Learn GTM & Sales Automation LinkedIn Engagement Leads

LinkedIn Prospecting

LinkedIn engagement leads: from likes to booked calls

Find the people already reacting to posts in your market, keep the ones who fit, and reach out without burning your LinkedIn account.

4-stage pipeline 8 tools compared ~7 min read

LinkedIn engagement leads are people who liked or commented on a post about your market. They are easier to open a conversation with than a cold list. You know at least one topic they care about, and you know they are active on LinkedIn.

The catch is doing it by hand. A post with 284 likes and 42 comments is an afternoon of clicking profiles. Most of those people are the poster's coworkers or the wrong job title. This guide walks through the PhantomBuster setup from this walkthrough video, what to filter, and the alternatives if PhantomBuster isn't the right fit.

Problem and solution illustration for LinkedIn engagement leads: finding people who like or comment on posts by hand is slow, so PhantomBuster flows find engagers, collect profile data, filter for your ICP and run LinkedIn outreach, with Sales Navigator, Google Sheets, Zapier and native LinkedIn analytics as alternatives.

The problem and the solution on one page. The rest of this guide goes stage by stage.

The workflow

How the LinkedIn engagement leads pipeline works

Two PhantomBuster flows do the work. The first finds and stores engagers. The second takes a filtered list and sends invitations. Strip the tool names away and it's four stages any stack can copy.

  1. 1

    Source engagement

    Pick posts your buyers already react to.

    • A company page (yours, a competitor, an adjacent tool) or a personal profile (an influencer your ICP follows)
    • Choose commenters only, or commenters and likers
    • Limit to recent posts with a date range
  2. 2

    Extract profiles

    Turn each reaction into a row.

    • Name, headline, company and profile URL
    • The post URL and the comment text, if there is one
    • Re-check the same page on a schedule so new engagers get added
  3. 3

    Qualify leads

    Cut the list down to your ICP.

    • Exclude the poster's own employees
    • Keep titles that match, e.g. "CEO" or "co-founder"
    • Drop existing customers and people already in a sequence
  4. 4

    Outreach and measure

    Invite, follow up, count what matters.

    • Connection request plus a follow-up once it is accepted
    • A low daily cap, such as 20 invitations a day
    • Track accepted invites, replies and booked meetings

Setting it up in PhantomBuster

1. Point the post scraper at a source

Choose the company-post scraper or the personal-profile scraper. The example in the video targets Notion's company page, looking for CEOs and co-founders. Connect your LinkedIn account and pick commenters only, or commenters and likers. A date range keeps it to recent posts.

The flow chains a few PhantomBuster tools together. One finds new posts on the page. Another extracts everyone who reacted. It then re-checks the page on a schedule, so the table keeps growing. Each row holds the profile, the post URL and the comment text.

2. Let it run, then check the dashboard

The dashboard shows a table of scraped profiles and a daily activity report. After a few days the example had pulled engagers from 29 posts. That's the raw pool. Don't send anything to it yet.

3. Filter the list to your ICP

Create a list from the collected profiles and add rules. The first rule is always the same: exclude people who work at the company you scraped. Notion employees liking Notion posts tell you nothing. Then keep titles containing "CEO" or "co-founder", and narrow further with location, company or other profile fields.

4. Connect the outreach flow

Feed the filtered list into the LinkedIn outreach flow. Write the invitation note and a follow-up that goes out as soon as someone accepts. The video caps it at 20 invitations a day. The flow consumes new rows as the scraper adds them, so the two flows become one continuous prospecting loop.

Once it works on one page, add more sources. Your own company page finds warm people. Competitor pages and influencers in your niche find people who've never heard of you but are clearly in the market.

Not all engagement is equal

A like is not buying intent

Engagement is a prospecting signal, not a qualification. Rank what you scrape before it reaches a sequence. Here is roughly how we'd weigh it.

Signal Strength Why
Thoughtful comment on a post about the problem you solve Strong They wrote something. You have a real opener and know what they care about.
Comment on a competitor's post Strong They are evaluating the category, or already paying someone in it.
Same person engaging with several posts over a few weeks Strong Repeat attention is rarer than a one-off reaction and much harder to fake.
Like on an industry post, matching title and company size Medium Right person, weak intent. Worth a light touch, not a hard pitch.
"Great post!" style comment Weak Often engagement farming. Treat it like a like.
Like from someone at the poster's company Weak Employees like their own company posts. Filter them out first.

The comment text is the most useful column in the export. Use it in the invitation note. "Saw your point about onboarding docs going stale on Notion's post" gets accepted. "I'd love to connect" gets ignored. Also judge each source by what comes out the other end: accepted invites, replies, meetings and deals. A page that produces 500 profiles and two replies is a worse source than one that produces 40 profiles and six.

PhantomBuster alternatives

Replace the part you actually need

No single tool does every stage equally well. Decide which stage you're replacing (finding engagers, enriching, or outreach), then pick for that.

PhantomBuster

Find + outreach

The setup this guide is based on. One flow scrapes likers and commenters from target posts, a second sends invitations and follow-ups to a filtered list.

Signado

Find engagers

Built around finding people who engage with LinkedIn posts and comments, with the context of what they engaged with. Closest to the engagement half of the workflow.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Find + qualify

LinkedIn's own search by title, company size, industry and region. Save leads, watch their activity and review posts by hand. No scraping, so no account risk.

Apify

Custom extraction

Ready-made scrapers ("Actors") plus an API for building your own. Good for technical teams, but you assemble the engagement-to-outreach pipeline yourself.

TexAu

No-code automation

Multi-step prospecting workflows in the same spirit as PhantomBuster. Check that a current recipe covers post engagement before you commit.

Waalaxy

Outreach

Import a qualified list and run connection and follow-up sequences. Stronger at the outreach stage than at finding every liker or commenter.

Clay

Enrich + score

Adds company data, job details and contact info from many providers to a list you already have. Turns raw engagers into scored prospects.

Apollo.io

Database + sequences

Search a B2B contact database by title, industry and company size, then sequence them. A different approach: ICP fit first, no post engagement involved.

Torn between building the enrichment step in Clay or in a workflow tool? See n8n vs Clay for cold outreach.

Pick a starting point

What's your main goal?

Choose a goal to see where to start.

The low-risk route

Find LinkedIn engagement leads without scraping

LinkedIn's user agreement prohibits scraping and automated activity through third-party software. Accounts get restricted for it. If that risk is too high, automate the spreadsheet work instead of the LinkedIn work.

  1. 1

    LinkedIn Sales Navigator

    Find relevant companies and decision-makers, and read what they post and comment on.

  2. 2

    Google Sheets

    One row per prospect, with the engagement signal you saw written next to it.

  3. 3

    Apps Script or n8n

    Dedupe rows, score ICP fit and set follow-up dates.

  4. 4

    Personal outreach

    Review each prospect and write to them yourself, referencing what they engaged with.

It's slower, but every message is personal by default, and nothing runs on your account while you sleep. The slow part is copying profile details into the sheet. Our LinkedIn CRM extension handles that: right-click a profile you've chosen and it's saved with your tags and notes, and sent on to your Sheet or CRM if you want. You still do the reviewing. It just removes the copy-paste.

Common questions

FAQ: LinkedIn engagement leads

Save the right people in one right-click

You pick the prospects. LinkedIn CRM saves them with tags, notes and your own fields, and can send each one to Google Sheets or your CRM.

See LinkedIn CRM → Learn GTM engineering

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