Are LinkedIn post likers good leads?

Usually weaker than commenters. A like costs one click and many come from the author's friends and colleagues. A comment shows the person thought about the topic, and gives you their words to open with.

Which LinkedIn posts have the best engagers?

Posts about a specific problem your product solves, posts by competitors or their staff, and posts asking for tool recommendations. Viral motivational posts attract engagers who are mostly not buyers.

Is it against LinkedIn's rules to export post engagers?

LinkedIn's help centre says it does not permit third-party software that scrapes, automates activity on, or modifies its site, and accounts using such tools risk restriction. Check how any tool you use accesses the data.

How should I message a LinkedIn post engager?

Refer to what they said in their comment, add one useful thought, and ask one question. Do not pretend you know them, and do not pitch in the first message.

LinkedIn post engagers as leads: which posts, which people

The idea in one paragraph

A job-title search finds people who could buy. A post's engagers are people who just raised their hand about a topic, in public, with their name attached. If the topic is the problem you solve, some of them are buyers right now. The work is in choosing the right posts and separating buyers from the much larger crowd of peers, friends and fellow vendors who engage with everything.

Which posts are worth mining?

Not all posts are equal. The author and the subject decide who turns up in the comments.

Post type	Who engages	Lead value	Notes
A practitioner complaining about a specific problem	Others with the same problem	High	The best source. "Same here" comments are pure signal
"What tool do you use for X?"	People shopping and people selling	High, with filtering	Remove the vendors replying with their own product
A competitor's product announcement	Their customers, prospects and staff	Medium to high	Customers asking hard questions are your leads
A competitor's employee posting about the category	Their network: peers, prospects	Medium	Good for finding the buyer community
An industry influencer's opinion post	A broad mix, many sellers	Low to medium	Comments beat likes by a wide margin here
Viral career or motivational posts	Everyone	Low	Volume without fit. Skip

Rule of thumb: the narrower and more practical the post, the higher the share of buyers in its comments.

Comments versus reactions

A reaction costs one click. Many come from the author's colleagues and friends, and people react to dozens of posts a day. A comment takes thought and gives you something you can use: the person's own words about the problem.

Decision rule: treat commenters as your primary list. Only add reactors if the commenter list is short and the post is narrow (a complaint about a specific tool, say), and score them more strictly because you have less to go on.

Filtering the engagers: a worked example

Say you sell a scheduling tool for physiotherapy clinics, and a clinic owner posts about patients missing appointments. The post has 180 reactions and 40 comments. Here is how the list shrinks, with illustrative numbers.

Start with the 40 commenters.
Remove the author's obvious network (colleagues at the same clinic, the author replying to themselves): say 6 go, leaving 34.
Remove vendors. Anyone whose comment pitches their own product, or whose headline sells software or consulting: say 9 go, leaving 25.
Check fit. Clinic owners or practice managers, at clinics of a size you serve: say 12 remain.
Check now. Comments like "this is killing us at the moment" beat "we had this years ago": say 7 remain.

Seven people from one post, each with a sentence you can open with. That is a better day than 200 cold contacts from a database, because every one of the seven has told you they care.

Opening the conversation

The comment is your opening line. Three rules:

Name the comment, briefly. "Saw your reply on Priya's post about no-shows" is enough. Do not quote it back at length.
Add one useful thing. A tactic, a number from your own experience, a question that shows you understood.
Ask one easy question. Not for a call. Something they can answer in a line.

If you send a connection request, the note is short. LinkedIn's help centre says notes can be up to 200 characters, and free accounts can add a personal note to only a few connection requests a month (three, at the time of writing); Premium removes that cap, though other connection request limits still apply. A good 200-character note is one specific sentence and one question. More on writing it in write a first message from their words.

The rules you have to respect

LinkedIn's help centre says it does not permit third-party software, including crawlers, bots, browser plug-ins or extensions, that scrapes, modifies the appearance of, or automates activity on its website. Members using such tools risk having their accounts restricted or shut down.

In practice: be wary of any tool that logs in as you and clicks through post engagers, or sends invites on a timer from your account. The risk sits with your account, not the tool's. Read how a tool gets its data before you connect your profile. We cover the invitation side in LinkedIn sending limits.

Doing it by hand versus with a tool

By hand, the method above takes roughly 20 to 30 minutes per post: open the comments, check each profile, note the keepers. That is fine for two or three posts a week.

Sluice does the reading and filtering. Paste a LinkedIn post (or search for phrases across LinkedIn, Reddit, X and five other platforms), and it works out who each engager is, scores them 0 to 100 against your customer profile on fit, worth approaching and whether their words show the problem now, and ranks them with a link back to the post. It drafts an opening from their comment, scores the draft, and sends only through a LinkedIn account you connect, only for messages you approve. Platform access can change, which is a real limitation of any tool that reads public posts. See LinkedIn as a lead source and, if you came from Trigify, what to do before it shuts down.

This week

Find three narrow posts about the problem you solve, list their commenters, and run the five-step filter above. If fewer than one in ten survive, your posts are too broad. Pick narrower ones and try again.