Read Their Likes, Not Their Posts

I used to judge a prospect by what they posted.

Most of my best prospects have never written a post in their life.

The simple idea

LinkedIn decides what to show you based on what you engage with. Like three posts about pipeline data and you will see pipeline data for a month.

That works in reverse too.

If you can see what a person liked and commented on, you can work backwards to what is on their mind. The feed is a mirror. You are just reading it from the other side.

How it applies

A job title tells you what someone is responsible for. It does not tell you what is bothering them this month.

Their engagement does.

Someone who commented on four posts about dirty CRM data is telling you, in public, that they are thinking about dirty CRM data. You did not have to guess and you did not have to ask.

What I found

In August I was in a Clay AlphaForge session building this and I pulled one person as a test.

Zero posts in a year. Six comments. Ten likes.

Every one of those sixteen actions was about the same problem. I knew more about what he cared about than I would have learned from a discovery call, and he had never typed a word into the feed.

That was the moment it clicked for me. The people who look quiet are not quiet. They just do not write.

How it works

I run it in Clay with three Apify actors.

1. A post scraper, for anything they wrote.
2. A comment scraper, for anything they replied to.
3. A reaction scraper, for anything they liked.

I pull the last 30 days and cap it at 10 of each. That is enough to see a pattern and cheap enough to run on a big list.

Then one AI step turns all of it into what I call an engagement summary. One paragraph, plain English, on what this person seems to be paying attention to right now.

On cost, the LinkedIn comment scraper runs about $5 per 1,000 results. Apify plans start at $29 a month. Running the same volume through Clay credits costs a lot more, so I do the scraping in Apify and the thinking in Clay.

Then the first line of the message writes itself. Not "I came across your profile." Something closer to "you seem to be deep in the CRM data thing right now, so I wanted to ask you something."

The limit

This tells you what is on someone's mind. It does not tell you they have budget, or authority, or a deadline.

I have written warm messages to people who had no ability to buy anything. Engagement is a timing signal, not a qualification signal. Keep your firmographic filters doing their job.

And I might be wrong about the 30 day window. It is just what has worked for me. Someone in a slower industry might need 90.

If you try it and find a better window, tell me. I would like to know.