LinkedIn is a perfect platform for generating leads, prospecting, and recruiting. However, LinkedIn tries to restrict scraping data from profile search results. Thus, only a limited amount of profiles is shown in search results if you run a search on LinkedIn. If you are looking for the maximum number of monthly searches on LinkedIn, this blog post (opens new window) might be helpful.
This article explains the most up-to-date LinkedIn search limits and a workaround to overcome these limitations.
Up-to-date LinkedIn search limits
LinkedIn search limits depend on whether you have a premium account on LinkedIn or a free one. If you run a LinkedIn search, the maximal number of profiles that you can browse is the following:
- 1000 profiles or 100 pages if you have a free LinkedIn account (10 profiles per page),
- 2500 profiles or 100 pages if you pay for LinkedIn Sales Navigator (25 profiles per page).
This means that if you run a search that results in tens of thousands of profiles, you can only view the first 1000 or 2500 of them. However, there is a workaround that allows you to scrape lots of relevant profiles from LinkedIn search and overcome its limitations.
How to avoid profile search limitation on LinkedIn
The following strategy turns limited LinkedIn search into an almost endless source of leads that match your search criteria: segment your target audience and connect with your target audience. Both of these ideas are discussed in detail below.
Segment your target audience
LinkedIn offers advanced filtering of profiles, so you can specify the location, company, and many other properties of your target audience. The key idea is to adjust your search criteria and to run multiple searches where each search brings you a smaller list of highly relevant profiles.
This strategy has multiple advantages. For instance, simply running ten separate searches this way brings you ten times more profiles, 10.000 for a free LinkedIn account and 25.000 for Sales Navigator. The most straightforward way to turn your search into ten narrower searches is to set a more specific location in your search criteria. Scraping LinkedIn profiles and emails from search results as well as exporting them to CSV/Excel can be easily automated with InTouch Tool (opens new window), so you can then contact your target audience directly on LinkedIn or via email.
The second important advantage of running multiple narrower searches is that you end up having a number of very specific groups of leads. This is extremely useful since you can create a highly relevant and personalized campaign for each group which increases your conversion rate. Running custom campaigns on LinkedIn with automated sequences of personalized messages is a core feature of InTouch Tool (opens new window).
Connect with your target audience
An easy way to open up more leads in your search results is to connect with people from your target audience. Once anyone from your target audience accepts your invitation to connect, they become your 1st-degree connection. All contacts in their network become your 2nd-degree connection and many of them may actually belong to your target audience as well.
From our years of experience of helping people to automate lead generation on LinkedIn using InTouch Tool (opens new window), we typically recommend avoiding searching among 3rd-degree connections and viewing 3rd-degree connection profiles. This kind of action is considered as an indication of the commercial use of LinkedIn, so LinkedIn might adjust some of its limitations for your account. For instance, it can reduce the monthly number of searches available for you or even temporarily block your account.
Thus, the recommended way of lead generation on LinkedIn is the following:
- Search for people from your target audience among your 2nd-degree connections.
- Send them invitations to connect.
- After some of them connected with you, repeat search among your expanded network of 2nd-degree connections. You will see many new leads in your search results. Continue connecting to them and repeating the search.
That’s it for today! Drop us a line at support@intouchtool.com if you have any questions about the LinkedIn limitations and the suggested workaround.