How to Bypass LinkedIn Invitation Limits (100% Legal And Fast)

Running into limits sucks. It kills the momentum you’re in while prospecting for sales or looking for potential candidates. It’s annoying, right?

In this article, I’ll show you how you can easily and legally bypass LinkedIn’s weekly invitation limits, and do it fast.

First, let’s see the different types of limits you would face when sending invitations.

Or jump straight to the 5 ways to bypass LinkedIn's weekly invitation limit.

Different types of limits

Invitation limits, messaging limits, profile viewing limits, and connection limits are some of the most common limits faced during prospecting.

Invitation limits

• Free account: ~80 connection requests per week without notes.
• Premium account: ~100 connection requests per week without notes.
• Free & Premium accounts: 10 connection requests per month with notes (Limited to 200 characters only)

Kevin (our sales guy) had hit a limit when sending 10-20 connection requests a day. After a week or so, he received this popup notification.

Messaging limits

• Free account: 100 messages per week
• Premium account: 150 messages per week

Most accounts only allow messages from connections. Sending too many messages in a week can trigger LinkedIn's Terms of Service violation detection. 

When this happens, a restriction popup will appear, and you'll need to verify your identity to avoid getting banned.

Profile viewing limits

• Free account: 500 profile views per day
• Premium account: 2,000 profile views per day

When you want to connect with people, you must view their profile first, right?

So, if you hit the limit on profile viewing, LinkedIn may flag your activity as commercial use. When this happens, you'll be temporarily unable to view profiles of people who aren't your connections.

If you're using a free account, LinkedIn may ask you to upgrade to a premium plan.

Connection limits

• Free and Premium accounts: 30,000 1st-degree connections total

This is the total number of connections you can have per account. It’s a fixed limit, and it doesn't seem like LinkedIn will increase it anytime soon. 

Once this limit is reached, you can’t add more connections, only followers.

Why does LinkedIn have these limits?

LinkedIn has these limits to maintain a high-quality user experience and combat spammy behavior, especially from bots or automation tools.

Why should you care about LinkedIn Limits?

When you frequently reach your limit, you’ll trigger LinkedIn’s spam detection and your account will be closely monitored.

When your account comes under close monitoring, it enters the 'fuse limit' zone. It’s when your activity limits are reduced and you risk facing more restrictions. 

The longer you keep engaging in the “spam” activity, the lower and lower your fuse limit will get and there are only two outcomes from this:

1. Your account gets suspended temporarily
2. Worse, you get a permanent ban

How long does LinkedIn’s suspension last?

If it’s your first suspension, it might last from a few hours to several days. But usually, you’ll regain access typically within a few hours.

If you have faced multiple restrictions, it can last up to 7 days or even longer, depending on how often and seriously the violations occur.

For a permanent ban, you may appeal but chances of recovery are near zero compared to temporary suspensions. It’s better to create a new account than waste time and energy appealing.

When does LinkedIn's weekly invitation limit reset? And what to do when the limit is reached?

LinkedIn’s connection request limit resets 7 days after you send your first invitation. The messaging limits also follow the same reset mechanism as the invitation limit.

However, profile viewing limits do not reset weekly. They reset every 24 hours instead.

There’s not much you can do other than wait. Based on the reset schedule for profile viewing, you’ll have to wait 24 hours before you can view profiles again. 

If it’s a connection request or messaging limit, you’ll have to stop prospecting for 7 days. And that’s 7 days' worth of prospecting wasted.

But don’t worry. I know 5 ways to bypass the limits. 

Here are the ways in descending order from the hardest to the easiest.

1. Improve LinkedIn Social Selling Index score (SSI)
2. Subscribe to Sales Navigator
3. Message group members
4. Contact your prospects directly by email
5. Use Chrome extension for LinkedIn

5 ways to bypass LinkedIn’s weekly invitation limits

1. Improve LinkedIn Social Selling Index score (SSI)

The LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) score is a way to measure how well you're using LinkedIn for social selling. 

Improving your SSI won’t directly bypass the weekly invitation limits. It just signals to LinkedIn that you're engaging positively, which could increase connection limits over time. 

For example, while most standard accounts can send around 100 invites, that number could rise to 250, even on a free account.

It ranges from 0 to 100 and looks at your performance in four areas.

