Social Selling Bad Advice: Comment on your prospects posts.

TL;DR: Commenting on prospects’ posts can help, but it shouldn’t be a core strategy because most of your market doesn’t post. For many real-world businesses, focusing only on active posters shrinks the prospect pool so far that the strategy stops being viable.

I'm going to write a series of articles on bad advice which is often dished out about social selling and LinkedIn. I'll define the bad advice in three ways...

• It only works for creators and influencers.
• It's unsustainable for the average person.
• It doesn't work at all.

So the first one I'm tackling is widespread and on the face of it, it sounds like a great strategy.... comment on your prospects posts.

Even AI and Google promote this...

Why is commenting on prospects posts bad advice?

Quick answer: Because the vast majority of people don't post on LinkedIn.

On LinkedIn Sales Navigator, it shows that around 19 million people posted in the last 30 days. That's less than 2% of LinkedIn's users.

Any social seller with real experience on the platform should understand the problem with making outbound commenting a core part of the strategy.

Are you supposed to ignore the other 98% of your target market?

What do you do with the majority of prospects who don't have any content for you to engage with?

It's a strategy for 2% of your market.

But there is another flaw in this advice too. A large proportion of the posts you'll see on prospects profiles are reposts of their employers marketing content, announcing a new role or advertising job vacancies. What do you do with them?

Why LinkedIn and social selling experts say this?

What this advice exposes is the commercially inexperience of many social selling and LinkedIn experts. They are stuck in their own perspective - they're selling LinkedIn on LinkedIn.

People who are posting are marketing and promoting - they want more customers. That's a good signal for a LinkedIn or social selling expert. It's a signal they want more leads, more clients or more sales from LinkedIn - they're likely to be interested in what they have to sell.

But if you're a construction company, law firm, business coach or consultant, you're not selling "more leads" or "more sales". The overlap between people who happen to be posting and people who currently need what you sell becomes much smaller.

At that point, restricting your prospecting to people who post doesn't just narrow the market. It can shrink it to a non-viable number.

It's not that commenting in itself is bad, it can prove to be useful way to engage people - but, for real businesses, very few of their decision makers are posting - that then fuels the belief that "LinkedIn doesn't work for my industry".

The reality is the majority of users are what we call lurkers - they scroll and rarely post. For the real world businesses, that aren't influencers and content creators - these are the people you need to engage. So, you need a strategy that works for the majority of people who don't post.