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Eric is in charge of content and SEO at La Growth Machine. A specialist in Outreach topics for over 8 years, Eric has written for numerous French and English blogs, sharing his experiences, hacks, and other use-cases. A trainer and speaker in his spare time, he is a reference for all topics related to B2B prospecting and automation.

LinkedIn New Connection Request Limits!

In October 2023, LinkedIn just announced that they’ll change their policy regarding weekly connection limits.

These changes are concerning only LinkedIn free users.

Check out below to see the current connection limits for your invitation on LinkedIn. 👇

 

You’re new to automation on LinkedIn and insecure about how to best protect your account from being blocked or suspended.

LinkedIn is the social network on which LaGrowthMachine relies to carry out effective growth marketing strategies and quickly reach business objectives.

Indeed, at LaGrowthMachine, we realize that the quality of your profile has a real impact on the performance of your sales prospecting campaigns.

More than a resume, LinkedIn is your digital business card. It is the pillar on which your credibility and know-how are based.

Want to learn how to best adjust your limits on the leading professional social media? Read on!

My account is fairly new and/or I’m not very active yet!

If your account is a few weeks old (or much older, but you barely use it) just like email warm up, you’ll have to ramp your daily volume up slowly.

Be smart about it. An unusual spike in activity may alert LinkedIn that something is wrong. No human would, all of a sudden, go from barely any activity to 100+ connection requests and DMs in a week.

Before October 2023

Here’s what was recommended:

  • LinkedIn visits: Start with 40/day and increase by 10 until you reach the recommended amount of 80.
  • LinkedIn contacts invitations: Start with 20/day and increase by 10 until you reach the recommended amount of 100 – 150 per week. (if you’re using notes, you can’t go over 10 per week from October 2023!)
  • LinkedIn messages: Start with 40/day and increase by 10 until you reach the recommended amount of 120.

I’m already active daily on LinkedIn

This means you won’t be creating an unusual spike of activity. You can start with the “fast” recommended values:

Before October 2023

Here’s what was recommended:

  • LinkedIn visits: 100/day. You may do more for a few days if you have an emergency need, but never more than 250-300/week
  • LinkedIn contacts: 100 – 150/week
  • LinkedIn messages: 120/day

After October 2023

Here’s what was recommended:

  • LinkedIn visits: 100/day. You may do more for a few days if you have an emergency need, but never more than 250-300/week (no change)

  • From October 2023, for free acounts:

    • 150-250 connection requests per week (Without notes)

    • 10 Connection Request per week (With notes)

  • LinkedIn messages: 120/day (no change)

What are the new limits for LinkedIn standard accounts?

The party is over for free users on LinkedIn.

Up until October 2023, there was no difference in terms of volume/limits between a free account on LinkedIn, and a paid one.

Namely, all accounts had the same quota on connection request

  • 150-250 connection requests are allowed per week.
  • If you added a note, no impact on the quota
  • The note was limited to 300 characters

Now, LinkedIn free accounts are subjected to different restrictions :

  • 150-250 connection requests / Week – WITHOUT NOTES
  • 10 Connection Request / MONTH – WITH NOTES.

    Yes, you read that right, per month!
  • Connection requests with notes are limited to 200 characters. Not 300 characters anymore.

As mentioned by Linkedin in the screenshot, this is a restriction to LinkedIn-free accounts.

We’ve reached out to LinkedIn which has confirmed the change :

What are my strategic options if I want to remain on the Free LinkedIn?

If you have a tight budget, upgrading might not be an option. You have two options then :

  • When crafting your sequence, make sure not to include a note anymore.

    This way, you will not be affected by the recent change and will still be able to connect with 150-200 new people a week.

If you chose to include a note, you should consider upgrading to a Premium or Sales Navigator

And given that sending a connection request with a note tends to increase conversion rates, you should definitely think about upgrading!

Let’s look at the upgrade option together!

Why should I upgrade to a LinkedIn Premium account (35€/month)?

As mentioned earlier, sending a connection request with a note tends to yield a better conversion rate, so you’ll probably end up upgrading.

The good news is that it’s not very expensive to unlock the old limits of 150-250 connection requests per week with a note.

Considering you can almost double your opportunity rate, it’s definitely worth the 35€/months!

But you should even go as far as considering upgrading to the Sales Navigator plan

LGM Best Practice: When should you upgrade to a LinkedIn Sales Navigator Account (75€/month)?

At La Growth Machine, we’ve always recommended that any of our users upgrade to a Sales Navigator account. And much before the recent changes around the connection request limits.

Upgrading to the Sales Navigator plan will not only :

  • Allow you to benefit from the higher restriction of 150-250 connection requests with a note per week, as enabled with the Premium Plan
  • But allow enable to source leads directly from Sales Navigator. And as data shows, segmentation is the key part of any good strategy.

And Sales Navigator is the best tool out there to build a strong segmentation strategy! By using Sales Navigator Right, you can easily generate +30% reply rate sequences.

