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LinkedIn has about 900 million users, making it a treasure trove for business owners, sales reps, marketing managers, and recruiters.
If you know how to use this data effectively and correctly, you’ll be far ahead of your competitors. This means having potential clients, recruiting top talent, and partnering with other businesses.
This is possible with LinkedIn Scraping, a robust technique that extracts lead and company data from LinkedIn.
In this guide, I’ll walk you through LinkedIn Scraping and introduce you to LinkedIn scraping tools that can help you grow your business and improve your lead generation strategy.
I’ll cover:
- What Is LinkedIn Scraping?
- How To Export LinkedIn Data Ethically?
- How To Scrape LinkedIn Data?
- 9 Strategies To Export LinkedIn Data
- 7 Best LinkedIn Scraping Tools
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
What Is LinkedIn Scraping?
LinkedIn Scraping automatically extracts data from LinkedIn profiles to generate leads and build prospect lists.
This may include collecting information from user profiles, job postings, company pages, and other publicly available areas of LinkedIn.
Another popular notion is web scraping, a way to extract large amounts of data from various websites.
These techniques are used by business owners, sales and marketing professionals, e-commerce owners, data analysts, and other specialists.
LinkedIn data scraping is used for:
- Lead-generation
- Enriching prospect lists
- Talent acquisition
- Market research
- Competitor analysis
- Content creation
- Price data
- Outreach campaigns
- Etc.
However, it’s important to note that scraping LinkedIn data must be done carefully.
LinkedIn’s Terms of Service prohibit unauthorized scraping, and violating these terms may result in account suspension or legal consequences.
So, when done correctly and ethically, LinkedIn scraping can be a powerful technique for extracting valuable insights and opportunities from the platform’s vast data resources.
How To Export LinkedIn Data Ethically?
LinkedIn rules are very strict regarding data scraping.
They can easily restrict your LinkedIn account if they notice excessive automation tools usage or illegal activity.
To avoid account restrictions, follow these practices for scraping LinkedIn data ethically:
- Respect user privacy: Scrap only publicly available user data and not scrap sensitive, personal info
- Control your scraping frequency: Limit it to avoid overwhelming LinkedIn’s servers with excessive requests
- Use official APIs: Whenever possible, use LinkedIn’s official APIs to ensure compliance with their policies
- Keep Transparency: If contacted by LinkedIn regarding your scraping activities, be open and honest about your purpose
On LinkedIn, you can find data in the 3 following categories:
- Personal Profile
- Company Page
- Job Offers
Depending on your subscription plan and if the users have public profiles or not, you can profile information like:
- Profile/Account name
- Job title
- Company name
- Contact info: Email, phone number
- School or University name
- Mutual Connections
- Skills
- Life event reminders
- Etc
The data you have access to helps you to identify your ICP (ideal customer profile), target them, identify the decision-makers, and estimate the possibility of launching multichannel outreach campaigns.
So, you know what data you can get by scraping LinkedIn and how to avoid being restricted by LinkedIn for that.
How To Scrape LinkedIn Data?
To scrape LinkedIn data, you can either use:
- Scraping tools
- LinkedIn API
1. Scraping Tools
To facilitate your lead-generation and prospecting processes, there are tons of scraping tools to facilitate your job.
These web scraping tools are made for extracting contact or company information from websites, LinkedIn’s user accounts or company profiles, or other web platforms into CSV files, Excel sheets or even directly to your CRMs.
If you want to try out a scraping tool, you can check out Evaboot, that scrapes data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
It’s a great tool if you’ve built a network on LinkedIn private and public profiles and want to target them in the first place.
If you want to know more about other data-collection tools, you can check our complete guide on the best LinkedIn Scraping tools.
2. LinkedIn API
Another way to export LinkedIn companies and contacts is to use LinkedIn API.
The LinkedIn Scraper API (Application Programming Interfaces) is a comprehensive tool designed to help developers and businesses extract valuable public data from LinkedIn.
To access LinkedIn API, you must first become a LinkedIn Partner.
With LinkedIn API, you can gather detailed information from LinkedIn profiles such as:
- user IDs
- names
- cities
- job titles
- profiles
- posts
- current company details
- work experience
LinkedIn Scraper API improves application functionality and user experience and ensures flexibility and scalability without infrastructure, proxy server, or blocking concerns.
