How to Bypass LinkedIn 100 Invitation Limit?
You might already have heard about it. LinkedIn introduced a new limitation of the number of weekly contact requests you can send. This is quite an issue for LinkedIn automated outreach as the main outreach workflow starts by sending over a contact request.
Several growth hacks popped up on the internet about how to bypass this invitation limit. The most common one is to use personal email to send invitations. This isn’t a good idea as you won’t be able to personalise the contact request, and it is not GDPR complaint. My favourite automation tool made a nice stand about this topic.
In this article I will recommend two growth hacks, which I believe to be the best to bypass the LinkedIn 100 invitation weekly limit.
Make the most of your 100 weekly invitations
Ok, this isn’t really a way to bypass 100 invites per week, but hear me out. LinkedIn is implementing the limitation in order to limit spam on the platform. I personally believe it is a good thing as it will encourage people to work more on their targeting.
Targeting and copy are the two main critical success factors for LinkedIn outreach. LinkedIn lead generation has always been a quality rather than a quantity game. With the new weekly invitation limit you need to spend even more time on your targeting. You want to make sure your 100 invitations will only reach the relevant leads.
In my experience the best way to create a hyper-targeted audience is to extract group members and event attendees. Both of these options are supported by Phantombuster.
But you can go one step further in your targeting. You can scrape all the LinkedIn profiles instead of sending the contact request straight away. That will allow you to do extra filtration based on the profile data. You can, for example, filter your leads based on the language of their profile, as I described in my previous article. I plan to create a new template to filter leads based on:
- Skills
- Tenure of the current job
- Keyword in the description or job description
- Graduation date
All my templates will be compatible with Phantombuster new outreach template, so stay tuned for updates.
Moreover, scraping profiles can offer you two side benefits:
- You can leverage Phantombuster email discovery tool to follow up with people who did not accept your contact request.
- You can get a list of LinkedIn groups that your target audience use, which is useful for the next hack. This information is hidden in the JSON result file, but I can help you get it out.
Leveraging group to send free InMail
Now here is a true hack to bypass the weekly 100 invitation limit. InMails are not counted toward the contact request limit. So if you have a premium LinkedIn account you can still reach out to people outside your network without sending contact requests.
Even if you have a free LinkedIn account, there is a way to send InMails outside your network for free. You can leverage the group direct message feature. If you go to any LinkedIn group that you are a member of, you will see that there is Message button for every member. You can message for free even those outside your network:
Moreover, you can safely send up to 30 messages per day. This increases the weekly connection limit by 350, which is far more than the 100 weekly invitations allowed by LinkedIn.
However, pay attention that with great power come great responsibilities. This feature will allow you to send a lot of messages, but you will have to be really smart about your copy. The message you are sending is the first time a person hears about you. So avoid being too sale pushy.
In my experience two types of messages work well:
- Offer freebies
- Ask for feedback
For example, the copy below can generate leads 57 times cheaper than LinkedIn PPC:
Hi #FirstName# I saw that you are a member of the group #GroupName#. We are currently running a giveaway to get free starting set for #nameOfTheProduct# : link to the giveaway landing page.
There are several automation tools that you can use to send this group outreach:
- Phantombuster, has a Phantom for it. I recommend to setup the Phantom to send 10 messages at once and run it 1 to 3 times per day.
- Icereach also supports group messaging. It is a bit more stable automation than Phantombuster as it isn’t relying on cookies. Icereach has also some security to avoid messaging the same person twice from 2 different groups. (You can get 10% off by using the code TETRIZ10).
PS: I’m preparing an online course about LinkedIn automation. You can register for the waiting list here.
If you like what I’m writing you can buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fabiana2