I need to do a big push, can I go over the recommended limits?

As you can already guess, optimizing your LinkedIn profile is the essential foundation for any prospecting effort on LinkedIn.

Then, provided that you have completed this preliminary step, you can start prospecting for B2B opportunities.

For this, we can only recommend you use our tool, which will allow you to create automated sequences on LinkedIn and gain significant amounts of time compared to all your manual actions, such as:

  • View profiles
  • Request connections
  • Send messages
  • Lead management within the tool
  • and more…!

Likewise, it is up to you to publish engaging, inspiring content from your personal or professional experience.

So to answer your question: Yes, you can, but bear in mind that it should be a temporary measure. Not a definite one.

Should you choose to go over the “fast” value recommended by LaGrowthMachine, we then recommend not to implement them for longer than 12 days.

What are the risks of using “fast” limits?

LinkedIn may consider you to be going too fast and set weekly restrictions on your account.

If you’re doing too much, they may send you a warning of suspected bot activity.

LinkedIn Account being restricted

Now, volume is not the only factor. You may very well be able to do a high volume, so long as you generate a positive experience on LinkedIn, which means:

  • High connection rate: Proving to LinkedIn that people are interested in you and what you have to offer
  • High LinkedIn reply rate: Proving to LinkedIn that you’re building lasting relationships
  • High Social Selling Index: LinkedIn’s global indicator of your social quality

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Are limits different if I’m sending connection requests with or without notes?

LinkedIn introduced new rules regarding behavior and limits to adding new people to your network. Weekly limits are restrictions LinkedIn can set on your account when the overall experience you’ve generated isn’t up to their standard.

As mentioned in the aforementioned article (we strongly suggest you read it), LinkedIn has “various restrictions in place to protect its overall member experience and ensure that LinkedIn remains a trusted space for all our members.“

However, using LaGrowthMachine, you will quickly notice that you can send more connection requests using LGM than manually or via other tools, why is that?

A trick to send unlimited invitations without notes

Our role at LaGrowthMachine is to provide you with the best ways to reach your prospects. That includes finding ways to bend the rules with ethics.

Connection requests sent by LaGrowthMachine without notes are received in a specific manner which results in a vast majority not being counted in your weekly quota.

This trick enables you to achieve high volume -and only a few (if not just us) know how to make it work at scale.

Don’t forget, that this only applies to connection requests sent without a note or via LaGrowthMachine.

EDIT: Since late 2022, LinkedIn updated its verification systems so this trick doesn’t work anymore. Therefore, be particularly careful with the number of invites you send to avoid your account being hit with a strike.

What should I do?

From October 2023, everything’s changing!

It’s up to you now!

You’ll understand it, we quite agree with LinkedIn’s recent change. Even though that means a slight budget increase, it’s only 35€/month to get started.

If you’re a bit short on money, you can get ahead by removing notes for a few weeks, getting your first few clients, and then upgrading to a paid LinkedIn licence.

But soon enough, you’ll experience the need to segment as you better understand your audience, and this is when you’ll upgrade to Sales Navigator :)

All, in due time!

It’s all about the volume you need to achieve:

Below 100-120 new leads/week/identity:

You may consider adding a note since data shows that being transparent and direct by pitching early in the connection rate, though often considered sales-y, yields a higher qualified call rate than without any message.

By putting a note, you’ll actually be able to pitch 100% of the leads that have a LinkedIn profile instead of only the ones that accept you on LinkedIn. Since the average connection rate is 30%, that gives you 3x more reach than by not pitching at all.

Albeit you’ll have to do it in 300 characters, which is difficult, but definitely worth the endeavor!

Between 120-200 new leads/week/identity:

You may reach LinkedIn’s weekly limits periodically.

Given the higher conversation rate using direct and transparent notes, you may consider keeping the notes though not all leads will be contacted in a given week.

You may also consider using Evaboot’s automatic cleaning of Sales Navigator search results. Data shows that 30% of search results don’t match the given query. This means you’re wasting 30% of your quota on people that aren’t right for you!

More than 200 new leads/week/identity:

If despite using Evaboot’s automatic cleaning Sales Navigator search results you still end up with more than 200 matched leads to contact/week/identity, you may consider a sequence that will use Emails as the main channel and LinkedIn as a fallback.

If you use LinkedIn-first sequences, you’ll risk creating a bottleneck around the connection requests when hitting your weekly limits.

By using Email-first sequences, since you can send 200-300 emails/day, you won’t create any bottleneck. And connection requests being used as a fallback down the road, there is a high chance – with a decent reply rate, that you will not be sending hundreds of connection requests a week.

But don’t forget, a high-volume strategy rarely payoffs as data show!

If you’re still under the belief that high-volume strategies (i.e. blasting out to thousands of leads per month) work – you couldn’t be more wrong! And you should definitely read our guide on how to generate +30% reply rate sequences with careful segmentation & copywriting!

Good luck and happy prospecting!