How to target your competitors' followers on LinkedIn, step by step

To target a competitor's followers on LinkedIn, pick one or two competitors whose customers look like yours, build a list from their followers or post engagers, filter it hard to your ideal customer, then reach out about the person's problem rather than the competitor. This guide walks through each step, with a one-week plan.

For the bigger picture of why this works and how extraction is priced, read our guide to competitor follower extraction. This post is the practical how-to.

Step 1: choose the right competitors

Not every competitor's audience is worth your time. Start with a short list and score each one.

Score competitors on three questions

Question	Why it matters
Do their customers look like ours?	If not, their audience will not fit your ICP
Is their audience focused or broad?	Focused audiences produce cleaner lists
Can we explain in one line why their follower would care about us?	If you can't, your outreach won't land

Look beyond direct competitors

Some of the best lists come from adjacent tools: products your buyers use alongside yours. Their followers often fit your ICP without being committed to a direct alternative. Industry media brands and communities can work too.

Pick one or two to start. You will learn more from one well-run test than from five rushed ones.

Step 2: write down your ideal customer

Before you build any list, write down who you actually want to reach:

• job titles and seniority
• titles to exclude, such as recruiters, students and people working at other vendors
• company size and industry
• regions you serve

Our free ideal customer profile template walks you through each one. These rules become the filters for your list.

Step 3: build the list

There are two main sources: the competitor's company page followers and the people who engage with its posts.

Option A: post engagers, by hand

Reactions and comments on a competitor's public posts are visible on LinkedIn. For a small test, open a competitor's recent posts on topics close to your product and note the commenters who fit your ICP. Commenters are usually more valuable than reactors, because a comment tells you what they think.

This is slow, but it costs nothing and teaches you a lot about the audience.

Option B: post engagers, extracted

If a competitor post has many engagers, Live Leads can extract them as a list. Our guide to LinkedIn post engagers covers how to pick posts worth extracting.

Option C: company page followers, extracted

For the broader audience, GTM Plays Live Leads extracts the followers of a LinkedIn company page in one order:

• Standard orders charge 1 credit per follower.
• ICP-Filtered orders charge only for the followers who match your filters, plus a flat 500-credit filter fee, which usually suits large competitor pages with mixed audiences.
• Most orders finish in 2 to 6 hours, delivered as CSV or Excel, or as import files for Clay, Instantly or Smartlead.
• New accounts get 100 free credits on signup to test a small Standard order.

Live Leads is a one-off extraction, paid per lead with credits and separate from the GTM Plays Pro plan. See our LinkedIn follower scraper guide for what each row contains.

Step 4: clean and segment the list

A raw list is not ready for outreach. Spend an hour on it.

1. Remove people you should not contact: existing customers, open deals, anyone who has opted out, and employees of the competitor and other vendors.
2. Match against your CRM so you do not message someone as a stranger when your team already knows them.
3. Segment by role and company fit. Group heads of sales separately from founders, and large companies separately from small ones.
4. Prioritise. Start with the best-fit segment, not the biggest.

If you plan to email as well, enrich the top segment with work emails using your usual tool. The Clay, Instantly and Smartlead import formats make this step quicker.

Step 5: write outreach that is about them

This is where most competitor campaigns go wrong. The person did not follow a competitor to be told about you.

Rules for the first message

• Lead with their role and problem, not the competitor.
• Don't say where you found them. "I saw you follow X" feels like surveillance.
• Offer something useful: a short insight, benchmark or resource related to the problem.
• Ask one easy question, such as whether the problem is a priority this quarter.
• Keep it short. A few sentences.

A simple structure

1. A line about something relevant to their role or company.
2. One sentence on the problem you solve, framed as a question or observation.
3. A light, specific question.

Our LinkedIn message generator can draft a few variations for each segment so you can test them.

If they ask how you compare

Be factual and fair. Many competitor followers are happy customers. Overclaiming damages trust quickly; a clear, honest answer about where you are different earns respect.

Step 6: send at a human pace and handle replies

• Send connection requests and messages at a pace a person could manage.
• Reply to responses quickly; interest fades within days.
• Log outcomes in your CRM so you can see which segment and message work.

Step 7: measure and decide what's next

Track each competitor list separately:

Metric	What it tells you
Share of the list matching your ICP	Whether the audience fits
Acceptance rate on connection requests	Whether your profile and note are relevant
Reply rate	Whether the message resonates
Positive replies and meetings	Whether the list produces pipeline

After two or three weeks, compare lists. Often an adjacent tool's audience beats a direct competitor's. Double down on what works, and drop what doesn't.

A one-week plan

Day	Task
Monday	Pick one competitor and write your ICP filters
Tuesday	Build or order the list; most Live Leads orders finish in 2 to 6 hours
Wednesday	Clean, check against the CRM and segment
Thursday	Write two message variations for your best segment and start sending
Friday	Reply to responses and note early results

Going from one-off lists to ongoing signals

A competitor list is a snapshot. If you want to keep catching people as they show interest, the GTM Plays Pro agent finds intent signals, scores fit against your ICP, writes and sends LinkedIn messages from your own account and brings replies into one inbox. It does not book meetings by itself. Pro is $149 a month with a 7-day free trial. Many teams start with a competitor list and then let the agent keep the pipeline moving.

Common mistakes

• Starting with too many competitors and running none of them well.
• Skipping the filter, so most of the list never had a chance of buying.
• Making the competitor the message.
• Assuming a follow means the person is unhappy with the competitor.
• Not measuring by list, so you can't tell which audience worked.

The bottom line

Competitor audiences are some of the most relevant lists a B2B team can build. Choose the competitor carefully, filter to your ICP, write about the person's problem and measure each list. To try it, sign up for 100 free Live Leads credits and run a small test order on one competitor.