--- title: "Find LinkedIn Users Engaging Your Competitors | CatchIntent" url: https://catchintent.com/blog/find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors/ description: "A guide to finding LinkedIn users who like, comment on, and follow your competitors. Manual workflow, tools, ICP filtering, and outreach plays included." --- [← Back to blog](https://catchintent.com/blog/) # Find LinkedIn Users Engaging Your Competitors A guide to finding LinkedIn users who like, comment on, and follow your competitors. Manual workflow, tools, ICP filtering, and outreach plays included. ![Akash Rajpurohit](https://catchintent.com/static/images/akashrajpurohit.jpg) Akash Rajpurohit · July 16, 2026 · 12 min read ![Find LinkedIn Users Engaging Your Competitors](https://catchintent.com/static/images/scenaries/scenary-087.png) Most teams audit competitor LinkedIn pages for the wrong reason. They check post counts, follower growth, and engagement rate so they can copy the playbook. It’s vanity research dressed up as strategy. The real gold isn’t the competitor’s content. It’s the people clicking like, leaving comments, and hitting follow under that content. Those people are problem-aware, in your category, and most of them aren’t being outreached to by anyone yet. Your competitor saw the engagement notification, said “nice”, and moved on. That list of warm hand-raisers is sitting there, public, waiting for someone to qualify and reach out. > TL;DR: People who engage with your competitors’ LinkedIn content are warmer than any cold list. They’ve self-identified as in-category and problem-aware. Track four behaviours: liking posts, commenting, following the company page, and attending competitor webinars. Use a manual workflow (free, slow) or tools like Surfe, Lemlist signals, Common Room, Gojiberry, or CatchIntent to automate it. Filter for ICP fit before outreach. Lead with the problem they’re researching, not the engagement itself. If you build one new prospecting motion this quarter, make it this one. ## Why Competitor Engagers Are Warm Cold outreach assumes nothing about the person. You picked them off a Sales Navigator filter and hoped the timing was right. Competitor engagement flips that. Three things are already true about anyone engaging with a competitor’s content: - **They’re problem-aware.** Nobody likes a CRM post unless they think about CRMs. The category itself is on their mind. - **They’re in-market or near-market.** Following a vendor or commenting on their feature launch is a soft buying signal. They’re learning about solutions. - **They’re not locked in.** If they were already a happy customer, they wouldn’t be browsing the alternatives’ content. The fact that they’re publicly engaging with your competitor (not just using them) often means they’re still in the consideration set. The rough conversion math, based on what we see across teams running this: | Lead source | Reply rate | Meeting rate | | --- | --- | --- | | Cold list (firmographic match only) | 1 to 3% | 0.3 to 0.8% | | Competitor engagers (ICP-filtered) | 8 to 15% | 2 to 5% | | Recommendation requests on Reddit/X | 15 to 25% | 5 to 10% | Competitor engagement sits in the warm middle. Not as hot as someone publicly asking for a tool, but five to ten times warmer than cold. And the volume is much bigger than recommendation posts, so it’s the most scalable warm channel. ## Four Behaviours Worth Tracking Not all engagement is equal. Here’s how to rank by warmth. ### Liking competitor posts The lightest signal, but also the highest volume. Someone liking a post about “the 5 things wrong with our category” or a feature launch is showing passive interest. Multiple likes across multiple posts (especially product-related ones) is a stronger pattern than a single like. Watch for likes on: - Feature launch posts - “We raised” announcements - Comparison or competitor-callout posts - Customer case study posts (these are pure buyer-mode signals) ### Commenting on competitor posts Stronger signal. Someone willing to type a public reply is investing more attention. Read the comment. There are three flavours: - **Positive (“love this”, “great launch”)**: They like the competitor. Could still be warm if they’re a prospect, not a customer. Many prospects compliment vendors they’re evaluating. - **Question (“does this support X?”)