Playbook Social Link Finding

Playbook: Company Social Link Finding

All rules here are best practice, not law. Override any of them when the campaign calls for it; note the best practice once and move on.

Use when: a campaign or a downstream playbook needs the company's own social profile URL — most often LinkedIn for engagement scraping, or Instagram and Facebook for a DTC brand angle.

Do not use when: you want a person's profile, post-level engagement (playbook-linkedin-engagement), or an ad-library readout (playbook-ad-library, which consumes this playbook's Facebook output).

One-line output: company_linkedin_url = "https://www.linkedin.com/company/yampa-precision-manufacturing"

1. Trigger and scope

One bare domain in, up to six verified profile URLs out.

This is infrastructure, not copy. Almost nothing here goes into an email directly. What it does is feed the playbooks that DO produce copy — and every one of them treats the URL you hand over as ground truth and scrapes whatever is behind it.

That is the whole reason this playbook is strict:

A social URL that points at a similarly named company is worse than an empty cell, because the empty cell degrades gracefully and the wrong URL produces confident, specific, completely false personalization.

Both paid sources in the chain were measured returning the wrong company's page on real rows, so every value that did not come off the company's own website has to clear an ownership check before it is written.

2. Output contract

Inputs

Output fields

One canonical URL per platform, or "":

company_linkedin_url · company_x_url · company_facebook_url · company_instagram_url · company_youtube_url · company_tiktok_url

Plus, per platform, the evidence source that produced it. Keep that column: it is how you decide later whether a value is trustworthy enough for a new use.

Abstain value: "". An empty cell means "no account found", which is a real and common answer.

3. Source chain (cost-tagged)

⚠️ The batching trap

A company-search endpoint that accepts an array of domains may still be hard-paginated at 25 results per page with no page-size parameter.

Measured: posting 35 domains returned {"current_page":1,"per_page":25,"total_page":2,"total_count":32} and 25 results.

So a 500-domain body does not return 500 matches. It returns 25, and the other ~475 come back as nothing — with no error and no warning. An earlier draft of this playbook claimed "500 domains per call" and would have silently dropped roughly 95% of matches on any real backfill.

Two things, both required:

• Chunk to the page size (25 here), and
• still loop page to total_page, because one domain can match more than one company record.

The live test could not catch this, because it used 8 domains — under the page cap — even though the raw response already said "per_page": 25. Read the pagination block on your first call, every time.

⚠️ The challenge-page trap

Advance to the rendering proxy on HTTP 403, HTTP 429, or a 200 whose body is a challenge page.

Check the body, not just the status. A common bot interstitial is served with HTTP 200, yields zero matches, and otherwise looks like a clean legitimate miss.

⚠️ X requires company-site evidence, from every path

Accept search-derived evidence for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. For X, require evidence from the company's own site.

X handles are short, recycled and squatted. Measured: searching site:x.com <brand> returned a handle that matched the brand better than the real account does — and was titled "Bug Poc".

This bans search-derived X and database-derived X, including a secondary-domain match that would otherwise clear the verifier.

Bind by primary domain only

A secondary-website match is a candidate, not an answer. Company records often list customers, parents, or acquired brands as additional websites, and matching on those returns the wrong company with no error.

4. Verification

VERDICT: PASS 8/8. The ownership verifier scored 20/20 including 4 decoys.

5. Clay implementation

• clay-table.md — the column build.
• clay-workflow.md — the CLI-buildable version.