The Ultimate Guide to Avoid the LinkedIn Connections Limit

What is the LinkedIn connections limit?

LinkedIn has experienced a lot of scams and the site can be abused by spammers and phishers. However, most of the abuse comes from legitimate users who misuse the site to get closer to others they know or want to know better.

It has over 66.8 million monthly active users in the United States alone and over 810 million users worldwide.

As far as every salesperson is concerned, LinkedIn is the best place to be. It’s the world’s most popular social network for professionals, and it’s brimming with potential leads.

You use it to prospect, nurture relationships, and close deals. But with a sales automation tool like LaGrowthMachine, you can use it to its full potential.

Indeed, many tasks in your LinkedIn prospecting routine can be automated such as adding new contacts, sending connection requests, and reaching out to new connections.

That way, both your sales and marketing teams can focus on your most important task: selling.

This is what we do here at LaGrowthMachine, here are just some of the commands that can be set up from within our tool:

As you can see, LaGrowthMachine allows you to schedule sequences for your LinkedIn Automation with specific actions:

• Visit your lead’s profile
• Connect with your leads
• Send a message on LinkedIn
• Send a voice message on LinkedIn (our newest feature!)

However, all these actions are subject to LinkedIn’s limitations.

The connections limit for 1st-level connections you can have is 30,000. If you have reached the maximum number of connections and try to add more, LinkedIn will not allow it.

You can see your current number of users connected to you by going to your profile and looking at how many are listed in the “Connections” section.

Before 2021, depending on your plan, your weekly connection requests limit is somewhere between 350 and 700.

However, after their 2021 update, LinkedIn enforced a rule that each user had only around 100 connection requests per week!

We use an estimate since the exact number of LinkedIn connections can vary depending on multiple contributing factors, including but not limited to:

• How old your account is
• How active you are (and this includes connection requests, latest likes, comments, etc.)
• Your SSI (Selling Score Index)
• etc…

It’s quite the secret recipe that LinkedIn is holding on tight, which is understandable since you don’t want people getting their hands on such information to exploit it.

This change had a huge impact on the salespeople’s LinkedIn outreach because of the radical nature of the change.

So for those of you who work in sales: If and when you cross the sending limit for the first time, you’ll see this message: “You’ve reached the weekly invitation limit”

In this case, you should stop your activity for a couple of business days (obviously not all of it, just connection requests).

If you’re using a sales automation tool, to be on the safe side, you can “rewarm-up” your account by sending a few manual requests before firing that automation back up again.

Why is there a LinkedIn connections limit?

Now that we know what the connections limit is, have you ever wondered why there is one? It is not like there is a constraint on how many friends you can have on Facebook. It can be frustrating, especially if you’re trying to grow or learn more about other professionals in your industry.

Well, this limitation is a bit of an enigma but there are reasons for it. The fact is that it’s all about privacy. They want to maintain a professional tone on the site. Part of that means ensuring people aren’t connecting with total strangers.

The amount of information you share on their platform is not very guarded compared to Facebook. It is also a self-policing method because when you have reached your connections limit, you can only message someone if they’ve accepted your invitation first.

In theory, this is supposed to keep everyone from shooting random requests just to bulk up their number of followers. That way, the sent requests are legitimate and help build an accurate representation of each user’s skills, accomplishments, and experience.

But you might be thinking ” What if I want to avoid this connections limit?” The good news is that it is possible to avoid this limit.

How to avoid the LinkedIn connections limit

We now have a pretty good understanding of this limit and why it exists. Well, there are some steps you can take to grow your presence without getting banned or reported. Here are some quick tips on how to avoid this limitation and start connecting more.

1. Be smart about your connection requests

According to LinkedIn, 80% of professionals consider networking important to career success. So whether you’re looking to get a new job, advance your current one, or start your own business, your contacts will be an essential component of your success.

There are two types of users:

• Those who accept every request.
• Those who only approve requests of the person they know or want to know.

Regardless of which type of user you are, be thoughtful about how you communicate with others. If you choose to accept everyone, make sure your profile reflects who you are and what you do. That way, when a customer or prospect views your profile they have an accurate understanding of why they should be connected with you.

You’ll also want to make sure you send a personalized note with your request. This lets the person knows that it’s not a random request from someone they don’t know.

Instead of sending a generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network” note, tell them why they should accept your request. This will highly impact your connection acceptance rate.

If you don’t know the person well and haven’t worked with them professionally, write a brief note (one sentence is fine) telling them why they should accept your request. It’s too easy for anyone to hit delete when they see a boilerplate message or something generic like “I see we have this XYZ person in common.” Be specific about why you want to get in touch with this person.

2. Apply these five lead generation strategies

The ultimate goal of every LinkedIn user is to grow his/her followers; not just in volume, but also in depth. Hubspot states that LinkedIn has 3X higher conversion rates than any other major platform.

It’s great to have a huge contact list, but if those contacts are not relevant and don’t bring you any opportunities, then your efforts will be wasted.

Follow these lead generation strategies to discover the people that are most relevant to you:

• Use the ‘Advanced’ search tool to look for the customers or prospects interested in your industry.
• Use the ‘Saved Search’ feature to get alerts about new prospects in your target audience.
• Send requests to prospects with a personalized note.
• Create a group and develop conversations around topics that matter to your customers.
• Start a page where you can post regular updates about yourself or your business (if you don’t have one already).

