Why is my basic Social search only adding a few prospects to my campaign?

When running a Social search campaign using a basic (non-Sales Navigator) account, you may notice that prospects are being added slowly or in small numbers, even when your search returns hundreds of results. This article explains how basic Social search works within the platform and what you can do to optimize prospect sourcing.

This behavior is expected for basic Social searches. Here's what's happening and how to address it:

How basic Social search adds prospects:

• Basic Social search processes 10 prospects per page, one page at a time, on a scheduled basis.

• The search automatically pauses when a campaign has more than 80 prospects queued and waiting to be processed. It resumes on its own once the queue drops below that threshold — no manual action is needed.

• Using the Rerun Search button restarts the search from page 1, which re-pulls the same people. Avoid using Rerun unless you specifically want to restart from the beginning.

Important note about Instant Searches:

Instant Searches currently only speeds up Sales Navigator searches. For basic Social accounts, having Instant Searches enabled hides the Pages Searched setting without providing any speed benefit. To ensure your settings are configured correctly:

1. Go to Settings > Account Limits in the relevant account.

2. Turn off Instant Searches. This will restore normal search pacing for basic Social accounts.

3. Once Instant Searches is off, the Pages Searched setting may display as Unlimited, which is the expected behavior — no further changes are needed.

Tips to improve sourcing speed for basic Social accounts:

• Pause other active searches on the same account so the campaign you care about gets the full available capacity.

• Review your search URLs to make sure boolean operators like OR are capitalized correctly. Using lowercase or causes Social to treat it as a regular word rather than a boolean operator, which can result in very few or repeated results.

• If you need a large list sourced quickly, consider using a CSV upload as a workaround. You can export connections directly from the Social Platform (Me > Settings & Privacy > Data privacy > Download your data) and upload the file to your campaign. The 80-prospect queue limit does not apply to CSV imports, so contacts are added all at once.

• For clients who regularly need large lists sourced quickly, Sales Navigator is the recommended option, as Instant Searches provides a meaningful speed improvement for those accounts.