LinkedIn auto connect: personalized invites from Airtable

I do not send LinkedIn connection requests by clicking Connect on each profile. I keep the URLs in a table, point a Growth-Hacking.io module at that table from Integromat — now Make.com — and let it open the profile and send a personalized invite. This video is the first stage of the bot: connect. Follow-up after they accept is a later module.

Start with Airtable and a last-modified trigger

You need a database. A CRM works. Google Sheets works. I use Airtable. The base I opened was a blank template. No rows, no names, nothing to send yet.

Add one trigger field: last modified time. When a row changes, the scenario has something to fire on. Name the field. Switch to the grid. That is the whole setup on this side.

Drop in the Growth Hacking module. Yours will be blue. Mine was not, because I was on the test environment.

Two values go in: the API key, and the LinkedIn account. The LinkedIn login is the session cookie, not a password. Open LinkedIn. Right-click anywhere on the page. Inspect. Application → Cookies → linkedin.com. Scroll to li_at. Copy the string of numbers and letters. That is the session. The module acts as you. The password never sits on their servers.

Paste the profile URL and send the invite

Find a prospect you actually want to grow a relationship with. Copy the LinkedIn URL into the Airtable row. Change the title if you want a label you can read later.

Map that profile URL into the module. Tell the scenario to connect with anyone stored in the table. It logs into the account, opens the profile, and sends the connection request. The intro note uses their first name.

The response I got back: status OK, message sent, first name, last name, company, connection status. That is the payload you keep.

Write first name, last name, company, and connection degree back

Add a second module so the row is not only a URL. Map the record ID, then first name, last name, the company they work for, and connection degree. You will want those later for email personalization. The same write works in a CRM or in Sheets if that is the store you picked.

Three records a run, skip anyone already invited

I added three LinkedIn profiles for the demo. Paste them by hand, or drop in a different module that scrapes the list automatically. Save the scenario. Set max records to 3 so each run only takes three rows. Run it. Watch the table: first name, last name, company, and connection level land on the row. That means the invite went out.

A row I had already run did not send again. The scenario skips it. You can force Integromat to replay a record. Leave that off unless you mean to.

That is the first stage of the sequence. List in the database. Cookie on the module. Personalized invite. Fields written back. Repeats skipped.

OFM Insider and Automation Academy if you want the communities from this video. Tools and resources are Bento. A one-off session is Calendly. Four sessions is 4x Consultations.

Transcript

hey guys I'm gonna build a quick miniseries showing you how to make a LinkedIn bot from scratch and I'm gonna break it up into individual sections so to start off with like get yourself like a database you can use either like a CRM you can use Google sheets in this scenario I'm going to be using Airtable but yeah it's completely up to you based on personal preference so it's completely blank currently there's no information in there this is just like the template template version and we need to go and add a trigger field so just put in last edit and last modification time whole field and then you can refresh this label field can be named you can be grid for you

cool so then we're gonna go and come over here and we're going to use the growth hacking module your one is probably going to be blue because I'm using our like testing environment and then just add in like your information so you're gonna want let your API key and you alright LinkedIn account so I'm going to show you how to get your cookie now just put in the API key and then to get your LinkedIn cookie just go to LinkedIn you can just right click anywhere on the page and just do inspect come over to application cookies LinkedIn and then scroll down to li_at and just copy this little random numbers and digits and that is that's your session cookie so that allows us to log into your like LinkedIn account without needing a password I mean it means that nothing needs to be be stored on our servers which is good

and then what we'll do is we'll go and find a LinkedIn account that we want to it's going to grow and we can just copy his LinkedIn URL and we may as well just change the title here to cool so his profile is now stored here in our database and we can go and tell our automation that we would like to go and connect with anyone who's stored in our database here so we can put in the profile URL it's collected and then we and so this module is now going into the LinkedIn account it's going to open up that profile and it's going to send the connection requests to them so then like we can just see the response so it's got his first name status okay message was sent correctly it put his first name there we've got his company name and we've got his first name last name and his connection status

so now let's go into like storing this information just in case we want to use it in future for like any like email personalization so we can go ahead and add in like a second module so like you can do this in like a CRM you can do like Google sheets if you prefer it to Airtable and really it's just just down to your personal preference so record ID and then let's say we want to sync his first name let's do its last name let's do the company they work for and let's do the connection degree so first one is now done so what I'll actually do is just to show you like how how this works and like this is completely automated so I'm just like building it in front of you and giving you examples

but here we can go ahead and add three LinkedIn profiles or we can use a different module and just scrape them automatically so if we press save and we can tell Integromat that we want to run three profiles every time if we come down here at max records three click Save and we can just run it and we can watch what's happening over here so when it runs successfully we will know because it's going to add the first name last name company and the connection level that they are so all the information is synced back so here we can see we've got this information and that means a connection request is cool and on this one because we ran this record previously it's a it's not going to work I mean we can tell Integromat to run it again but just automatically they choose to skip it

cool so that is how you build the first stage of your linkedin automation sequence it's just a really quick to the point video to help you like getting started and understand how sort of logic works within Integromat