Scraping Data From Linkedin With Expandi: 6 Use Cases

Connecting with the right people on LinkedIn can be hard.

You could have the best outreach script and the most optimized LinkedIn profile, but as long as you’re not targeting the right people, none of this matters.

You have to first narrow in on who your target audience is, then, figure out how to find them on LinkedIn, and how to personalize your outreach.

The last part, in particular, good personalization is critical for cold outreach. You need to have a strong reason to connect with a lead, and base your personalization on the reason.

Now, the good news is that LinkedIn holds a wealth of data that can be leveraged for various purposes. From scraping contact info to reaching out.

And to make things even better, you can youse Expandi to do all of the above within one platform.

Which is exactly what we’ll be focusing on below.

You’ll learn 6 proven use cases on how to scrape data from LinkedIn using Expandi.

We’ll cover how to scrape:

• People and companies from the free LinkedIn search results
• People and companies from Sales Navigator 
• LinkedIn group members
• LinkedIn webinar and event attendees
• People who engaged with a specific LinkedIn post
• People you may know on LinkedIn

But before we begin…

Wondering how to get the most out of LinkedIn?

Then you’ll want to join our private group The LinkedIn Outreach Family. In it, we’re constantly sharing the latest proven outreach strategies as well as data scraping methods.

Why Scrape Data From LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a treasure trove of information for businesses.

To put things into perspective:

• There are over 200 countries and 900 million members on LinkedIn, with 4 out of 5 members driving business decisions.
• 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for lead generation, research, and outreach, according to ThinkWithGoogle.
• 96% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing, placing it ahead of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms in terms of demand.

Overall, if you work in the B2B world (and not only), you’re almost guaranteed to find your target audience there.

Once you have your ideal customer profile and buyer persona defined, your LinkedIn data scraping will instantly become easier. Below, you’ll learn all the best ways to scrape data for your unique audience with proven methods.

Now, let’s take a look at the proven use cases for scraping data from LinkedIn.

1. Scraping People And Companies From LinkedIn Search Results

One of the easiest ways to find your target audience on LinkedIn for free is by using the platform’s search function.

If you have your target audience defined well, you can’t go wrong with using LinkedIn filters.

We won’t go into detail about using those filters here though. So, if you are interested, see our full guide on LinkedIn X-ray search for more info.

Let’s assume you know how to search for your audience on LinkedIn and the search results look like this.

Now, here’s how to scrape those results from LinkedIn into a spreadsheet file.

1. Copy the search URL.
   
   
2. Log into Expandi or sign up with a free, 7-day trial if you haven’t done so yet.
3. In your Expandi account go to Search from the main navigation menu and click on “Add New Search“.
   
   
4. Name the new search, choose search type Basic, paste the URL, and click “Search“.
   

Once the search is complete, you can filter down the list of contacts even more. Or you can simply select  Export as your desired data file (CSV, webhook, etc.).

From there, you can use LinkedIn automation to reach out to them directly since you already have their profiles. Or enrich their profiles even more and reach out via email as well.

Our guide on building a prospect list might help here as well.

An example of a personalized connection request you can use here might be:

“Hey {first_name},

I’m Stefan, founder of Expandi.io (LinkedIn automation SaaS).

But I know that’s boring & doesn’t concern you.

So, how about I send you a kickass guide on how we drove 1,500 paid customers from LinkedIn in just 4 months?

Accept if you’re interested. Or you’ll never hear from me again!”

Benefits of this approach:

• You can filter your audience for free with boolean operators.
• Easy to find people no matter their industry or job role.
• The contacts list appears directly in your outreach automation tool. Meaning, if you use Expandi, you can scrape the search results data and reach out to the leads from the same platform.

2. Scraping People And Companies From Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is a great way to zoom in on your target audience with advanced search filters.

The platform offers 20+ filters you can apply to your search, with the keywords, title, company fields allowing you to perform boolean searches too, and more.

But scraping LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results is similar to the first step discussed above.

Here’s how it works:

1. Copy the Sales Navigator search results URL.
   
   
2. Go back to Expandi to import the search like we did in the first step.
3. But in this case, simply select Sales Navigator Search.
   
   
4. Name the search and paste the URL.
5. From there, you can scrape the search results as a spreadsheet or automate your outreach directly.

It’s that simple!

For more Sales Navigator hacks, see our modern prospecting search tactics.

Because you can filter for job change alerts with Sales Navigator, one outreach template you can use is:

“Heyo {first_name}, congratulations on the new position as {job_role} at {company_name}!

I help agency owners like you fully automate their LinkedIn lead-generation process without getting their accounts suspended.

Would you be interested in hearing more about this?”

Benefits of this outreach:

• Sales Navigator offers advanced unlimited filter features.
• Connection requests sound authentic and not automated by personalizing based on their new job position.
• You can save search URLs and overall, it’s easier for data scraping as well.

3. Scraping LinkedIn Group Members

LinkedIn groups are a great way to find your target audience members. All you have to do is enter related keywords and filter for Groups.

1. Then, join the LinkedIn group you want to scrape.
2. Copy the URL and select Group search in Expandi.
   
   
3. Enter a search name and paste the group URL. Keep in mind the limit for scraped contacts here is 2,500. If you want to scrape more than that, you’ll need to auto reload the search.
   
   
4. Select Export the data as needed.
   
   

Note: You don’t need to be connected with people in a mutual LinkedIn group to message them. 

So, if you want to message them directly, you can simply automate that outreach instead.

