All you need to know about LinkedIn messaging

LinkedIn is the leading professional social network, and LinkedIn messaging is one of its most widely used tools. 💬
Sending LinkedIn messages, finding out if a message has been read, deleting a conversation… the LinkedIn Inbox seems simple. In reality, as exchanges multiply, LinkedIn instant messaging quickly shows its limitations. 😅

In this article, we take a look at how LinkedIn messages work, their limitations, and alternatives for managing your messages effectively. 📮

What is LinkedIn messaging?

LinkedIn messaging is simply the instant messaging feature built into the professional social network. It allows you to communicate with other users without having to use email. 💬

If the person is part of your network (1st-degree connection), you can exchange messages freely, without limits. This is the most common and most used form of LinkedIn messaging.

If the person is not connected to you, things change. You can’t send a classic LinkedIn message. Instead, you have two options:👇🏻

• Send a connection request with a note (up to 300 characters).
• Use a LinkedIn InMail, available only with Premium accounts.

This is why many users search for how to send LinkedIn messages without Premium or how to message someone on LinkedIn if you are not connected.

All these exchanges are centralized in one place: the LinkedIn Inbox. 📥 It includes:

• Standard LinkedIn messages.
• Invitation notes.
• InMails.
• Archived and unread conversations.

Messages can be accessed from the desktop (sidebar or full-page view) or directly from the LinkedIn mobile app.

Not all LinkedIn messages work the same way, though. There are three main types 👀:

• LinkedIn messages, used to communicate with your connections.
• LinkedIn InMails are paid messages sent to users outside your network.
• LinkedIn Page messages allow users to contact a company page when the messaging feature is enabled.

On paper, the system looks clear and complete. In practice, as soon as you start handling multiple conversations at the same time, messaging on LinkedIn quickly shows its limits. 😅

What is the difference between a LinkedIn message and an invitation?

A LinkedIn message can only be sent to someone you are already connected to. A LinkedIn invitation is used to request a connection.

The invitation can include a personalized note of up to 300 characters, which is useful for explaining your approach. ✍️

LinkedIn messaging features

Before we look at how to send a message on LinkedIn, let’s take two minutes to see what LinkedIn messaging actually allows you to do. 👀

1. Send LinkedIn messages

LinkedIn messaging allows you to exchange written messages with your connections directly from the LinkedIn Inbox. 💬 You can accompany your messages with:

• Emojis.
• Images.
• GIFs.
• Videos.
• Attachments (PDFs, documents, etc.).

LinkedIn has also added the option to react to a message with an emoji, without necessarily replying in writing.

2. Send invitation notes

When someone is not yet in your network, you must send them a LinkedIn invitation. You can add a personalized note (maximum 300 characters). If the person accepts:

• The note appears in the message.
• The conversation is automatically created with this new message.

3. Send LinkedIn voice messages

You can also send audio messages. LinkedIn voice messages are only available from the mobile app. 🎙️ They allow you to send a recorded audio message directly in the conversation.

This is a very effective format for:

• Prospecting.
• Recruitment.
• Or simply humanizing an exchange.

Clearly, it stands out. However, not everyone likes to receive voice messages… so use them with a minimum of common sense. 😄

Sending a LinkedIn InMail

“I thought you could only send messages on LinkedIn to people in your network. So what is a LinkedIn InMail?”

In principle, to send a LinkedIn message, you must be connected to the recipient. This is how you send a LinkedIn message without a premium account. However, there is one exception: LinkedIn InMails.

An InMail allows you to send a message to someone without being connected to them.
This feature is reserved for LinkedIn Premium accounts, and the message is clearly identified as sponsored, which gives it a more commercial feel. 💼

To access this feature, you must have a premium subscription (Sales Navigator, Recruiter, Business, Career, etc.). The number of messages you can send each month is limited. For example, a Sales Navigator account entitles you to 60 InMails per month.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Recruiter messaging

When prospecting or recruiting on LinkedIn, one question often comes up: How can you avoid mixing professional exchanges with more personal conversations with your network?

To address this need, LinkedIn has developed two specific interfaces: Sales Navigator messaging and LinkedIn Recruiter messaging.

Their main benefit is simple: they allow you to separate prospecting or recruiting exchanges from the rest of your LinkedIn messages. This makes it easier to follow up and avoids losing important conversations. 💼

From your contact’s point of view, however, nothing changes. Your message is still displayed in their regular LinkedIn messaging.

