Learn How To Scrape LinkedIn Data Using The Most Affordable LinkedIn Scraper Tool

WebscrapingAPI on Nov 22 2022

B2B lead generation often begins with LinkedIn. Whether you are a budding entrepreneur or a pro businessman, LinkedIn is crucial to your company's success. The platform provides rich data for lead generation because it has a professional database. 

With over 830 million users across 200 countries, LinkedIn is a treasure trove of information. But manually reviewing this data is impossible. This is where the LinkedIn scraper tool comes into play.

If you rely heavily on LinkedIn for your B2B venture, then this information is for you. Let us understand more about LinkedIn scraping in this article.

LinkedIn Data Scraping

Firstly understand the need and concept of scraping. There is plenty of data on the internet. There is a lot of power in this data. You can connect with a potential client through it.

Getting in touch with them is all you need to do. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to sift through so much data for the purpose of generating leads?

It is evident that searching for leads in the data manually is time-consuming and inefficient. Such a scenario requires an innovative approach to finding information.

Thank goodness there is! Scraping data is one way to obtain it. Linkedin Scrapers further smoothen this process. You can scrape data and get more insights through LinkedIn profiles.

The LinkedIn scraper automates the process of finding the best leads. This results in increasing lead generation efficiency. 

Using the right scraping tool saves you time and effort. It provides you with a list of potential leads. Additionally, it offers all the details necessary to reach out to the lead. 

 Importance of LinkedIn Scraper Tool

A business's first step in generating leads is to scrape LinkedIn and use LinkedIn sales navigator. Conducting outreach campaigns is relatively easier when you have a list of potential leads. You can find information such as:

• Names
• Email IDs
• Contact numbers 
• Job titles/Designations
• Skills 
• Awards 

LinkedIn scraping can produce varying amounts of data depending on the tool or extension you use.

Types of LinkedIn Scraping Tools

There are two types of LinkedIn scraping tools.

1. Ready-Made LinkedIn Scraping Tools

2. In-House LinkedIn Data Scrapers

What Are Ready-Made LinkedIn Scraping Tools? 

It is available off-the-shelf and automatically collects LinkedIn data using several methods, depending on how it is built. An automated LinkedIn scraper can scrape emails, phone numbers, social media links, website links, job titles, skills, staff, ratings, reviews, locations, and more from the LinkedIn user and business profiles.

You must know how to use a LinkedIn Extractor as a user. You need to instruct the LinkedIn scraper to collect the data; it will do the rest. Various providers offer LinkedIn data scraping tools.

What Are In-House LinkedIn Data Scrapers?

Creating your LinkedIn Lead Generation tools is more expensive than using ready-to-use scrapers. As a result, most in-house LinkedIn scrapers are written in Python, a relatively simple programming language.

Several application libraries contain pre-written Python code for specific purposes.

Depending on your budget and resources, you can choose between ready-to-use LinkedIn crawlers and in-house crawlers. However, both can scrap off LinkedIn web pages on a small or large scale.

However, roaming proxy servers are also required to use them effectively for large-scale LinkedIn data extraction exercises.

LinkedIn's Take on Scraping: Is it Legal?

The waters can get muddy here. LinkedIn scraping has been the subject of a long-running debate regarding its legality. Online data mining is a tactic used by large and small data aggregators to generate leads. However, it was still considered a problem. What's the reason?

Specifically, LinkedIn had problems with the data aggregators that mined its website. As an official policy, LinkedIn discourages data scrapers from using the platform so that user data is protected and bad actors cannot infiltrate the platform. 

According to LinkedIn, this scraping violates the privacy of its users and is also against the site's terms. As a result, it wanted to prevent the outsider company from mining its data. 

However, the court has ruled that scraping LinkedIn data is entirely legal. There is only one condition: "the data must be public." It was good news for many companies, even though LinkedIn was unhappy with the court's decision. In conclusion, scraping LinkedIn is entirely legal. 

Nevertheless, scraping public data from the platform is completely legal. This matter was the subject of a Supreme Court lawsuit LinkedIn lost against a San Francisco startup called hiQ Labs in 2019.

After blocking hiQ Labs from scraping data for research purposes, the startup filed an injunction against the LinkedIn corporation, which stood in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. 

According to their ruling, people who post data publicly on a social site do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, so data scraping isn't a violation of privacy.

Scraping publicly available user data doesn't violate the platform's terms of service so scraping won't get you in trouble. Isn't that great news for all startups and SMEs? 

Is it possible to scrape LinkedIn using LinkedIn sales navigator?

It is possible to scrape the entire web for data using the LinkedIn sales navigator. The problem with this approach is that you will end up with irrelevant generic information. Using data scraping correctly is essential if you run a B2B business.

To put it another way, invest in LinkedIn scraping. 

There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a professional platform that houses executives and employees of different companies. The bottom line is that LinkedIn is a great place to find your target audience, regardless of the B2B sector you are working in. 

Therefore, LinkedIn is a gold mine for generating leads. You are missing out on plenty of opportunities if you aren't using scraping. To learn more about this, let's dig deeper.

