connection requests automatically. Interestingly, it comes with many essential perks for a smooth outreach, such as: email finding option, error-correction feature for names, bypass the weekly limit, random time-outs and override platform.
If you activate the Advanced settings for the tool, then along with sending a personalized connection request, it will try to find a valid personal email for this contact.
More important, if you activate the in-built ‘Undocumented feature’, the tool will continue inviting despite the weekly invitations limit from LinkedIn that normally is a serious hindrance to scalable outreach.
This allows you to significantly scale up your business, get sales calls scheduled faster, and saves you hours of manual work.
The tool behaves completely as a live person: its in-page navigation feature opens profiles through LinkedIn search field.
Random time-outs are a security measure and serves to randomize sending times for invitations by 3–60 seconds: this creates a real-human effect behind the account and is part of what we call “safe LinkedIn automation”.
‘Invite 2nd and 3rd level’ tool has a terrific feature to normalize names that are misspelled, capitalized or contain emojis, abbreviations or anything that doesn’t look normal. It is done automatically. What can be worse that wasting your sales opportunity because you’ve given away that you were using automation?
What if you’ve collected profiles from the Sales Navigator platform, but want to invite them via your standard LinkedIn profile? Then, simply activate the Override platform setting — it helps you choose which platform will be the target one.
#2 Auto-accept invites
Are you getting quite a few of incoming connection requests every day? If you aren’t very selective and want to welcome everyone to your network, take a look at the Auto-accept invites tool. It will open your network page, and simply click ‘accept’ to any pending invitations. Besides, this feature is also present as a built-in option with the ‘Filter Contacts Out of My Network tool.
#3 Message to 1st connections
Auto-message your first connections on LinkedIn using Message to 1st connections tool. Unlike connection requests, you can send unlimited messages to your 1st connections, which opens a lot of sales opportunities. You can plan your outreach over a sequence of messages with custom delays, therefore creating message chains. Message chains are designed to keep sending next messages to people who don’t reply to previous ones.
The tool comes with a number of features that allow you to get everything right in your messaging strategy.
💬Reply detection: Someone replied to your previous message? After connecting with an individual, you messaged them again? Then you will certainly thankful that reply detection is activated by default to not send subsequent messages in that case. Such replies are aggregated in a dedicated replied sub-list. Skim through your replies and decide which ones to ignore and which ones need your attention. Reply detection is a real time-saver that allows you to focus on and quickly sort through replies in no time.
⏳Filter-by-content: aren’t sure, but feeling like you might have already sent similar messages in the past, maybe even not through Linked Helper? Just activate Filter-by-content plug-in and set one or few key phrases (i.e. “weekly demo”, “upcoming UX conference”). Being a smart tool, the ‘Message to 1st connections’ tool will scan earlier messages and will skip this contact if it finds the ‘red flag’ phrases in the chat history.
👉Hyper-personalization: thanks to custom fields, the in-built Uclic and Hyperise features your messages will shine. Uclic and Hyperise allow you to use custom pictures or custom links for every recipient automatically creating an impression you’ve taken the messaging process very seriously and spent some time on personalization.
#4 Message to Group members
Unlike with the previous tool used to message your current 1-st level network, messaging fellow group members is a strategy widely used to get your message though quickly and without being directly connected with someone on LinkedIn. If you are member of a group on LinkedIn, you will see a list of other members. After you message someone via a Group page, they will receive an incoming message request that they can accept. ‘Message group members’ is simple to use: collect people from the group members page, set up your message, assign Group ID to all recipients and press Start.
Good news for Sales Navigator accounts! You can use Group filter in combination with other search filters to find multiple contacts belonging to certain groups, and set up campaigns for them.
#5 InMail to 2nd and 3rd level contacts
LinkedIn Premium subscriptions include InMail credits — messages that can be sent to people you are not connected to.
Thus, LinkedIn Recruiter gives 30 monthly credits on a Lite plan, 100 credits — on a Talent, and 150 credits on a Pro plan. The Sales Navigator comes with 150 credits per month. More credits can be purchased additionally. InMails are said to look more professional than simple messages, which is essential to sending job offers or sales proposals.
If you are using this feature of LinkedIn regularly, you may want to automate this as well. InMail to 2nd and 3rd level works if you have active InMail credits. But even if you don’t, InMails can be sent for free to Open profiles (profiles who opted for receiving InMails). Just build a list of people you need to send InMails to, set Message Template and click “Start Campaign”.
#6 Message Template Editor Pro
Let’s face it — sending messages that address someone directly by name is the minimal standard, but not by any means enough to meet the needs for a deep personalization. Can you use LinkedIn automation at scale and still sound personal? Can you vary your message depending, let’s say, on the industry, a skill, or location, or whether I and the recipient have or don’t have mutual contacts automatically?