1. Establishing a Professional Brand
   This checks out how complete and polished your LinkedIn profile is, including things like your profile picture, headline, and the content you share.

2. Finding the Right People
   This evaluates how well you use LinkedIn's search tools to connect with the right people. This means clearly defining your ideal connections by industry, role, and interests, not just some random people.

3. Engaging with Insights
   This looks at how much your content connects with your network, by tracking engagements like likes, comments, and shares. Strong engagement shows that you're sharing valuable content.

4. Building Relationships
   This looks at how well you’re building relationships with your connections, like commenting on their posts, rather than just adding more contacts.

Here’s my personal SSI score. Still have some work to do, but I’ve got a few workarounds for those invitation limits. I’ll share it below.

Also, you should aim for an SSI score of 70 or higher. LinkedIn claims that users with scores in this range see 45% more opportunities and are 51% more likely to hit their sales targets.

If you want to check your SSI score, go to www.linkedin.com/sales/ssi.

2. Subscribe to Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is a shortcut to increasing your SSI score.

You also get to use advanced search filters to find better leads.

But even if you subscribe to Sales Navigator, you’ll still face limits and restrictions. Upgrading to a paid plan just gives you a bit more room, but it doesn’t completely get rid of those limits I’ve mentioned earlier.

And increasing your SSI score is a long-term commitment and requires a lot of hard work. It takes skill to create quality content, and not everyone finds that easy. Plus, building strong connections can take years.

What if I told you there’s an easier and faster way to bypass those limits completely? From the intern to the CEO, anyone can do it. 

Best of all, it’s 100% safe and legal. The following methods will show you how.

3. Message group members

If you’re in the same group as your prospects, you won’t have to send a connection request first to message them. You can just message them directly. 

Personally, I’m in a writer’s group.

This works well if you’re just contacting a handful of them. 

The downside is that your messages will land in the Message Request folder instead of the main inbox. That’s basically tossing your message in the bin. They won’t even see your message.

Plus, if you want to contact thousands of them, this method isn’t reliable. You’re limited to just 150 messages a week.

So, another option is to just email them directly. Because your message will certainly land in their inbox and also there’s no limit to how many emails you can send per day. 

Which brings me to my next point.

4. Contact them directly by email

Out of 119,382 members in the writer’s group above, you can find at least 1000 emails in seconds using our Prospector. Just tick the “Has email” filter and enter the group's name in the "LinkedIn group" filter. 

Let me show you how it works.

Say you want more similar prospects (copywriters/content writers) who aren’t in the group and narrow it down to those who work for US advertising companies.

Here’s how you can find them using our Prospector.

Then, export the profiles you’ve unlocked from our Prospector. After that, upload the list to an email-sending application such as Smartlead.

This way, you’ll completely bypass three limits:

1. connection requests limit
2. profile viewing limit
3. messaging limit

Therefore, saving your account you’ve built brick by brick for years from running into limits and getting suspended.

Searching for profiles with our Prospector won’t cost you any credits. Your credits are only used when you unlock a profile to uncover their information, which costs 30 credits per profile.

Also, you’ll see “None found” if we can’t find a profile’s phone number or email. This way, you won’t waste credits unlocking a profile that isn’t useful to you.

Most importantly, our data is CCPA and GDPR-compliant.

5. Use Chrome extension for LinkedIn

Say you would like to know when your prospects change jobs. Requesting connections is not a bad move since you’ll be notified. But what if you send hundreds of connection requests, but only a few accept them?

That can negatively impact your SSI score because LinkedIn may label your account as exhibiting spammy behavior.

So, what can you do? Easy. Use our Job Change Monitor. You’ll never have to face a connection request limit anymore.

After creating a Sapiengraph account and enabling the Chrome extension, you'll notice a green 'Monitor Job Change' button on every LinkedIn profile you visit.

You can also see the button on search results.

When you start monitoring a profile, you’ll get an email notification like this whenever there’s a job change.

Also, every profile you monitor will appear in your Job Change Monitor List in your Sapiengraph account’s dashboard.

Try Sapiengraph for free

If you think our Prospector and Job Change Monitor can help you prospect more easily and quickly, try it for free first. Just sign up for a free trial to get 100 free credits and test if they suit you.

We also have a more comprehensive video demo of our Prospector ready for you. Email us at [email protected] and we’ll send it ASAP.