What is LinkedIn Scraping? Challenges and 4 Use Cases

LinkedIn scraping is an automation strategy to scrape publicly available data on LinkedIn for lead generation. LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals to connect, share, and learn. LinkedIn is continuously growing with 830 million members worldwide. LinkedIn empowered 1.2 million job seekers to grow in their careers and expand their professional network through

LinkedIn scraping is an automation strategy to scrape publicly available data on LinkedIn for lead generation. LinkedIn is the largest social network for professionals to connect, share, and learn.

LinkedIn is continuously growing with 830 million members worldwide. LinkedIn empowered 1.2 million job seekers to grow in their careers and expand their professional network through career coaching and mentorship.

LinkedIn users connect with like-minded individuals, apply and recruit for jobs, know the latest news in the industry, and follow influential people across the globe. It’s essential to understand how LinkedIn is harnessed by the members and brands. You will gain valuable insights into how your business will benefit by incorporating LinkedIn into your social media strategy.

What is LinkedIn Scraping?

A B2B business needs data for prospecting. Often, it starts with scraping LinkedIn as it is the most complete and updated professional database. An automation tool visits, copies, and pastes the information available on the LinkedIn profile. The LinkedIn profile scraper gathers the following information from the LinkedIn profile:

• Profile
• Email ID
• Positions
• Timestamp
• URL
• City
• Country code
• Experience
• Education
• Certifications
• Courses
• Recommendations
• Jobs

It gathers the following from the company profile:

• URL
• Company name 
• Followers
• Employees
• About
• Location
• Employee Updates
• Headquarters

This platform is rich in content with tailored data for many businesses. The members are high-level professionals, influencers, employees, and companies. It is a gold mine for digging information that helps grow your business. You get a list of potential leads that you need to create effective outreach campaigns. The data you scrape from LinkedIn is useful in many ways including:

• Lead generation for business development – Collects LinkedIn URL and discover email IDs.
• Lead segmentation and marketing – Segment the prospects or group them based on various parameters or insights.
• Business Intelligence – Predict market and industry trends. Sort a company based on the role, size, profit, and other parameters
• Human resource – Improves hiring and recruitment process.
• Harvest information about the prospects – Maintain customers’ contact details, buying preferences, issues, and differences.
• Information about the competitors – Compare prices, reviews, and strategies. Find competitor’s growth with a particular characteristic.
• Investment – Venture capital and decide about future investments.
• Alumni – Find alumni based on location, industry, or expertise.

Challenges in LinkedIn Scraping

Web scraping is a challenging process, so scraping LinkedIn is also demanding. It’s imperative that you learn the strategies LinkedIn uses to prevent unauthorized scraping. You must perform scraping carefully while respecting the restrictions of the company or the country and not scrape any personal data, intellectual property, or confidential information.

LinkedIn doesn’t encourage scrapers to collect data from its website.  Back in 2019, LinkedIn lost a court case against hiQ, a startup company that scraped the website for research purposes. The court ruled that it is completely legal to scrape the public data and it is unreasonable to expect privacy.

Scraping isn’t unethical. Search engines scrape data to collect and index information found on the internet. Scraping benefits both the user and the website to search and find snippets of information.

LinkedIn is against scraping if it is done without permission (unauthorized access). It puts public-facing websites such as e-commerce, news sites, and social media sites at risk and you have no ability to track where the data goes or how to use it. Unauthorized scraping is not a violation of privacy, breach, or hacking. But when the scraped data get into the hands of a bad actor, they may use it in ways that you don’t expect.

Linkedin uses AI and legal methods to prevent unauthorized access and hold the perpetrators responsible. These form the challenges for the web scraper to gather information from websites.

LinkedIn has created, deployed, and maintained models and rules that detect and prohibit unauthorized scraping. It allows the scraping of the public profile to collect viewable data on LinkedIn with and without logging in.

Scraping without logging in

LinkedIn is sensitive to automated profile viewing and employs models that look for signs of it. These models are retrained and automatically deployed several times a day to learn new patterns. LinkedIn uses a scalable abuse detection system and machine learning models to adapt to evolving attack patterns.