Then, you can message directly with something like:

“Hey {first_name}, noticed we’re both part of LinkedIn growth hackers group. 

Since we have some mutual interests – I’m looking for feedback on my new omnichannel outreach tool. 

Would you be open to giving me your thoughts in exchange for a free, 4-week trial?

Let me know if this makes sense and I can send over more info.”

Benefits of this outreach:

• You don’t need to be connected with someone to message them.
• You can assume their interests based on the group topic.
• You can jump into the pitch if it makes sense.

4. Scraping LinkedIn Webinar Event Attendees

LinkedIn events are another great source of targeted prospects.

Similarly as with LinkedIn groups, you can easily find prospects by searching for relevant keywords and filtering for Events.

This makes for easy personalization as well. From our testing, we managed to reach a connection request acceptance rate of up to 60%. 

Here’s how to scrape LinkedIn webinar event attendee data in under 5 minutes.

1. Find an event you want to scrape and click Attending.
   
   
2. Run another Search on Expandi and select Event Search.
   
   
3. Paste the Search URL and wait for Expandi to scrape its data content.

From there, you can also scrape the list of attendees or automate your LinkedIn outreach via Expandi now.

Because you’ll be reaching out for people who are attending the same event, personalization will be really easy here.

See the templates we used to achieve a 66%+ reply rate in our full scraping LinkedIn events guide for more info.

The template we used for this went something like:

“Hey {first_name}, I see you are planning on attending the DigiConf23 hosted by OST Marketing. 

Me too, very much looking forward to Philip Storey’s Marketing automation session. What is your favorite?

Would love to get connected before it.

Talk soon, Amy”

Benefits of this outreach:

• You can assume their interests based on the webinar topic.
• It’s not commonly used, so, people might not think this is automated.
• Your personalization will be the same for everyone, since they’re all attending the same webinar.
• It can be very targeted. For example, if you’re reaching out to attendees of a webinar about growth hacking. They might be interested in lead generation tools that help with their growth.

5. Scraping People Who Engaged With A Viral LinkedIn Post

If you follow a lot of influencers on LinkedIn, you’ll often see their posts go viral.

You can take advantage of this and leverage their audience by reaching out to a group of people who might be interested in the same topics.

For example, if it’s a viral post by a marketing agency owner talking about their favorite SaaS tools, it’s safe to assume the comments might be by people who are also interested in checking out those tools.

If you’re a SaaS owner, you can leverage that and reach out to people to pitch yourself.

That said, here’s how to scrape LinkedIn posts:

1. Find a LinkedIn post you want to scrape and copy the URL.
   
   
2. Launch another Expandi search and select Post Engagement.
   
   
3. Paste the post URL and ID.
   
   

Then, wait as Expandi does its magic!

Note: You can also scrape your own posts with Expandi, your polls (and its results), and more.

In this case, you can personalize your connection requests by mentioning something specific from the original post.

See some of our proven connection message templates for more info on that.

If you’re scraping your post, you could send something like:

“Hey {first_name}, 

Glad you liked my post on bootstrapping.

I’m constantly publishing similar content on getting the most out of LinkedIn and personal insights on growing a business.

Let’s connect?”

Benefits of this outreach:

• Easy to gain a lot of new connections.
• Easy to personalize your requests.
• If it’s your post, most people will connect with you after commenting on your post.
• You can “steal” the audience of a similar content creator in your niche.

6. Scraping “People You May Know” Results On LinkedIn

Last but not least, we’re goint to cover the “People You May Know” section of LinkedIn.

Under My Network, you’ll see a section of people you may know. This is based on LinkedIn’s own algorithm.

LinkedIn goes over 100s of terabytes of data daily and recommends you people you may know based on mutual connections, interests, industry, and so on.

So, the more optimized your profile is, the more likely you’ll se relevant people in this section.

That said, here’s how to scrape data from this section now.

1. Add new Search in Expandi.
2. Select People You May Know and enter a Search name.
   
   
3. Click search.
4. Wait as Expandi does its magic and pulls data directly from your LinkedIn.
5. From there, you can export the scraped data as CSV as needed.

The reason this is so useful is because you can gain a lot of new connections this way.

All you have to do is structure your connection request appropriately. You can even mention they came up in your ‘People You May Know’ section and that LinkedIn recommended you connect.

“Hey {first_name},

LinkedIn recommended your profile in the People You May Know section and thinks we should connect.

Saw you work in SaaS marketing as well. So, I think LinkedIn is up to something and there might be a way for us to collaborate on a project.

Let me know what you think.”

Also note that you shouldn’t be pitching yourself directly here.

Benefits of this outreach:

• Great way to make more connections.
• Your outreach here doesn’t have to be heavily personalized.
• Very easy to scrape.

Conclusion

To recap, done right, LinkedIn can be an infinite source of leads. All you need to know is how to scrape them to prepare for outreach.

Above, we covered how to scrape:

• People and companies from LinkedIn search results.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator search results.
• LinkedIn group members.
• Online event attendees.
• People who engaged with a LinkedIn post.
• Contacts from the ‘People You May Know” section on LinkedIn.

And as you saw above, scraping all this data is easy.

You can get started with a free, 7-day Expandi trial, scrape all of the above data, and reach out to your prospects automatically in under a day. 

Alternatively, if you’re looking for more methods on how to scrape LinkedIn data and proven templates to use in your outreach, be sure to join our free group called The LinkedIn Outreach Family!