Yes. With the powerful Message template editor tool from Linked Helper 2 you can customize your message using names, company and current position data, number of mutual contacts, and even custom fields that you can add yourself! to refer to restaurant awards or ratings or other industry-specific data. That’s where custom fields come in. The less “robot-like” your message looks, the better. IF-THEN-ELSE plug-in will help you create several variations of your pitch depending on a condition you create.
#7 Sent Invites Canceller
If you find yourself sending a lot of connection requests that do not get accepted, you will have to clear your pending invitations queue from time to time. Practice shows that having over 1000 pending connection requests affects your deliverability rates. Actually, your new invites do not get delivered. Clicking “Withdraw” button 500 times can be quite overwhelming! Use the in-built invitation cancellation feature, or Sent Invites Canceller to automatically withdraw a lot of pending connections requests. This tool does it almost in an instant, freeing up your time for more important things on LinkedIn. Select the date in the settings, and the tool will cancel all outgoing pending invites sent prior to that date in a few clicks.
Even better, the automatic Invites canceller comes as a built-in setting for the ‘Filter Out-of-my-network’ tool. You can choose to cancel unaccepted pending invitations after 30/45/50/… days if people don’t accept. How convenient!
# 8 Campaign templates (Drip campaigns)
Best salespeople don’t sell in the first message. In fact, no one sells on the first meeting or encounter with a lead. Various statistics claim that it takes 8 touches on average to close a deal. For a lead generation process on LinkedIn, it translates into “Warm-up your leads, invite them, send several messages”.
Campaign templates are tools that supply ready-made campaign plans for your LinkedIn outreach or data scraping goals.
If you are seeking to scrape profile data, then ‘Export profile information’ is your option: it will auto-view profiles, attempt to extract verified emails and then export them through web-hook to a 3-rd party tool of your choice (Visit — Scrape Email — Send to Webhook).
Campaign templates have easy onboarding: the ask your questions like “Select how many days to wait”, “Set up your 2nd follow-up message” and by choosing your options you receive your ideal Workflow.
For flexibility they offer an Empty template, where you build your Workflow as you like. Drip campaigns are so flexible that you can implement almost any lead generation strategy on LinkedIn, building it from scratch with your own messages, delays, in the order you prefer.
WARM-UP and ENGAGEMENT TOOLS
#9 Follow Profiles
This tool allows you to start following your 2nd and 3rd level connections in bulk. It’s a proven technique to increase the acceptance rate of your sent invitations and grow your network fast. Practice shows that by following your leads prior to inviting them — you will likely start receiving more incoming connection requests from them, or that they will more willingly ‘make friends’ with you later when you invite them. Naturally, this also helps you get more profile views on LinkedIn. Next, by following certain people and unfollowing others, you control what posts you see in your feed. By interacting with your prospect’s content, putting likes and comments, you increase the chance to add them to your network.
#10 Like and comment posts & articles
Do you enjoy reactions, such as likes and comments, to your posts on LinkedIn? So does everyone else! ‘Like posts and articles’ is an ideal tool for warming-up contacts before reaching out to them. On the activity page of any given profile, you can find posts and articles he shared or published. Using the ‘Like posts and articles’ you can automatically like 1, 2 or more recent posts and/or articles they shared on LinkedIn, and even add a comment below.
#11 Invite to Group
On LinkedIn you may invite your 1st connections to join a group provided that you are a member of that group.
Group Inviter tool helps you automate sending invitations to your 1st connections. Consider using this tool if you build a group page as a way to promote your business or industry. After all, LinkedIn is a platform for building and sharing expertise. Many people use LinkedIn Groups for lead generation, so why ignore this tool?
Just collect your 1st connections, then proceed to a group page and click “Invite”.
#12 Endorse My Contacts
Shortly after adding people to your network, you may want to build better relationship by endorsing their skills. Endorse My Contacts tool automatically visits each profile in queue and endorses skills as specified in the settings:
· All skills listed
· First 2, 3, 4…skills
· Specific skills like “Interior design”, for example
Some of the benefits are getting endorsements in return and warming up your network before contacting them with your sales offer.
#13 Invite person to event
LinkedIn has a terrific feature that allows you to host an event and invite your network to participate. This is good to spice up your network on LinkedIn, and a lot of marketers use events feature to share content or research customers’ needs before sending their sales pitch. If your network is quite big, consider using LinkedIn automation to send invites to your event in bulk. With the ‘Invite person to event tool’, you only need to paste the link to event, select your recipients and click the “Start” button.
SCRAPING and COLLECTING TOOLS
#14 Visit and Extract Tool (people profiles)
A great LinkedIn automation tool that visits 1st — 2nd — or 3rd-level LinkedIn profiles that you’ve put into the queue, scrapes information available on profile pages and accumulates it into a csv file. This tool extracts names, workplaces, data about education, skills, interests, industry, mutual connections, and email or phone(for 1st connections only). Free options and add-ons include: attempting to extract verified emails of 2nd and 3rd level contacts.
