Your engagers are the list

I ran eight network engagement audits across brands, founders and investors, and pulled every post they published plus the humans who showed up in the reactions and comments. 198 posts. 6,244 named people. One pattern repeated in all eight, and it has nothing to do with reach.

6,244named engagers captured

198posts audited

8brands and people audited

53%best comment-to-like ratio

The pattern is that everyone chases reach and almost nobody works the replies. Which means the highest-value list in most companies is sitting in public, one click away from the post they already published.

Finding one

A follower count is a number. An engager list is an address book

Follower counts tell you how big the audience looks. Engagement tells you who is actually in the room, and on LinkedIn the room is public. For every audit I captured who liked, commented and shared, then ranked those people by name, title, company and how often they showed up.

That single difference is the most underused advantage in B2B right now. The data is not hidden behind a paywall or a data vendor. It is on the post, sorted by recency, and it belongs to whoever is willing to read it.

Finding two

Engagers per post separates a room from a megaphone

Fig. 1 — named engagers per post. Volume and participation are different achievements. Battery Ventures averaged 36 named people per post. Descript averaged under 5, on a product with far more reach. One built a room. The other built a broadcast.

Descript is the useful case for me. Its audience was exactly right, video editors, podcast producers, content marketers. The people were the market. The surface was wrong, because a corporate page reads like a press release feed and nobody comments on a press release.

B2Linked proves it from the other direction. Its company page did not post once in thirty days. The founder's personal feed pulled 421 engagers across 16 posts, including 197 comments. The logo was a ghost. The human was the channel.

Finding three

Comments are the signal, likes are the decoration

Fig. 2 — comments per 100 likes. A like is a reflex. A comment is a decision. ColdIQ ran 53 comments per 100 likes across 53 posts. Lambda ran 4, on 20,882 likes and 1,031 shares. One audience argued. The other scrolled.

I look at this number before anything else. A page with enormous reach and a 4% comment ratio is a distribution channel for someone else's attention. A page with modest reach and a 53% comment ratio has a market that wants to be talked to, which is the asset I would rather own.

Finding four

Depth beats breadth, and the drop-off is your to-do list

Fig. 3 — how thin the inner circle is. 1,184 engagers, 100 of them repeat. The other 1,084 are warm but unworked, and every one of them is a name, a title and a company. A fund with massive reach and a thin inner circle is leaving most of its sales floor untouched.

People who engage two or more times in thirty days are warm. Three or more and they are a sales floor you already own, because they have raised their hand repeatedly and their details are public. Almost nobody sorts for that, which is why almost nobody converts it.

Finding five

The deliverable is a report, not a spreadsheet

The last agent in this crew builds the report itself, a self-contained document with the profile, the audience, the engagement trend and the ICP match rate. I built it for polish and kept it because it is the part people actually use. A founder will read a report and will not read a CSV.

Reports also survive the meeting. A deck that names which engagers look like buyers is a sales asset with a shelf life measured in quarters.

One honest caveat about the underlying data. Engagement capture reads what the platform shows publicly, which means the numbers are a floor, not a ceiling. People who engage privately or from restricted profiles never appear. The list you build is the visible room, and the visible room is still far bigger than most teams have ever worked.

The five, in one page. The prospector builds the list. The researcher finds the signals. The strategist writes the sequence. The analyst measures who showed up. The storyteller puts it in a report a human will actually read.

What to copy

Five moves that turn engagement into pipeline

Pull the engagers, not the impressions. Every post you publish is a list of named people who raised a hand. Capture it before the window closes.
Rank by frequency, then by fit. Two touches in thirty days means warm. Three means call. Fit decides the order you work them in.
Read comments, not likes. A comment tells you what someone cares about in their own words, which is the only brief you need for a first message.
Audit your competitors' reaction tabs. Who engages with your competitor, your investor and your buyer is a public market map, and it updates daily.
Ship the report. A deck that names the people is worth more than a dashboard that counts them.

One thing to be careful with. This data is public, which does not make every use of it polite. I use it to write a better first line, not to spray a list. The audits work because the messages that follow are specific enough to earn a reply.

The room is public, and almost nobody is in it

Eight audits, 198 posts, 6,244 people with names and titles. The work was not collecting it. The work was reading it properly, which is the one thing a report can force a person to do and a spreadsheet cannot.

Sources

Sexton, Koka. “The LinkedIn Pipeline Crew.” Agent crew infographic series, 15 Oct. 2026.
Sexton, Koka. “Your brand has reach. Your executives have trust.” LinkedIn, 4 Sep. 2026. Eight network engagement audits, 30-day windows Aug 3 – Sep 2, 2026: Nooks, B2Linked, Battery Ventures, ColdIQ, Descript, Lambda, Dan Lee, Richard van der Blom.
Per-audit engagement counts as published in that report: 198 posts, 6,244 named engagers. Battery Ventures, 1,184 engagers with 100 repeat.