By leveraging this API, you greatly enhance the capabilities of your products and easily extract valuable LinkedIn data.
However, as this is a very long workflow, I suggest you use LinkedIn scraping tools.
9 Ways To Export LinkedIn Data
When I say export LinkedIn data, I don’t mean data from LinkedIn.
While all profile and company data is stored on LinkedIn, there are 9 ways to boost your lead generation and help you scrape and gather more data.
Here are 9 ways to scrape data from LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn Search Results
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Lists
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account Lists
- Event Attendees
- Post Likers and commenters
- Competitors’ company followers
- Group members
- LinkedIn contacts
- Recruiter lists
1. LinkedIn Search Results
If you use only a LinkedIn basic or premium account, then you can export LinkedIn search results by using LinkedIn’s search engine and Boolean search techniques, and narrow down and make your search results precise.
Step 1: Once you have a satisfying search result, copy the URL to the search results.
Step 2: Open Phantombuster and search for the “LinkedIn Search Export” phantom.
Step 3: Paste your searched profile URLs to the box and hit launch.
Step 4: And voilà, your search results are ready to be exported in a CSV, Excel file or Google sheets.
But be aware that with a free account, you are limited to visiting 80-100 LinkedIn profiles per day.
2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lead Lists
If you are serious about LinkedIn prospecting, you must ultimately get LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the best B2B database, as LinkedIn users constantly update the data.
Once you pair it with the Evaboot Chrome extension, the smartest LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraper, you get a powerful duo to export clean, valuable data and find emails from the LinkedIn database in just one click.
Exporting leads from Sales Navigator is a great way to build qualified lead lists, as you get a lot of data, such as names, job titles, emails, company names, company website URLs, etc.
This information can create targeted lists of potential customers for your sales team to contact.
With this data, you can create hyper-personalized messages that speak directly to your ideal prospects’ needs and pain points.
Additionally, LinkedIn scraping allows you to identify company decision-makers, focusing your efforts on those who have the power to make a purchase.
By scraping LinkedIn, you can streamline your sales process, increase your conversion rates, and ultimately drive revenue growth for your business.
3. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account Lists
LinkedIn Sales Navigator account list scraping can be a powerful tool for conducting competition analysis.
By analyzing competitors’ profile data, businesses can gain insight into their strengths, weaknesses, and strategies for success.
One effective approach is to use a web scraping tool to collect data on company information, competitors’ job titles, skills, and educational backgrounds.
This information can then identify patterns and trends that inform a company’s own hiring and training strategies.
Additionally, LinkedIn scraping can help businesses identify potential partners, customers, and suppliers by analyzing connections between competitors and other industry players.
4. Event Attendees
If you have recently hosted or participated in an event on LinkedIn, that’s a great way to gather lists of leads who are interested in a particular topic.
To export LinkedIn event attendees use Phantombuster, to import them into a CSV file with their contact information and mention of the event.
These events provide a great icebreaker for your prospecting messages. You can send direct messages to all LinkedIn event attendees without sending a connection request.
5. Post Likers and commenters
Just like event attendees, people who like and comment on your LinkedIn posts manifest an interest in a specific topic and show your audience’s behaviors.
If you export LinkedIn post commenters or likers and then reach out to them, that provides a great icebreaker for your prospecting messages.
For this one, too, you can use Phantombuster’s LinkedIn Post Likers Export Phantom.
Note that with the free trial account, you’re limited to only several exports.
6. Competitors’ company followers
Did you ever think about targeting your competitor’s audience?
Well, that’s a brilliant way to avoid building an audience from scratch when your competitors already do all the work for you.
Here is a complete tutorial on how you can use to extract your competitors’ company page followers.
By getting the data, you can target someone who follows a competitor on LinkedIn, which means that they may be interested in your products or services.
Use Phantombuster or TexAu to paste the URL of their connections and export your new leads.
7. Group members
If you’re a member of a group or find a group with potential clients, you need to use that occasion to turn LinkedIn group members into clients.
Another use case is exporting and reaching them if you’re recruiting someone for a specific position.
Like in the example below, I’m a member of a group called “Developer group”, or something connected to Python.
I can look for leads that are members of those groups and export their contact data from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
By exporting LinkedIn group members, you are to build a qualified lead list of people interested in a specific topic.
All members joined the group because they sought answers to their problems.
Try to find out if they found it or if they still need help.
