LinkedIn, the largest professional networking platform in the world, is popularly called the ‘Facebook’ of CEOs and entrepreneurs for the right reasons. This particular social media platform is very different from the other ‘mind-numbing’ platforms where people mostly scroll on for hours and end up wasting each minute without getting much done (excluding messed-up sleep cycle & compromised productivity). Unlike those, LinkedIn enables you to form valuable connections, find global business opportunities, gain professional insights, learn new skills, exchange updates regarding your industry & areas of business interest, keep ‘tabs’ on the career progression of old friends & colleagues and much more.
It isn’t just about these words, but if we look at the stats, it states about 774.61 million worldwide use LinkedIn and this number is expected to touch 1,034.56 million by 2025.
While that implies benefits of using LinkedIn are many, but the underlying truth is, so are the challenges in sifting through the pool of profiles and humongous amounts of data present in those, to find exactly what you’re looking for. That’s exactly where a LinkedIn extension plays a savior. You sure are well aware of that and thus, landed just at the right place with the intention to enhance the goodness of LinkedIn with the power of a custom extension.
Since we have already discussed the numerous benefits of chrome extension development, we’ll dive a little deeper and focus specifically on LinkedIn extensions in this article.
Thinking of building a custom LinkedIn extension but don’t know where to start?
Talk To BinaryFolks LinkedIn Extension Consultants !
So what is it about LinkedIn extensions, these small programs installed on a browser like Chrome to improve or enhance our LinkedIn experience that the industry giants are investing in, to add-on new features and increase productivity?
Let’s find out :
Why Should You Use A LinkedIn Extension?
LinkedIn being a goldmine of valuable data and prospects that can help you scale your business to new heights, it is the hot target for every contemporary social media marketer. According to a recent study, a staggering 79 percent of B2B marketers worldwide who used social media platforms for paid content promotion said that LinkedIn delivered the best results.
There are several benefits that LinkedIn extensions can provide like automating manual tasks, generating quality leads, finding your prospect’s contact information or simply boosting your visibility and engagement to reach your business goals faster.
However, your business requirements are unique and so are the business processes associated with your workflow. But there are some essential features that eases reaching the core goal. Here goes a list of the such popular features you must include in your dedicated LinkedIn extensions:
Manual Task Automation
What if the major LinkedIn related tasks like collecting information, sending connection requests, direct messages, endorsing connections or even inviting them to join a group or event were done without your scrupulous attention devoted to those? (that too more effectively)
LinkedIn extensions make all of the above possible by incorporating planned automation, thus reducing manual effort requirements.
LinkedIn automation tools can be extremely versatile and helpful for employees across the various departments like recruiters, sales representatives, marketers, business development executives, content creators and alike by helping them save time, reduce repetitive manual efforts and shift their efforts to intense insight analysis based tasks, thus increasing overall efficiency.
As an example, imagine you are trying to promote an upcoming event of yours on LinkedIn and you want to send all your connections a direct message inviting them to attend the event. Then instead of manually sending all your individual connections a message, you can automate the entire process with a LinkedIn extension and save your precious time and efforts!
Our HR automation guide can give you a clear picture of a contemporary human resource system remodeling!
Prospect Identification & Filtration
Finding prospects could be one of the most important functions a LinkedIn extension can provide to a business. Most of the businesses in the market today are striving to expand their market and acquire new clients constantly. LinkedIn has been one of the top choices for marketers and sales representatives to generate new leads and find valuable business prospects worldwide. A well built extension like a LinkedIn prospect finder that works on astute logic and impeccable algorithm in sync with your business rationale can make this process 100% more efficient and accurate.
Here’s a great example, imagine you're working for a recruitment agency looking for experienced software developers from the USA on LinkedIn, then instead of spending hours scanning through the LinkedIn search results and each individual profile manually, you can use a custom extension like LinkedIn prospect finder. This extension can take your specific requirements and find you a comprehensive list of matching profiles, download the prospects’ data in a CSV file and even send them a direct mail automatically. Imagine how much time and effort this will save!
