Do you currently rely on sending LinkedIn invites to generate business?
If this is the case, you’ll most likely have to adjust your strategy.
Anyone using LinkedIn automation will. LinkedIn has “moved the cheese” by rolling out an invite limit that significantly lowers the amount of invites you can send out every day.
How does this limit affect your marketing strategy and what can you do to keep growing your business despite it?
Read on to find out.
What is the Invite Limit?
Since the beginning of 2021, LinkedIn has been significantly restricting the number of connection requests you can send out in a short time period. The kicker is that they have not revealed the number. While there is a restriction on how many invites you can send, they have not disclosed what the actual number is, and probably will never reveal that information.
So how do you know when you’ve reached the limit? Very simple: LinkedIn tells you. The platform will block your invites and send you a message letting you know that you cannot send any more invites for the day or the week. They phrase the message to suggest that personal connections are the most valuable, and that you shouldn’t be connecting with anyone that you don’t really know.
Why the change?
LinkedIn made this change to crack down on spam Chrome apps and other automation apps out there. More and more people have turned to a churn-and-burn new connections funnel to grow their businesses. Unfortunately, the vast majority do so without creating value. On the platform, this strategy comes across as spammy and annoying to users. LinkedIn wants their platform to be filled with value, so they are making some big changes.
What LinkedIn is Doing About It
This is not something new. LinkedIn has been fighting these types of spammy behaviour for years now. One of the first changes they did is they introduced email restrictions when connecting.
Now, they are taking it one step further with the connection invite limit. While they have not stated the limit, it appears to be between 100 and 200 invites per week. What we’ve seen happen is that toward the end of 2020, they first implemented the pop-up messages blocking additional invites. Early in 2021, they had a very buggy rollout of the restriction, as many were false positives and it was not heavily enforced. As of now almost every account out there has been hit.
Limit Triggers
Several different factors seem to trigger the limit including:
- High invite volume: Sending more than 40 invites per day 6 days a week will most likely trigger it.
- Low acceptance rate: Having an acceptance rate under 20% appears to be a factor. If people are not accepting your connection invites it tells LinkedIn that you’re trying to connect with people that don’t know you or are not interested in connecting with you.
- Pending invites: If you have too many pending invites that have not been accepted by the people you’ve sent them to, this might be flagging you as well.
- Pending Personal Event invites: Same as with the connection invites, if you are sending out too many invites to join an event and nobody is accepting them, it most likely will also flag you.
- Mass invites that are sent in batches: If you’re sending out too many connection invites in a very short period of time; for example, 20 invites in 30 minutes.
- Lack of non-invite activity on the app: If you’re not doing anything else on the platform besides sending out connection requests.
- Low engagement: If you get low engagement in your content. This tells LinkedIn that your network may have no real relationship with you.
- LinkedIn errors: We’ve seen some accounts getting the limit even if they’re not doing any of the points mentioned above. This tells us that there are still many glitches with how LinkedIn is enforcing this.
What Does This Change Mean?
For those who rely primarily on new connection message sequences, these changes are bad news. You can expect up to an 80% decrease in appointments.
Moving forward less really is more. Rather than spamming out invites, around 20 per day will have to be the new norm.
Given this change, it will be time to adjust your strategy.
What You Can Do
Fortunately, there’s quite a lot you can do to still find success on LinkedIn.
Let’s dive into some helpful strategies.
General Best Practices
- Be mindful of targeting. Narrow in your target audience.
- Personalization. Generic messages won’t be effective, and they may up your chances of reaching a limit. Get personal.
- Engaging messages. Make your message more interesting and engaging with Loom videos or images.
- Uses Sales Navigator instead of the free version. This is really a must if you’re serious about using LinkedIn for your marketing.
Spintax Your Invite Messages
You don’t want to copy and paste cookie cutter messages. It is very easy to detect. Even personalizing the name/ company will still leave a footprint if the message is the same. Lean on the spintax to deal with that. This means providing different variations for parts of the message so that you have more variations.
