Updated: August 2024
Whether you’re new to LinkedIn, dabble with it occasionally, or are an active participant in group conversations with lots of connections, it’s good to keep the subject of effectiveness at the back of your mind when using this social networking platform.
LinkedIn is the most widely adopted B2B networking platform worldwide, offering you an opportunity to network with over 1 billion professionals.
Harness it correctly and it can be a highly valuable source of information, recommendations and sales leads. Ignore it completely and you could find your business losing market share and brand presence to your competition.
But how can you use it most effectively and where does the balance lie?
How much time and activity should I invest in LinkedIn?
For some businesses, LinkedIn is their sole source of customer acquisition.
If you’re a good networker and willing to spend time joining in conversations, posting content and messaging your connections every day, then for a small business this can be highly rewarding.
The amount of time invested in LinkedIn is often related to the size of the business. Larger businesses may have employees dedicated to social activity to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to their websites. Consistent engagement on LinkedIn can be a key of brand identity, strengthening your business's presence and recognition online.
For many of us though, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day and LinkedIn can get neglected for other more urgent and pressing tasks. Urgent quotes, customer issues, development projects, financial planning, and HR/finance tasks can mean prospecting outreach falls by the wayside.
We’ve all been there.
Automating LinkedIn
The good news for those of us concerned about our lack of LinkedIn prowess is that LinkedIn Automation solves many of these concerns.
It allows business owners, sales professionals and marketers to be active on LinkedIn without the need to be there, for the most part anyway.
Think about it; the most time-consuming LinkedIn tasks are those that either don’t involve any or involve only very light interaction with your target prospects.
Building your lists, viewing profiles and attempting your first outreach - often a connection request or short message for example. These tasks can all be done without investing your valuable time, and without compromising the personalization that we all strive for when engaging with new prospects.
By automating processes like sending connection requests, you can save up to 80% of your time and skip straight to the personalized engagement piece. And here’s where it gets really good. By focussing on those prospects that have been responsive to your initial outreach, guess what? Your conversion rates are going to be much higher.
Better conversion rates, less time spent? Sounds like a win-win situation, right?
That’s why Dux-Soup has gained over 80,000 users. It’s an attractive proposition and one that is low-cost, quick and easy to benefit from.
How do I Automate LinkedIn activity?
So, you could go ahead and get started right now. In fact, Dux-Soup offers a free trial of our Turbo plan so you can have a play with the tool, including its campaign feature and see the benefits of automating your LinkedIn activity.
But before you jump ahead with automation, it’s important to understand what LinkedIn Automation tools have to offer, so you can determine whether they will work for you.
Watch our overview on Dux-Soup to understand the key features and benefits.
Then use our LinkedIn automation playbook to get started with pre-prepared campaign workflows and messaging templates.
Top 6 ways to use LinkedIn Automation
Although Dux-Soup (with its Starter, Professional, Turbo and Cloud Editions) has many features available, here we’ve highlighted the best-loved and most widely used features below:
1. Viewing and Tagging LinkedIn Profiles
It’s just human nature that we’re intrigued as to who is looking at our LinkedIn profile, right?
When you view someone’s profile, the other person can see that you’ve done this, which sparks a curiosity as to why you may be viewing their profile. Chances are they may look at your profile in return, and so this becomes your first opportunity to showcase your brand/business/capabilities to them.
Therefore, it’s important to have an up-to-date profile before you start automating your LinkedIn activities. When you build target lists in LinkedIn, it often helps to tag prospects and categorize them for follow-up.
It may be you want to tag them based on what information they’ve shown an interest in, or with the name of a specific campaign you are running.
By tagging LinkedIn profiles, you can segment prospects easily and follow up with more personalized content. And we all know that more personalization yields better results. Our video below shows how easy this is to tag LinkedIn profiles with Dux-Soup.
It's really simple to view and tag profiles with Dux-Soup. Find a list of profiles in LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or Recruiter.
Then, with Dux-Soup Pro, head to your extension and hit 'View profiles' as shown here.
To tag profiles as Dux-Soup visits them, make sure to switch on the action to 'Tag profiles...' and enter the name for your tag as shown here (you'll need to be in expert mode to see this option).
If you're using Turbo or Cloud, a profile visit is set up within your drip campaigns and you can select to tag profiles with the ID when enrolling profiles into your campaign.
2. Sending Personalized Connection Requests
By automating your LinkedIn connection requests you’ll save a lot of time and generate plenty of leads.
Some may argue that the connection request process shouldn’t be automated as the messages look too generic. Well, the good news is that by tagging profiles with Dux-Soup, downloading your data and tidying it up, then creating tailored and highly relevant messages, you can improve connection rates up to 70%!
And if you're sending 1000 connection requests a month like Littoral, with a 70% acceptance rate, then think how quickly your network can grow!
