How to Target the Followers and Engagers of Your Competitors on LinkedIn

LinkedIn generates 80% of all B2B social media leads. That's a staggering figure when you consider how many platforms are competing for attention. But here's what makes this statistic particularly interesting for outbound teams: the people who follow and engage with your competitors are already educated buyers. They understand the problem space. They've shown purchase intent. And most importantly - they're actively looking for solutions exactly like yours.

The challenge? LinkedIn doesn't let you directly target competitor followers or customers through ads. There's no filter that says "show me everyone who follows Company X." So sales and marketing teams have been stuck with workarounds, guesswork, and manual research that burns through hours without meaningful results.

Well, not anymore.

We're going to break down the exact methods growth teams use to identify, extract, and reach competitor audiences on LinkedIn and which approaches actually convert versus which ones waste your time.

Why Competitor Audiences Convert Better Than Cold Lists

When someone follows a competitor's LinkedIn page or engages with their content, they've made a micro-commitment. They've said, implicitly, "this topic matters to me enough to see more of it in my feed."

According to Socialinsider's 2025 LinkedIn benchmarks, multi-image posts see engagement rates of 6.60% on average, significantly higher than other platforms. But here's the part most people miss: the individuals doing that engaging are not random. They're people who've already self-selected into your target market.

Think about what happens when someone comments on a competitor's post about CRM data quality issues. That person:

• Understands the problem exists
• Cares enough to spend time engaging publicly
• Is likely evaluating or already using a solution
• Has visibility into their organization's pain points

Compare that to sending cold outreach to a list of "VP of Sales" titles you pulled from a generic database. One group has demonstrated intent. The other is just a job title.

Companies that work competitor audience targeting into their LinkedIn strategy can boost brand power by up to 34%, according to research on B2B advertising effectiveness. The logic is simple: you're reaching people further along the buyer journey, which means shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates.

The Four Ways to Identify Competitor Audiences

There are essentially four pools of competitor audiences you can tap into on LinkedIn. Each has different levels of accessibility, data quality, and outreach potential.

1. Company Page Followers

Every company on LinkedIn has followers. These are people who clicked "Follow" to see that company's content in their feed. For B2B companies, followers often include prospects, customers, partners, industry analysts, and job seekers.

The catch: LinkedIn doesn't make follower lists public. You can see the total follower count, but not the individuals. To access this data, you need third-party tools that can extract follower information, and even then, the data may be partial depending on privacy settings and the tool's capabilities.

What makes followers valuable: They've made an explicit choice to stay connected with a brand. That's a stronger signal than a one-time engagement.

2. Post Engagers (Likes, Comments, Reactions)

This is where things get interesting for outbound teams. When someone likes or comments on a LinkedIn post, that action is public. You can see exactly who engaged, click through to their profile, and gather context about their role and company.

Post engagers are often the highest-quality signals because:

• Comments indicate active interest. Someone who takes time to write a comment cares about the topic.
• Engagement is time-stamped. You can reach out while the topic is still fresh in their mind.
• The post itself gives you context. If they engaged with content about sales automation challenges, you know what's on their radar.

A post that generates 50-100 comments from your target audience can fuel weeks of highly relevant outreach - if you can extract and enrich that data efficiently.

3. LinkedIn Event Attendees

Competitors run webinars, virtual events, and LinkedIn Live sessions. These events attract people who are actively exploring solutions in your space. Attendee lists are often visible (at least partially) to other attendees, making them a goldmine for prospect identification.

The people attending a competitor's webinar on "How to Fix CRM Data Decay" are essentially raising their hands and saying "this is a problem I'm trying to solve right now." That's bottom-of-funnel intent signaling.

4. LinkedIn Group Members

Many industries have LinkedIn Groups dedicated to specific topics, tools, or challenges. Some competitors even run their own branded groups. Members of these groups have self-selected into a community around a particular interest.

Targeting member groups in Campaign Manager lets you reach people who've joined groups related to your competitor's offering. These tend to be smaller audiences, but they're highly focused.

How to Extract and Enrich Competitor Engagement Data

Identifying competitor audiences is only half the battle. The real value comes from systematically extracting this data, enriching it with contact information, and routing it into your outreach workflows.

Let's walk through a practical approach.

