Best LinkedIn automation – tools and software to generate leads

Finding the best LinkedIn automation tool is important as it will help you grow your social reach on LinkedIn quicker and simpler.

LinkedIn has around 700 million members. Its marketing network is growing substantially and has become a hub for recruitment and marketing brands. With over 30 million companies competing, it is hard to gain attraction.

LinkedIn Automation Software can help you publish your content to the right audience at the best times. They can even act as an agent to handle incoming messages directly from LinkedIn. Apart from applying the general mundane tasks for you, they are smart enough to generate leads and create follow-ups.

We will look at why you should use LinkedIn automation tools and also give an in-depth analysis of the best LinkedIn automation tools to use.

Linkedin Automation – Why should you rely on software?

There are several reasons why you should be utilizing LinkedIn automation tools. Finding the best LinkedIn automation tool will depend heavily on what you require for your business. Here are just a few significant reasons why Automation tools can help:

• Automation tools can help you publish your content to the right readers at the best time. This will in turn help promote brand quicker and easier.
• They can help your business give priority to building a good relationship with your target audience. They will also allow you to set a personalised touch to your user interactions.
• LinkedIn automation software allows a simpler and more efficient management of leads. They make it easier to view profiles, send messages and connection requests.
• The tools can automate repetitive and dull jobs that can be tedious.

Let’s take a deeper look at how these features can help you and why you should invest in LinkedIn automation software:

Saves you time to focus on tasks that yield a better ROI for the business

Most time is spent on building relationships and gaining traction. Without them, you cannot build brand awareness or find new recruits.  Using automation software tools can free up your time and resources, and allow you to focus your time on actions that are essential to your business.

Compound Connection Growth (CCG)

If you do not have a lot of connections, especially if you are just starting out, there is a technique you can use called Compound Connection Growth. It’s a process that is highly effective and simple.

With automation tools, you can set daily targets that you need to reach to build a social reach. Some examples include the following:

• Adding an upper limit for new connection requests per day.
• Setting the number of daily profile visits .

For illustration, if you have only 1000 connections, you can set your LinkedIn Automation tool with the upper limit of 100 new connection requests and profile visits daily. If your profile is optimized, you will generate around 10-15% connection requests from the profiles you visit.

This will allow for a significant percentage of these contacts to view your profile even if you do not have many connections.

Grow your network

The best LinkedIn automation tools can help build the right relationships and expand your network. You don’t want automated tools to just generate content, you want it to generate quality that can raise brand awareness and loyalty. Automated Tools will help in the process of content creation in posts, profile page, comments, direct messages, headlines and much more.

Automation plays a crucial role in building your professional network on LinkedIn. At the same time, the quality of your content has a deeper impact on building brand awareness and loyalty.

When looking for the best LinkedIn Automation tool you need to look out for the following features:

1. Automating tasks which are up to date with LinkedIn constant updates.
2. Incorporation with CRM
3. LinkedIn recruitment that offers multiple levels
4. Sales navigator
5. The sending of personalized requests to contacts up to third network connections.
6. Export of contacts when visiting profiles automatically.
7. Auto-responder
8. Auto-mailing
9. Performing sequential messaging to first-time contacts. Sequential messaging gives more user interaction in the conversations.
10. Invitation to first connections to join your LinkedIn group.
11. Creating a mail list for your target audience automatically.
12. Generation of endorsements from other users and automatic return of endorsements from users that endorse you.
13. Automated signatures to messages, management of connections, and withdrawal of sent invitation which remain pending.
14. List Manager

Having these features ensures you get the best automation tool that is suited for your business.

Risk of using automation tools on LinkedIn

While using LinkedIn automation tools provides many benefits, it also has some risks. However, using it safely can minimize the risks. A safe approach to using automation tools is to understand what your LinkedIn Range (LR) is and try to not exceed the limit.

Your LinkedIn Range is basically 3.5-5% of your total connections. For example, 10,000 contacts would yield an LR of 350-500 daily limit for profile views per day. In practice, people will have much fewer connections, so their LR will be smaller. When I spoke about Compound Growth Connection, this is what I meant about setting your limits!

What are the risks?

There is a  possibility that LinkedIn can restrict, or worse ban your account. That is why it is important to use caution when using LinkedIn automation tools. In fact, a lot of tools had to reduce the number of actions they could perform due to these risks. However, luckily the best LinkedIn automation tools continually work to update and adapt to the latest LinkedIn algorithms. It is the reason why automation tools are so successful as they always manage to find a workaround to LinkedIn’s updates.

Here are some things to look out for to ensure a safe usage in LinkedIn automation tools:

Delete pending sent connection requests

One of the things that can trigger a red flag in LinkedIn is trying to contact too many people that are not in your network. Setting up a schedule to delete past connection requests that were sent and not yet accepted will help keep you out of trouble.