Performance Tracking
With a potential audience of more than 750 million people on LinkedIn, it’s a smart idea to create and share content that can build your brand awareness and increase engagement among your followers! You should always strive to improve and optimize your content quality and tailor it to your audience’s liking. But it can be really difficult to figure out what your audience wants and what can increase your performance.
Even though LinkedIn offers some insights on your post’s performance and engagement metrics, that’s not enough to draw concrete conclusions. Instead, if you opt for a LinkedIn extension that can not only keep an eye on the performance of your content but also track the activities of your followers and target audience to give you valuable insights and help you optimize your content quality. For example, assume you are an influencer who creates content about smart financial investments. However, your posts are not receiving a lot of attention from your target audience on LinkedIn, you can improve your content quality by using a LinkedIn extension like a performance and activity tracker to closely monitor and analyze your engagement and audience preferences to improve your performance and reach.
A custom LinkedIn extension will use statistics and tailored logical analytics to measure performance of your post, hashtags, visibility and engagement, in order to help you find the most successful content categories to meet your business objectives, understand your audience (including their location, occupations, company and other details), their likings, preferences and also suggest the best days and times to post your content. This results in driving engagement and boosting your overall brand image and visibility!
Schedule Content
Now we already know the impact of good quality content tailored towards your target audience can have on your business. But you should keep this in mind that creating good content is not enough. You have to analyze your target audience, study your engagement history, and then come up with a well structured strategy to post your content on the right time and date. This will increase your visibility, reach out to desired audiences and boost the performance of the post.
For instance, imagine you are a service provider based in Japan who wants to acquire clients from the USA and you post something around 4:30 pm in Tokyo but it’s 3:30 am in New York! Do you think your post will be able to reach your target audience? Clearly not!….
Marketers and big tech companies have already realized the impact the time and date of posting a content can have on its overall performance. As a result, major social media platforms like Facebook already provide you the flexibility of scheduling the time and date of a particular post on their platform, but unfortunately no such functionalities are available on LinkedIn.
However, there’s a solution! You can use an extension like a LinkedIn scheduling tool that can schedule the exact time and date of your post and make it easy for you to reach out to your desired audience anywhere in the world! And that’s not all, with a custom LinkedIn extension you can even analyze the activity of your connections and suggest the perfect time to schedule your next post!
Scraping Data
These days data is one of the most valuable assets a business possesses and it has a tremendous possibility of impacting its long-term success. As mentioned earlier LinkedIn is a goldmine of valuable data with tremendous potential to help your business grow. But unearthing the right information from this seemingly endless network can be next to impossible and on top of that the fact that LinkedIn is so strict about their privacy policies can make it worse…
So how should you extract the data you need smartly? Build a LinkedIn data scraper that is developed around your workflow by an experienced team of engineers who have prior expertise in developing data scraping extensions for a variety of platforms and purposes. A well-researched versatile extension like LinkedIn prospect finder or LinkedIn lead generator can filter and extract data as per your specific input logic like region, job title, industry, experience, languages spoken, and more. Then, it will be easy for you to export the results in a CSV or Excel sheet for your ease of analysis. (Read more about our price scraping software here)
Here’s a relevant instance, assume you are running a huge email marketing campaign for your company and you want to build a large database of quality leads from LinkedIn. So instead of spending days on end manually going through each profile and collecting individual e-mail IDs you could use a LinkedIn scraper extension that can take your requirements and collect all the data you want in no time!
Check out our top tips to help you nail your chrome extension here!
Let’s Discuss Your Requirements In Details !
How To Pick The Right Functionalities To Include In Your Custom LinkedIn Extension?