8. LinkedIn contacts
You can use your LinkedIn account to export your LinkedIn contacts, which will take minutes.
This is a great way to back up and protect your LinkedIn contacts in case your account experiences potential issues, such as hacking or technical glitches.
To extract data from your LinkedIn contacts:
- Open the CSV file to get your contacts
- Click “Me”
- Click “Settings & Privacy”
- Click “Data privacy”
- Click on “Get a copy of your data”
- Select “Connections”
- Click the download link in the email
- Click “Download archive”
This step-by-step guide leads you to a point where you need to download a CSV of contact data that looks like this:
This is because LinkedIn only gives you the contact information (email, phone numbers) of those who chose to share it with their 1st-degree connections.
So, overall, data extraction with third-party scrapers remains a better option to
9. Recruiter lists
Last but not least, LinkedIn scraping can be a powerful tool for recruiters seeking the best candidates to hire.
Using web scraping software, recruiters can export LinkedIn profiles containing specific keywords and job titles, making it easier to build a list of candidates with the right skills and experience.
Once the recruiter has compiled a list of potential candidates, they can use LinkedIn’s messaging feature to reach out to them and measure their interest in the position.
They can also upload the files into their own Applicant Tracking System.
7 Best LinkedIn Scraping Tools
For the most legit LinkedIn scraping experience, here are 7 best LinkedIn profile scrapers to use for extracting contact data, enriching your CRM, and nailing your outreach campaigns:
- Evaboot
- Phantombuster
- LaGrowthMachine
- Expandi
- GetProspect
- TexAu
- Waalaxy
1. Evaboot
As I mentioned earlier, Evaboot is a LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraping tool that allows you to export leads and get emails from Sales Navigator.
It’s a great tool if you’ve built a network on LinkedIn and want to enhance your lead-generation strategies.
With Evaboot, you get a ready-for-outreach Excel file in just one click.
Main Features
- Export leads from LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Export company profiles
- Export LinkedIn profile URLs
- Clean the data (emojis, capital letters, typos…)
- Detect false positives in your search results
- Find professional emails
- Verify emails
Pricing Tiers
- $9 per month for 100 credits
- $29 per month for 500 credits
- $49 per month for 1500 credits
- $99 per month for 4000 credits
2. Phantombuster
Phantombuster is a generalist scraping platform covering many LinkedIn use cases.
They also extract data from social networks like Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok.
Main Features
- Export LinkedIn searches
- Scrape LinkedIn profiles
- Send connection requests
- Send messages
- Enrich LinkedIn profiles
- Connect to other social platforms
- Can give data in JSON
Pricing Tiers
- $69/month for 5 phantoms
- $159/month for 15 phantoms
- $439/month for 50 phantoms
3. LaGrowthMachine
LaGrowthMachine is a sales automation tool that helps sales teams and recruiters benefit from the most advanced growth techniques without technical skills.
The main goal of this tool is to automate the sending of LinkedIn messages and connection requests, but it can also export LinkedIn searches.
Main Features
- Scrape Linkedin
- LinkedIn messaging automation
- Cold email automation
- Twitter Automation
- Voice message automation
- API
- CRM Sync
- Integrated email enrichment
- Sequence templates
- Shared Inbox
- Webhooks
Pricing Tiers
- €60 per month for rigid templates and no email enrichment
- €120 per month unlimited email enrichment and API
- €180 per month for CRM sync and custom workflows
4. Expandi
Expandi is a LinkedIn automation tool designed to help users enhance their outreach efforts. It allows users to send personalized invites, messages, and InMails and supports email outreach.
The tool has features like image and GIF personalization, smart sequences, and integrations with other tools through Zapier, Integromat, or a custom-made webhook.
Expandi also provides educational resources to help users become more proficient in LinkedIn outreach.
Main Features
- LinkedIn Scraping
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator scraping
- LinkedIn Recruiting scraping
- LinkedIn Automation
- InMail Automation
- Personalize images and GIF
Pricing Tiers
One plan of $99 per month per seat.
5. GetProspect
GetProspect is a lead generation tool that offers a Chrome extension to bulk extract emails and profiles from LinkedIn.
A large B2B database of over 200 million contacts enables users to quickly collect a substantial base of business email addresses, freeing up time for crafting compelling outreach content.