**: Gold. They’re evaluating. Whatever they’re asking about is the gap they care about. - **Critical (“missing Y feature, switched away”)**: Even better. They’re frustrated. If your product solves Y, this person wants to talk to you. ### Following the company page Underrated signal. Followers are a slower commitment than likes, but it indicates sustained category interest. The catch: LinkedIn doesn’t show you a competitor’s full follower list (only mutuals via Sales Nav workarounds). New followers can sometimes be inferred via “Recent Activity” of your existing connections. This one is hardest to track manually but is what tools do well. ### Attending competitor webinars and events Strongest signal of the four. Showing up to a 45-minute product demo is real intent. You can find attendees through: - Public LinkedIn event pages (attendee list is sometimes visible) - Posts in the days after the event (“just attended X’s webinar, great session” is a warm public confession) - Replies on the competitor’s “thanks for joining” post If your competitor runs monthly webinars, that’s a recurring warm-lead pipeline you can mine. ## The Manual Approach You can do this for zero dollars. It just takes time. **Step 1: Pick 3 to 5 direct competitors.** Not every brand in your category. The ones whose customers you actually win against. If you don’t know, ask your last five closed-won customers who else they evaluated. **Step 2: Bookmark their LinkedIn company pages.** Visit each page weekly. Sort posts by recent. Open the engagement panel on the top 5 posts from the last 7 days. **Step 3: Skim names.** Don’t try to capture everyone. Look for ICP-shaped titles (the seniority, function, and company size you sell to). Spend 60 seconds per post, no more. **Step 4: Copy promising names into a doc.** Just first name, last name, title, company. Do this for likes and comments. Note the post they engaged with, that’s your conversation starter later. **Step 5: Qualify against your ICP checklist.** Open each profile. Confirm company size, role authority, geography, industry. Drop anyone who doesn’t fit. You should be cutting 50 to 70% at this stage. **Step 6: Draft outreach for the survivors.** Reference the problem the post addressed, not the like. Send connection requests with a short note (more on this below). A focused operator can run this loop on 5 competitors in about 2 hours a week and get 30 to 50 qualified prospects out of it. That’s enough to keep one rep busy with warm pipeline. The downside: it’s manual, fragile, and your week off means an empty pipeline. Which is why most teams switch to tools once it’s working. ## The Tool Approach Several tools automate parts of this loop. None of them do the full thing as well as a sharp human, but they all save hours. | Tool | What it tracks | Strength | Weakness | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | Surfe | LinkedIn likes/comments via Chrome extension | Cheap, easy to start, exports to your CRM | Manual scrape, you still pick the posts | | Lemlist (Signals) | Job changes, engagement, intent across sources | Bundled with sequencing tool | Engagement signals are a feature, not the focus | | Common Room | Multi-source community + LinkedIn signals | Strong for community-led teams (Slack, Discord, GitHub) | Pricier, broader than just LI | | Gojiberry | LinkedIn engagement + AI SDR flow | Good UX for LI-first teams | Newer, smaller dataset | | CatchIntent | Scheduled agents that find people matching your ICP plus signals (including competitor engagement) | Defines an Agent once, runs daily, AI-drafts opener referencing the actual post, browser extension delivers it | LinkedIn-only, Growth $99/Scale $249/mo | Most teams pick one and stop there. The decision usually comes down to whether you want a Chrome-extension-driven manual workflow (Surfe), a bundled-with-sequencing approach (Lemlist), or a fully scheduled agent that wakes up daily and pushes leads into your inbox (CatchIntent, Gojiberry). The pattern across the better tools is the same: you tell it your ICP and the competitors you care about, it watches the engagement, it filters, it drafts. Your job becomes review and approve, not search and copy. ## Filtering for ICP Fit This is where most teams blow it. They get excited about a list of 200 competitor engagers and start blasting. Half of them are vendors selling to your