Most people prospect on LinkedIn by building a list of profiles and sending requests. That works, slowly, because every person on the list is a stranger who was not thinking about you. A different starting point is the post. Every week, some people write on LinkedIn that they are looking for an accountant, a developer, a recruiter, a better way to invoice. They said it out loud, in public, in their own words. Those are warm leads.

This guide is about finding those posts, deciding which ones deserve an answer, and replying in a way that reads like help. It also covers a part most guides skip: how old a post is when you reach it, because on LinkedIn that decides almost everything.

Why a post beats a profile

A profile tells you what someone did. A post tells you what they want now. A VP of operations with a perfect-fit title is a guess. A VP of operations who wrote "we are replacing our scheduling tool before Q1, what are people using?" is a buyer with a date.

The reply is also easier. When you message a stranger from a profile, you have to explain why you are writing. When you answer their question, the reason is already on the screen.

The post window is short

On Reddit, an old thread can still rank in Google and send readers for months. LinkedIn is the opposite. In our experience most replies to a post arrive in the first day or two, so by day three the person has usually heard from a few people. Reach a post that is a week old and the person has probably chosen someone or stopped looking.

So search for posts from the last day or week, newest first. LinkedIn's own content search can sort that way. Filter to posts, use the date filter for the past 24 hours or the past week, sort by latest, and read from the top.

What to type into the search box

Search the post results, not the people results, and write the phrase the way a buyer would say it. Five patterns find most of what is worth reading:

  1. "Looking for a" plus your category. "Looking for a bookkeeper," "looking for a fractional CFO." Direct and common.
  2. "Can anyone recommend." Pair it with a category or a city: "can anyone recommend a commercial cleaner in Austin."
  3. "Does anyone use" or "what do you use for." Tool shoppers write this way: "what do you use for client invoicing."
  4. "We are hiring" for the role you replace. A founder who posts a job for a part-time marketer may be open to an agency instead. Handle this one gently, and only if your service is a fair substitute.
  5. The complaint. "Our current provider just went down for the third time this month." No ask, but it is the moment someone is receptive.

Run each phrase for one category at a time. If you sell to several kinds of buyers, keep a separate search for each so the results do not blur together.

Sorting what you find

Not every match deserves a reply. Read each post for four things, and skip it if two fail.

  • Age. Under three days is best. Under a week is fine. Older, write only if you can add something useful for the people still reading the comments.
  • Who wrote it. A person with a role that buys the thing, or a founder with their own money on the line. Someone collecting names for a vendor list is not a buyer.
  • How specific the ask is. "Need help with ads" is vague. "Need someone to rebuild our Google Ads account, $8k a month spend, ecommerce" is a buyer.
  • The comments. If forty people already offered, a forty-first adds little. If there are two comments, both generic, your answer stands out.

Comment or message

You have two ways to answer: a public comment on the post, or a direct message to the person. They are not equal.

A comment is the better first move for most posts. It is visible, it helps the other people reading, and it does not land in anyone's inbox uninvited. Say something useful in two to four sentences, say what you do in one short clause, and stop. Here is an example for a designer answering a founder who wrote that investors keep passing on their pitch deck:

Pitch decks usually fail on slide two, not slide one. Put the problem and the one number that proves it there, and move the team slide to the end. I design decks for early-stage founders, so if you want a second pair of eyes on yours, message me. Either way, fix slide two first.

A direct message makes sense when the post asked for private replies or when the comment section is crowded. Open with a reference to their post, answer their question in a line, and make the next step easy to decline. A connection request that opens with a pitch rarely gets accepted. For longer message templates, see how to write a LinkedIn message to potential clients.

Doing this at volume without breaking the platform's terms

It is tempting to automate this, and LinkedIn is the platform where that deserves the most care. Its User Agreement says members must not use bots or other unauthorized automated methods to send messages, or to create, comment on, like or share posts, and it also restricts scraping with browser plugins. People who automate on LinkedIn risk restrictions, and LinkedIn decides what counts. The cautious version is manual: you look, you read, you write, you send.

What you can speed up is the looking and the first draft. Reading fifty posts to find five worth answering is the slow part.

How Rocketship fits

Conversations does the finding and the drafting. When you press Search LinkedIn, the free Rocketship Chrome extension opens LinkedIn's own post search in your own browser, newest first, reads that one page, and sends the posts to Rocketship. Rocketship picks the people who are asking for what you sell, shows how old each post is, and drafts either a comment on the post or a note and message to the person, whichever you choose. That search reads one results page in your own browser and does not open profiles or click anything, and LinkedIn decides what its terms cover, so read them yourself. You edit the draft and send it from your own LinkedIn account. If you do not want the extension, you can copy a LinkedIn search page and paste it in.

There is also an optional setting called Post for me, on Launch and up, that has the extension post LinkedIn comments from your own account, within a daily limit you set. It is off until you turn it on, and because LinkedIn's terms limit automation, we cover what it does and where it stops in its own article. Rocketship never sends LinkedIn DMs or connection requests for you.

A weekly routine, about an hour and a quarter

  • Monday and Thursday, 15 minutes: run your three or four searches for the past week, newest first. Pick the best two posts each time.
  • Same sitting, 15 minutes: write the comments. Use one detail from the post in each.
  • Friday, 15 minutes: check who answered. Reply to every reply the same day.

Track it simply: posts answered, replies received, conversations started, customers. After four weeks you will know whether your buyers use LinkedIn this way. If you sell to people who never post about their problems, this channel will find little, and it is better to learn that in a month than a year. For the slower profile-based approach, see how to get clients on LinkedIn: a 30-day plan, and for finding who to email once a post turns into a conversation, how to find an email address from a LinkedIn profile.

To see the posts Conversations finds for your business, read how it works or start the 7-day trial. It takes a card, and you can cancel before day 8 and pay nothing.