Main Features
- LinkedIn scraping
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator Scraping
- Email Finder
- Email Verifier
- Google Sheet Integration
Pricing Tiers
- 1,000 emails /month: $49
- 5,000 emails /month: $99
- 20,000 emails /month: $199
- 50,000 emails /month: $399
6. TexAu
TexAu lets you connect automation, build powerful workflows, grab data, or generate leads in minutes.
Like Phantombuster, they are a generalist scraping platform, but they offer many LinkedIn automation and scraping features.
Main Features
- Export search and lists
- Export group members
- Export event attendees
- Export posts commenters and likers
Pricing Tiers
- Starter: $29 /month
- Growth: $79 /month
- Agency: $199 /month
7. Waalaxy
Waalaxy (ex-Prospectin) is another French multichannel outreach tool. It started as a LinkedIn messaging automation tool and then added LinkedIn cold emailing to its sequences.
Main Features
- Scrape Linkedin
- Send connection request
- Send LinkedIn messages
- Send emails
- Integrate email finder
- Shared Inbox
- Manage multiple accounts
- CRM sync
- Integrates with Recruiter and Sales Navigator
Pricing Tiers
- $112/month for Linkedin automation
- $160/month for Linkedin + Email automation
Don’t hesitate to test each tool and see which works best for your needs.
Conclusion
Well, now you see why LinkedIn scraping is a big deal.
It saves you time and ensures that you have accurate and up-to-date data to drive your marketing and outreach strategies.
Most importantly, you can export data from various data points, like LinkedIn groups, post likers and commenters, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Recruiter, etc.
So, I recommend using LinkedIn’s potential by choosing the best LinkedIn scraping tool to respond to your business needs.
FAQ
How do I scrape LinkedIn leads?
The fastest way to scrape LinkedIn data is to use a tool like Phantombuster.
- Log in to Phantombuster and select the “LinkedIn Search Export” phantom.
- Access the LinkedIn profile scraper.
- Enter the LinkedIn profile URLs you would like to scrape.
- Configure your scraping settings.
- Start scraping.
- Save the data to a CSV file.
Is it legal to scrape LinkedIn data?
The be short, LinkedIn scraping is illegal, but can be considered legal if done properly.
It’s important to use techniques and tools that comply with LinkedIn’s terms of service.
What are the best practices for scraping LinkedIn profiles?
The best way to gather LinkedIn profile data, is to scrape only publicly available data and avoid sensitive personal information.
Secondly, follow the scraping frequency limits. Do not overload LinkedIn’s servers with excessive requests, as this could be flagged as suspicious activity.
What are the best LinkedIn profile scraping tools?
You can find some of the best LinkedIn scraping tools in this table.
| LinkedIn Scraper | Type | Price (starts at) | Free Trial |
|---|---|---|---|
| Evaboot | Cloud-Based | $9 | No |
| Phantombuster | Cloud-Based | $69 | 10 leads |
| Wiza | Cloud-Based | $30 | No |
| Skrapp | Cloud-Based | $49 | Yes |
| Linked Helper | Desktop-Based | $15 | Yes |
| Findymail | Browser-Based | $49 | 10 emails |
| Prospeo | Cloud-Based | $39 | 75 leads |
| GetProspect | Cloud-Based | $49 | 50 leads |
| TexAu | Cloud-Based | $29 | Yes |
| Captain Data | Cloud-Based | $999 | 1000 credits |
| Dux-Soup | Browser-Based | $12.99 | Yes |
| Octopus CRM | Cloud-Based | $6.99 | Yes |
What is the best way to scrape LinkedIn profiles without violating their terms of service?
To scrape LinkedIn profiles without getting banned by LinkedIn is to limit your scraping frequency. Don’t overwhelm LinkedIn’s servers with too many requests; this might be flagged as suspicious.
You can also use LinkedIn API, if possible. It’s like LinkedIn’s permission to access data as a more compliant alternative to scraping.
Is it possible to scrape data from LinkedIn?
Different sources state that LinkedIn’s terms of service prohibit scraping. However, automating data collection can be legal if you follow best practices for LinkedIn data scraping.
What is a LinkedIn scraper?
A LinkedIn scraper is a tool that collects unstructured, publicly available data and converts it into structured data for export.
It uses web scraping techniques to extract information from public user profiles, making it useful for outreach strategies.
Disclosure
This content was partly written by AI (ChatGPT 4), I added my own perspective, fact-checked it and made sure it is helpful for you.