One examples is
{Hi/Hey/Hello] [I’m/ I was/ I am} {looking/hoping} to connect {?/!}
With the different variations within this Spintax invite, you get 36 different unique message options even without personalization. That will really help you to avoid leaving a footprint or red flag in LinkedIn.
If you’re not sure how spintax works, you can read more about it in this article. There’s even a free spintax tester you can use here.
Use “Posted in 30 Days” Filter with Caution
LinkedIn Sales Navigator allows you to only target accounts that have posted something on the platform in the last 30 days.
The number of people you will find using this filter varies greatly by industry, but it can help you increase your acceptance rate as they are the ones most likely to accept your invites to connect. Why? Because they’re simply more active on the platform. If you’re sending out invites to connect to someone that never uses LinkedIn, that person won’t even see your request.
Do Shorter Batches
A lot of people have LinkedIn Power Hours, where they specifically go into the platform to do all of their activities at once. This is great for time management, but not great for the new LinkedIn limits.
What you want to do now is pace out your invites (and rest of activities) throughout the day. Instead of sending out 20 invites in just one hour, send out 5 invites at 4 different times.
Leave a reasonably large window of time to spread out when the invites are sent. Additionally, do some other activities (posting content, commenting, etc.) in between the batches to help break it up.
Open Link Messaging
You will find that some people mark their profile as open, and these tend to be premium users as well. When this is the case, you can send them a free InMail. This is a great strategy. Send thoughtful, relevant messages to open accounts. This strategy works well, but it is quite labor intensive because many profiles are not open.
This strategy is most effective with 20-40 messages a day maximum. Make sure to check your data, and this can rack up many page views. Create saved searches that target to the 2nd and 3rd degrees connections mostly.
Group Member Messaging
This is based on a saved search. Create a search based on a group you are a member of. You can layer on all of the other filters to get the most targeted prospects, and you can reference the group as well in your message.
Be mindful that this method takes a bit longer. It’s a great add-on that helps you gain connections. Keep messages between 20 and 40 per day max. Keep in mind that the messages have to be accepted first.
Monthly Promo Email
Combine LinkedIn with other marketing strategies, like email marketing. Although LinkedIn is a very powerful tool still, it’s not a panacea. You should always be thinking about ways of taking your leads from LinkedIn (which you don’t own) to your email list (which you do own).
Send something very specific that adds value and gets them off LinkedIn and into your funnel. Plan ahead, thinking about who you can hit. Send a message via LinkedIn as a heads up for the email. A few days later, you can send an option follow-up to bump the original message.
Content Strategy
You need to have a strong content strategy to attract the right people. When you connect, LinkedIn will put your content in front of them. Having regular content is mandatory for success. Just focusing on lead gen is not enough, the pivot must be a holistic system with a content strategy.
Some tips include:
- Have an actual strategy for your content. What will you post about? Who are you trying to reach? How often will you post? Those are all questions that you need to ask yourself.
- Post on a regular basis. Content is written with a C for consistency. If you only post every once in a while, you will never see the benefits of a sound content strategy. Check out our Beep2B Daily for ideas and inspiration.
- Leverage strategic commenting: creating content takes time & effort, but leaving insightful comments on other people’s posts can be a lot easier and get similar results.
Strategies Outside of LinkedIn
You should diversify your strategy so that you do not rely on invites.
- Add optin forms for your LinkedIn profile on other platforms.
- Add links to your LinkedIn in your email signatures and landing pages.
- Leverage remarketing Pixels.
- Develop your email strategy.
The Next Steps
The LinkedIn invite limit is a bump in the road, but there are several ways to still find success on the platform. Make sure to dedicate time to updating and adding to your campaigns. Agencies should use activity analysis report to optimise scheduling.
The team here at Beep2B is here to help. If you’re already a client of ours remember that we offer group coaching every Tuesday and Thursday for more advice and answers to questions. If you are not yet working with us we’d love to chat and see if we are a fit. Contact us today to learn more and schedule a free demo!
