How to access your LinkedIn Cookie and what exactly does a cookie do?

If you're using the LinkedIn Personalisation system within Smartwriter, you'll need access to a LinkedIn cookie from your LinkedIn account.

How to access your LinkedIn Cookie and what exactly does a cookie do?

Lets first kickoff to understand what Cookies exactly are:

  • Cookies are a set of text files that allow browsers to remember whether you have seen a website before, and if so, what information you've saved.
  • Our browser stores tiny data files known as cookies. When we request a page from a website, such as this one, our browser sends any stored cookies back to the server. These cookies are often used to identify you, including your name, interests, and previous activity."
  • The majority of websites use cookies for analytics, recommendations and advertising.

PS Instructions for Instagram and Other platforms are at the bottom*

So how does SmartWriter use cookies?

SmartWriter uses cookies to access LinkedIn data. This means that when you login to a website, it appears as if our systems viewing the same content. This is pretty much how any scraping service in the world works, cookies help us leverage server based authentication to fetch user data. This is why we've set up safety systems to prevent over use.

If you're outreach plan is around 30 profiles a day you can continue using your primary account, however we recommend you creating an isolated account for outreach which you can then use to scale to 50 or even 100 profiles a day. We have built human behaviour inspired algorithms to protect accounts as much as we can.

So with that being said, lets kick off:

In Google Chrome
  1. Open a new tab and visit the website whose cookie you're looking for.
  2. Right-click anywhere on the page and click on Inspect.

Linkedin Cookie source

3. You'll have the console open up for you. Switch to Applications tab.

Application preference

4. Then scroll down on the left side. Expand on the Cookies option, you'll see www.linkedin.com


Linkedin Cookie storage

From there you need to find the li_at value, which will look something similar to this

Linkedin Cookie list value

All you need to do is copy that Value and head over to your SmartWriter Account and paste the value when you click into a LinkedIn Personalised Outreach Message template

Linkedin Outreach personalisation

And thats all there is, the magic will kick off and you'll be generating unique and personalised messages to your prospects. Here's a full tutorial on how

Okay but what if you're looking for Instagram's cookie or maybe Twitter, the process remains exactly the same as above, except instead of using the li_at variable you will be using sessionid (for Instagram)

Make sure you click on the "Show URL decoded" and only then copy it across

Decoded URL display in Smartwriter

Here's a reference image for all the social medias


Cookies name for Social media platforms