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How Swan sends LinkedIn outreach

LinkedIn outreach runs through your own connected LinkedIn account — Swan doesn’t use LinkedIn’s official messaging API (there is no InMail support), it sends connection requests and direct messages as your account, the same way you’d send them by hand. Because of that, all of LinkedIn’s normal account behavior and limits apply, and Swan paces sending specifically to protect your account from being flagged. A sequence can include connection requests, direct messages to connections, or both. LinkedIn requires a connection before you can message someone who isn’t already connected to you, so if a sequence includes both, the connection request step always comes before any message step to that contact.

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Connection requests don’t hold up the sequence

Sending a connection request is fire-and-forget: Swan sends the invite and immediately moves the contact on to whatever comes next in the sequence — it doesn’t sit and wait to see if the invite gets accepted. The wait only happens later, if and when the sequence reaches an actual LinkedIn message step to that contact and they still aren’t connected yet. See Replies and stop conditions for exactly how that wait works and what happens if the invite is rejected or expires.

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Sending limits and Sales Navigator

Swan applies daily and weekly per-sender caps to connection requests and messages to keep activity within what LinkedIn considers normal for a human account. If your connected account has LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Swan detects this automatically at connection time and raises your daily and weekly sending caps accordingly, since Sales Navigator accounts get more headroom from LinkedIn itself. You don’t need to configure anything for this — it’s picked up from your account, and a “Sales Nav” badge appears next to the sender on its LinkedIn integration card at agent.getswan.com/tools once detected. Sales Navigator also determines whether your connection requests can carry a personal note. LinkedIn heavily restricts note-bearing invites on standard accounts, so Swan only includes a note when the sender has Sales Navigator — a sequence step can have a note written on it, but if the sender is a standard LinkedIn account the invite goes out without it. See sending limits for the exact default numbers.

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Tracking invitation status

Acceptances are picked up in real time: as soon as LinkedIn notifies Swan that the connection landed, the sequence continues from wherever that contact was waiting. On top of that, Swan runs a periodic background check across all your pending invitations to catch the other outcomes — a request that was rejected, or one that’s gone unanswered long enough to expire. A connection request that’s still pending after 2 weeks (counting from when it was sent) is treated as expired, and Swan stops trying on that path rather than waiting indefinitely.

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When a connection request can’t recover on its own

LinkedIn sometimes blocks a connection request outright — for example, if this contact was already invited recently (by this sequence or another one), or if LinkedIn has otherwise restricted the sender from inviting them. For a recent-invite block specifically, Swan first tries to recover automatically: it checks whether it already has a pending invitation to the same person from elsewhere and reuses it, then checks the sender’s own sent-invitations list on LinkedIn for a match. Only if neither recovery works does Swan give up on LinkedIn for that contact — and even then, any email steps in the same sequence keep running. For other kinds of LinkedIn pushback (a restricted profile, an invalid URL), Swan doesn’t retry — retrying against LinkedIn’s own pushback is exactly the kind of behavior that risks your account being restricted.

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Common questions

Can Swan send LinkedIn messages to someone I’m not connected to? Only by sending a connection request first and messaging once it’s accepted — Swan can’t message a non-connection directly. Can Swan add a personal note to connection requests? Only when the sender has Sales Navigator. On a standard LinkedIn account, Swan sends the invite without a note even if the sequence step has one — LinkedIn heavily restricts note-bearing invites on non-premium accounts. Does Swan post, comment, or react on LinkedIn on my behalf? No. Swan can send connection requests and direct messages, and it can monitor engagement (likes/comments on tracked posts) to trigger outreach, but it doesn’t publish or interact with posts itself. What happens if I already sent someone a connection request manually before Swan tries? LinkedIn will block Swan’s attempt as a duplicate/recent invite. Swan tries to recover by matching it to an invitation it can find (from another sequence or in your sent list) and continuing from there; if it can’t find a match, it stops trying LinkedIn for that contact while any email steps in the sequence keep going. Do LinkedIn limits reset if I add Sales Navigator later? Yes — Swan detects your account’s tier again when you reconnect, so upgrading to Sales Navigator and reconnecting (from the LinkedIn integration card at agent.getswan.com/tools) raises your caps. Can I connect a LinkedIn company page instead of a personal profile? No, only personal LinkedIn accounts can be used as outreach senders. Company pages can be monitored for engagement but not used to send messages.