We have had the opportunity to work with several brilliant clients having their own sets of unique requirements and pain points. We worked together to come up with exceptional solutions and functionalities to include in their custom softwares. So through our years of practical experience here are some recommendations we have for people coming from different industry verticals:
Recruiters
Recruiters and HR Managers would get the most use out of features like finding prospects, automating messages and scraping data from LinkedIn. Our custom extensions can give you the option to download your prospect's profiles in CSV format, or scrape required data and integrate them in your personal database automatically. We can also build a backend platform for your extension where you can do a lot more with your collected data like filter the results, add notes and tags to the profiles, and update their status. These are some LinkedIn extension functionalities you can consider:
- LinkedIn Automation
- LinkedIn Prospect Finder
- LinkedIn Email Scraper
- LinkedIn Profile Scraper
Marketers
Creating and promoting content is usually the main priority for markets so features like tracking performance, scheduling content and automating tasks on LinkedIn would be extremely helpful for them. Our custom extensions can help you reach your marketing goals by providing you cutting edge functionalities that can enable you to measure performance of your content, analyze engagement, track activities, automate personalized tasks, and schedule content. These are some LinkedIn extension functionalities you can consider:
- LinkedIn Marketing Automation
- LinkedIn Performance Analysis
- LinkedIn Scheduling Tool
- LinkedIn Engagement Tracker
Salespersons
Generating high quality leads is one of the most important aspects of any sales person’s job and LinkedIn can be a treasure trove of prospects and leads for any business! Our linked extensions can help you send bulk connection requests, invite them to attend a meet or join a group and send personalized messages automatically. You can also download your prospective lead’s profile details in bulk format, upload them in your CRM and apply logical filters to process them further. These are some LinkedIn extension functionalities you can consider:
- LinkedIn Lead Generator
- LinkedIn Prospect Finder
- LinkedIn Email Extractor
- Sales Navigator Scraper
Influencers & Content Creators
Influencers and content creators would require somewhat similar functionalities like marketers to promote their posts and track their performance, measure engagement analytics, and automate messaging and scheduling etc. However, some additional functionalities like measuring trends in your industry, comparing the performance of your competitors, moderating your comments section and getting detailed insights about your followers can be a great addition. These are some LinkedIn extension functionalities you can consider:
- LinkedIn Performance Analysis
- LinkedIn Engagement Tracker
- LinkedIn Automation
- LinkedIn Scheduling Tool
Freelancers
If you're a professional freelancer then it’s important to find good clients and LinkedIn is definitely a great platform to do that, however you have to strategically find the right opportunities for yourself. To help you achieve that, features like finding prospects, scraping their details, and automating engagements with them can be helpful. You can automate personalized messages, comments, endorse your connections, and other engagements to help you form a strong network. If you share your work samples and promotional content on LinkedIn to attract more clients then marketing functionalities like content analytics and scheduling posts can also be helpful for you. These are some LinkedIn extension functionalities you can consider:
- LinkedIn Prospect Finder
- LinkedIn Automation Tool
- LinkedIn Email Scraper
- LinkedIn Content Tracker
Let’s Plan Your LinkedIn Extension?
The Drawbacks of Popular OTS LinkedIn Extensions:
We have seen so many amazing benefits a LinkedIn extension can provide till this point and you must be getting really eager to use them right? But hold on….
Ahead is one of the most important pieces of information you should know before downloading or using any extension for LinkedIn so pay attention and go through the major cons of using popular OTS LinkedIn extensions in the market:
Against LinkedIn’s Terms Of Service
First, let’s address the elephant in the room, shall we? LinkedIn disapproves of any invasive third party extensions on its platform… Now if you’ve been doing your research then you might already know how strict LinkedIn can be with their data protection and privacy policies. You can get your LinkedIn account restricted or even banned if LinkedIn detects that you are using or even have any frowned upon extensions installed on your browser. The main problem with ready-made extensions is that in order to accommodate the multifaceted requirements of the masses OTS extensions provide aggressive functionalities and modifications on their LinkedIn extensions which are strongly condemned by LinkedIn and are much easier to detect due to its large user base.
