The Quiet Ones Are Not Inactive

I spent a while building a list of people who post about my space.

It was a small list. It was also mostly consultants.

The simple idea

Posting on LinkedIn is rare. Reacting is common.

Almost everyone reads. A much smaller group comments. A tiny group writes.

So if your prospecting only looks at who publishes, you are looking at the smallest and least representative slice of your market. You are finding the people who sell for a living, not the people who buy.

How it applies

The buyer I want is usually a busy operator with a lot on their plate. They open the app, scroll, tap like on a few things, occasionally reply to a peer, and go back to work.

They will never write a post. They are on LinkedIn every day.

Someone in the Clay AlphaForge pod had a name for them.

"They're like, I call them lurkers."

That is the group. Invisible to a post scraper. Fully visible to a reaction scraper.

What I found

The best fit prospect I researched last month had authored zero posts in a year.

She had comments. She had likes. She had a clear pattern of what she was working on, sitting there in public the whole time.

If I had run a keyword search on posts, she would not have appeared. If I had run a hashtag search, she would not have appeared. She only showed up because I asked a different question. Not "who is talking about this," but "who is paying attention to this."

How it works

Two directions, and they need different tools.

Person first. You have a list of people already. For each one, pull their comments and their reactions from the last 30 days. This is the reaction scraper doing work the post scraper cannot do. Now you know what each person is thinking about.

Post first. You do not have a list yet. Pick one account your buyers actually read, an influencer or a well known operator in your niche, and scrape everyone who liked or commented on their recent posts. You get a pool of active, self selected people.

A warning on the second one. My ICP hit rate on post engager scraping runs about 1% unless the account is very specific to my niche. Scrape a general business influencer and you get thousands of names and almost no fit. Scrape someone narrow and boring and the hit rate climbs fast.

Once it works, put it on a schedule. I have the actor pull only the last 24 hours of engagement and run daily. Small batches, fresh signal, no backfill cost.

The limit

A like is a weak signal on its own. One person tapping like on one post means very little.

It is the pattern that means something. Six comments and ten likes all pointing at the same problem is a pattern. One like is noise.

So do not send a message that says "I saw you liked a post." That reads like surveillance and it deserves to.

Say the thing you learned instead, and leave out how you learned it.

Anyways. Go look at what your best customer has liked in the last month. It is usually a surprise.