5 things about Linkedin that you probably did not know about

In this article, you will find out what limits and restrictions Linkedin imposes on its users and how to deal with them. You will also learn how to create advanced enquiries and how to receive weekly alerts about new people meeting certain criteria. Last but not least, you will learn what hours and days are best for posting on Linkedin. I encourage you to read the article: 5 things about Linkedin that you probably did not know about.

1. Limits and restrictions

Linkedin has various restrictions. They can be divided into 3 groups:

Officially stated by Linkedin with specific figures

• 30,000 1st level contacts (source: Network size limit)—if this limit is exceeded, further persons will be added as followers. This means that the followers can see your news but you don’t see any posts posted by the followers.

Officially given by Linkedin, without specific figures (source: Commercial use limit)

• Profile Search—if you search for profiles too often, you may be warned when you are about to approach a limit. The limit is reset every first day of the month. This limit applies both to the number of searches and the speed with which you do so.
• Viewing profiles with ‘People Also Viewed’ functionality.
• Limit of unanswered invitations sent—according to various sources you can have between 1500 and 5000 unanswered invitations sent. If you have reached this limit, you must delete the unanswered invitations sent. In this case, a script from PhantomBuster or the Invitation Management tab on LinkedIn can help.

Not given by Linkedin, without concrete figures, yet observed and existing

• Invitations flagged as ‘I don’t know this person’—supposedly it is enough for 5 people to mark you as ‘I do not know this person’ when an invitation is issued for Linkedin to block or not deliver invitations to other people. In this case, you may not even realize that you have been affected by certain restrictions. Linkedin will show you that you have sent an invitation to a person, but the other person will not see it.
• Limit of invitations sent—depending on the reputation of your profile, you can send more or fewer invitations. For a new account, 30 a day may already be too many. The safe number is considered to be 50 invitations sent per day for an account that already has a certain history. This limit can be increased by buying a premium account.
• Sent messages limit—Linkedin limits the number of messages sent. It is considered that the safe level is about 80 messages per day.

2. Profile reputation

Each Linkedin account has its own reputation factor. It is not publicly available. Reputation is (probably) influenced by factors such as the age of the account, the number of posts, the number of invitations sent, the activity of the account, and probably many other criteria that are known only to the creators of Linkedin. A low reputation means more restrictions and lower levels of limits as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

The good news is that you have an influence on the reputation of the account. It all boils down to make sure that the activities undertaken on the account are evolutionary, not revolutionary. If you want to increase your prospecting activities, do so moderately. Warm up the account. Increase the number of invitations and messages sent out from week to week.

Any activity that looks unnaturally fast will be noticed by the Linkedin algorithms.

3. Advanced search

Advanced search allows you to find people by precise criteria. For example, if you want to find all software developers in Warsaw but exclude companies such as Microsoft and Google, you can do so using the following query entered in the search window:

title:"software developer" NOT company:Microsoft NOT company:Google

This way we find all the people who meet the above condition.

At the moment Linkedin supports 5 search operators (source: Using Search Operators on LinkedIn):

• first name—looks for people by their first name
• last name—looks for people by their last name
• title—looks for people by the title of the post
• company—looks for people by the company they currently work for
• school—looks for people by the school where they studied

In addition, we have additional operators such as:

• NOT – excludes a certain category
• OR – extends the search with additional criteria
• AND – narrows down the search—there is no need to use AND, you can write after space, e.g.  title:"Software Developer" AND title:"CMO" is the same as the title:"Software Developer" title:"CMO"
• Parenthetical searches – parentheses allow you to carry out group searches. If you want to find all the Directors except Assistant Directors and the Sales Directors, you should search:Director NOT("Assistant Director" OR "Sales Director").

4. Search Alert

Imagine that you can get information about new people meeting certain criteria in your email box every week for free. All you have to do is create an alert when you create your enquiry.

Linkedin will send a notification to your mail when there are new people meeting the criteria.

5. The best time to publish posts on Linkedin