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If you’re reading this, you surely came across the “You’ve reached the weekly invitation limit” from LinkedIn after sending some connection request.
Bad news: LinkedIn implemented a new weekly invitation limit.
In this article, I’m going to show you 3 hacks to bypass LinkedIn weekly invitation limit so you can avoid seeing this message again.
Let’s see how to bypass this LinkedIn limit.
What is The Weekly Invitation Limit on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn has limited the number of connection requests you can send to 100–200 invites per week. Previously, that limit was set at 700 invites per week. This limit has been implemented to fight spam.
When Does LinkedIn Weekly Limit Reset?
LinkedIn’s connection limit resets 7 days after you send your first invitation. If you send a connection request on a Friday at 5 PM, the limit to refresh precisely a week later, same day, same hour.
How Many LinkedIn Invites Can I Send Per Week?
Most of LinkedIn users can send 100 invitations per week. If you have a good Social Selling Index score and your account is old, you can go up to 200 invitations per week.
You’ve reached the weekly invitation limit: how to react?
If you see the “You’ve reached the weekly invitation limit” message:
- Stop sending invitations for 3 days
- Send few manual invites after 3 days
- Slowly relaunch your automation tools
Never relaunch your LinkedIn automation software before making a manual test.
What is the Impact of the New LinkedIn Invitation Limit?
This new limit has a huge impact on the way you should organize your LinkedIn outreach campaigns.
LinkedIn connection requests are a rare resource now. You can’t waste them.
There are basically three things you can do:
- Find techniques to bypass the limit
- Find technique to send more invites
- Personalize your invites to get me most out of them
Let’s start by seeing 3 techniques to bypass the connection request limit.
How To Bypass LinkedIn Connection Limit?
3 ways to bypass LinkedIn weekly invite limitation:
- Connect with Open Profiles
- Connect with group members and event attendees
- Sync LinkedIn with your email contacts
1. Connect with Open Profiles
One of the most underrated LinkedIn prospecting strategies is to bypass the LinkedIn invitation limit by detecting and messaging open profiles.
You don’t need to be connected to an Open Profile to send a DM.
Open profile actually allow you to send an unlimited amount of InMails.
You can message them right away without sending a connection request first.
Disclaimer
You need to have access to InMails, so you need to be Premium LinkedIn Subscription to use this feature (LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiter, or LinkedIn Premium)
When you want to message an open profile, a different type of chat box opens.
LinkedIn tells you that can you send a free InMail messages to that person.
Free InMails appear exactly like regular LinkedIn InMails on your prospect’s LinkedIn inbox.
But how to easily detect how is open profile among your prospects?
For that, you can use Evaboot when you export your leads from Linkedin Sales Navigator.
If you export your leads with Evaboot, you will know if your prospect has an open profile or not.
Once you have this information, you can split your prospecting campaign in 2 parts:
- campaign on open profile without connection request step
- campaign on closed profile with connection request step
This way, you can save a lot of invites for your outbound campaigns.
The only drawback of InMails and open InMails compared to cold emails is that you can’t send follow-ups.
2. Connect with group members and event attendees
The weekly connection limit LinkedIn create does not apply to group members and event attendees.
When you are part of a LinkedIn group, you send direct message to other members without being connected.
So you can message 2nd and 3rd degree connection without sending a connection request first.
Once the admin of the group accepts your request to join, you will be able to see all group members by clicking on See all
Once you get to the list of LinkedIn group members, you can message them directly by clicking on message:
It is exactly the same thing for LinkedIn events.
Once you sign up for the events, you can get access to the list of all event attendees and you can send direct messages to them.
Simply click on the Networking Tab.
Then, you will be able to message any event attendees.
The only drawback with this technique is that your messages will land into the Message Request section and not the main Inbox section.
3. Sync LinkedIn with your email contacts
The first hack to bypass LinkedIn connection request limit is to transfer your email provider contacts to LinkedIn.