Sales navigator inbox vs. LinkedIn inbox

Sales Navigator improves prospecting, but how different is its inbox from the standard LinkedIn Inbox? Here’s a quick comparison. 👀

Feature	LinkedIn Inbox	Sales Navigator Inbox
Who can you message	Connections only	Connections + InMail
InMail access	❌	✅
Inbox separation	Personal and professional messages mixed	Sales conversations separated
Lead context (profile insights)	Basic	Advanced (lead & company data)
Lead saving	❌	✅
Message organization (tags)	❌	❌
Scheduled follow-ups	❌	❌
Built for high message volume	❌	⚠️ Limited

How do you use LinkedIn messaging from a company page?

A LinkedIn company page can also receive and send messages, provided that messaging is enabled in the page settings. 💬

Once enabled, a ” Send a message” button appears directly on the LinkedIn page for visitors.

Messages sent to a LinkedIn company page are managed collectively. They are not linked to a personal profile but are accessible to several team members, depending on the rights assigned. In practice, the following people can respond:

• Page administrators.
• Super administrators.
• Certain advanced roles, depending on the configuration.

Conversations on the page appear in LinkedIn messaging, with a selector allowing you to switch from your personal profile to the company page. Exchanges remain separate from personal messaging. 📮

In terms of functionality, LinkedIn messaging for pages is deliberately kept simple. It allows you to respond to incoming requests but quickly shows its limitations as soon as the volume increases. 😅

Specifically, there are no:

• Tags to organize conversations. 🔖
• Scheduled reminders. 📆
• Prioritization or assignment of messages between sales team members. 👯‍♂️
• Advanced history or structured tracking. 🔍

For a few messages per week, it works. But for customer care, sales inquiries, or recruitment, management quickly becomes complicated.

Challenges and weaknesses of LinkedIn messaging

It’s time to talk about the real issue. Why does LinkedIn messaging, for a social network with hundreds of millions of users, generating billions in revenue each year… work so poorly? 😅

1. Poorly designed management of unread messages

When you receive a lot of messages, managing messages quickly becomes frustrating. Each reply you send automatically takes you back to the top of your inbox. You then have to scroll again to find the next message to deal.

2. Messaging unsuited to large volumes

As long as you manage fewer than ten messages per day, LinkedIn messaging remains usable.
But as soon as you move to dozens or even hundreds of messages per day, which is common in prospecting or recruiting, the tool clearly shows its limitations. Complicated sorting, loss of context, forgotten conversations: productivity quickly drops. 😅

3. No tools for structuring prospecting

It is impossible to add tags to your conversations, prioritize certain exchanges, or segment your prospects.
You also cannot temporarily hide a discussion to find it later or schedule a follow-up. In other words, everything relies on your memory… or on Post-it notes. 🙃

4. No connection to your CRM

Even when prospecting works and responses are positive, LinkedIn messaging does not allow you to export your prospect information to a CRM… Everything has to be entered manually, even though the data is already visible on the screen. And no, even Sales Navigator does not solve this problem. 🥲

5. Very limited suggested responses

LinkedIn does offer automatic response suggestions. But in practice, these often boil down to very basic exchanges such as “Thank you”, “Ok”, “thank you ” or ” Great”. Useful for saving a few seconds, but much less so for conducting a real business exchange.

At this point, it’s normal to feel a little discouraged. Between forgotten messages, wasted time, and the lack of tracking tools, LinkedIn messaging quickly becomes more of a hindrance than a help. Fortunately, there are more suitable alternatives when volumes increase. 😇

Best inbox to manage LinkedIn messages and DMs

We experienced the situation described above on a daily basis. When you manage dozens of LinkedIn accounts and sometimes more than 1,000 messages a day, LinkedIn messaging quickly becomes a real nightmare. 😅 So we needed a robust, reliable, and effective solution. That’s how Inbox Waalaxy was born.👽 It gives you access to a whole host of new features.

1. A dedicated interface designed to manage LinkedIn messages

Inbox Waalaxy works in a separate interface, designed solely for managing LinkedIn messages. It’s a Chrome extension that sends messages directly to LinkedIn, just as if you were using the basic messaging system. This means you can also send voice messages, images, and more.😎

For LinkedIn and your prospects, it’s completely transparent. Messages comply with the platform’s rules and are sent exactly as if you had clicked on ” Send” from the LinkedIn Inbox.

