Renting or Buying LinkedIn Accounts - What Is Better?

If you’re running lead generation campaigns on LinkedIn then you probably understand how important having reliable LinkedIn accounts is for that process. In fact, we can easily argue that LinkedIn accounts are far more important than the tools you use to automate activity, which by the way are all prohibited and you shouldn't be using in the first place. Remember, an outreach tool without a LinkedIn account is worthless, it’s just a blank canvas and a straight ticket to a permanent ban. However, a LinkedIn account by itself can still send connections, follow-ups, and essentially generate new business for your company. That is why a lot of companies worldwide are incentivating their employees to have professional looking accounts. They view them as assets.

When it comes to LinkedIn accounts, you have three different options: you can either buy them, create them yourself, or rent them (includes matching with agents). In this article we will cover the pros and cons of each and by the end of this you will have enough information to make the best decision for your LinkedIn campaigns. 

Option 1: Creating A LinkedIn Account

Your first option would be to create a LinkedIn account from scratch. A lot of black hat groups create fake LinkedIn profiles or use IDs they find God knows where to create them from scratch. Technically you can create them yourself, but you are probably in for trouble over the mid term.

However, there are a couple of things to take into consideration. Newer LinkedIn profiles need to be warmed up for months before they can be used in outreach campaigns. They also tend to get restricted quite often and are very unstable at least for their first six months. Creating LinkedIn profiles for outreach is a cost-effective route but a not so effective one, time-wise. If, on top of this, you get a fake LinkedIn profile you created restricted then you can say goodbye to it for good and restart again.

Note: we are only highlighting that creating fake accounts is a process a lot of black hat actors do to try and we are not endorsing it in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. Actually, if anything, we strictly warn you to thread carefully if you're evaluating this method.

Option 2: Buying A LinkedIn Account

Your second option would be to buy a LinkedIn account and use it for outreach. You can find multiple LinkedIn account providers in the Internet but thread carefully, most are scammers just trying to trick you into sending them money for LinkedIn accounts that will get banned immediately or, worse, no LinkedIn accounts at all. Buying LinkedIn accounts will only leave you with fake profiles that, once banned, can’t get verified with IDs (as they have none). This can get annoying quite fast, so though it might seem like a cheaper short term solution, down the road it makes you burn money. 

Note: again, we don't recommend buying LinkedIn accounts. You don't know who these belong to and you might be impersonating someone without knowing. Please do your research if you have ever considered this.

Option 3: Renting or Matching With A LinkedIn Account

Your third and by far the best option would be to rent a LinkedIn account. Renting a LinkedIn account gives you access to real accounts from real people with real IDs you can use to verify them. Renting real LinkedIn accounts is the only solution that can provide a stable outreach over the long term.

However, when renting LinkedIn accounts you have two options.

The first consists of renting LinkedIn accounts, be it real or fake, and accessing the accounts directly. This violates LinkedIn's terms of service and can result in permanent bans. Many providers like LinkUnity and MirrorProfiles operate with this model. The former via real accounts and the latter via AI/fake accounts.

The second is called "profile matching" - or getting connected with a vetted outreach agent that will run campaigns on your behalf, just like a hired SDR would. This does not violate LinkedIn's terms since you wouldn't be accessing the account but rather the real account owner would be doing outreach on your behalf, following your training. Akountify operates with this model of "profile matching".

Now that you know your three options, it would be good if you take action and see what might be better for your use case. Remember always that having an army of LinkedIn accounts is always better than having an army of tools with no accounts to use on them. Also remember, automation tools are prohibited anyways, so don't make them your bottleneck.