Chapter 24: Linkedin Scraper & Bot, Automate Adding Connections and Messaging
Linkedin, which is the professional networking platform, recently announced that the China version of Linkedin will sunset later this year. It’s due to a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirement. It will launch the global standalone platform called InJobs in China. But the platform will not include a social media feed or the ability to share posts or articles. It’s what it is. Linkedin business networking is still very valuable to users, no matter whether Chinese need to use VPN to login their profiles, or inJob still has the feature of people search.
1-on-1 communication is critical in B2B marketing, which is different from massive consumer market campaigns. After all, B2B deals before closing have more considerations than just buying a piece of iPhone case. Frankly, it doesn’t have many high-quality business network platforms globally. Before you have plenty of qualified 1st party data applied to emails, social media, and advertising, Linkedin must be one of the battlegrounds your B2B business line has to take up.
In this Python Tutorial, I would walk you through how to automate increasing specific target connections, and activate the automatic messaging. It’s for the purpose to start the conversation with your target business account. By the end of this Python Tutorial, you can master the basic rules of Linkedin connections and tips and tricks to use this bot and scraper. And most importantly, you can start automating instead of what you are repeatedly doing every day.
Table of Contents: Linkedin Scraper
- Linkedin Connection Rules and Account Creation Tips
- Keyword and People Search URL Parameters
- Add Connection Automatically
- Sending 1st Connection Messages Automatically
- Full Python Script of Linkedin scraper and bot
Linkedin Connection Rules and Account Creation Tips
Each Linkedin user can have at most 30k connections and unlimited followers. Apart from recruitment and job search purposes, people usually leverage the connection to build business networks and blast business-related messaging.
To any new user, she or he can go to search for a company or a name with or without some filters. Basically here is the place to add new connections and messaging to your 1st connections.
Messaging to 2nd connection and 3rd connections requires signing up for Linkedin premium plans. So in this chapter it mainly talks about how to automate messaging to 1st connections.
Personally, there are two tips and tricks. First, please sign up for a new account and put it as a dummy account instead of using your real personal account. It’s because Linkedin on and off investigates the robot account. It’s for avoiding your personal one that might be suspended.
Secondly, please add some friends with a certain amount of Linkedin connections before automating networking. It’s better to build connections with more than 5000. It’s because Linkedin doesn’t grant access to your profile and you can’t see the 2nd or 3rd connections button if your account hasn’t any connections.
People Search URL Parameters
Adding new connections is the first step of this Python bot script. Adding people from different companies is different from what company name or brand name keywords you input into the section.
For example, here is the URL for searching for people from Furbo which is a well-known brand of the pet camera devices. In the script, apart from the path, the keyword parameter can change for different results. You can add Furbo, tesla, Microsoft, etc. What’s more, you can go to the 2nd page, 3rd page, and more by changing the page parameter.
For specifically searching your 1st connection using keywords, you need to add one parameter “network=%5B%22F%22%5D” in the URL.
For example,
https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=easy2digital&network=%5B%22F%22%5D&page=1
Add New Connections Automatically
First thing first, we need to find the connect button element and the path. Luckily, Linkedin assigns this button with the button element. It’s easy to write this line of code. But things you need to be aware of are the buttons with different messages. You don’t need to click all the buttons. So here are the codes that only click those buttons named in connect
all_buttons = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name("button")
connect_buttons = [btn for btn in all_buttons if btn.text == "Connect"]
Then, things are not just a one-click button. There are 3 steps broken down in this journey, which are “click, send and close”.
You might find that there are some blockers in the Linkedin scraping process. Basically, there are three types of blockers
– Blank elements
– Inactive elements
– Element not interactable exceptions
When adding new connections, you would come across sometimes the Javascript pop-up or snippets stopping your scraping. So for resolving this and making the scraping go smoothly, you need to add execute_script and arguments[0]. It is your way of accessing the first argument to the anonymous function.
Sending 1st Connection Messages Automatically
Regarding automatic messages, you must have a specific company or brand communication objective. So the keyword here should be the brand or company name in your 1st connections.
https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?keywords=easy2digital&network=%5B%22F%22%5D&page=1
First things first, it’s different with adding new connections. Now you need to click the button named in the message
all_buttons = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name("button")
message_buttons = [btn for btn in all_buttons if btn.text == "Message"]
Then, creating a for loop is necessary as you would repeat to click and send the same messages. If you need to visit more than 1 page, you also need to create one more for loop above this level
for contacts in range(0,len(message_buttons))
driver.execute_script("arguments[0].click();", message_buttons[contacts])
One key step here is to add this XPath, because you have to click the message window before you type any messages. To activate this section and paragraph section, you need to add this script.
main_div = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//div[starts-with(@class, 'msg-form__msg-content-container')]")
Last but not least, you paste the message to the conversation window and box, and click the submit button and close button. Basically, one automatic messaging is done until here.
I would walk you through how to customize the name and opening in the next Python Tutorial chapter.
Full Python Script of Linkedin Scraper and Bot
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