A comment sits under someone else's post, so it is read by the author's audience as well as your own. For a B2B team that is a useful property: you can put your name in front of people who follow the right author, without needing a large following of your own. Most of the effort goes into choosing which post to comment on, and the writing is the shorter task once that is settled.
Why the choice of post matters
A comment is a short piece of work addressed to a particular conversation. The same two sentences can be useful under one post and irrelevant under another. If the post is read by people who buy what you sell, or who advise those who do, the comment does its job. If it is read by people who will never need you, it does not, however well it is written.
That is why this guide spends most of its length on finding the posts and only a section on writing.
Step by step: a weekly commenting routine
1. Decide who you want to be seen by
Write down the groups. For a B2B supplier these are usually the buyers themselves, the people who influence buyers (analysts, journalists, consultants, partners) and the peers whose audiences overlap with yours. Be specific about job titles and markets. "Marketing directors at mid-sized operators in Europe" gives you something to search for; "decision makers" does not.
2. Build a topic list
List ten to fifteen phrases your buyers use when they talk about their own work. Use their words, not your product's. A payments supplier might list the problems operators discuss about checkout and conversion, and leave out the feature names from its own brochure. Add the names of events, regulations or trends that your market keeps coming back to.
3. Build a people list
Add twenty to thirty profiles: buyers, influencers and a handful of people whose posts attract the discussion you want to be part of. Review it every quarter, because people change jobs and stop posting.
4. Search once a week
Search LinkedIn for each phrase and look at the posts that come up, then check the recent posts of the people on your list. Set a time and keep to it. A weekly pass is easier to maintain than a daily scroll, and it gives you a stack of candidates to choose from instead of whatever happens to be in the feed.
5. Choose with four tests
For each candidate post, ask:
- Audience: are the people in the comments the ones you want to reach?
- Timing: is the thread still being read? A post from the last day or two usually is, and one from last month is not.
- Room: is there something left to add, or has the point already been made well several times?
- Credibility: can you say something about this from your own work?
Pick the three to five posts that pass all four. A short list you comment on well beats a long list you comment on thinly.
6. Write a comment that adds something
A comment earns attention when it contains something the post did not. Useful shapes include:
- A related observation from your own work, in two or three sentences.
- A figure you can source, with the source named.
- A question that moves the discussion on, for example about how the author's point applies in a different market or at a different company size.
- A respectful second view, stated as your experience and not as a correction.
Leave out the compliment on its own ("Great post!"), the link to your product, and the pitch. If the author or another reader is interested, they can click your name and see what you do. Write in your own voice, in the first person, as yourself.
7. Reply to replies
If someone answers your comment, answer back within a day or two. The second exchange is often where the useful conversation happens.
8. Keep a log
Record the post, the author, the date, what you said and whether anyone replied. After a month, look for patterns: which authors and topics led to conversations and which did not. Drop the ones that did not and add new ones. Some of the value of commenting is slow and cannot be measured, so treat the log as a way to improve your choices and not as a scorecard.
Competitors' posts
Posts by competitors are visible to the same audience as yours, and the comments under them show what that audience is asking. You can comment on the topic courteously, as you would at an industry event, and add something useful. Do not comment to criticise, and leave the product comparison out.
Sharing the work across a team
One person doing this every week is a routine. A team doing it can cover more ground if each person takes the topics or regions they know best. Give every colleague a short list of their own posts to review, so nobody spends time sorting through the whole set. Agree a few shared rules: comment as yourself, disclose where you work if it is relevant to what you say, and never share confidential information.
The slow part of the routine is the search. If you want it done for you, Discovery can supply the weekly list of posts to comment on, described at the end of this guide.
LinkedIn commenting checklist
- I have named the groups of people I want to be seen by
- I have a list of ten to fifteen topic phrases in my buyers' words
- I have a list of twenty to thirty people to follow
- I search once a week at a fixed time
- Each post chosen passes the audience, timing, room and credibility tests
- Each comment adds a fact, an observation or a question
- No comment contains a pitch or a link to my product
- Any figure in a comment has a source I can name
- I reply when someone responds to my comment
- I log what I commented on and review the log monthly
How long it takes
A first pass, building the topic and people lists, takes an afternoon. After that, the weekly routine can be done in about twenty minutes: a few minutes to review the candidates, then a few minutes per comment. If it takes much longer, shorten the lists.
