How To Scrape LinkedIn: A Beginners Guide to Data Scraping
Tags: scraping
Published: 2022-10-17 12:22:02


[LinkedIn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn) is a fast growing social network with over 575 million users. With such a strong user base, it’s no wonder that data scraping LinkedIn has proven to be such a successful lead generation tool for businesses. However, LinkedIn makes it difficult to scrape their website. They have implemented numerous security measures and settings to limit what information can be scraped from their website. In this article, you will learn how to scrape LinkedIn and reap all of the benefits of this popular social network.


## What is data scraping?

[Data scraping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_scraping) is the process of extracting data from websites. This is usually done by either using a web crawler to go through the website and find everything,  by using specific programming language to scrape the data or specific tools. There are many different reasons why businesses might want to scrape data from another website. One of the most common uses for data scraping is [lead generation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_generation). When you scrape data from other websites and then add your own data to it, you are creating a “combined” dataset. This can be used for a variety of different purposes, such as market research, product research, sales prospecting, etc.

## Why is LinkedIn data so valuable?

LinkedIn has become one of the leading social networks for professionals. As more and more people are using the network to find jobs, network with other professionals, and even find companies to work for, they are leaving behind a lot of information. If you’re scraping LinkedIn, you’ll have access to a wealth of data that is extremely valuable. There are two specific types of data that you can scrape from LinkedIn that are extremely valuable. The first is lead data. You can scrape people’s emails, job titles, and other information to find out if they are a good fit for your product or service. You can also scrape people’s names, job titles, and company names to find people who might be interested in your product or service.

## How to scrape and extract data from LinkedIn

If you want to scrape data from LinkedIn, you have to keep in mind that LinkedIn doesn't like that at all and will reject your attempts. It will show you regular catches if it thinks you are automating your profile and even ban you from LinkedIn. Automatic extraction is against LinkedIn's policies. [LinkedIn's Terms of Service](https://www.linkedin.com/legal/l/service-terms) state that users are not allowed to use automation to post content or send messages.

"Customer agrees that it will not, and will not enable or authorize any third party .... use any automated means or form of scraping or data extraction to access, modify, download, query or otherwise collect information from LinkedIn’s websites"

There are 3 ways to scrape LinkedIn: 

## 1. Browser automation with Puppeteer and co. 

[Puppeteer](https://developer.chrome.com/docs/puppeteer/) is a headless browser and allows you to control the browser remotely and does this in the context of a chrome browser. LinkedIn does not know that you are accessing it with a software. For authentication you just use your LinkedIn browser cookie. 
I can not omit to mention that you must make sure that the behaviour of human use should be mimicked. If you go too fast from page to page and read the data, LinkedIn will notice. Therefore, be careful to mimic human behavior and take breaks that are not regular. 

## 2. Voyager API

Another option is to use LinkedIn Voyager API. This will give you direct access to the API calls from LinkedIn. You can find an API [here](https://linkedin.api-docs.io/v1.0/cities/vd6hsmNDEEduPLMba).

There is a lot of information you can retrieve this way. Again, be aware that LinkedIn can detect robot like behavior and stay within a human behavioral range that is "natural". 


## 3. Specific tools that can help you retrieve data from LinkedIn


**ScrapeBox** is one of the most popular scraping tools. It has been used by thousands of people for all sorts of different data scraping projects. It is a very robust tool that can be used for scraping almost any website. 


**Phantombuster** - PhantomBuster is a data extraction software that saves businesses time and money by extracting data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms. Users can save data in CSV and JSON format from the cloud.
Businesses can save time by using PhantomBuster to extract data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other online platforms in CSV and JSON formats.


**Evaboot** - Evaboot is a Smart LinkedIn Sales Navigator Scraper that extracts, cleans, and enriches your search results. With Evaboot's chrome extension, you can easily [export  leads](https://evaboot.com/blog/export-leads-linkedin-sales-navigator) from LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches or lists and turn them into clean CSV files.

The good thing about Evaboot is that they allow you to get the data from LinkedIn in a secure way without the risk of getting banned.  


## Conclusion
Data scraping can be a very powerful tool for businesses. It can be used for lead generation, product research, market research, and many other different things. LinkedIn is one of the most difficult websites to scrape data from. If you want to build a tool yourself, you have to be careful not to be discovered by LinkedIn. Luckily, there are tools out there that make it much easier to scrape LinkedIn, if it's just about getting the data for yourself.