Who's engaging with your competitors on LinkedIn

When a competitor posts and a hundred people react, those hundred people are not the competitor's property. They are people interested in the category, and a meaningful slice of them are early in a buying process. They have not signed anything. Many of them are comparing options, asking around, or just starting to feel a problem they will eventually pay to solve. That is exactly the moment you want to be present, and it is happening in public on LinkedIn every day.

This is one of the most under-used sources of warm leads in B2B, partly because it feels slightly cheeky and partly because most teams don't have a systematic way to capture it. Let's deal with both.

Why a competitor's audience is worth your attention

Someone who engages with content from a competitor is doing something a cold prospect never does: they are signaling interest in your category, on a specific topic, this week. That is three useful pieces of information bundled into one action.

There are a few flavors of competitor engager, and they are not equally worth your time:

• Active evaluators. People weighing options right now. The best group by far.
• Category-curious. People feeling the problem but not yet shopping. Worth a relationship, not a hard pitch.
• Existing customers of the competitor. Sometimes the strongest leads of all, if they are frustrated, and sometimes a complete waste of time if they are happy. You have to read the signal.
• Noise. The competitor's employees, investors, friends, and the usual LinkedIn cheerleaders. Filter these out.

The work is separating these groups, which is mostly a matter of reading what people actually wrote and checking who they are.

How to capture it systematically

You can do this by hand. Open a competitor's recent posts, click through the reactions, read the comments, and note the people who look like a fit. It works, but it is tedious and you will not keep it up.

The systematic version is to track the competitor pages and founders you care about and collect everyone who engages, continuously. That is what Folkscope does: you pick the company pages and profiles to monitor, it syncs daily and keeps history, and it enriches the engagers into leads with role, company, and location so you are not staring at a wall of names. Then it scores each one against your ICP so the in-market, good-fit people surface first. However you do it, the goal is the same: turn a stream of public engagement into a ranked, qualified list.

A practical tip: track founders and individual employees, not just the company page. People post more from personal profiles than from company pages, and those posts usually get more engagement and more honest comments.

The ethics and etiquette

This is public information. Likes and comments on a public post are visible to anyone, and collecting them is no different in kind from noticing them yourself. There is nothing shady about paying attention to who is interested in your category.

There is a line, though, and it is about how you use the information rather than whether you gather it. A few rules I would hold to:

• Don't quote the competitor. Never open with "I saw you commented on [Competitor]'s post." It is creepy, it tips your hand, and it makes the person feel surveilled.
• Reference the topic, not the act. They engaged with a post about a problem. Talk about the problem.
• Stay useful. If your only message is "we're better than [Competitor]," you are asking them to do work for you. Bring an insight, a resource, or a genuinely relevant question.
• Respect a no. If someone is clearly a happy customer of the competitor, move on. Trying to pry them loose with a cold message rarely works and burns goodwill.

The signal tells you who to talk to and what they care about. It should never become the subject line.

How to actually reach out

Say a competitor's founder posts about the pain of messy pipeline forecasting, and forty people engage. You enrich them, score them, and end up with a dozen who match your ICP. Now what?

Lead with the topic and a point of view. Something like: "Saw a lot of chatter this week about forecasting accuracy at growing teams. The thing I keep seeing is that the forecast breaks not because of the model but because reps update deals once a month. Curious whether that matches your experience." No mention of the competitor. No pitch. Just a relevant observation aimed at someone who clearly cares about the topic.

If they reply, you are in a conversation about their actual problem, which is the only place a real deal starts. If they don't, you have lost nothing and you have not annoyed them with anything overtly salesy.

Timing matters too. Reach out while the topic is fresh, ideally within a few days of the engagement. A daily sync helps here because a lead that is a week stale has lost most of its heat. The person has moved on to other things, and your "relevant observation" looks random.

What this is not

This is not about poaching with bravado or trash-talking the competition. The teams that do that get blocked and build a reputation as the pushy vendor. The version that works is quieter: notice who is interested in the category, understand what they care about, and show up with something useful before the rest of the market does.

Your competitors are doing your audience research for you, in public, every time they post. The only question is whether you are paying attention.