competitor, students, junior employees with no buying power, or people in geographies you don’t sell to. A simple ICP filter has 4 to 5 hard rules. For example: - Title includes (Head of, VP, Director, Manager) AND function (Sales, Marketing, RevOps, Growth) - Company headcount between 50 and 500 - Geography in (US, UK, Canada, Australia) - Not a current customer, not in pipeline already - Not a competitor employee Run every name through the filter before drafting outreach. If a tool doesn’t let you set hard ICP filters, it’ll waste your sequencing slots. The cleaner your ICP, the better this motion works. Vague ICPs (“B2B SaaS marketers”) produce noisy lists. Sharp ICPs (“Heads of Demand Gen at Series A to B SaaS, 50 to 200 employees, US”) produce lists where 70% are real prospects. ## Outreach Plays Once someone’s qualified, the outreach has to feel like a normal human reaching out. Not a stalker who scraped their like history. **The cardinal rule:** never lead with the engagement itself. Lead with the problem. ### For likers Bad: > “Hey Sarah, saw you liked [Competitor]‘s post about pipeline forecasting. Want to chat?” That’s slimy. She knows you watched her like. It triggers privacy creep and gets ignored. Good: > “Hey Sarah, came across your profile while researching demand-gen leaders at Series B SaaS companies. We help teams who are rethinking their pipeline forecasting setup, often when the spreadsheet stops working around 50 reps. If that’s on your radar in Q4, happy to share what we’ve learned. If not, no worries.” This references the topic she engaged with (pipeline forecasting) without admitting you watched her like. Same warm context, no creep factor. ### For commenters Commenters are easier because their comment is public and they expect engagement. Reference the comment naturally. Good: > “Hey Marcus, saw your comment on [Competitor]‘s launch post asking about API access. We solve that exact problem differently, our API is the primary surface (the UI is built on top of it). Would 15 minutes be useful?” You’re treating their public question as what it is: a public question. Answering it isn’t creepy. ### For followers Hardest because there’s no specific post to reference. Use the category framing. Good: > “Hey Priya, you and I are both watching the [Category] space closely. We’re a newer player in it, with a different take on [the thing your category gets wrong]. Curious if you’d want to compare notes for 15 minutes?” The framing is peer-to-peer, not pitch-to-prospect. ### For webinar attendees Strongest case. Reference the topic of the webinar. Good: > “Hey Tom, [Competitor] ran a great session on [topic] last week. We have a different angle on [specific point], specifically [your differentiator]. Mind if I send you a 90-second loom?” Loom > meeting on first touch. Lower commitment, higher reply rate. ## Common Mistakes A few patterns I see teams fall into: **Outreaching everyone in the engagement list.** No filter. They burn their domain reputation and get 0.5% reply rates because 80% of the list isn’t ICP. **Mentioning the engagement directly.** “I saw you liked X” is the fastest way to get blocked. Reference the topic, not the action. **Pitching on first message.** Competitor engagers are warm, not hot. Lead with problem framing or a useful resource. Earn the meeting in message two or three. **Ignoring negative engagers.** Someone leaving a critical comment on your competitor is the warmest lead you’ll find this month. Many teams skip them because the comment is “negative”. They’re missing the point. Frustration with the incumbent is buying intent. **Running it once and giving up.** This is a weekly motion. Engagement happens daily. Set a recurring slot or use a tool that runs scheduled agents. **Skipping the qualification step.** Even with great tools, ICP fit varies. A 5-minute profile review per name keeps the list sharp. ## Key Takeaways - Competitor engagers are 5 to 10x warmer than cold lists because they’re already problem-aware and in-category. - Track four behaviours: likes, comments, follows, webinar attendance. Comments and webinar attendance are the strongest. - Manual workflow is free and works. Tools (Surfe, Lemlist, Common Room, Gojiberry, CatchIntent) save hours but require an ICP filter to be useful. - Always qualify against ICP before outreaching. Cut 50 to 70%. - Never reference the engagement itself in outreach. Reference the topic. - Frustrated commenters on a competitor’s posts are often your hottest leads. Don’t skip them. --- ## Frequently Asked Questions **Is it legal or ethical to track who likes my competitor’s posts?