Best practices: safe volumes and warming up a new LinkedIn account

The fastest way to lose a LinkedIn account's reach is to go from zero to full volume overnight. Swimlane doesn't ramp up volume for you: it applies the limits you save. This guide gives you a prudent way to set and raise them.

Before your first campaign

1. Set your office hours to your real working day and timezone (Settings → Virtual Office Hours). See Set your virtual office hours.
2. Open Settings → Import & Automation Limits and lower the ceilings if your account is new or has been quiet for months.
3. Keep your profile credible: photo, headline, a few posts or comments. People accept invitations from profiles that look real.
4. Enrich your lists with Enrich with LinkedIn, so connection degrees are known and your ICP levels are meaningful.

A suggested warm-up plan

These are our suggestions, not LinkedIn rules. LinkedIn doesn't publish its thresholds, and every account is different. For a new or long-inactive account, you could:

• Week 1: set Daily Invitations Sent around 5 and Daily Messages Sent around 20. Run one small campaign on your best-matching contacts.
• Week 2: move invitations towards 10 if your acceptance rate holds up.
• Week 3: move towards 15.
• Week 4 and after: the Safe Mode values (20 invitations, 150 messages a day) if everything stays healthy.

For an established, active account, start directly from Safe Mode.

Raise only one step at a time, and only after a week where nothing looked wrong.

Keep your acceptance rate high

Your Invitations accepted rate, on the Campaigns page and on each card, is the best signal you have. When it drops, lower your volume and fix the targeting before sending more.

• Target tighter. Turn on ICP match with High match or better in the campaign audience.
• Warm people up first. A Like last post step a couple of days before the Connection Request makes your name familiar.
• Keep notes short and specific. LinkedIn limits note length (200 characters on a free account, 300 on Premium), and free accounts can only send a limited number of personalised notes per month. An invitation without a note is a valid choice.
• Give invitations time. A Wait for acceptance of 14 days leaves room for people who don't check LinkedIn daily.

Spread your volume

• Remember the weekly cap. LinkedIn limits invitations per week, beyond your daily setting. Twenty a day every day adds up quickly.
• Don't stack campaigns on the same people. A contact can be in several campaigns at once. Start flows with Has a conversation to leave out people you're already talking to.
• Keep room for your own replies. Inbox replies use the same Daily Messages Sent allowance as your campaigns.
• Use likes and pokes lightly. They aren't counted in any daily limit, so the restraint has to come from your sequence design.
• Watch your waiting invitations. Each one uses profile refreshes while it waits, from your Daily Profile Scrapes allowance.

Signs you should slow down

• The Invitations accepted rate falls week after week.
• Your LinkedIn session keeps expiring and Swimlane asks you to reconnect your account (see Reconnect LinkedIn when the session expires).
• Many people ignore or decline your invitations.

When that happens, pause your campaigns for a few days (see Pause, edit, resume or delete a campaign), lower your limits, then restart with a smaller, better-targeted audience.

What Swimlane does for you in the meantime

Invitations and messages are spaced by random pauses and checked against your ceilings before they're sent, campaign actions wait for your office hours, and connection requests are never sent to people already connected to you. See How Swimlane keeps your LinkedIn account safe.