Imitate user behaviour as much as possible

Try to find an automation tool that tries to act as a normal user rather than a bot. Tools that have features that allow you to set daily limits (LR), resuming and restarting actions and setting realistic schedules. Doing all this will minimize the risk of setting off any alarms of automated processes. Rather it should create a form of a duplicate of yourself.

Personalise your connections

It’s essential to use a LinkedIn automation tool that is capable of customizing and personalizing messages.  You will increase your chance of prospect engagement if you personalise your messages. Personalise your messages using names, job positions and company names. If you are creating a regional campaign, try to personalise by location as much as possible.

Factors to be aware of when choosing the right tool

Look for steady track record from the tools that are highly reviewed. You need to ask yourself the following questions before making the choice – How accessible are they? Do you have a good support contact system? Can you trust the tool?

You need to find tools that have real testimonials that show tangible results. Look out for companies with a similar industry that have used LinkedIn automation tools to meet their targets. You are also better off at choosing tools that have been around for more than a year since they would be been more established.

Top LinkedIn automation software to use

In this table, we outline the 5 best LinkedIn automation software to use from. Sales Navigator, Zopto, Crystal, LeadFuze and PhantomBuster all came in the top 5. Our first rank is LinkedIn Helper as it is the cheapest plan and offers a considerable number of features with the given price. However, each tool has distinctive features which makes them a great candidate.

I give a very short overview of each tool here. If you would like an in-depth review for each tool including pros, cons, ranking score and price, lookout for the next section.

Linkedin tools – in-depth review

1. LinkedIn Helper

Our verdict

5/5

The tool provides multiple actions such as messages, leads, follow-ups, and auto-sending personalised connection requests. It also integrates with LinkedIn Automation and Sales Navigator as well as CRM platforms

Price

Trial for 14 days (free) and then premium starts at $15 per month.

Description

LinkedIn helper is one of the most powerful LinkedIn automation tools that can automate tedious processes like messaging, inviting, and connecting. This tool will save you a lot of time and resources when it comes to social outreach marketing.

It can be used as a Chrome extension or a desktop application. The tool allows for smart chain messaging, personalised communications, and creating email mailing lists for suggested prospects. You can also categorise your invites to build a target audience.

LinkedIn Helper additionally provides integrations with Sales Navigator to help you connect with profiles that are more likely to make decisions. It then sends sequence messages to these prospects by first sending a greeting, followed by a sales proposal.

Pros

1. Makes use of Sales Navigator, which gives 5x more chance of connecting with high prospects.
2. Requires minimum user effort and can be used 24/7.
3. Integrated with LinkedIn Automations
4. Automatically adds your signature to messages
5. Makes use of a robust List Manager that can build smart lead funnels and makes sure to avoid overlapping between different campaigns you may be running.

Cons

• It is not the best at multitasking. Unfortunately, if you minimize your browser, the software will not process in the background.
• Also, the layout needs some improvement, especially when trying to extract the contacts. Sometimes it can cause a technical glitch.
• There is no support of emojis in your content. Lack of emojis can end up making your messages unfriendly and seem automated.

Link: https://www.linkedhelper.com 

2. Zopto

Our Verdict

4.6/5

The price is much higher than LinkedInHelper but it offers more security. If sales are your primary goal, then Zopto works exceptionally in the lead generation process.

Price

Starts at $215 per month for 1 account.

Description

If you are a start-up company or a sales team who are looking to improve their lead generation efforts from LinkedIn, then Zopto is a great option for you.

Zopto is a cloud-based solution and is easily set up. If you have a LinkedIn Premium account or Sales Navigator account, you can get started. Once you sign up, Zopto presents you with a dashboard with statistics of your campaigns running in LinkedIn. Apart from automating your lead generation process, it also helps you find new prospects that are currently not within your network connection.

The price is more expensive than LinkedIn Helper, however, if security is very important to you, it is worth the money. Zopto has access to a dedicated IP and a robust setup that is explicitly designed to keep you working in line with LinkedIn’s terms and conditions.

Zopto also proves an InMail template generation with over 12,000 sample campaigns for you to use with templates that have been confirmed to work.

Pros

• Contain advanced filters to help you target your ideal clientele for each campaign that you are currently running in LinkedIn. Such filters include geotargeting by location, targeting by industry, company size, seniority, technology, followers and more.
• Zopto gives you the freedom to set the amount of engagement for each specific campaign. You can customize settings such as connection invites, sequential messages, InMails, profile view generator and other actions.

Cons

• If a campaign goes wrong and you accidentally contact the wrong people, there is no way of cancelling it once its up and running.
• The price is not cheap, and they tend to to be unfair with their billing practices. For instance, not informing clients when their free trials end.

Link: https://zopto.com/

3. LeadFuze

Our Verdict

4.4/5

LeadFuze is a search engine for connecting with business professionals and extracting contact details. This tool helps find new loads, new recruiters and run targeted ads.

