The people liking and commenting on your competitors' and your niche creators' posts have raised their hands. Go and talk to them.
A-leads, a B2B contact-data company in a market dominated by Apollo.io, searched LinkedIn for busy posts about Apollo and collected everyone who liked, commented on or shared them. It kept only senior sales leaders at companies of ten or more people who scored at least 80% against its ideal customer profile, sent each a connection request, and pitched A-leads as a tool built for teams that use Apollo and ZoomInfo.
Of 4,100 connection requests, 2,170 were accepted (53%), 410 people replied (19% of those who accepted) and 150 replies were positive, and at least five contracts were signed at $10,000 or more a year (Sendpilot case study, undated). Sendpilot sells the tool used to collect the engagers, positive replies are not qualified pipeline, and there was no control group.
B2B companies selling to people who are active on LinkedIn.
Engagement is a live sign of interest with a reason to write built in: the targeting is warm even when the channel is cold. It matters more as LinkedIn gets noisier: replies to LinkedIn connection notes have fallen 37% (Overloop, a sales software company, June 2026), so a message needs a reason to exist.
Vendor. A-leads' figures from Sendpilot's case study (undated). Overloop's 2026 benchmarks on falling LinkedIn connection-note replies (June 2026).
Cost to test. Data tools at tens to a few hundred dollars a month, or an hour a week by hand.
Kill it if after a month and 200 contacts it still trails the reply rate of your ordinary list.
Scraping LinkedIn breaches its user agreement: treat it as a research signal, not a mass list, and keep volumes low. Naming the exact post you saw can feel like surveillance, so keep it light. Data protection law applies to every name you collect, so keep only what you use.
The Founder Feed, Boost the Founder, Trigger Outreach
A 30-minute call first. If it fits, two calls in one week and a written growth plan you keep.