Automation, especially in digital marketing, has become an important progress feature. It can greatly reduce the time spent on menial work so that you can spend more time doing the things you'd rather be doing and just pass the simple work to the bot. Most of the time, these trade-offs are business-critical functions.
It might be tempting to start automating such tasks to boost your company's productivity and efficiency. The demand in such a service is so great that it has led to companies scrambling to obtain them. Along with the rise in demand also comes a rise in supply. A lot of tools that offer this functionality exist today in the market, including but not limited to software programs, bots and browser plug-ins and extensions.
However, there are some caveats to using such tools on the platform.
1. Using such tools can get you banned
Although scraping the platform is considered legal after HiQ winning the case of legal action taken against web scrapers (read our article, Is the platform Scraping Legal, for more details), the platform policies for platform users include some restrictions and limited access to profile data that make automation hard to do. One of them is as stated [in the platform website](https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/help/the platform/answer/82934/account-content-restricted-or-removed? an unusually large number of page views from the account can get your account restricted or even removed.
[the platform website](https://www.professionalsocialnetwork.com/help/the platform/answer/56347/prohibited-software-and-extensions? also state that it is prohibited to develop, support or use the software, devices, scripts, robots, or any other means or processes (including crawlers, browser plugins, and add-ons, or any other technology) to scrape the Services or otherwise copy profiles and other data from the Services and use bots or other automated methods to access the Services, add or download contacts, send or redirect messages. These actions can violate the User Agreement and risk your account from being restricted or shut down.
Although using automation tools can help you scrape the platform and manage your account, it may not be a good idea to risk your account which may result in losing all your connections and lead customers. Thus, the risk of utilizing the platform automation tools to your the platform account may outweigh the rewards.