Someone who posted about your problem last week is the warmest cold lead you’ll ever find. Here’s how to find them, and how not to waste the moment.

A title tells you who someone is. A post tells you what they’re thinking about right now. If a VP of Sales writes three paragraphs about their SDR team missing quota, they’ve done the hardest part of prospecting for you: they’ve told you, in public, that they care about the problem.

The catch is that LinkedIn doesn’t make this easy to do at scale. People search is built around titles and companies. Post search exists, but it’s noisy and you can’t filter by the author’s role in any precise way. Below are five methods, from free and manual to fast and assisted, plus what to do once you’ve found the right people.

The short answer

Use LinkedIn’s search bar with a Boolean keyword query, switch to the Posts tab, set Date posted to the past week or month, and sort by Latest. Then open each post and check whether the author fits your ICP. To skip the manual checking, use a tool that combines “posted about this topic” with role and company requirements, such as Manet.

Method 1: LinkedIn post search with Boolean operators

This is free and it works with any LinkedIn account.

1. Type your keywords into the LinkedIn search bar and press enter.

2. Click the Posts filter at the top of the results.

3. Set Date posted to Past week or Past month.

4. Set Sort by to Latest, so you see fresh posts first rather than the most popular ones.

5. Use extra filters where your account shows them, such as author company, author industry or content type.

The keyword query is where most of the precision comes from. LinkedIn supports quotes for exact phrases and the operators AND, OR and NOT, written in capitals, plus parentheses to group terms. For example:

(“cold outreach” OR outbound OR “pipeline generation”) AND (SDR OR BDR) NOT hiring

That finds posts about outbound and SDRs, and leaves out job ads. A few tips that make a big difference:

• Search for the words people use when they complain, not the words you use when you sell. People rarely post “we need a sales engagement platform.” They post “our reply rates fell off a cliff this quarter.”

• Use exact phrases for jargon. “Founder-led sales” in quotes is much cleaner than the three words loose.

• Exclude the noise. NOT hiring, NOT webinar and NOT course remove a lot of promotional posts.

• Save your best queries. You’ll want to re-run them every week.

The limitation: you can’t filter by the author’s title. Expect to open a lot of posts from consultants, recruiters and vendors before you find a buyer.

Method 2: Find the people commenting, not just posting

For every person who writes a post about a topic, dozens comment on it. Commenters are often a better target, because they’re engaging with the topic without having built an audience around it.

Find the creators and companies who post regularly about your problem space. Open their recent posts and read the comments. People who leave thoughtful comments, rather than “Great post!”, are telling you what they think. Engagers on a competitor’s posts are worth watching too.

The limitation: it’s slow, and comment threads on popular posts can run into the hundreds.

Method 3: Sales Navigator’s recent-activity filters

Sales Navigator lets you filter leads by recent activity, including people who have posted on LinkedIn recently, and combine that with title, seniority, company size and geography. That flips the problem around: start from people who fit your ICP, then keep only the active ones.

The limitation: the activity filter tells you someone posted, not what they posted about. You still have to open profiles and read. We compare Sales Navigator with AI tools in more detail in LinkedIn Sales Navigator vs. AI prospecting tools.

Method 4: Search LinkedIn posts through Google

Public LinkedIn posts are indexed by search engines. A query like the one below can surface posts LinkedIn’s own search buries:

site:linkedin.com/posts “founder-led sales” “first hire”

Use your search engine’s date tools to limit results to the past month. The limitation: coverage is patchy, and it only finds public posts that happen to be indexed.

Method 5: Describe it and let an AI tool do the checking

The manual methods all share the same bottleneck: finding a post is easy, but confirming the author is someone you actually want to talk to takes time. That’s the part software is good at.

In Manet, you describe the combination in plain English, for example “heads of sales at B2B SaaS companies with 20 to 200 employees who posted about outbound in the last 30 days.” Manet treats “posted about outbound” as one requirement and the role and company as others, checks each person against the evidence, and shows you the post that qualified them. You can also ask for people who engaged with posts on a topic, or with a specific post you link. We explain how that search works under the hood in how Manet’s people search works.

Which method should you use?

Time estimates are ours, based on typical B2B briefs, and will vary with how niche your ICP is.

What to do once you’ve found them

Finding the post is half the job. The other half is not ruining it.

Comment before you connect. A useful comment on someone’s post is public, low pressure and gets your name in front of them in a context they chose. It should add something: a specific experience, a number, a respectful disagreement, a question they’d enjoy answering.

Here’s the difference in practice. Imagine someone posted that their team’s reply rates halved after they doubled email volume.

• Weak: “Great insights! This is exactly what we help with at Acme. Would love to connect.”

• Better: “We saw the same thing when we went from 50 to 200 emails a day. Replies came back when we cut volume and only wrote to people with a recent trigger. Did you see the drop across all segments or mostly in mid-market?”

Then connect with context. A short note that references their post works far better than a blank request. “Enjoyed your post on reply rates and volume. I’m working on the same problem from the founder side, would be good to be connected.”

Don’t pitch in the first message. They wrote about a problem, not a buying intent. Let the conversation earn the pitch. We go deeper on this in how to personalize LinkedIn outreach with AI without sounding like AI.

A note on etiquette

Posting publicly isn’t an invitation to be scraped and spammed. Only reach out when you have a real reason, keep volume human, never misrepresent why you’re messaging, and stay within LinkedIn’s terms. Done well, responding to someone’s post is just good networking. Done badly, it’s the reason people stop posting.

This is step two of our LinkedIn prospecting playbook, which covers the whole process from ICP to first conversation.

Frequently asked questions

Want the list without the hours of scrolling? Describe who you’re looking for in Manet and see who’s been posting about it.