Unlimited “InMails” –  LinkedIn “Hack”

Okay don’t kill me, I don’t know if this is a growth hack, I think it falls under that!

Little history, i’ve been a huge fan of LinkedIn, and use the platform heavily, recently had a article of mine cross 120,000 views and growing — me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaibhavnamburi/ (say hi)

And I feel like i’m slowly slowly getting what its all about. Each platform may be different but I suppose what has and always stay consistent is consistency. Every big influencer says it, stay consistent and it will eventually happen! The above article was my “win” after posting for 2 years straight almost every single day!

So what is this “growth hack” — okay, we know inMail, we know that its limited — usually 40 per month if you’re business, but you need to send more but can’t afford ridiculous LinkedIn prices what do you do ?

You send people personalised connection requests, because they end up seeing the text when they receive the connection AND when they accept, just in case the missed it, LinkedIn goes the extra step and pushes it into their messages and notifies them!

Now why do I say “inMail hack” in quotes, because its not exactly an inMail, but a hack around it. When you send an inMail and someone responds to it, ideally you create a connection, because you won’t be spending inMail credits anymore. Well you’re doing the EXACT same THING again with this, except for free UNLIMITED NUMBER OF TIMES!

But wait, you already get a way to send a little hello note, BUT that only lets you type 300 characters, and sometimes this JUST isn’t ENOUGH. You want a little more — now i know “Sorry if i had more time i would have written a shorter letter — Napolean” but sometimes when you’re doing an introduction where you introduce yourself a little or shoot an InMail, you certainly need some extra room.

Attached video demo here: http://recordit.co/bitwABkaiB

Here’s how-

Go to the person you want to add — search for them! Click on add a note button that shows up!

This is where the magic begins:

Go ahead and add a note or whatever text you’d like, you quickly realise the 300 characters are just not enough.

So then, right click on the input box, go ahead and then inspect element and it opens up the console.

Target the ID of the textfield:

In this case it was “custom-message” they might change this in the future.

LinkedIn’s front end uses jQuery, so we can easily work with selectors like IDs and classes.

By using the “#” symbol with the id name and finding the value, you can see that you get to see whatever I typed in the input box — i typed in “hi how are you”

Now the message with is more than 300 characters long how do you add that! Simple:

Just invoke the function:

$(‘custom-message’).val(‘my 1000 character long text’)

The second you type that in your console and click enter, you’ll see the text update in your input box as well most likely see a negative count on your character count

See the -12 here.

And thats about it, click send invitation and you have access to send however long messages to whoever you want, and since connections are free, you can somehow “bypass” inMails!