Scraping with logging in

Instead of a user, an automated bot scrapes viewable data. LinkedIn models prevent logged-in scraping by monitoring bot-like activity. LinkedIn’s deep learning technology classifies sequences of user behavior and uses outlier detection algorithms to detect activities that appear non-human.

LinkedIn also has a funnel of additional defenses to detect and take down fake accounts engaged in scraping.

Data from LinkedIn Profiles

The scraper can extract the following details from the LinkedIn page:

Profile page extraction – A visit to the Show Page, Company Page, Profile Page, School Page, and Job Page.

Search result extraction – LinkedIn search displays thousands of results. You can scrape up to 1000 results using a regular LinkedIn account in batches. A scraper will manage to scrape up to 2500 results by making more specific searches and scraping each batch separately.

Company profile extraction – It extracts company URLs to generate leads and improve data enrichment about the current clients.

Extract your contact’s URL –  It extracts the profiles and their URLs of your entire connection list.

Post or article extraction – It extracts the latest posts, articles, and the liked content of your new prospects, important clients, or potential recruits.

Like or comment extraction – Collecting this information is valuable as it lists the people who are aware of the topic, contribute to the topic of discussion, and are active in their professional lives. Such information is valuable for lead generation.

Group member extraction – It allows scraping the details of more than 2500 members in the group.

Auto-connect action – The scraper automatically sends connection requests to a list of LinkedIn profiles based on your profile preferences.

Auto-liking action – Auto-like the posts and articles to show support for your connections. It increases your LinkedIn profile’s visibility when you frequently give out likes.

Rate Limit Constraint

LinkedIn has a rate limit constraint for automation. All applications require authorization and authentication before they can fetch data from LinkedIn or get access to scrape LinkedIn member data. 

LinkedIn implements a protocol for member authorization and API authentication to prevent abuse and ensure service stability. Rate limit specifies the maximum number of API calls allowed in a 24-hour period.

There are two kinds of rate limits for the APIs or scrapers:

• Application – the total number of calls that an API or a scraper can make in a day.
• Member – the total number of calls that a member can make in a day per application.

LinkedIn wants to connect real people with real information. LinkedIn rewards the users with more visibility and access to information if it gets more information from the users. A new account with 0 connections, no education history, no professional experience, and no profile photo finds restrictions in sending new connection requests.

Use Cases

LinkedIn data points offer a more targeted and effective approach to doing business. The data you scrape finds its purpose in the following use cases.

Reach Out to the Right People

LinkedIn is a rich source of potential customers from where you can find the right contacts for lead generation. An automated scraper helps you access the profiles of your choice by running scraping queries. You may filter the profiles based on company names, shared connections, or using the details in their resume.

Scraping to Discover Talent

Human resource professionals find it easy to collect information about employee titles and profiles from targeted industries. For instance, scrapers can get detailed information such as the names of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) with 10+ years of experience in the gaming industry.

Identify New Deals

The scraped LinkedIn data enables venture capitalists, financial hedges, and financial groups to identify new deals. They look for opportunities where they can gain a competitive edge. Venture capitalists target companies that are not performing well, have stagnant employee growth, low user brand engagement, or companies that get negative coverage. They analyze those companies to find whether investing in them would help them to revamp and then finalize the dealings.

Explore Markets Based on the Geography

The LinkedIn public data aids multinational companies(MNC) to look for a new market, rolling out a new product, and attempting to change the present way it does business. The MNC collects data points on marketing campaigns, and articles that are shared and engaged with, and looks for influencers impacting the customers. You turn this information into valuable and actionable insights for marketing strategies.

Final Thoughts

LinkedIn data assists in identifying talents, analyzing career paths, identifying companies for investment, exploring competitive landscapes in new markets, and in customer relationship management. The scraper proxy collects LinkedIn data in batches within the rate limit. 

If you are looking for proxies for scraping LinkedIn check out at ProxyScrape which offers a variety of proxies for all your needs. ProxyScrape has a pool of fast, static data center proxies from which the users can get proxies at affordable rates. It ensures unlimited bandwidth and unlimited concurrent connections and supports HTTP/S and SOCKS4/5 datacenter proxies. 

Keep checking our blog for more information on the newly introduced proxies, their uses, and the benefits ProxyScrape offers.