What’s more, it’s easy to use, with smooth navigation and a much more enjoyable experience. When you easily spend an hour a day in your messaging system, this convenience makes a real difference. 🙂

2. Smooth management of unread messages

You know the problem with unread messages on LinkedIn: reloading the page, endless scrolling, and automatically returning to the top of the list after each reply. With Waalaxy Inbox, all that disappears.
You can scroll through all your unread messages without limits, without reloading the page. And when you reply to a message, it is automatically marked as read and removed from the unread list. Simple and effective. ✅

3. Saved replies to save time

When you exchange a lot of messages, you quickly realize that many of your replies are repetitive. Inbox Waalaxy lets you save personalized replies that you can reuse with a single click.
This allows you to respond much more quickly to recurring messages or uninterested prospects, without sacrificing personalization. 🚀

4. Keyboard shortcuts to go even faster

Inbox Waalaxy includes keyboard shortcuts that allow you to work almost without using the mouse. In particular, you can:

• Find and send a saved response.
• Switch between conversations.
• Return to the previous or next discussion.

Taken separately, these may seem insignificant. But when used effectively, these shortcuts can save you time every day. ⌨️

5. Automate LinkedIn messaging to schedule follow-ups

In the past, when a prospect said “Get back to me in two weeks”, it was often forgotten. It’s difficult to personalize LinkedIn follow-ups when you’re dealing with dozens of messages a day.

With Inbox Waalaxy, you can schedule a follow-up directly from the conversation. It only takes a few seconds to set the date and message, without any sticky notes or external reminders. ⏰

6. Advanced tags and filters

Inbox Waalaxy allows you to add tags to your conversations.
These tags are used to:

• Quickly identify the type of contact.
• Segment your prospects for CRM export.
• Easily find a category of conversations.

The filters go much further than those on LinkedIn. You can filter by tag, follow-up status, last message sent (by you or your contact), lack of response, or even by time period.
In other words, you finally regain control over your messaging. 🕺🏻

Here is a small comparison table between the two inboxes:👇🏻

Features	LinkedIn messaging	Waalaxy Inbox
Sending text messages	✅	✅
Attachments (PDFs, documents)	✅	✅
Images, GIFs, videos	✅	✅
Reactions to messages	✅	✅
Voice messages	✅	✅
Invitation notes	✅ (300 characters maximum)	✅
InMails	✅ (Premium accounts only)	❌
Sales Navigator/Recruiter messaging	✅ (separate interfaces)	Centralization in a single inbox
Company Page Messaging	✅, limited features	✅, centralized management
Unread message management	Limited (scroll, reload)	Smooth, unlimited
Saved replies	Very limited	✅
Keyboard shortcuts	❌	✅
Reminder scheduling	❌	✅
Tags	❌	✅
Advanced filters	❌	✅
Export conversations/prospects	❌	✅
Suitable for large volumes of messages	Difficult	✅
Main objective	Simple exchanges	Prospecting and advanced management

LinkedIn Messaging API: What’s Possible (and What’s Not)?

This is a very common question : Is there a LinkedIn messaging API? Short answer: not really. 😅

LinkedIn does not provide any official API that allows you to send or manage LinkedIn messages programmatically. You can’t use an API to send messages, InMails, or follow-ups directly from an external tool.

What LinkedIn’s API allows instead:👇🏻

• Sign in with LinkedIn.
• Share content on LinkedIn.
• Access limited profile or company data (depending on permissions).
• Integrate with LinkedIn Learning or certifications.

But when it comes to messaging, the API is deliberately restricted. So how do automation tools send LinkedIn messages?

They don’t use an API. Tools like Waalaxy rely on browser-based automation. Messages are sent through LinkedIn’s own interface, exactly as if you were typing and clicking “Send” yourself. ✨

➡️ From LinkedIn’s point of view:

• The message is sent from your account.
• Through the LinkedIn Inbox.
• Following the same rules and limits as manual messaging.

That’s also why there is no real “LinkedIn messaging API” for bulk messaging, scheduling messages, or inbox management.

4 tips for using LinkedIn messaging effectively

If you’re involved in recruitment or prospecting, we could devote an entire article to this topic… But there are some basic rules that are essential whenever you send LinkedIn messages. Here are my tips:

• Avoid group conversations when contacting multiple people: LinkedIn allows you to create group conversations, but this is clearly not intended for prospecting or promotion. Grouping together several people who don’t know each other to send them the same message is one of the worst possible uses of LinkedIn messaging. This type of practice can give a very bad brand image and greatly increases the risk of being reported for abusive behavior. 😬
• Avoid sending the exact same message too often: LinkedIn closely monitors repetitive messages. Sending the same message to 100 or 200 people in a row is quickly considered spam. Your messages are likely to end up in the Spam folder and never be read. 😕 The best practice is to create several variations of the same message. Ideally, limit each version to a maximum of 50–100 messages, with slight changes in wording. 😉
• Keep your messages short and mobile-friendly: Most users read and reply to their LinkedIn messages on their phones. Small screen, limited time, limited attention.

