LinkedIn Scraping : How to do it? [Guide Step By Step] (2024)

In recent years, LinkedIn scraping has been enormously popularized, in particular with the arrival of tools that makes possible a practice that was until then reserved for developers.

In this article, I explain how to scrape LinkedIn, without being a developer. 😜

What is scraping?

Scraping is a computer technique that systematically retrieves information on a web page, in order to re-use it in another context. 👆

Web scraping involves making HTTP requests to a website’s server, downloading the HTML content of the page and then parsing that data to extract what it’s needed. That extracted data can then be stored in a local file or database for later use. Web scraping is often used for a variety of purposes, such as data mining, data analysis, price comparison, sentiment analysis, and more. You can then parse your data in order to buy product or services for example.

Why LinkedIn scraping?

LinkedIn is a professional networking platform with over 700 million users 😱, making it a valuable resource for businesses and individuals alike. LinkedIn scraping refers to the process of extracting data from LinkedIn profiles, companies, and other pages to gain insights and intelligence.

There are many reasons why someone might want to scrape LinkedIn data. For example, businesses can use the data extraction to identify potential customers, target their advertising, and recruit talent.

Sales 💰 team can also use the data for prospecting new leads and harvesting qualified data. Recruiters can also use LinkedIn scraping to find and reach out to passive job seekers who might not be actively looking for work but would be open to new opportunities.

Scraping allows you to retrieve valuable information on the internet, for example, to build up a prospecting file, or even to find out about your competitors.

For example, you can take advantage of a user base of over 500 million members on LinkedIn by collecting information from members’ public profiles. And it is perfectly legal! 💥 Speaking of that, let’s plunge into this subject.

Is scraping LinkedIn legal?

We spoke about public profiles and there is a reason for that ✅.

Scraping data from LinkedIn is a bit of a legal grey area and is subject to the terms of service and user agreements of the platform. In general, scraping of publicly available information on LinkedIn is considered legal as long as it’s done for legitimate purpose such as for personal or educational use.

It is better to review and understand 🧠 the terms of service of any platform before engaging in any data scrapung activities and to seek legal advice if there is any uncertainty. And don’t forget to be respectful of user’s privacy.

In any case, as long as the data are public, it is entirely legal to use scraped data.

How to scrape LinkedIn?

You are not a developer, and you still want to scrape LinkedIn? No problem, I’ll show you how to scrape LinkedIn using Waalaxy, in a few steps.

Start by downloading Waalaxy here.

Let’s say you want to scrape emails from your LinkedIn connections, it’s very simple:

Go to LinkedIn, click on “My Network” then “Connections”;

You arrive at the page of your relations. Click on the Waalaxy icon at the top right of your browser or simply open a LinkedIn page, create a new campaign by clicking on “Create a campaign” then select the number of profiles you want to scrape, and finally click on validate.

The profiles will be imported in Waalaxy, once the import is complete, you will only have to download the information of your contacts in CSV format from the Waalaxy CRM. Click on the “prospect” button to access it. Then select all of them and export your contacts.

Once on the CRM:

• Click on “Campaign”,
• Then select the campaign previously created. There you will find the profiles you have just exported.
• To obtain the file containing their information, click on “Export” then on “Export the prospects of this campaign in a CSV“.

You will get a CSV file containing the first name / last name / email address / company / position / LinkedIn premium or not / region / link to LinkedIn profile / phone number. This is a simple way to export data. 😜

You can also scrape people search pages on LinkedIn, the process is almost identical.

The only difference is that this time, you will start from a person search instead of your contacts to perform your search.

Here is an example, if you want to scrap the architects in Paris:

For the rest, and to retrieve the CSV file containing all the information, same process as for your relations.

Conclusion of the article

Throughout this article, we have seen that scraping can do a lot of things. You can collect :

• Profiles.
• URLs.
• Emails.
• Phone numbers.
• Etc…

But you need to keep in mind that you must respect privacy before harvesting data.

FAQ of LinkedIn scraping

Is it possible to automate web scraping ?

The answer is “yes absolutely”. It is very possible to automate web scraping while using various tools and programming languages such as Python, Java or Ruby with the help of librairies and frameworks. These tools allow you to extract and process data from websites automatically, making it possible to scale and automate the data collection process.

There you go, scraping LinkedIn, a breeze, right? 😉

Follow the complete guide on prospecting for your business here!