How are messages automated on LinkedIn?

What can be automated?

LinkedIn provides a series of APIs that developers are able to use to automate various things - like creating content, or sending messages. Most of the things you can do as a user of LinkedIn can be replicated and done by software using LinkedIn's available APIs. Software is able to automate these things specifically from your profile if you grant access for it to do that (following guided steps).

What are the benefits of LinkedIn automation?

1. Automating LinkedIn connection requests and messages makes it possible to reach the volumes of prospects you need to reach in order to have a large enough pipeline to achieve target. Reaching these kinds of volumes manually is usually not possible without dedicating all of your time to it.

2. There is no time or effort required from you to generate pipeline and warm up leads until the point that a prospect wants to talk to you.

3. You will never waste any time on prospects that inevitably will never respond - of which there will always be a decent volume, regardless of your outreach approach.

What are the risks - and how are they mitigated?

1. LinkedIn has its own automation that detects unusual activity - like high volumes of messages being sent from one account. Anything that doesn't look like it could feasibly be human activity can be blocked by LinkedIn. Automated sending of messages and connection requests should always ensure it stays within the limits set by LinkedIn so that it is not determined to be a bot.

2. Some automation tools do not have the capability to personalise messages to the extent where they are evidently not automated. This can result in prospects receiving messages that feel impersonal. This is the problem that Koneksi solves.

3. If you were sending messages to prospects manually, you would probably ensure you space out the timing of your follow-ups to ensure that it doesn't seem too much. Automation needs to follow this same approach, to ensure messages are not sent in too quick succession.

4. You would usually not send a generic response if a prospect has actually replied - you would instead tailor your return response to their reply. Automated messaging must ensure it mirrors this approach by setting appropriate wait times between messages.

What are the takeaways?

So long as your automation tool of choice is configured to perform and behave moderately and not excessively on the LinkedIn platform, just like a highly performant human would or could, then you are fine to run automation to increase the number of activities you are able to perform from your account every day while you focus on other things. Well built automation tools will always cooperate with the official limits that LinkedIn puts in place to determine that your account is being run by you personally.

Using automation is a very powerful way to maximise your outreach potential - because it enables you to reach many, many more prospects. And combined with a human-like messaging system, your results (i.e. the number of warm leads you generate) will always be significantly better with automation than without.