Tracking accounts and competitors
How to track competitors' LinkedIn engagement
Every time a competitor posts and 80 people engage, a slice of those people are actively evaluating your category. They haven't signed anything, and many of them will be in a sales process within the quarter. Tracking competitor engagement means watching those posts continuously and collecting the engagers, so your team sees category demand as it surfaces instead of six months later in a lost-deal review. The information is public, and it's one of the cheapest sources of warm pipeline in B2B.
The manual way
- List the competitors worth watching: two or three company pages plus their founders and loudest sellers, since personal profiles post more and pull more engagement than pages do.
- Visit each account weekly. Open the Posts tab on company pages and the Activity section on profiles to catch everything from the past week.
- On each post with real traction, click the reaction count and read the comment thread, and note the people who look like your buyer rather than the competitor's employees and investors.
- Check each promising person's profile for role and company, then decide which bucket they belong to: active evaluator, category-curious, or the competitor's happy customer.
- Record the fits in a sheet along with the topic of the post they engaged with, because the topic is your opener later.
This workflow dies of inconsistency. Week one you check every competitor and take careful notes. By week five the habit is gone, because clicking through reaction modals across a dozen accounts takes hours and produces mostly noise you have to filter by eye. The interesting people also engage on your competitors' posting schedule rather than yours, so a weekly check misses the window where the signal is fresh enough to act on.
The Folkscope way
- 1
Track competitor pages and founders
Add them in Folkscope. It reads their public engagement through authorized APIs, with no connection to your LinkedIn account, and syncs every tracked account daily.
- 2
Let it collect every engager
Likes, comments, and reactions on every competitor post get captured automatically, with history retained, so a burst of engagement on a Tuesday launch post doesn't slip past you.
- 3
Score against your ICP
Daily scoring filters out the competitor's employees, investors, and cheerleaders, and surfaces the engagers who match who you sell to.
- 4
Alert your team
A Flow can ping a Slack channel when a high-ICP person engages with a competitor's post, so a rep acts within days. Start by tracking a single competitor page for a week and judge the output yourself.
What you end up with
You get a continuously updated list of everyone engaging with your competitors' content, enriched with role, company, and location, scored against your ICP, and stamped with the post topic. Instead of a quarterly spreadsheet safari, your reps see a daily feed of in-market people, and multiple engagers from one company flag a warming account early.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal or ethical to track a competitor's LinkedIn engagement?
Reactions and comments on a public post are visible to anyone, and collecting them differs in degree from noticing them yourself, not in kind. The ethical line sits in how you use the information: never open a message with 'I saw you commented on [Competitor]'s post', because it makes people feel watched. Reference the topic they cared about and leave the competitor out of it.
Will the competitor know I'm tracking them?
No signal reaches them. Folkscope reads public engagement data through authorized APIs and doesn't use your LinkedIn account, so nothing visits their page on your behalf and no new follower shows up for them to spot. Checking manually is equally invisible as long as you browse normally.
Should I track the competitor's company page or their founder?
Track both, with the founder weighted higher. People post more from personal profiles than from company pages, those posts pull more engagement, and the comments under them are more honest. Add the competitor's most active sellers and evangelists too, since their audiences skew heavily toward buyers in the category.
More guides
How to see who engages with a LinkedIn company page
LinkedIn page analytics stop at percentages. Here's how to identify the individual people engaging with any company page, by hand and with daily tracking.
How to track LinkedIn influencer audiences
A niche creator's post can pull in hundreds of your future buyers. How to capture, qualify, and work LinkedIn influencer audiences without scraping anything.
How to export LinkedIn post likers
LinkedIn has no export button for post reactions. Here's the honest manual method, why scraping extensions risk your account, and how Folkscope automates it.
How to export LinkedIn post commenters
Commenters are the highest-intent people on any LinkedIn post. How to collect them manually, keep the comment text, and automate the list with Folkscope.
From the blog
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