• Copy-and-paste templates don’t work miracles: Many people search for LinkedIn message templates to reuse them exactly as they are. The problem is that everyone is doing the same thing. If you found a template on ChatGPT, chances are your contact has already received it several times. And the more a message resembles something they’ve already seen, the less likely they are to respond. Of course, there are copywriting principles to follow. But the number one rule remains the same: stand out. 🤓

Privacy and legal aspects of LinkedIn messaging

When it comes to LinkedIn messaging, privacy is one of the most common concerns. And for good reason. 👀

Are LinkedIn messages private?

Yes, LinkedIn messages are considered private. 🔒 They are only visible to participants in the conversation.

As with most social networks, LinkedIn may analyze certain elements automatically (for example, to improve its algorithm). However, no human, including LinkedIn support, reads your messages during normal use, except in very specific cases related to a report or legal obligation.

For prospecting or recruiting, LinkedIn remains a relatively safe channel, as long as you maintain a professional tone. 👀

How can you tell if a message on LinkedIn has been read?

When someone reads your message, you’ll see a small profile picture appear below the message; this is the check mark on LinkedIn messages. This is LinkedIn’s official indicator that the message has been read. 👀

If you don’t see it, a few things may be happening:👇🏻

• The person hasn’t opened the message yet.
• Read receipts are disabled on their account.
• You’ve disabled read receipts yourself.

What happens in case of abuse or a report?

If a message violates LinkedIn’s policies (harassment, spam, inappropriate content), it can be reported directly from the messaging interface. 📲

➡️ In that case:

• The conversation may be reviewed by LinkedIn’s moderation systems.
• LinkedIn support may access the message only as part of a report or legal obligation.
• Repeated abuse can lead to message restrictions or account penalties.

For normal professional conversations, though, LinkedIn messaging remains a relatively safe and private communication channel.

Let’s recap LinkedIn messaging

LinkedIn messaging remains an essential tool for the social network. 💬 For occasional use, it may be sufficient. But as soon as volumes increase, prospecting, recruiting, following up with numerous contacts, its limitations become apparent. 😅

Lack of organization, no follow-ups, complicated management of unread messages: the LinkedIn inbox management is not designed for intensive use. This is where solutions like Waalaxy come into their own, providing structure, visibility, and time savings on a daily basis. 🚀

It’s up to you to choose the tool that best suits the way you use LinkedIn. 😉

Frequently asked questions about LinkedIn messaging

Can you delete messages on LinkedIn?

You can LinkedIn messages be deleted. On a computer, deleting a LinkedIn message is quite simple. Hover over the message, click on the three dots (…), and then select “Delete conversation.”

A few important things to know: 👇

• A deleted message cannot be restored.
• Invitation notes and forwarded messages cannot be deleted.
• The other person will see that a message has been deleted.

On mobile devices, deletion is not always available depending on the version of the app. 📱

How to message a recruiter on LinkedIn?

To message a recruiter on LinkedIn, start by checking whether you’re already connected. if you are, you can send a LinkedIn message for free. If not, send a connection request with a short personalized note, or use an InMail if you have LinkedIn Premium. 💬

Keep your message short, clear, and human. Recruiters often read messages on mobile, between meetings. Explain briefly why you’re reaching out and what kind of role you’re looking for. 😉

➡️ For example:

Avoid sending your resume in the first message unless it’s requested. The goal is to start a conversation, not to pitch everything at once.

If you don’t get a reply, wait about a week before sending a short follow-up. One follow-up is enough. 😉

Can you send bulk messages on LinkedIn?

Yes, but with great caution. LinkedIn closely monitors repetitive messages. Sending the same message on a large scale can quickly be considered spam. Your messages may not be delivered or may end up in the folder.

The right approach is to 👇🏻:

• Limit the number of daily messages by respecting LinkedIn quotas.
• Vary the wording.
• Personalize each message as much as possible.

Tools such as Waalaxy allow you to automate these messages while staying within the rules. 🚀

How do you archive a LinkedIn message and find archived conversations?

On LinkedIn, you cannot archive an individual message, but you can archive an entire conversation.

To archive a conversation in LinkedIn messaging:

• Select the “…” in your conversation in your messaging.
• Click on “Archive.”

Once archived, the conversation will disappear from your main inbox, but it will not be deleted. To find it again, simply use the “Archived” filter in your inbox. 📮

Archiving is useful for sorting, but it has its limitations: there are no tags, no reminders, and no real advanced organization. This is often where additional tools come in handy. 😉

Now you know everything there is to know about LinkedIn messaging.