LinkedIn is the BEST tool for growing your business or service.
In fact, 4 out of 5 new B2B leads comes from the LinkedIn platform.
As far as social selling, LinkedIn is by far the best choice compared to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for finding your ideal customer and targeting them with cold messages.
People that use the LinkedIn platform are serious about business, unlike heavy users of Facebook or Instagram that are looking to be entertained by funny memes and photoshopped photos.
If your business sells to other businesses, you definitely need to spend time growing your LinkedIn network!
Using Automations To Grow Your LinkedIn Network
Many business users who want to grow their network and connections on LinkedIn quickly realize that the manual way of searching for ideal prospects and connecting with them can be time-consuming.
They quickly begin searching for automation tools that can help them "speed up" the process.
A quick search for "LinkedIn Chrome Extensions" returns dozens of tools that they can add to their Chrome or Mozilla browsers to do some of the searching and connecting for them.
In this post, we will discuss 3 of the best LinkedIn Chrome extensions (also called browser plug-ins) and talk about the reasons you, as a business owner or marketing professional, SHOULD NOT use them.
Best LinkedIn Chrome Extensions for 2021
The following are the best LinkedIn Chrome Extensions for searching and connecting with business prospects on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Helper
FEATURES:
Add hundreds of targeted contacts.
Auto-visit profiles.
Sequential messaging.
VERDICT:
LinkedIn Helper promises to be the perfect LinkedIn Chrome extension for growing your network on LinkedIn. But it has a few major downsides like:
Poorly designed interface that looks like it was designed in the Windows '95 era.
You must keep your browser tab open while using the tool. If you close your browser it will stop working.
There are no safeguards in place to prevent over-using the tool. You can easily put your LinkedIn account in jeopardy by using LinkedIn Helper.
If you do it in a small amount you'll be fine, a couple hundred profiles a day won’t be any problem for a paid account. However if your extension is spotted you will lose your account for TOS violation.
Now if you use multiple accounts LinkedIn is known to go for legal actions, they have a large dedicated team on hunting such scrapers all over the world. They are quite good in spotting that sort of activity.
John Koala
Technical CS, Data Scientist
Open Network
Open Network is geared more towards HR and recruiting professionals.
It helps you save your LinkedIn connections and access thousands of other business leads through it's own contact data.
FEATURES:
Prospecting tool to find leads, get emails, phone numbers and other contact data.
Free users can search and view the results up to 100 leads per month.
Premium users ($19.99 per month) can save their leads and export them as a .csv or .xls file.
VERDICT:
It has recently been renamed to People Finder which is a sign that it has been banned for scraping LinkedIn user data which is against the ToS.
Many reviews also point out that the free version redirects to the subscription page that "pushes" the Premium version.
There is also a high-level of inaccuracy with using this tool.
Imagine building up a large LinkedIn Network and getting caught violating the TOS and losing that network. Too risky for me.
TEddy burriss
LinkedIn Consultant
Discoverly
Discoverly allows you to look up contacts on LinkedIn, Gmail, Hubspot, and Twitter.
FEATURES:
Reveal and save more complete social contact info alongside the online profiles you normally view.
VERDICT:
Many reviewers report that Discoverly will cause your LinkedIn account to be inactive unless the Chrome extension is uninstalled. If a user fails to uninstall this extension then their LinkedIn account is suspended.
Why You Shouldn't Use LinkedIn Chrome Extensions
As we have shown, using LinkedIn Chrome extensions to grow your LinkedIn network is highly risky.
While many of these extensions offer a seemingly good service for free, there is always the additional concern of losing your LinkedIn account.
Most of the LinkedIn Chrome Extensions reviewed in this roundup have either changed operating names, had poor reviews, or were no longer active in the Google Chrome Store.
Our best advice is to avoid using LinkedIn Chrome extensions entirely.
A better choice for serious sales teams and networking professionals would be to use a tool like Clickedin which is an AI-powered platform for growing your sales pipeline on LinkedIn.
It utilizes a high-advanced algorithm that knows when to send connection requests and more importantly, who are the right prospects you should be targeting.
It is the only LinkedIn tool that has partnered with IBM Watson, and it uses AI to automate your LinkedIn connection sequences in a natural, human-like way.
If you're interested in exploring what Clickedin can do for your sales team or business, your best bet is to schedule a LinkedIn Lead Generation Session with a Clickedin Growth Expert.
Clickedin vs. Chrome Extensions
A short summary of using LinkedIn Chrome extensions vs. an automation tool like Clickedin.io for searching for and growing your connections on LinkedIn.
Clickedin
Chrome Extensions
Conclusion:
If you are seriously about growing your LinkedIn connections to increase your visibility and lead generation efforts, we highly discourage using a free LinkedIn Chrome extension of any kind. Instead we recommend investing in a tool like Clickedin so you can not only automate your LinkedIn prospecting, but also sleep well at night knowing the time and effort you put into your LinkedIn profile will not be at risk for flagging or termination.
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