Workflow

Workflow is basically a sequence of actions, which you set up for your campaign. Please check the detailed article on how to create a campaign here.

Let's take a closer look at what campaign's workflow is and it's general rules:

1. How to setup workflow
2. General workflow rules
3. How profiles are moved through the workflow
   • By bunches
   • One-by-one 
4. How to manually move profiles through workflow
5. Actions priority

How to setup workflow

While creating a campaign, you can select one of the predefined campaign templates for your workflow or just create an empty campaign and arrange Actions yourself. Here is the list of available templates:

• Empty campaign - a campaign that contains no action at all. You can add any sequence of actions needed by your business / personal goal;
• Invite & Follow Up - invites 2nd and 3rd-degree connections, filter those who accepted your invite, and then sends a "Thank you for connection!" message. You can adjust messages as per your needs.
• Invite 1st to Group - sends an invitation at a group you are a participant of to your 1st-degree connections;
  
• Invite 1st to follow Organization (Company / School) - sends an invitation at to your organization to your 1st-degree connections;
• Visit & Extract Profiles - a simple one-action campaign that visits LinkedIn profiles and extract available information from their profile pages.
• Send InMails - send InMails to 2nd and 3rd-degree connections provided that you have a paid LinkedIn subscription.
• Follow profiles - follow profiles news and updates.
• Endorse 1st connections - endorse 1st-degree connections to get endorsements back.
• Remove 1st connections - remove 1st-degree connections from your network.
• Messaging Sequence - a three follow-up campaign with delays between messages.

To make your own workflow, just navigate to the "Workflow" tab of your campaign and click on "Plus" to open the actions menu:

To add action to your workflow click on it:

It is possible also to:

• delete an action if you do not need it:

• move it up or down provided that there are no profiles in Queue or Processed lists:

• or add a new action to the middle of your workflow:

Check what will happen if you add a new action to the middle of your workflow with already processed profiles:

Please note that when you add action at the beginning of your workflow, all profiles that previously were at "Queue" of Action #1 of your workflow, will be moved to "Queue" of this new action. This may lead to a situation when you made a campaign to message your 1st connections, collected them to "Message to 1st connections | group members" Action, then added a step to "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action connections above, and now you have all 1st connections in "Queue" of "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action instead of "Message to 1st connections | group members" Action.

After you run such a campaign profiles will "fail" to invite, because they were not your 2nd/3rd connections, Linked Helper will mark them as "Failed" and won't process in the campaign further, because for "Failed" profiles campaign end. That's why we recommend to build your workflow from top to bottom and not vice versa.

General workflow rules

Since profiles are moved through the workflow from the top to the bottom, and some actions are not able to process 1st-degree connections and vice versa, here are three general rules you need to follow when creating a workflow:

1. In order to set a delay between Actions, for example, a week delay between messages, you need to use "Delay between actions".
2. Actions that work only with 2nd or 3rd-degree connections must not be added below actions that work with 1st connections only (unless you want to remove your 1st-degree connections), otherwise, you may end up having many profiles in the "Failed" list because you didn't set the workflow correctly.
3. Actions that work only with 1st-degree connections must not be added below Actions that work with 2nd or 3rd-degree connections only without "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" and "Filter contacts out of my network" Actions between them. Otherwise, you may end up having many profiles in the "Failed" list because you didn't invite profiles and they have not become your 1st-degree connections at the moment of processing by Actions that work only with 1st-degree connections.

As an example, "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action must be always above "Endorse my contacts" action, because "Endorse my contacts" can only process your 1st connection, and "Filter contacts out of my network" Action between them.

The reason is Linked Helper actions that work only with 1st connections will fail all those profiles who did not accept invite before being processed.

Linked Helper has a feature to make sure you don't get in this situation. If you try to add "Message to 1st connections | group members" action after "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action, you will see that those actions will be automatically "split" by "Filter contacts out of my network" Action:

adding Message to 1st connections | group members" after "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action

LH2 automatically puts "Filter contacts out of my network" Action between them, to move from "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action to "Message to 1st connections | group members" Action only those who became 1st connections

The same will happen if you try to add any other action that works only with 1st connections after "Invite 2nd and 3rd contacts" Action. But it doesn't mean that you can't add "Filter contacts out of my network" Action manually. "Filter contacts out of my network" is a very useful action when you need to split your workflow to actions that work only with 2nd/3rd connections and actions that work only with 1st connections. You can find a detailed article about how "Filter contacts out of my network" works and why you should use it here

How profiles are moved through the workflow

As mentioned above, profiles that you collect into your campaign, move from up to down of your workflow, so the workflow is basically a funnel. There are 2 ways on how the profiles are processed:

1. Processed by bunches
2. Processed one-by-one

By bunches

That means each action processes a bunch of profiles before Linked Helper will switch to another action. This happens when you have an action that delays profiles in the workflow. Actions that may delay profiles in your workflow are - "Delay between actions" and "Filter contacts out of my network (keep 1st level only)":

Example of such workflow:

In this workflow, Linked Helper will process several profiles in a row with "Visit & Extract" and several profiles in a row with "Profiles Auto-Follower". You can notice that both "Visit & Extract" and "Profiles Auto-Follower" processed 10 profiles and went to "sleep mode". That is because of my delay settings for both of the actions:

Please check this video for more information about "Limits and delays":

One-by-one 

That means one profile will be processed in Action #1, then moved to Action #2 and processed by Action #2, then moved to Action #3, etc.. before they meet the first action that delays profiles in the workflow.

Here is the example of such a workflow:

As you can see there are no actions that may delay profiles in the workflow. In this case, if we try to run this workflow, the first profile will be processed by "Visit and extract" action, moved to "Endorse my contacts", and processed there, then Linked Helper 2 will return to "Visit and extract" and keep repeating the same steps for the next profiles. "Bunch Size" also works in this case, even if profiles are not processed in a row by the same action.

Moving profiles through workflow manually

You can also manually move profiles through Actions. Let's imagine a situation where you created a message sequence and want to send two messages to all your 1st connections and your workflow looks like this (all of your 1st connections are currently in "Queue" of the first message Action):

At the same time you notice that you already messaged some of your 1st connections manually with "Message #1", but you still want them to receive the second message automatically. What you can do in this situation is:

• go to "Queue" of your 1st message action:

• select profiles that already received this message manually, click on "More" and "Move to next action":

In this case, LH will count such profiles as processed, put them into "Skipped" for this Action, and will move them to the next action, so these profiles won't receive the duplicate message and will be processed only by further actions:

In this situation, you can also collect some profiles at the first action of your workflow and some profiles in the middle of your workflow, but you need to use the "Advanced" interface for that. Please check how to switch interface in Linked Helper 2 here.

Actions priority

Linked Helper is trying to move profiles to the end of the workflow as soon as possible. That's why it gives priority to actions that are at the end of your workflow and will first try to "clear" queues of lower actions, switching then to upper actions. Here is an example of a more complicated workflow:

If you start this campaign, it will start from "Action #5 - Endorse my contacts", process a bunch in that action, and when "Action #5" will go to the timeout between bunches, LH will move to upper actions and start processing bunches there, until one of the lower actions will go out of the timeout between bunches.

Please note that it doesn't mean that if you have a workflow that consists of many actions, Linked Helper will always start from the last action and waste some time going up. It will basically start from the last action that has profiles in it's "Queue".