Here's our short tutorial to show how to easily connect with thousands of LinkedIn users.
If you're using Dux-Soup Pro to do this, you just need to get your LinkedIn list ready and press the 'Visit & Connect' button, adding you message into the box below.
If you're using Dux-Soup Turbo or Cloud, simple enter your connection message into your drip campaign, set the time delay from the previous action (if there is one) and Dux-Soup will schedule it to send at the right time, personalizing each message as it sends it.
Go to your extension, click 'Enrolll Profiles' and then choose the campaign and number of profiles to enroll into your campaign. Voila! Dux-Soup Turbo or Cloud will now send your connection messages for you.
3. Sending Personalized Messages to 1st-Degree LinkedIn Connections
Use LinkedIn automation to message your first-degree connections. It's a great way to nurture your professional connections, keeping your network up to date with news, latest offers, events or promotions. A time-consuming task to do manually, automating the task reduces it to just a few minutes. And the rewards can be high!
If you want to be more targeted with this, you can visit your entire network (as outlined in point 1), download your list with the help of Dux-Soup Pro, Turbo or Cloud, remove the connections you don't want to target and then revisit this data, sending a direct message to just these prospects. Don't forget to tag this cleaned list as you go!
To send direct messages to your LinkedIn connections with Pro, just toggle the action in your Dux-Soup options and write your message in the box. Then, when you click 'Visit' on your extension, Dux-Soup will visit, tag and send a direct message all in one go! Pretty neat, huh?
With Turbo and Cloud, you guessed it - your message will be added as a step in your drip campaigns. We're going to move onto this next.
3. Nurture your business leads with LinkedIn outreach campaigns.
If you’re struggling to connect with a prospect via your usual marketing channels, LinkedIn may just be the approach that get their attention.
It is often said that people are more likely to read a LinkedIn InMail or message than respond to an email. By uploading your business or CRM contacts to Dux-Soup, you can visit these profiles and run drip campaigns to your existing database. Send them campaigns with up to 12 touch-points including relevant content, updates, marking messages or offers.
Even better, with a Turbo or Cloud license you can send LinkedIn campaigns direct from your CRM system (no need to upload data lists manually). Check out our Dux-Soup integrations to see if your CRM system is a native integration, or use Zapier or Make to connect the two.
See how easy it is to create LinkedIn campaigns in this tutorial.
You may be asking what results you can expect from running LinkedIn campaigns. Well, Motivational Diaries won $200,000 of business in 24 months, Ideas First gets a 2-3% response rate with large businesses interested in discussing their service proposition, and Amped Marketing drove 30 meetings a week into their pipeline.
There are some pretty huge results to gain from LinkedIn automation, and with our Cloud Edition, it's always-on, running 24/7 on your behalf to generate a consistent flow of leads.
5. Download your LinkedIn data
When you’ve built your lists, sent connection requests, enrolled profiles into your campaigns, you may want to pull off a list of email addresses to send to colleagues for a multi-channel marketing approach. Dux-Soup Pro, Turbo and Cloud are excellent data scraping tools, allowing you to download the data from LinkedIn, including email addresses and start to communicate with your prospects ‘off platform’.
(Note: If you have Turbo or Cloud, then you can send your LinkedIn data straight to your CRM as seen with our Hubspot integration).
6. Build your email database
With some LinkedIn automation tools you can benefit from their data scraping capability, accessing the email addresses of 2nd and 3rd degree connections (which are not normally provided by LinkedIn) to build your email database. Dux-Soup does this via 'points' which you can purchase. With every successful email address found, you use up 1 point. It's a really low cost way of building the perfect database when you combine it with LinkedIn's excellent search capability. Then, simply download your data from Dux-Soup and use it for email marketing campaigns.
So there you have are 6 cool LinkedIn actions you can automate, which will make you more efficient with your time and costs. But there's plenty more you can do with Dux-Soup. Why not sign up to our Learning Hub to stay informed of the latest lead generation tips hot off the press?
What NOT to Automate
Whilst we believe that automating SOME parts of your sales process can offer huge time savings and increased sales conversions, we don’t promote using automation for every step in the sales process.
Nothing beats personal interaction with responsive prospects, and this is where we recommend you start to take your LinkedIn activity into your own hands. So, once you’ve got a response to a message in your drip campaign then we recommend you pick up the phone or send them a message directly so that you can start to build a relationship.
Quantifying the Benefits of LinkedIn Automation
It often helps to see the return on investment before you decide whether to automate your LinkedIn activity. Our Dux-Soup results demonstrate how companies are achieving outstanding results with Dux-Soup.
Hopefully you can find something here that fits what you’re looking to achieve for your business, but if not you can always browse our website to learn more about the features of Dux-Soup LinkedIn Automation tool.
