What is LinkedIn's policy on scraping?
Well in turns out that, although LinkedIn may not like it, scraping publicly available LinkedIn data is legal, however this may vary from country to country so be sure to check the rules in your location. Back in April 2022, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed its 2019 preliminary injunction stopping LinkedIn from blocking data company hiQ Labs from accessing publicly visible LinkedIn member profiles. So, within limits, there is nothing stopping you from scraping LinekdIn data, as long as it's publicly available. Just don't scrape Government agency data - as this may get you into trouble.
What are some of the ways you can utilize a LinkedIn scraping tool?
- Lead generation: many LinkedIn scraping tools like Phantom Buster, allow you to scrape LinkedIn profiles to gather information such as job titles, company names, location and more. You can then utilise this data in for automated LinkedIn messaging, or in your wider sales process.
- Competitor analysis: You can use these types of scraping tools to gather information on your competitors and their employees, such as company sizes, HQ location, number of employees and even which type of jobs they are hiring for. This can help you gain insights into their strategies and operations and identify areas where you might improve your own business.
- Talent acquisition: scraping tools can be extremely useful for headhunting. For example, you could scrape the profiles of everyone with a specific job title in a given location and then crunch that data to find the perfect candidate. You could also utilise that data to reach out to these candidates with a hyper personalized message that will be sure to receive a reply.
- Market research: scraping tools can be extremely useful for market research purposes, for example - let's say you're conducing research on the potential market size for your new product targeting Product Managers. You could use a scraping tool to gather information on the number of product managers in a given location, and even how many of them work for companies of X size and above.