LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 810 million members worldwide. With so many profiles and activities happening on the platform every day, there is a wealth of data that can be extracted and analyzed for business insights. Here are the main ways to get access to LinkedIn data.
LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn Analytics provides data and insights about your company’s LinkedIn presence and how people engage with your business on the platform. It is available to LinkedIn business page admins for free. Some of the data you can get includes:
- Follower growth over time
- Post reach and engagement
- Top follower locations
- Follower demographics like job role, industry and seniority
- Page visitor statistics
This gives you an understanding of the health and performance of your LinkedIn presence. You can use the data to optimize your content strategy and better engage your target audience on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn Recruiter is LinkedIn’s recruitment software that helps employers source, manage and develop talent. It provides access to LinkedIn’s database of 660+ million members. Some of the data available includes:
- Advanced search filters like years of experience, education, skills, etc. to find qualified candidates
- Contact information of prospects
- Candidate’s full profile data including work history, education, accomplishments, skills and recommendations
- Statistics on how well your jobs and recruiter account are performing
This data facilitates targeted recruiting and helps understand the hiring marketplace. The Recruiter seating options range from a self-serve Talent Basic plan to the comprehensive Recruiter Corporate plan.
LinkedIn Talent Insights
Talent Insights provides aggregated and anonymized data about LinkedIn members to analyze talent trends. It offers data on topics like:
- Company size and industry data
- Talent migration patterns
- Skills gap analysis
- Salary and compensation benchmarks
- Talent pool availability
The platform provides dynamic visualizations of the data for better insights. It is useful for recruitment planning, competitor analysis and ensuring you attract the right skills. There are different subscription plans based on data needs.
LinkedIn Talent API
For more customized access, LinkedIn also offers a Talent API. It lets you directly query LinkedIn data through a set of endpoints and build the data into business applications. Some ways the API can be used:
- Integrate LinkedIn profile data in your ATS or HR database
- Create customized recruiting analytics and reports
- Build Chrome extensions and apps with LinkedIn integrations
- Automate candidate screening and outreach based on preferred skills, titles and experience
The API provides flexible access but requires technical resources to work with. Pricing is customized based on expected usage levels.
LinkedIn Ads API
For marketers, LinkedIn provides the Marketing Developer Platform with an Ads API. It allows managing LinkedIn ad campaigns programmatically via scripts and macros. Key capabilities include:
- Automate ad creation and optimization
- Pull campaign metrics like impressions, clicks and spend
- Apply data filters and splits to analyze performance
- Make bulk updates to large campaigns
This saves time on manual work and provides deeper insights from LinkedIn advertising data. API access starts from a free sandbox environment to paid production access.
Web Scraping
Many developers also rely on web scraping to extract LinkedIn information at scale. This involves using bots and custom scripts to automatically pull data from LinkedIn profiles. Some types of data that can be web scraped include:
- Public profile information like name, headline, location
- Connections, groups and interests
- Experience and education details
- Posts, articles and activity feed
Scraped LinkedIn data can power a variety of apps and business uses. However, web scraping violates LinkedIn’s Terms of Service if done without permission. It also risks your account getting banned.
Buying LinkedIn data
Rather than scrape yourself, there are providers that sell ready LinkedIn datasets collected legally. Some common products include:
- Company employee lists for lead generation
- Contact lists of professionals by role, skill or geography
- Parsed profile data for enriching business databases
- Listings with full public URL or anonymous IDs for tracking
The data coverage and recency varies between vendors. It can be hard to evaluate data quality and compliance. Prices range from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the volume and attributes provided.
How to choose the right LinkedIn data solution?
When selecting the most suitable way to get LinkedIn data, here are some key considerations:
- Data needs – What specific fields or metrics do you need? How granular? How frequently?
- Target audience – Are you looking across LinkedIn or focused on subsets like your own followers or talent by industry?
- Use cases – Do you need individual contacts or aggregate analytics? Marketing or recruiting focus?
- Budget – What level of investment do you have for software, developer resources or purchased datasets?
- Capabilities – Do you have in-house technical skills or need an external partner?
- Compliance – Does the approach align with LinkedIn’s terms to avoid legal risks?
Mapping your requirements and constraints will point you towards the ideal approach – whether it is LinkedIn’s own tools, API access, web scraping or purchased data.
Conclusion
LinkedIn has become the go-to professional social network for brands and recruiters. But turning its profile, activity and network data into tangible business value requires choosing the right access method. Official options like LinkedIn Analytics, Recruiter, Talent Insights and the Marketing Developer Platform provide authenticated access to satisfy diverse needs from free to customized solutions. Unauthorized web scraping delivers volume and flexibility but with high risk. For most use cases, purchased LinkedIn data rarely offers the right combination of coverage, accuracy and value. By aligning access approach with specific data and usage requirements, businesses can tap LinkedIn’s rich data to derive data-driven recruiting, marketing and competitive insights.