LinkedIn Network Booster

Table of Contents

Comments (0)

New! This API now supports email discovery.

You have to grow your LinkedIn network for 3 reasons

LinkedIn is a highly competitive network. Get higher in search results by increasing your 1st and 2nd degree connection network.
Reaching out to someone you don’t know on LinkedIn is really restricted. Grow your network and maximize your chances to have acquaintances with your target.
You want to get attention and be visible? More connections = wider reach and larger audience (Yeaaah size does matter sometimes…)

Bonus: It looks really cool to have a lot of connections!

Our solution: Add into your account a list of LinkedIn profiles

Starting from a Google spreadsheet filled with a list of LinkedIn profiles, Phantombuster will send automatically, in addition to a private message, an invitation to all those profiles.

What will you need? ⚙️

Session cookie: Your session cookie from LinkedIn.
Spreadsheet URL: The link of a Google Spreadsheet (or CSV) with LinkedIn profile URLs in it.
Number of adds per launch: How many (between 1 and 10) invites to send per launch
Only second circle: Do you only want to only connect with people from your 2nd circle or not.
Message: The message you want to send.

(You already have all that? Click straight away on "Use this API")

How long does that take to set up this amazing hack?

It takes 5 minutes and 20 seconds (we like to do things precisely). 🕒

What you need to do.

1. Create an account on Phantombuster.com 💻

If you haven't already, create a FREE account on Phantombuster. Our service will browse the web for you. It’s a website automator which runs in the cloud. Once done we'll follow up.

2. Use this API on your account.👌

We cooked up in our lab a script with first-class attention.
Now that you're connected to Phantombuster, Click on the following button (it will open a new tab).

3. Click on Configure me!

You'll now see the 3 configuration dots blinking. Click on them.

4. Linkedin authentication 🔑

Because the script will manipulate LinkedIn for you, it needs to be logged on your LinkedIn account. For that you just need to copy paste your session cookie in the script argument:

Using Chrome, go to your LinkedIn homepage and open the inspector
→ Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect”
→ CMD+OPT+i on macOS
or
→ F12 or CTRL+MAJ+i on Windows
Locate the “Application” tab

Select “Cookies” > “http://www.linkedin.com” on the left menu.

Locate the “li_at” cookie.

Copy what’s under “Value” (Double click on it then Ctrl+C) and paste it into your script Argument)

// How to access your cookies with Firefox and Safari//

5. Add a Google Spreadsheet 📑

Below your session cookie you’ll find Spreadsheet URL.

Add in the Spreadsheet URL textbox the link of a Google spreadsheet with this same format (only column A is mandatory) (Share option must be OPEN):

Your spreadsheet should contain a list of profile URLs to add (one link per row).

You can also specify the name of the column that contains the profile links. Simply enter the column name in the next text field.

6. Add a private personalized message 🆕 💬

Below the column name you'll find the message configuration. This step isn’t mandatory but highly recommended.

In the message textbox you can write a private note (Total: 300 characters MAX) which will be sent to the profile included in your Google spreadsheet list in addition to the invitation to join your network.

#firstName# will be replaced in your message by the first name of the person you’re adding.

Many other replacement tags are available, like #company#, #jobTitle# and #school#. In fact, you can use any column you want from the output CSV. (Note: you have to enable scraping by not checking the last checkbox for these tags to be available.)

Click on 💾 Save

Click on Launch & Enjoy!

It’s done! All that is left to do is to click on "launch" to try your script!

This will launch the API and, if you didn't already change the spreadsheet URL, send Phantombuster's team LinkedIn connection requests.

⚙️️Repetition setup ⚙️

Now that your API is ready, you just have to customize it to make it work repetitively.

Every time the API is launched, it will send 10 connection requests and stop. (You can lower this value in the API's configuration.)

To do so, simply hit the “Settings” button to define when your API is launched.

Then, select a frequency:

Now that this is set, click 💾 Save at the bottom of the page.

There you go, you only have to wait for connections to be made for you!

Email discovery (optional)

Thanks to our friends at Hunter (an email discovery service), this API can guess the email of each profile it visits.

To use this feature, first create an account at Hunter here. Once done, get your Hunter API key by going to "Dashboard" > "API" > "Copy API key".

Paste your API key in the "Hunter.io API key" field in your API configuration. It will now guess the email of every visited profile! Expect a success rate between 20% and 50%.

Hunter gives you 100 free email guesses per month. After that, you'll have to buy one of their plans or wait a month.

Important note: When email discovery is enabled, the API will open LinkedIn company pages to get company domains. For this reason, we recommend you limit your visits to 40 profiles per day.

Limits

Please be aware that this API, like most of our LinkedIn APIs, will manipulate your own account on your behalf. Like Uncle Ben once said, "With great power comes great responsibility."

We have noticed that adding more than 80 connections per day will almost always result in LinkedIn invalidating your session cookie (that is, logging you out). We recommend no more than 8 launches per day of 10 connection requests for this reason.

Note: When email discovery is enabled, we recommend you divide this limit by 2 (that is, 40 profiles per day).

Having a LinkedIn Premium subscription might raise this limit. Please see these official LinkedIn help pages: Commercial Use Limit and Finding People on LinkedIn.

Developers

Like all APIs on Phantombuster, this API comes with an HTTP endpoint. Launch it from your computer, app or server with a simple HTTP request and get its result as JSON. Click Use this API above to create your new endpoint.

Clone this API

The script below is all that's required to make the API work. If you're a developer, click the button to clone the code into a new Custom API Agent in your Phantombuster account. This operation will allow you to customize the API to your exact needs. This will also create a custom HTTP endpoint.

Contribute on GitHub

Feeling adventurous? Unsatisfied with the current state of this API? Send us pull requests on GitHub to improve the API store! The script is here and you might be interested in reading our documentation here