3. Use InMail

InMail is a messaging feature that allows LinkedIn members to contact other members, even if they don’t know each other. It’s the most effective way to get in touch with the users you don’t have on your list yet.

InMail has a 10-25% reply or response rate according to Recruiter. So how do you write a message or a template that gets the highest reply rate? There are a few simple techniques that are easy to implement:

• Write directly to the recipient
• Keep it short – less than 250 words
• Use an attention-grabbing subject line
• Start with an interesting introduction or intriguing question
• End with a clear call to action such as scheduling a time for a phone call or meeting

For job seekers, it offers a one-month InMail trial at zero fees. You just need to submit your resume to a business or a company through their job search tool.

To send an InMail message, follow these steps:

• Go to the profile of the person you want to contact.
• Hit the “More” button at the top of their profile. Doing this will reveal several options; hit “Send InMail” to start writing your note.
• Enter your message or template into the inbox window that appears and hit “Send”.

4. Look for the people you and your connections have in common

LinkedIn’s “People You May Know” feature recommends you a list of users it recommends adding to your network based on similarities between your profile and theirs. It’s a great way to start new relationships, but if you don’t want to go through the list one by one to see who you have in common, there is a shortcut.

To view your mutual friends, go to your “People You May Know” page. When you go to this page, you can view your mutual followers by clicking the drop-down menu next to their connection request button and selecting “View shared connections.”

Sending a request to prospects and those you have in mutual will drastically improve your connection acceptance rate. Just remember the previous tips including making it personal — not just ‘Hey, we have mutual connections, let’s connect.”

5. Get LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator plan

One of the best and most effective ways to reach prospects is with Sales Navigator. When you save leads to Sales Navigator, your chances of converting them increase by 17%. You’re also 42% more likely to close bigger deals. It helps you to identify your ideal prospects based on job titles, seniority levels, industries, functional areas, and more.

Sales Navigator also makes it an easy and effective way to stay up-to-date with everyone on your follower list. The Updates feed brings the latest news from accounts and people right into your feed and inbox. These updates also include call-to-action buttons that help you take immediate action and continue conversations.

6. Find alumni from your college or university

If you don’t have a lot of followers, or you’ve recently joined the site, you can use it to discover alumni from your college or university. Searching for alumni by your alma mater is an easy and effective way to get started.

The best way is to use Alumni Tool which allows you to search for alumni who work in a specific industry. You can also search for current students and look for the followers that you have in common with them.

To find people using the Alumni Tool:

• Click My Network at the top of the homepage.
• On the left side of your My Network page, click Find Alumni.
• In the search bar, start typing the name of your college or university and select it from the list. You can also filter by year and location if you prefer.
• Once you have your list of alumni, you can hit the Invite (next to their name) and send them an invitation to join via a message. Better yet, press Connect (under their photo) and select Add a note before sending a connection invitation.

7. Find your target audience on LinkedIn Groups

A LinkedIn group is a place for professionals in the same industry, company, or with similar interests. People use them to share content, get answers, view and post jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.

After you join a group, other members will be able to see that you’re a member. This can help them get a better sense of what you do professionally, increasing the chances that they’ll get in contact with you.

If you have an existing product or service that might be useful to its members and the group allows it, you can ask your members for permission to post links, messages, or templates directly.

8. Meet more people at LinkedIn live events

LinkedIn Events is the best way to join with like-minded professionals virtually. According to LinkedIn, 62% of companies are adopting live broadcasts, and 73% of companies have claimed it has a positive impact on their ROI.

It allows you to keep up with professional events on your feed and receive notifications. This feature also lets you easily RSVP to events, see who’s attending, and even post updates during or after the event. These events get 24x more comments and 7x more reactions as per LinkedIn.

9. Like, comment on, and share relevant content in your network’s feeds

You’re probably already doing this one, but it’s worth mentioning anyway. The most basic way to build your follower list is to simply interact with others’ content. You can do this by liking, commenting, and sharing relevant content in your news feeds.

Not only will this let those who posted the content know that you came across it and appreciate it, but it’ll also put your profile in front of people following them, too. Many successful companies have adopted this LinkedIn strategy as a part of their business.

Upwork is a perfect example. It actively participates on this platform by posting content and engaging in conversations.

LaGrowthMachine: The tool you need to connect with your leads

There’s no question that growth and marketing go hand in hand and LaGrowthMachine helps you build relationships that generate greater returns while removing many challenges that come with manual processes.

From discovering ideal customers to handling InMail communications, LaGrowthMachine handles every aspect of LinkedIn prospecting for you. We want to help you spend more time focusing on the areas of your business that need your attention and less time on the nitty-gritty of growing your followers.

It is a sure way to boost your lead generation and connect with relevant customers! LaGrowthMachine allows you to:

• Automate and optimize your campaigns and multiply the reply or response rate by 3.5!
• Save 40% of your time by engaging with your customers at scale in a human way using templates.

Avoid Your Connection Limit with Care

At its core, LinkedIn is a networking tool and social media. It is a great way to join other professionals and expand your professional horizons, discover new career paths and stay updated on important industry news and trends. Above all, connecting with like-minded individuals and LaGrowthMachine is your perfect assistant to help you succeed.

Today, we talked a lot about LinkedIn connections. Let us know which strategy was your favorite for avoiding this limit. How will you be using these strategies to achieve your goals? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below.