Here are just some of the popular tasks that Visit and Extract tool can be used for:
- Send a message only to people who have Java Script skill listed;
- Send a message to people with 1000+ followers;
3. Split profiles by geographical area, if you collected them as ‘commentators’ under a post and want to send a different message to each area;
4. Filter out people who became your 1st connections before February, 2020.
#15 Extract organizations (companies/schools)
This tool’s name speaks for itself: it helps you extract information from company pages in LinkedIn. For example, you type in a keyword in the search field, go to Companies and see a lot of results.
Use Companies Extractor to obtain data such as: Company name, company URL on LinkedIn, website, domain, industry and specialties, headquarters, number of followers and other.
You may further filter that list to address only companies that are located in a certain geographical area or have this or that number of followers.
#16 Find profile emails
There are lots of email finding tools out there, but this one reportedly has 70–80% success rate for finding verified personal emails. The tool comes with 20 search credits on a standard plan (15$ per month) and with as many as 100 search credits on a PRO plan (45$ per month). A search credit is spent on successful profiles, for which an email was found. Failed attempts don’t count towards the credit. In the exported file you will have, among other data, links to profiles and emails.
#17 Collect post likers and commenters
Most automation tools for LinkedIn automate manual actions in LinkedIn, such as viewing profiles, adding and removing people from your network, sending messages, etc. When it comes to targeting a specific audience, you have to rely on LinkedIn Search tool — and limit your search by either region, industry, relationship level and keywords. More targeted search is available for Sales Navigator and Recruiter subscriptions.
Another way of attracting audiences is by creating engaging content. You post your expert opinion on a professional subject or a teaser in LinkedIn and it gets 2000 likes and 3000 comments. Wow! Many of you would prefer to follow-up with this engaged audience with something like “Thanks for commenting on …By the way, we address these issues in our 4-week course…”
‘Collect post likers’ tool allows you to pull a list of people who engaged with your post instantly. You would need to copy link to the post and open it in a separate tab, hit “Collect” and let the tool do the job.
#18 Upload Profile URLs
The feature of uploading external links is a must for a good LinkedIn automation tool.
Very often the filters on LinkedIn search page are not enough to build a list for a specific marketing purpose. What if your target audience is scattered across different locations, industries and profiles? Or what if you source your list not from LinkedIn at all, but from an agency or an external person who supplies you the data? Apparently, you will need a way to somehow upload a list of profiles externally. ‘Upload Profile URLs’ solves this task. Just paste a csv file or profile URLs themselves into the pop-up window. The tool will recognize them and you will be able to proceed with inviting, messaging or doing other things. See how to use Upload Profile URLs to tailor your outreach to the people you need.
CRM and CROSS-CHANNEL OUTREACH
#19 Send person to webhook
You may need accurate reports or weekly statistics, let’s say, of people who received your invitation on LinkedIn, who replied to a message, who received a follow-up, etc. If you don’t want to waste time on compiling lists yourself, ‘Send person to webhook’ might be the option you need. Similarly, sending profile data through webhook will link you to any 3-rd party CRM that supports Zapier or Integromat technologies — something every sales person needs. This tool can follow any of the other tools mentioned above (invitation, messaging, inviting to group, etc.) to transmit successfully processed profiles to a third-party tool (Google Sheets, CRM, etc.). Sending profiles to webhook does not increase your daily activity on a LinkedIn profile.
#20 Inbox & Check for replies
‘Check-for-replies’, if placed under invitations, InMails or messages, — finds replies to previously sent message(s) and puts them aside in a dedicated replied list. At the same time, if there were no replies found, such profiles are postponed and held for X days or Y hours.
It is a very straightforward tool that helps you find and focus only on certain replies rather than going through your pretty cluttered LinkedIn inbox. If you set tags, then locating such replies across Linked Helper is piece of cake.
Inbox, on the other hand, is a more sophisticated platform for aggregating and managing replies across various campaigns of your LinkedIn outreach. Easy filters allow you to view replies received within a set time range, coming from a specific or all campaigns. More importantly, on pressing the message icon you will open someone’s CRM profile card, where replies can be marked as read or ignored.
CRM
Getting a snapshot of all your past interactions with someone on LinkedIn and being able to view their profile without visiting their LinkedIn page? CRM stores campaign history, messaging history (with ‘new’ and ‘visible’ labels for replies), and a copy of extracted data from their LinkedIn profile. All steps are carefully recorded. Providing that you use Linked Helper for your outreach and other LinkedIn activity — your CRM remembers everything!
With tags and notes, add any records or reminders for your future reference. Best of all? You are building up a pretty rich database over time. So next time you are gathering designers or doctors to an event, fish out the relevant audience from your Linked Helper CRM and create your next outreach campaign.
You can download these tools here: https://www.linkedhelper.com/downloads.html
Watch how-to’s: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsSV9at7cPszVfPcAdVXMyQ