The email invitation through CSV uploads are not available anymore on LinkedIn. This hack was really useful but unfortunately you can’t use it anymore.
However, it’s still possible to sync your Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook/AOL contacts with LinkedIn.
These kind of invitations are not counted into the weekly limitation.
Here, I will describe the process for Gmail but it’s pretty much the same thing for any other provider.
Step #1: Find emails
The first step is to get the emails of the people you want to invite on LinkedIn.
Their emails should be the emails of their LinkedIn accounts. That’s why a big part of them will be personal emails.
Evaboot only find professionals emails as they are not GDPR-compliant for prospecting.
That’s why the tool might not be the best fit for this operation. I would advise you to use Skrapp.io that also find personal emails.
Step #2: Create a Gmail Account
The second step is to create a new Gmail account.
You don’t want to mess up your Gmail contacts with all the people you want to connect with on LinkedIn. So, let’s create another account especially for that.
Step #3: Add the emails to Google contacts
Once the new account is created, go to your Google Apps and select Contacts.
Once you are in Google Contacdt, fin the button “Import”
Then:
- Click on Import
- Select a CSV file
- Select a tag for the import if you want to
If you found valid email addresses, people will be added to your Google Contact.
Google will also add their names and profiles pictures.
Step #4: Go to LinkedIn to add to the contacts
Once your contact are imported:
- Go to the “My Network” tab
- Click on “More options” in the “Add personal contacts” section
- Select your email provider
- Select the Gmail you added the contacts into
- Accept LinkedIn permission request
After that you will land on a screen like this:
Simply tick all the checkboxes to invite the contacts.
Bypassing the invitation limit using this hack is not the only technique you can use to contact more people.
You can also use white-hat techniques to increase the number of LinkedIn invites you can send every week
How To Send More Connection Requests on LinkedIn?
The best way to get more LinkedIn connection requests on LinkedIn is to increase your LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score (SSI).
With a high SSI, you can send up to 200 LinkedIn invitations per week.
In order to increase your LinkedIn SSI, you can:
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile
- Increase your invitation acceptance rate
- Publish great content on LinkedIn
1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile
This all about increasing your acceptance rate when you send new connection requests.
Your LinkedIn profile has a huge impact on whether your target audience will accept your LinkedIn invitation.
That’s why it’s better to put all the chances on your side by optimizing your LinkedIn profile.
2. Increase your invitation acceptance rate
If LinkedIn sees that you have a lot of LinkedIn pending invitations , it means that most connection invitations you send are not accepted by LinkedIn members.
You must maintain a high quality LinkedIn network.
LinkedIn may be considered with this data that you are spammy and won’t increase the number of invites you can send.
Pro-tip on this one: it’s better to not add notes without your connection request.
Waalaxy made a study backing up this data. I personally verified that with my own experience.
Here is an example of a LinkedIn campaign I sent without notes in my connection request:
Results: 51% acceptance rate over 1300 invitations sent.
Be careful, especially if you’re using LinkedIn automation tools for your LinkedIn lead generation campaigns.
If you automate bad LinkedIn messages, your acceptance rate and response rate will decrease and LinkedIn algorithm will classify you as a spammer.
Always make sure to send personalized messages if you add notes in your requests.
3. Publish great content on LinkedIn
LinkedIn rewards people bringing value to the platform.
That’s why publishing great content that bring value to your 1st degree connection is a good way to increase your Social Selling Index score.
Other side effect: if people see you as a LinkedIn influencer, then they will more likely to accept your request and that will increase your acceptance rate.
Conclusion
LinkedIn has set new rules. If you want to maintain a high prospecting volume, you must adapt.
For that you have 3 techniques to bypass the new limitation:
- Open Profiles
- Group members and event attendees
- Email contact synchronization
These are, but don’t forget, that the real fight is to be able to send more connection request and get them accepted.
For that:
- Optimize your LinkedIn profile
- Increase your invitation acceptance rate
- Publish great content on LinkedIn
I hope all these techniques will allow you to generate enough meeting to grow your business!
