How to Steal Competitors’ Audience on LinkedIn

Why Steal Your Competitors’ Audience on LinkedIn?

Imagine having to start from scratch and painstakingly build an audience on LinkedIn from the ground up. You will spend time, effort, and money, and may still not get your desired result. However, if you steal your competitors’ audience on LinkedIn, you leverage their resources and save yours. 

Furthermore, this growth strategy allows you to reach out to an audience that is already optimized for your products or/and services. That is to say, they are knowledgeable and already interested in your niche. 

So, why go through the trouble of building and optimizing an audience from scratch when your competition has already done the groundwork for you? 

Now that you understand why you should steal your competitors' audience on LinkedIn, let us show you how you can pull it off. 

3 Ways to Steal Your Competitors’ Audience on LinkedIn

There are 3 effective ways you can steal your competitors’ audience on Linkedin and extract their email, they are: 

1. Company page followers.
2. Post commenters. 
3. LinkedIn event attendees. 

1. Get Your Competitor’s Followers on Linkedin 

This is the first of three strategies. Here, you visit your competitors' LinkedIn company pages and extract most or all their followers. 

The reason this technique works is simple—the people or profiles that follow the pages of these companies you are targeting are clearly interested in their products or services. This means that these people will also be interested in yours. 

There is just one thing to note before we start. This strategy will require you to have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Don't fret if you don't have it, we will also teach you how to work around it. 

Follow the following steps to steal your competitors' audience on LinkedIn by hacking their followers. 

Step 1: Create a burner LinkedIn account 

Due to the likely limitations on your original LinkedIn page, you may not be able to carry out this technique. So, create a new LinkedIn account. When you complete signing up, add a job experience at your competitor’s company. 

Step 2: Activate LinkedIn Sales Navigator free trial

If you have the premium version, jump to the next step. If you, however, don’t, do read on. 

You either can’t afford the Sales Navigator premium at the moment or you don’t want to spend that much just to get your competitor’s followers. What you have to do is simple and free of charge. Join the one-month free trial. You will be done before the one month elapses. Then, you can discontinue. 

Step 3: Select the followers on the company page

Now that you have the premium LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you are ready to steal your competitor’s audience on LinkedIn. Proceed to open the Linkedin Sales Navigator. Go to the Spotlight feature and select Following your company.

A list of all your competitor’s followers will come up on the right. 

Now, exempt everyone working for your competitor. You can do this by clicking on the company filter section and selecting the current company. This step is extremely crucial because you don’t want your competitor’s employees to get your prospecting messages. 

Step 4: Extract followers and get their emails

This is perhaps the most crucial step in this process to steal your competitor’s audience on LinkedIn.

Once you have excluded the company’s employees and owners, you extract the remaining followers into a CSV and get their respective email addresses using Spylead. 

This is the fastest email extraction you will ever do. What’s more, it’s reliable and easy to use. 

Step #5: Reach out to followers

Now that you have the list extracted along with the email addresses, it’s time to contact them. You can either reach out to them manually or build a LinkedIn prospecting campaign. In any case, do something direct and straight to the point. 

Something like this: 

Hi <name of follower>,

Forgive me for butting into your inbox like this, but I’m reaching out because I saw that you follow <competitor on Linkedin>. 

While we may have a similar product/service, here are some things that may interest you. <why your product or service is better than the competition>. 

Are you still interested in <your product or service>?

Regards,

<your name>.

NOTE: asking if the prospect is still interested in what you have to offer is vital because they may have moved on to other things. 

Ready for the second technique? 

2. Extract Your Competitors’ Post Commenters and Likers

Day in, day out, countless users react to LinkedIn posts. If they are not sharing them, they are liking and commenting on them. The kind of post people react to is a great indicator of their interest in the topic in the post. This is what makes reaching out to users who react to your competitors’ LinkedIn posts such a sound idea.

To effectively steal your competitors’ audience on LinkedIn via extracting their post commenters and likers, follow these steps: 

Step 1: Follow niche heavyweights

To keep up with the opportunities and developments in your niche, you have to get your competitor's posts on your LinkedIn feed. To have this, you have to follow all influencers and competitors in your niche. It’s in these posts that you see people comment and like, and that’s what you are after. 

Timing is important here. You are more likely to get a higher response rate if you reach out to them soon after they comment or like the posts. Then again, you want to allow enough time for the said post to gather maximum reactions before doing bulk extraction. The rule of thumb is to wait at least 24 hours before proceeding to the next step. 

Step 2: Extract post commenters and likers

This is what this whole article is about—extracting emails. 

This time, we will use Phantombuster to extract the information of people who like or comment on selected posts. All you have to do is copy and paste the URL of the post in Phantombuster and it will extract:

• First name
• Last name
• Linkedin URL
• Job title
• Degree connection

Phantombuster will do this for every post commenter or liker. 

Step 3: Reach out to post commenters and likers

You have the list with all their information, it’s time for the next and last step. Remember, it should be simple and cut to the chase. 

Here is a template you can use for your campaign:

Hi <name of post commenter or liker>,

I’m reaching out because saw your comment or that you liked <post of your competitor>.

I’m <what you are offering (eg. webinar)> on the same topic on <date and time>. 

Are you interested in getting more information on the topic?

Regards,

<your name>. 

NOTE: It’s always advisable to propose content first and not your product or service directly. 

3. Reach out to competitors’ event attendees

It’s great news if one of one or more of your competitors is organizing a LinkedIn event. That means they have done all the work, including spending money on ads and sending prospecting messages. In the end, the list of event attendees is public. So, you can leverage all this work and steal your competitors’ audience on LinkedIn. 

The steps are as follows: 

Step 1: Look for LinkedIn events in your niche

If any user is attending a LinkedIn event, it means they are interested in the topic and the niche. 

The first step is to look for the LinkedIn event. To do this, go to the LinkedIn search and type in relevant keywords. Use the event filters. A list of events packed with potential customers will come up.

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Step 2: Extract the list of LinkedIn event attendees

You must first click on Attend to get access to the list of event attendees. As soon as you do this, the Networking tab will pop up, which will grant you access to the list of all event attendees. Afterward, you are ready to extract again using the ever-fast and reliable Spylead.

Check out our case study Find the emails of event's attendees from Linkedin

You will get all the info and emails (100% verified) you need into a list, which can be exported into a CSV file. Once you finish, it's time to reach out to these attendees. 

Step 3: Contact event attendees

To successfully steal your competitor’s audience on LinkedIn using this technique, you can either reach out to them before or after the event. 

Send something simple and short.

Before event:

Hi <name of follower>,

I’m reaching out because I saw that you’ll also be attending <competitor’s event> <date> 🙂

Do you know <competitor name> well?

Regards,

<your name>.

OR

After event:

Hi <name of follower>,

I’m reaching out because I saw that you attended <competitor’s event>, 

I missed the event and I’m hoping for some highlights. I wonder if you might be able to help. 

Was the event valuable?

Regards,

<your name>.

NOTE: The goal at first is not to sell to them, but to open a line of communication. Who knows, you might learn about ways your competitors fall short and respond by suggesting a superior solution—your product or service.

That’s it for how to steal your competitors’ audience on LinkedIn. 

Finally 

Let your competitor do the work while you leverage it using effective, easy-to-do techniques. Steal your competitors' audience on LinkedIn and advance your business. Spylead is your effective partner throughout this process. Follow every point step by step and watch your response rate climb by up to 30%. 

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