Step 1: Monitor Competitor Content

Start by following every relevant competitor and industry influencer on LinkedIn. You want their content appearing in your feed so you can spot engagement opportunities as they happen.

Set aside 15-20 minutes twice a week to scan recent posts from competitors. Look for content that's generating meaningful engagement from your target audience, not just generic motivational posts, but substantive content about problems your solution addresses.

Step 2: Capture Engager Data

When you find a post with strong engagement from your target audience, you have several options for capturing that data:

Manual approach: Click through individual profiles, note the details, and add them to a spreadsheet. This works for small-scale efforts but doesn't scale.

Tool-assisted extraction: Platforms like Databar.ai can pull engagement data from LinkedIn posts and return structured information about each engager (names, job titles, companies, LinkedIn URLs and more). This turns what would be hours of manual work into a few minutes of automated extraction.

The key is getting engagement data while it's fresh. Someone who commented on a post yesterday will respond better to outreach referencing that post than someone you contact three weeks later.

Step 3: Enrich with Contact Information

Raw LinkedIn profile data is useful but limited. To run effective outreach, you typically need verified email addresses and sometimes phone numbers.

This is where multi-source enrichment becomes critical. A single data provider rarely has 100% coverage or accuracy. Waterfall enrichment (querying multiple data sources and taking the best results) dramatically improves hit rates.

With a platform like Databar, you can chain together enrichments: pull engager data from a LinkedIn post, find verified emails through multiple providers, add firmographic data about their companies, and push everything into your CRM or outreach tool. The whole process can run in minutes without manual data entry.

Step 4: Personalize Based on Engagement Context

This is where most teams drop the ball. They go through all the effort of identifying competitor engagers, enriching the data, and then send them the same generic template they'd send to any cold list.

The entire point of targeting competitor engagers is that you have context. Use it.

Bad approach:

"Hi [Name], I noticed you're in [Role] at [Company]. We help companies like yours with [generic value prop]."

Better approach:

"Hey [Name], saw your comment on [Competitor]'s post about data quality challenges in enterprise CRMs. You mentioned [specific thing they said]. We've been working with similar companies on exactly this, happy to share what's been working."

The second approach shows you actually paid attention. It references something specific and recent. It positions your outreach as a continuation of a conversation they're already having, not an interruption.

A Practical Workflow for Agencies and RevOps Teams

Let's put this into a concrete workflow you can implement this week.

Day 1: Competitor Audit

Create a list of 5-10 direct competitors and adjacent players whose audiences overlap with your ICP. Follow their company pages and key executives. Note which ones post regularly versus sporadically.

Day 2-3: Content Monitoring Setup

Identify the types of posts that attract your target buyers. Usually these fall into a few categories: problem-focused content (addressing pain points), educational content (how-tos and frameworks), and announcement content (new features, case studies). Set up a simple tracking system (even a spreadsheet works) to log high-engagement posts as you spot them.

Day 4-5: Extraction and Enrichment Test

Take one high-performing competitor post and extract the engager data. If you're doing this manually, aim for 20-30 profiles. If you're using a tool like Databar, you can pull all engagers at once and run enrichment workflows to get contact details.

Week 2: Outreach Campaign

Create a personalized outreach sequence for these engagers. Reference the specific post they engaged with. Acknowledge the topic they're interested in. Position your solution as relevant to that interest. Run the campaign and track response rates.

Ongoing: Systematize

If the initial test shows promise, build this into a repeatable system. Set aside time each week for competitor monitoring. Create templates that can be quickly customized for different post contexts. Measure conversion rates compared to your standard cold outreach.

What Doesn't Work (And Why People Waste Time on It)

Not all competitor targeting approaches are created equal. Some sound good in theory but fall apart in practice.

Trying to Target Followers Through LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn's Campaign Manager doesn't allow you to target the followers of specific company pages, only employees. Some advertisers try workarounds like targeting "Company Connections" (first-degree connections of employees), but this requires the company to have at least 500 employees and produces very broad audiences.

For precise competitor audience targeting, ads are not the right channel. You need direct outreach based on enriched data.

Scraping Without Enrichment

Pulling a list of LinkedIn profiles is easy. Turning that list into actionable outreach data is hard. If you're just collecting names and job titles without verified contact information, you'll end up doing manual research for each profile anyway, which defeats the purpose of automation.

