LinkedIn Engagement Prospecting: Turn Likes and Comments Into Actual Leads

Everyone who reacts to or comments on a post is publicly raising their hand on a topic. That’s a warm list. The trick is filtering it down to the people who fit your ICP — instead of scrolling 600 names and quitting at #80. Here’s how to do that, and why commenters usually beat likers.

Cold lists are stale the day you buy them. A LinkedIn post that just went viral in your space? That’s the opposite — a fresh, public, timestamped list of people who care about your exact topic right now. The only problem is the format: an un-filterable scroll. Let’s fix that.

Are LinkedIn likes actually a good sales signal?

Short answer: yes, but with a ceiling. A like means someone saw the post, agreed enough to tap a button, and is interested in the topic. That’s real intent — way warmer than a name pulled from a database. It’s a lightsignal though. They didn’t necessarily read closely or have a burning pain. Treat a like as “worth a relevant message,” not “ready to buy.”

The bigger point: a like tells you who’s paying attention to your topic. For prospecting, that’s gold — as long as you can filter the list down to your buyers.

Commenters vs likers — who do you go after first?

Go after commenters first. A comment costs more than a tap — they took the time to write something, which usually means a stronger opinion, a real question, or a visible pain you can reference. A good engagement workflow pulls bothreactors and commenters, but if you’re triaging, commenters are the warmer half and they hand you an opener on a plate (“you mentioned X under Dana’s post — curious how you’re handling it”).

So: both, but start with the people who actually typed something.

The trap: 600 reactions looks like opportunity, scrolling it looks like a job

Here’s where most people stall. You spot a post with 600 reactions, your buyers are clearly in there, so you open the list and start reading headlines. Ten in, fine. Fifty in, fatigued. Eighty in, you quit — and everything below, including plenty of perfect-fit people, never gets seen.

The signal is genuine. The manual scroll is what kills it. (We break the native-view limits down in how to see who liked a post.)

What engagement prospecting actually means

It means you don’t work the whole list — you work the slice that matches your buyer. Define your ICP once (target titles, a seniority range, the roles you always exclude), and let a classifier sort every engager into relevant or not for you, with a category and a confidence score. You read the top section and ignore the rest.

That’s the difference between a raw export dump and a prospect list. The filtering is the product— and weirdly, it’s the step almost no tool does. Most stop at “here’s everyone who engaged.” The useful question is “which of these 300 fit myICP?”

That’s what ReactedTo is built for. Paste a post URL, it pulls reactors and commenters (deduped), classifies each by job title against your ICP, and hands back the split. On a typical 600-reaction post that’s roughly 30–80 relevant prospects, in a couple of minutes.

How to find leads from a competitor’s post

This is the move people underuse. Your competitor’s audience is your audience. When they post something that lands, the people reacting are interested in the exact problem you both solve.

1. Grab the URL of a competitor’s (or thought leader’s) high-engagement post.
2. Set your ICP — your target titles, not theirs.
3. Pull the reactors + commenters and filter to your buyers.
4. Reach out with an honest, specific opener referencing the post.

You’re not stealing anything — it’s a public list. You’re just reading it better than they are.

A quick reality check on what you get

The filter runs on each person’s job title / LinkedIn headline against your ICP. It does notpull company size, industry, location, or email — that’s not what this is. You get a sorted, exportable list of people and titles, fresh off a post they engaged with. And LinkedIn caps reactions at ~1,218 per post, so on a mega-viral post you’re working a big sample, not literally every reactor. (See exactly what the export includes.)

Try it on a post your buyers are already on — free trial, 150 engagers, no card. See your filtered list · or see the pricing (free trial, then $29/mo).