Use the Most Affordable LinkedIn Scraper - Web Scraping API

We now know that LinkedIn scraping is legal. But how would you find the best affordable tool? All your queries end at WSA - Web Scraping API.

WSA is a simple yet effective REST API interface for scraping web pages at scale, making it easy for users to collect HTML code from websites. Its API automates tasks that would otherwise require a programmer to perform in order to ensure the highest quality of service.

Why Choose Web Scraping API?

Web scraping API allows you to scrape any web-based document: websites, APIs, files, images, and much more. Interacting with our API is mainly done through three channels:

• By using the official API endpoint: https://api.webscrapingapi.com/v1?
• By using one of our published SDKs
• By using our Proxy Mode

With WebScrapingAPI, you can start scraping web pages within minutes. You just need to sign up, obtain your API key, and send the requests.

It is necessary to create a new account in order to unlock the full power of WebScrapingAPI. By confirming your account, you will be able to generate an API key, which is required for authentication. Where do you get this API key?

Within the Dashboard, click the WebScrapingAPI tab to access the API key for WebScrapingAPI after registering.

How to use WebScrapingAPI to scrape LinkedIn data?

API Access Key & Authentication

WebScrapingAPI requires an access key before we can use it. You will need to create an account in order to acquire it.

There is a free subscription option as well, so the process is quite simple. You can move to your subscription plan later.

Reset API Key

Upon logging in, your unique Access Key will be displayed on the Dashboard. Always keep your API key secret, and if you ever think it has been compromised, you can always reset it using the "Reset API Key" button. Once you reset it, you can move to the next step.

Documentation

The features of WebScrapingAPI are essential for our web scraping adventure. WSA (WebScraping API) has made detailed documentation, which includes code samples in various programming languages.

To better understand how things work and how they can be integrated into your project, you can set the API_key and URL parameters to your access key and the URL of the website you want to scrape. 

API Playground

Use the playground to test some results before integrating WebScrapingAPI into your project. It is easy to use and has a friendly interface. Send the request with the parameters based on the type of scraping you want to perform.

Benefits Of LinkedIn Scraping Tools

Two ways are available to extract data from a website and save it to an excel spreadsheet; the first is to copy and paste the data from a website and save it to an excel sheet. This takes a long time, and you want to be able to collect a lot of data.

A second way is to use scraping tools that can scrape thousands of people and business data in a minute. Some of the benefits of scraping are listed below.

• Analyzing the competition

If you are running or starting a business, or if you are going to launch a new product, you might need to know about the market. Analyze the market; what is the price and the reviews of the product you are launching?

What is the competitor's sales strategy? By scraping all this data from web scraping tools into an excel spreadsheet, you can analyze product demand, sales status, etc.

• Take advantage of your customers' reviews and ratings

Data scraping allows you to scrape the reviews and ratings of your customers into an excel spreadsheet. This way, you can analyze what your customers want from your business and what products work and which ones do not.

The data can be scraped onto one sheet and used to make further decisions about your business.

• Extracting leads

You can scrape public and business directories for information about your potential customers and run outbound campaigns for your business with web scraping tools and software. This will help you find new clients for your business.

• Get to know your target audience

Building a marketing campaign may be easier if you understand your audience. You can gather information about your audience's interests and what kind of videos and pictures they like on social media.

You can achieve this by using web scraping tools and extracting the data into a structured form that can assist you in understanding them better.

• Capture the audiences most likely to respond to your marketing

If you own a B2B business that caters to software engineers, you can scrape software engineers' leads from public directories and contact them directly.

This way, you will be able to offer your services instead of investing a lot of money in social media marketing or digital marketing.

• The right use of Email Marketing   

Your direct marketing can be more effective with email marketing since it allows you to create targeted and personalized messages. As a result, it can improve your response rate. Through web scraping software, you can scrape emails in bulk from public directories like yellow pages and run email marketing campaigns effectively.  

• Monitoring the price

If you own an online store, you can now scrape the product prices of your competitors and wholesalers. This will help you monitor their pricing strategy, and you can make smarter buying and selling decisions.

• Mobile marketing campaigns

You can scrape people's phone numbers, addresses, and names from public directories using web scraping software and run SMS or telemarketing campaigns to reach people who don't use the internet or avoid using it.

In recent years, LinkedIn scraping has become a necessity for a number of Internet stakeholders. When it comes to working on an online business, data is essential for processing, analyzing, and streamlining information.

It appears that LinkedIn scraping will be alive and well in the near future. It is crucial to use the most appropriate web scraping tool to stay competitive in this digital world.

Bottom line

So visit the Web Scraping API website and get in touch with them.

WebScrapingAPI offers a suite of solutions, including basic web scraping, SERP scraping, and Amazon scraping. Learn how to scrape a website by simply sending HTTP requests to our endpoints.

It is the leading provider of web scraping services with millions of happy customers worldwide, offering a complete scraping suite with multiple features.

Web scraping can be as simple as sending a cURL command from your terminal using WebScrapingAPI. The API handles everything else. To discover a new way to scrape websites with less code and more data, start using Web Scraping API.