LinkedIn’s List Of Prohibited Extensions
LinkedIn has its own list of ‘naughty’ extensions that are considered to be against its privacy policies. The platform is actively looking for accounts that are using these third party tools and taking strict actions against them! The more popular some of these extensions become the higher the chances of LinkedIn finding them out. It’s easier and worthwhile for LinkedIn to target popular OTS LinkedIn extensions because they have a large user-base and are usually more aggressive in nature. LinkedIn’s list of prohibited extensions is huge and it’s growing steadily. However, here's a list of the most notorious third party tools and extensions that are banned by LinkedIn:
- 1. Adapt Prospector
- 2. Adorito
- 3. Aevy
- 4. Alore.io
- 5. Amazinghiring
- 6. Auto Connect tools Lily
- 7. Candidate.ai
- 8. CleverStaff
- 9. Colabo extension
- 10. Contact Out
- 11. Crelate
- 12. Data Scraper
- 13. Datananas
- 14. Daxtra
- 15. Discoverly
- 16. Dux-soup(fixed)
- 17. Ebstabullhorn
- 18. EbstaSalesforce
- 19. Ecquire
- 20. ELink Pro
- 21. Email Finder
- 22. Email Hunter
- 23. Emply
- 24. LinkMatch for PCrecruiter
- 25. LinkMatch for Greenhouse
- 26. Found.ly
- 27. Linkedin-Hubspot Connector
- 28. Get Email
- 29. HirEtuaL
- 30. Hr-Skyen
- 31. Icebreaker
- 32. iMacros
- 33. Instant data scraper
- 34. Lusha (FireFox Extension)
- 35. Lead Generator
- 36. Leadconnect
- 37. Leadiq
- 38. Leadkedin
- 39. Lempod
- 40. LinkMatch for zoho recruit
- 41. Linked Helper
- 42. Linkedbot
- 43. Linkedin assistant Lily
- 44. Gay2sms
- 45. Linkedroid
- 46. LinkeLead
- 47. Linklead.io
- 48. LinkMatch for CatS
- 49. EyeMail
- 50. Entelo
- 51. LinkMatch for Pipedrive
- 52. LinkMatch for zoho CrM
- 53. Leonard for Linkedin
- 54. LinkMe tool
- 55. LinMailNavigator
- 56. LinMailPro
- 57. Loxo social import
- 58. Lusha
- 59. Jlenty
- 60. Nimble
- 61. People.camp
- 62. Prophet
- 63. Prospect.io
- 64. ProspectHive
- 65. Prospectify
- 66. Ramper
- 67. RecruiterNerd
- 68. Sales Lead Multiplier
- 69. Saleslift.io
- 70. SalesLoftCadence
- 71. SalesloftProspector
- 72. Salestools
- 73. SeekOut
- 74. SellHack
- 75. Skrapp
- 76. Slik
- 77. Snapaddy Grabber
- 78. Social2Sugar
- 79. Sourcebreaker
- 80. Sourcehub
- 81. Spider for Linkedin
- 82. StepWells(colabo)
- 83. Talentbin
- 84. TurboHiring
So if you have any of these extensions installed in your browser then just remember that we warned you :)
Limited Functionality
Another problem with ready made extensions is that they are built to cater to a large number of users, as a result the functionalities and components in these extensions are not tailored to address your unique requirements efficiently. It’s also rare to find one OTS extension that can include all the features that you might need to satisfy your requirements end-to-end. So, if you’re looking for a good LinkedIn extension for your business or professional needs, then you should be very careful before making any decision and think about the advantages, consequences and long term results on your investments. OTS extensions might seem cheaper than custom ones at first but the constant stress of getting banned (and entire waste of investment if banned or warned against!) recurring long term costs and limited functionalities can be reasons to regret later.
Infringement On Your Privacy
Another important point to consider is your own privacy and security needs before downloading any extension on your browser. Browser extensions are powerful software programs that can collect your personal data, make unwanted changes to your browser, and access sensitive information from your device which can be a major threat to your privacy and security. You can prevent this issue if you opt for a LinkedIn extension that’s built following your instructions - so you decide what all the extensions can access, not the development team!
Negatively Affect Performance
Have you ever experienced an incident where you downloaded a new extension or software and suddenly your system became slow and started lagging? This is because these softwares could have been really bulky, taking up a lot of space, making unwanted changes in the background or simply weren’t developed efficiently! Many people have faced this issue with popular LinkedIn extensions as well. These negative effects on your browsing experience will get more noticeable with time and use. Instead, using custom built extensions that can address solely your requirements without affecting the browser's performance significantly.