Price

Trial: 25 lead credits for free, Premium: Starting at $132 per month.

Description

LeadFuze is an automated tool with a focus on seeking out new leads and extracting their information. It allows you to thoroughly search your entire market segments or specific individuals. Used by sales, recruiters, and marketing to help them find a potential list of leads and candidates. LeadFuze takes care of aggregating the data and export them directly to CSV.

LeadFuse allows B2B targeting using AdWords meaning you can target prospects who already spend money on Ads which gives you an idea of their spending budget before proceeding to connect.

They also make use of a “Technology Used” filter so that you can target your audience better. For example, filtering out users who do not have Web design skills or selecting users that do.

Pros

• Uses semi-automation to allow more control to the results before running the full campaign.
• Focuses a lot on lead campaign generation by providing capture, scoring, verification, and segmentation.
• All plans contain the same features except for the number of lead credits.

Cons

• There may be skewed results – results shown are not always in the industry or location you filter for. It is best to set the automation feature to semi-automated so that you can still have some control.
• Some of the qualities of the leads are a little dubious. This is not to say that it is the only issue for LeadFuze, but considering the price, then it’s a little frustrating.
• It may be a little slow and therefore its best to give it a test trial run before purchasing.

Link: https://www.leadfuze.com/

4. Crystal

Our Verdict

4.2/5

The Crystal LinkedIn automation software makes use of personality insights based on the DISC personality model. It gives you a good approach to connecting with your prospects.

Price

Free for 10 users, $49 for more users.

Description

Crystal is a great automation tool to help in understanding your customers, their behaviours, and their motivations for buying.

It is known as one of the largest personality platforms. What makes it unique is its ability to accurately predict a user personality from their LinkedIn Profile. With this feature at hand, communications with your prospects or connects will be more impactful and give you a better chance at social engagements.

Pros

• Makes use of Artificial Intelligence to assess personality characteristics and therefore the results are very accurate. It helps predict behavioural patterns by examining text samples, appraisal reports and other properties.
• Suggests the best ways of interacting with your connections depending on their personality.

Cons

• The free version only allows you to analyze 10 people a month. You will need to pay if you want to apply it to more connections.

1. There is some form of scope bias since the results may be inaccurate when taking the DISC test since not all may be true in their answers.

Link: https://www.crystalknows.com/

5. Phantombuster

Our Verdict

4/5

PhantomBusters is the last on our list but certainly still a great tool, nonetheless. It is a cloud-based tool that automates sales and marketing processes and scrapes useful data from LinkedIn. It also works with CRM so you can enrich your data further. It is a tool ideal for sales and marketing to increase their leads and create brand awareness.

Price

Free trial. Premium: Starting at $30/month.

Description

PhantomBusters is a cloud-based software that allows you to automate any action that you normally can do yourself on the web. It’s efficient, fast and works 24/7. It’s able to extract multiple information including emails using Sales Navigator and integrate it with CRM and social networks to expand your social outreach.

Apart from this, PhantomBusters schedules and triggers actions automatically. Without knowing how to code, you can easily set a frequency of connection requests and messages, a trigger or personalize messages with chain automation. Your workflow can be created or edited based on proven-to-work templates from professional sales, marketing, and growth-hackers.

However, if you are proficient in coding, PhantomBusters offers an API which makes it unique to other tools. Here are some of the things that it can do:

• Launch and abort search agents
• Get real-time console output from agents
• Retrieve user account, agent, and script records
• Create and update scripts

Pros

• Makes use of Sales Navigator, which gives 5x more chance of connecting with high prospects.
• Requires minimum user effort and can be used 24/7.
• Contains GDPR complain tool verifications.
• Provides API for more control of functionality.
• Results are very accurate

Cons

• The provided APIs do not have any proper documentation.
• Support is not very efficient.
• Lacks having its own database and visualization for the data that is gathered. It also lacks any data merging functionalities.

Link: https://phantombuster.com/

Linkedin Automation Tools – Conclusion

Discovering connections and manually interacting with users can be cumbersome, especially if you are still trying to create brand awareness. Automation tools can offer you compound growth strategies to automatically send connection requests and visit profiles without the hassle. The ability to mimic user behaviour automatically can help your business concentrate on the more core essentials of the business that help you convert candidates and sales.

Essentially, the best automation tool depends mostly on your requirements.  It is important to understand what your main goals are for your business and how quickly you need to achieve them. This can help you decide which is the best tool that can help you accomplish your goals. We hope that our recommendations will help you in deciding which LinkedIn automation tool suits you best.

Remember that LinkedIn is constantly updating their algorithms for any dubious actions and so you need to be vigilant and make sure that automation is used carefully. This can be done by setting limit ranges, personalising your interactions, and scheduling a realistic time to send messages and invites.

Andrea Kim

Veteran content writer with focus on Technology and SEO.