LinkedIn Weekly Invitation Limit Without Results? Here’s What to Do
Updated: Mar 15, 2022
Social selling on LinkedIn lets you foster relationships in ways that can be gradually steered towards a business proposition, creating organic opportunities for salespeople, marketers, and recruiters alike.
However, some of the practices followed by several salespeople and BDRs are changing the dynamics of social selling. Social platforms are warier than ever, which can damage the user experience for everyone using the channel.
In this post, we’ll focus on LinkedIn and how to avoid reaching your LinkedIn weekly invitation limit. We begin with what it is meant to be and how mindless prospecting efforts are hurting the very objective of businesses. We then look at the measures LinkedIn has taken to thwart this.
Finally, we conclude with what a smart technology tool can help to scale without any of the downsides associated with conventional approaches.
LinkedIn as a powerful platform
Each popular social media platform operates within a specific sphere, with a specific purpose. Facebook is primarily meant to help you connect with old friends or members of the family living in different locations. Instagram aims to create a more visual experience by encouraging people to share photos (or videos). Twitter lets people express themselves in 280 characters - microblogging, as it is called.
LinkedIn is essentially a platform for professional networking. As you grow your network, you discover new businesses and new people that complement your own strength and ultimately help you grow. Put differently, it helps you expand your professional reach.
What salespeople are doing wrong on LinkedIn
It’s not just salespeople, even recruiters are approaching LinkedIn with what turns out to be a self-defeating purpose. They are sending out connection requests to anyone and everyone they think is a prospect. Even the messages they send as a part of the invite are typically generalized (major no, no).
To the recipient, these connection requests look aren’t that different from the spammy emails we all constantly receive. And because the accompanying messages are typical canned messages, there’s no compelling reason for the recipient to accept the connection request.
And with that disappears the chances to engage and sell.
To be fair, it’s not entirely your salespersons’ fault.
LinkedIn offers them no direct solution either. That’s because LinkedIn looks upon itself as a networking platform, not a sales prospecting platform. That means what works elsewhere won’t work here.
Salespeople are used to sending 5k or 15k emails in a shot, it doesn’t occur to them that with LinkedIn, things are different. LinkedIn, evidently, doesn’t like you to turn the platform into just another message dumping ground.
LinkedIn weekly invitation limits have been set up
To ensure people don’t keep spamming LinkedIn users, in the name of connection requests, the platform has drawn a set of limits. Read our dedicated blog post on LinkedIn connection request limit.
What is the weekly invitation limit on LinkedIn
Earlier, they had restricted the number of requests you could send out per day. It was somewhere around 70 to 100. That discouraged people from sending out connection requests indiscriminately, but not much.
As a result, invitation limit LinkedIn per week have been further reduced. Today, you can send out no more than 100 connection requests per week. That’s nearly one-seventh of the earlier limit.
And we understand there’s more. Not only does LinkedIn cap the number of requests you can send but it also keeps a close watch on your ‘accept ratio’. Its algorithm tracks how many of your requests were actually accepted.
Put differently, it tries to figure out whether you’re bombarding people or whether you’re choosing your target connections carefully. The better you target, the higher your ‘accept ratio’ is.
The end of prospecting with LinkedIn? Not quite so
On the face of it, the new rules of LinkedIn seem to have clipped the wings as far as prospecting is concerned. Down from 70 or 100 per day to 100 requests a week is certainly a massive drop.
However, if you look closely, you’ll realize that’s not the case. By stopping you from sending junk messages or meaningless connection requests, LinkedIn is effectively bringing in a certain level of discipline in how you reach out to people, establish connections, and begin relationships.
LinkedIn is basically asking you to fine-tune your method and focus on quality rather than quantity. With a LinkedIn weekly invitation limit of 100 requests per week, you’ll naturally spend more time looking at the profile and activity of the person before sending a request. That means you’re going to connect with only those people who are likely to help you achieve your goals.
Sure, this would require you to spend more time understanding each target connection. It would certainly slow things down to a considerable extent. But that’s a small price to pay when you consider that you’ll ultimately get better results, thanks to the sharper focus.
But that raises another question: is there a way to scale all this?
Automation that is smart and effective
If you’re looking to improve your ‘accept ratio’, you naturally want to check the profile of your potential connection, see if they’ve been active lately, and get a general understanding of them before you send a request. It’s important, but the bad news is it’s terribly time-consuming.
Checking all these details manually will eat away your time and prospecting over LinkedIn will no longer be that efficient.
Thankfully, there are a few automation tools which can help you find contacts and build prospecting lists.
OneShot can also help you in your outreach efforts. How?
Going beyond the mere copy-paste-and-hit-submit routines, OneShot does the following for you:
It will check if the person you wish to connect with is currently active.
It will see how closely the profile matches your ICP
Automated LinkedIn messaging will automate a message for you that you can send with the connection request.
Is that all? No, there’s more.
Perhaps the most important thing OneShot does is to study the profile of your potential connection and build context. Based on the profile, the AI-powered technology of OneShot will generate a personalized message for the prospect. As a result, your message is so hyper-personalized, your potential connection will find it difficult to resist.
What’s more, it will also generate recommendations for follow-up actions. In essence, OneShot does all the heavy lifting for you. The relevancy of messages and recommendations means that you’ll not be wasting time on researching individual profiles; instead, you’ll invest more time, engaging, selling, or hiring, whatever your ultimate goals are.
By making LinkedIn a contextually important touchpoint in your business process, OneShot brings automation as well as efficiency. The underlying artificial intelligence also does the primary analysis of the profile, leaving you to focus on only bigger activities.
A few last words on the LinkedIn Weekly Invitation Limit
Restricting the number of requests you can send out ultimately helps businesse,since it will help them take a relevance-based approach. And achieving success over LinkedIn means following their regulations yet maintaining your ability to scale or bring automation.
As a platform, LinkedIn is a goldmine for networking, hiring, and selling - provided you use the right tools. OneShot brings the technology that lets you build the right backdrop to begin a meaningful conversation with prospects and stay ahead. If you aren’t making the most of LinkedIn by using OneShot, you are truly missing something.
Want to know how to write effective LinkedIn prospecting messages? We got you...
invitation limit linkedin per week