Why Should You Opt For A Custom LinkedIn Extension Over An OTS One For Your Business?
Because a custom LinkedIn extension saves you from all the above struggles - here’s how :
You Won’t Have To Worry About Getting Your Account Blocked
The biggest advantage of using a custom LinkedIn extension is that you won’t have to worry about having a bounty hunter coming after your account constantly! Keeping in mind how LinkedIn is actively looking for and penalizing accounts that are using the popular LinkedIn extension included in LinkedIn’s list of prohibited third party tools (earlier in this article) - building a particular extension should take into account multiple custom factors to ot match the OTS pattern. Fortunately, unlike a ready-made one the custom LinkedIn extension will be used by you or your business alone and it won’t become a huge threat that can get you in any trouble with LinkedIn. Having said that, you would only have the brownie points if you choose an experienced team of developers who have the prior knowledge of developing efficient and secure extensions that can deliver all the desired functionalities while keeping you off such troubles.
You Get All Of The Features You Need And No Junk!
Additionally a custom LinkedIn extension allows you to include all the unique components and functionalities tailored to your specific requirements and leave out any needless fluff. This will optimize your extension to serve your unique needs efficiently without compromising on your browsing performance.
You Won’t Have To Worry About Privacy Issues
When you get a custom LinkedIn extension then you become the owner of the software and are in complete control of it. This means that you won’t have to worry about the extension accessing sensitive data and performing any undesirable activities with your browser, data or system.
You Can Modify Your Extension’s Functionality In The Future
Scalability could be one of the most important advantages of a custom-made extension. Your personal requirements along with LinkedIn’s offered features and functionalities can change and grow with time. This is where a custom extension can help you keep up with these new changes and accommodate all your growing requirements and add new functionalities in your LinkedIn extension easily.
Your Browser’s Performance Won’t Deteriorate
As we discussed earlier OTS extensions are usually very bulky software programs that can deteriorate your browser's performance and affect your overall browsing experience. But you can prevent this when you go the custom route and take control of how your LinkedIn extension is built and optimize it as per your requirements. You can decide how your LinkedIn extension should behave and there’s nothing else about it that can threaten your web experience!
Follow this guide to help you find the right software development team for your custom LinkedIn extension.
Also check out our articles on :
- Twitter Extension - A to Z Guide
- Facebook Extension : A Comprehensive Guide
- eBay Chrome Extension - Is It The Right Decision For Your Business?
- 10 Gmail Chrome Extension Ideas For Your Business !
- Password Chrome Extension - The Starter Guide
- Amazon Chrome Extension - A Guide To Scale Your Online Business
Why Is Developing LinkedIn Extension With BinaryFolks A Good Idea?
LinkedIn extension can be an extremely useful tool but you need to be very careful before selecting any extension for LinkedIn, as you know how strict LinkedIn can get about using third party software on their platform. You should talk to experts who can give you the right suggestions and help you make informed decisions on this matter. BinaryFolks has an experienced team of software developers who have worked for giants like Microsoft and Google so they know how to deal with these tricky scenarios and come up with brilliant solutions! We can build an upstanding and safe LinkedIn extension for you so that you get the most out of using LinkedIn to meet all your requirements efficiently and not compromise on your safety. Here's what to expect when you’re developing your LinkedIn extension with BinaryFolks:
Driven by ex-engineers from Google, Amazon & Salesforce
101% Value For Money (+1 for Our Complimentary Consultation before You Spend Your 1st Dollar!)
Reviews That You Can Verify!
Safeguarded Business With An NDA
Out-Of-The-Box Innovations
Eye For Details
Questions Galore (Until Your Requirement & Our Understanding are mirror copies!)
Insight-Rich Scope Enhancement
Intense Domain Expertise
Close-knit feedback loop
Conclusion
Now that you have a better understanding about LinkedIn extensions… Don’t you think it’s a good idea to get one for you or your business? Then it’s time to put your plan into action and get a custom LinkedIn extension developed with the right set of functionalities and components to match your requirements!
Talk to our software experts who have built several cutting edge browser extensions and start planning now!
Get a Free Consultation For Your LinkedIn Extension!