Stale Data

Engagement signals decay quickly. Someone who commented on a post six months ago has likely moved on from that topic. The value of competitor engager targeting comes from recency. Build systems that capture and act on engagement data within days, not weeks.

Generic Messaging

We've said it before, but it bears repeating: if you're going to put in the work to identify highly targeted prospects based on their demonstrated interests, don't waste that context by sending them the same template you'd send anyone else.

Making This Scale With Automation

Manual competitor monitoring and outreach works when you're dealing with a handful of prospects. It doesn't work when you're trying to systematically capture competitor audiences across multiple competitors, multiple posts, and multiple weeks.

This is where data enrichment platforms become essential.

Databar, for example, connects to 90+ data providers and lets you build custom workflows without coding. You can set up a process that:

1. Pulls all engagers from a competitor's LinkedIn posts
2. Enriches each profile with verified email addresses from multiple providers
3. Adds firmographic data about their companies
4. Scores leads based on fit criteria
5. Pushes qualified prospects directly to your CRM or outreach tool

The whole workflow runs automatically. What used to take days of manual research happens in minutes.

For agencies managing multiple clients or RevOps teams supporting multiple sales reps, this kind of automation is the difference between competitor targeting being a nice idea and being a repeatable source of qualified pipeline.

Wrapping Up

Your competitors are already doing the hard work of attracting and educating potential buyers. Their content, their events, and their social presence create signals about who's interested in solutions like yours. The question is whether you're capturing those signals and acting on them.

Targeting competitor followers and engagers is a logical extension of intent-based selling: go where the buyers are already showing up, and reach them with relevant, contextual outreach.

The teams that do this well build systems, not one-off campaigns. They monitor consistently, extract data efficiently, enrich thoroughly, and personalize genuinely. And increasingly, they're using platforms like Databar to automate the tedious parts so they can focus on what humans do best: having conversations with prospects who really want to hear from them.

FAQ

Can I directly target competitor followers on LinkedIn Ads?

No, LinkedIn doesn't allow you to target another company's page followers. You can target employees of competitor companies (if they have 500+ employees) or members of LinkedIn Groups related to your competitors, but not their followers directly. For precise competitor audience targeting, you need to extract data and run direct outreach.

How quickly should I reach out to someone who engaged with a competitor's post?

Ideally within 48-72 hours. Engagement signals decay quickly, the topic that was top of mind when they commented will fade as their feed fills with new content. The faster you reach out, the more relevant your outreach feels.

What's the best way to personalize outreach to competitor engagers?

Reference the specific post they engaged with and the topic it addressed. If they left a comment, you can mention what they said. Position your outreach as relevant to the conversation they're already participating in, not as a cold pitch out of nowhere.

Is extracting LinkedIn engagement data legal?

Extracting publicly available data (like who commented on a public post) is generally permissible, but you should comply with LinkedIn's terms of service and applicable privacy regulations like GDPR. Use the data for legitimate business purposes and don't scrape at volumes that could be considered abusive.

How does this compare to buying intent data from third-party providers?

Third-party intent data shows you companies that are researching topics related to your solution, but it doesn't tell you which individuals are involved. Competitor engagement targeting gives you specific people who've demonstrated interest, along with context about what topics matter to them. The two approaches can complement each other.

What tools do I need to make this work?

At minimum, you need a way to monitor competitor content and capture engager data. Tools like Databar can automate extraction and enrichment, pulling engagers from LinkedIn posts and adding verified contact information from multiple data sources. You'll also need an outreach tool (email or LinkedIn messaging) and ideally a CRM to track results.

How do I find competitor posts that are worth monitoring?

Look for posts that generate meaningful engagement from your target audience, not just high engagement overall. A post with 500 likes from random people is less valuable than one with 50 comments from decision-makers in your ICP. Focus on substantive content about problems your solution addresses.

Can I automate this entire workflow?

Yes. Platforms like Databar let you build workflows that automatically extract engagers, enrich with contact data, filter by ICP criteria, and push to your outreach tools. The monitoring step still benefits from human judgment (deciding which posts to target), but the data extraction and enrichment can run on autopilot.