How to Find LinkedIn Posts Worth Commenting On

Most people who try commenting on LinkedIn as a growth habit give up within two weeks. Writing the comments is rarely what stops them. What stops them is the twenty minutes spent scrolling the feed looking for something worth saying, and the feed is a poor place to look, because it mostly shows you what people you already know are reacting to.

Why comments are worth the effort

A good comment on a post with a few hundred reactions gets read by more people than most of your own posts will reach this month. The people reading it already care about the topic, since they stopped on the post, and a sharp comment under it is the cheapest introduction to them you can get. The author reads it too, and authors remember the people who add something to their posts. Several of the professional relationships I value most started with a comment and a reply from the author.

The effect only shows up if you do it most days. One comment a week is invisible. Five a day, on the right posts, starts to show in your profile views within a couple of weeks.

Where to look instead of the feed

The feed is sorted for engagement, so you end up commenting on the same viral posts as everyone else, an hour after they went up and below three hundred other comments. You want recent posts on your topic, from people whose audience overlaps with the one you are trying to reach. These are the places I find them:

• LinkedIn search for your topic, filtered to Posts and sorted by latest. Search the phrases your buyers use. 'Pricing page' turns up far more real conversations than 'monetization strategy'.
• A short list of 20 to 40 people in your space whose profiles you check directly. Turn on notifications for their posts so they come to you.
• The comment sections of posts you already liked. The best commenters under a good post are often worth following, and their own posts get fewer comments, so yours stands out.
• A few niche hashtags with small followings. The big hashtags are noise, but the small ones still carry useful posts.

How to pick the posts worth your comment

Plenty of relevant posts still do not deserve a comment from you. I run every candidate through four filters, in this order.

• Age. Under a day old, ideally a few hours. Comments on a week-old post get read by nobody except the author.
• Comment count. A post with five to fifty comments is still being read, and yours will be seen. Past a few hundred, a new comment sinks.
• Something to add. If all you have is agreement, skip it. You need a number, an example, a counterpoint or a question the post raised and left open.
• The author. Someone who replies to comments is worth more than someone who posts and disappears, and a glance at their last few posts tells you which kind they are.

On a normal day, that leaves me with five to eight posts out of the thirty or so I looked at.

What to write

The comments that get replies make one point and then stop. Open with the author's first name. It makes the comment read as addressed to them, and people answer comments that speak to them directly.

Then add the one thing. From strongest to weakest, the options I reach for are a specific experience that confirms or complicates the post, a number from your own work, a counterexample, and a question the post raises. Two to four sentences is enough. Longer comments get cut off behind 'see more', and most readers will not click it.

Here is the difference in practice, on a post about raising prices. The usual comment looks like this:

Great post! Pricing is so underrated. Thanks for sharing.

Nobody replies to that, and nobody reading the thread clicks on the name. Compare it with this one:

Maria, we saw the same thing when we moved from $29 to $49. Churn stayed flat, but trial signups dropped about 15% for two months before recovering. Did your trials dip too, or did they hold from the start?

The second comment names Maria, gives her a real number and asks something she can answer in one line. Readers of the thread learn something from it, and that is what makes a few of them click through to your profile.

Mistakes that make comments backfire

• Pitching. A link to your product under someone else's post reads as spam to the author and to everyone else. Let your profile do that work.
• Handing the post back to the author. 'So true, trust is everything in sales' adds nothing they did not write themselves.
• Using one template for every comment. People notice when your last ten comments have the same shape.
• Arguing to win. A counterpoint is welcome, but a string of rebuttals makes you the person nobody wants in their comments.
• Commenting and leaving. If the author replies, answer within the day. The second exchange is where the connection actually forms.

Making it a daily habit

The hard part is doing this on busy days, which is most of them. What made it stick for me was separating finding from writing. Finding posts is the slow part, and it batches well: one pass through search and your list of people takes about ten minutes and gives you the day's candidates. Writing five comments after that takes another ten.

Keep a note of who replies to you. After a month you will have a dozen people you have traded comments with more than once, and those are the people to message directly when you want feedback before a launch.

These days Planboard does the finding for me. I tap Search now and it brings back recent LinkedIn posts on my topics, each linked to the original, with a comment drafted in my voice that names the author. I still read every draft, drop the ones that do not fit and edit the rest before copying them into LinkedIn, because the comment goes out under my name and has to be something I would say.