** Yes. Likes, comments, and follows on LinkedIn are public actions. Anyone can see them. The ethical line is in how you reach out, not in observing public behaviour. Don’t reference the like itself in your message and you’re well within normal sales practice. **How many competitors should I track?** 3 to 5 direct competitors. More than that and the list becomes noise. Stick to the ones your customers actually evaluated against you. **What if my competitors don’t post much on LinkedIn?** Then this motion doesn’t apply to your category. Look at where your buyers actually engage instead, that might be Reddit, Slack communities, or industry newsletters. **How often should I run this loop?** Weekly, at minimum. Engagement is fresh for about 7 days before the prospect’s attention has moved on. Scheduled-agent tools run daily, which is better. **Should I send a connection request or InMail?** Connection request with a short note. Acceptance rates are 25 to 40% with a relevant note vs 5 to 10% for InMail (plus InMail credits are limited). **Will my competitors notice and block me?** Possibly. Don’t engage with their posts yourself if you’re trying to mine them, just observe. Tools that scrape via your account carry slightly more risk than tools using their own data sources. **Is this enough to fill a pipeline on its own?** For most B2B teams, no. It’s one of three to five warm channels (recommendation requests, trigger events, intent signals, referrals). Don’t rely on a single channel. --- ## Related Reading - [How to Find Buyer Intent Signals on LinkedIn](https://catchintent.com/blog/how-to-find-buyer-intent-signals-linkedin/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) - [How to Generate LinkedIn Leads Without Cold Outreach](https://catchintent.com/blog/linkedin-leads-without-cold-outreach/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) - [From Signal to Closed Deal](https://catchintent.com/blog/from-signal-to-closed-deal/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) - [How to Find Warm Leads](https://catchintent.com/blog/how-to-find-warm-leads/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) - [LinkedIn Prospecting Without Sales Navigator](https://catchintent.com/blog/linkedin-prospecting-without-sales-navigator/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) - [Buyer Intent Signals: Examples That Convert](https://catchintent.com/blog/buyer-intent-signals-examples/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors) --- *Akash Rajpurohit is the founder of CatchIntent. He writes about buyer intent, social listening, and the practical end of B2B prospecting. Find him on [Twitter](https://x.com/AkashWhoCodes?utm_source=catchintent.com&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=find-linkedin-users-engaging-competitors).* Keep reading ## More from the journal [Aug 5, 2026 · Akash Rajpurohit ## Best B2B Prospecting Tool 2026: Buyer Guide There's no single best B2B prospecting tool—there's the right tool for your motion. This guide cuts through the noise: what each tool actually does, who it's for, and how to build a stack that matches your GTM. Read post →](https://catchintent.com/blog/b2b-prospecting-tool)[Aug 2, 2026 · Akash Rajpurohit ## Find ICP Prospects Automatically (2026) Stop spending hours on prospect research. Here is how to find ICP-matched prospects automatically using agents, intent signals, and AI-powered discovery. Read post →](https://catchintent.com/blog/how-to-find-icp-prospects-automatically)[Jul 31, 2026 · Akash Rajpurohit ## Signal-Based Selling for RevOps Teams (2026) How RevOps teams build a signal-based selling motion in 2026: data sources, scoring rubrics, routing, SLAs, attribution, and the mistakes that kill the program. Read post →](https://catchintent.com/blog/signal-based-selling-for-revops) Less reading, more catching ## Stop tab-hopping. *Get warm leads tomorrow* Spin up your first agent in five minutes. Wake up to scored, drafted leads tomorrow. [Start free trial →](https://app.catchintent.com/register) [See pricing](https://catchintent.com/pricing/) 7-day trial · Cancel anytime