How to find LinkedIn prospects by the topics they post about

A job title tells you who could buy. A post tells you what someone is thinking about this month. When a head of customer success writes 400 words about churn in the first ninety days, she has told you, in public and unprompted, which problem is sitting on her desk. That is why one of the most useful prospecting habits on LinkedIn is not a sharper title filter: it is learning to search LinkedIn posts by keyword and treating the authors as a prospect list.

This guide covers how to write those searches, how to tell a prospect from someone who merely writes about the topic, where lead-magnet posts fit, and how to open the conversation without pretending you read a post you never opened.

Why a post beats a job title as a signal

Title-based lists age badly. Everyone with “VP Sales” in their headline gets the same messages, and nothing in a title says whether your problem is a priority this quarter. A post is different in three ways:

• It is recent. People write about what they are dealing with now.
• It is in their words. You learn the vocabulary your buyer uses for the problem, which is rarely the vocabulary of your category.
• It gives you a reason to write. “I read your post about X” is the most natural opener on LinkedIn, as long as it is true.

The catch: posting is not buying. Plenty of authors write about a topic because they sell something around it, or because they are building an audience. The search finds people who talk. The qualification step decides who is worth a conversation.

How to search LinkedIn posts by keyword

Type your query in LinkedIn’s search bar, then choose the Posts filter. A few habits make the results usable:

1. Search the problem, not your category. Your prospects don’t write “sales engagement platform”. They write “my reps spend their mornings on admin” or “pipeline dried up this quarter”. Start from the sentences you hear on discovery calls.
2. Use Boolean operators, sparingly. LinkedIn search accepts exact phrases in straight quotes, AND, OR and NOT in capitals, and parentheses. Keep it short: "onboarding" AND ("churn" OR "activation") NOT "hiring". Long queries with many groups tend to return nothing at all.
3. Exclude job posts. NOT "hiring" removes the recruiters who write about every topic that comes with a vacancy.
4. Sort by latest and use the date filter. A post from last week is a signal. A post from last year is a memory.
5. Search in your prospects’ language. A buyer in Lyon posts in French; an English query will miss her entirely.

Topics that tend to surface buyers

• The pain in their words: “manual reporting”, “a CRM nobody updates”, “onboarding churn”.
• A change they are going through: “first sales hire”, “moving off spreadsheets”, “rebuilding our outbound”.
• A job they are doing by hand: a post describing a workaround is often the clearest sign that the problem costs them something.

Read the author, not the post

Before anyone goes into a list, look at who wrote the post. The same topic attracts very different people:

• Operators living the problem, like the head of sales describing her team’s week. These are your prospects.
• Consultants and vendors selling a fix for the same problem. Sometimes partners, often competitors, rarely buyers.
• Commentators who post about everything in the category to grow an audience.
• Job seekers and recruiters, whose posts mention the topic because a role does.

The headline and company usually settle it in seconds. When they don’t, ask one question: could this person sign, or strongly influence, a purchase of what you sell? If the answer is “maybe, through someone else”, they belong in a different list.

Lead-magnet hunters: authors who gate a resource behind a comment

One kind of post deserves its own search: the “comment GUIDE and I’ll send you the template” post. Its authors are not asking for help. They are investing time in LinkedIn as an acquisition channel, right now.

That makes them excellent prospects for some offers and useless for others:

• A strong fit if you sell to people who generate leads on LinkedIn: agencies, consultants, founders doing their own selling, B2B marketers. Anything that helps them produce content, handle the replies or follow up with the people who commented is relevant to them this week.
• A poor fit if your buyer is an operations director who never posts. Lead-magnet authors are a self-selected group, not the whole market.

Be clear about what this search returns: the authors of those posts, not the people commenting on them. The commenters are someone else’s audience and need a different import, covered in the last section. If you want to publish a lead magnet yourself and message the people who comment, that is a separate playbook: running a lead-magnet post and messaging its commenters.

Doing this in Swimlane

Manual post search works for a handful of posts a day, then turns into copying names by hand. Topic search is one of Swimlane’s LinkedIn prospecting channels, and it runs the whole loop: search, qualify, import.

Run a topic search

On the dashboard, under Find new leads, open Thematic Posts, or Lead Magnet Hunters for gated posts. Type the topic and choose how many authors to bring back: 15 by default, up to 100. A single word is searched as it is. For several words, Swimlane writes a short Boolean query in the language you typed, and for lead-magnet hunters it adds the “comment” and “like” terms that mark a gated post. The search runs in the background.

Review each author’s fit

The review screen lists every author with their headline and location, plus a colour-coded fit badge: green for a strong fit, amber for a partial one, grey for a weak one. Hover the badge and a one-sentence reason explains the rating, for example that the author runs an SDR team or sells a competing tool.

The fit is judged against what you wrote in Settings → Personalization: your ideal customer and how you help. Fill those in before your first search; left empty, every author comes back with the same neutral rating. Here is how Swimlane judges ICP fit.

Then import your selection, everyone, or only the good matches in one click.

Import into a list that feeds a campaign

The import creates a list named after your topic and opens it. Contacts you already had are added to it and keep their other lists.

Two things to settle before you automate anything:

• Refresh their profiles. A post card doesn’t tell Swimlane whether an author is a first, second or third-degree connection, and a campaign’s connection request skips anyone whose degree is unknown. Select the list and run Enrich with LinkedIn. It counts against your daily limit on profile fetches, so a long list takes a few days.
• Decide how the list grows. Every search creates a new list. For a one-off topic, make that list the campaign’s source. For a topic you will search again every few weeks, tag each batch with Add tags and build the campaign on that tag with no list selected: anyone who gets the tag later is enrolled automatically, the same principle as an evergreen campaign fed by a living list. The campaign’s Audience step can also keep only contacts rated “High match or better”, or you can give those contacts a shorter, more personal path of their own.

Open with their post, honestly

This is where topic prospecting is won or lost. There is no message variable for a post: templates know {firstName}, {company}, {headline} and a few other profile fields, nothing about what the person wrote. So be precise about what each message can claim.

In a campaign, refer to the topic. Everyone in the list posted about it, so a topic-level line is true for all of them:

Hi {firstName}, I came across your post on onboarding churn. I work on the
same problem from the sales side and would like to follow what you write next.

That fits within the 200 characters a free LinkedIn account allows in a connection note. Never write “loved your point about week two” in a template: it will reach people who never made that point.

For your best fits, write the first message yourself. Open their post, pick one specific claim, and ask a question they can answer in a sentence:

Your point that churn starts in week two, not month three, matches what we saw.
Did you fix it in the product or in the onboarding calls?

Swimlane’s AI can help with the wording. In an empty conversation it suggests an opener drafted from the contact’s profile, in your tone of voice. It has not read the post, though, so the reference to the post is the part you add.

Then stop. No pitch in the first message. They wrote about a problem; they didn’t ask for a demo.

Pair authors with the people commenting on their posts

Authors are one signal. The people commenting on a strong post are another: they chose to join that conversation, and they are often closer to the buyer than the author is.

When a topic search surfaces a post whose comments are full of your buyers, import the commenters too. Paste the post URL into the Post Engagement import for a one-off list, or watch the author’s profile with Auto Competitor Engagement to import the commenters on their new posts every few hours. From there, the post-commenters flow takes them from a comment to a first conversation, and persona-based people search covers the buyers who never post at all.

Together, the three channels answer one question from three angles: who is talking about the problem, who is listening, and who has the job but stays quiet.