Learn how to track likes and comments on posts from specific LinkedIn profiles so you can spot engaged contacts, monitor thought leaders or competitors, and turn engagement into outreach opportunities.
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to create a watchlist for LinkedIn profile engagement, choose what activity to track, narrow the audience you care about, and decide how signals should be processed in your workflow.
Why this matters
This workflow is ideal when you want to identify people already interacting with content from industry voices, competitors, or influential profiles in your space. Instead of prospecting cold, you can focus on contacts who are already showing intent through likes and comments.
Prerequisites
You should already have access to Signals in lemlist.
You should already know which LinkedIn profiles you want to monitor.
You should already have a plan for how to handle identified contacts, such as reviewing them manually, creating tasks, or pushing them into a campaign.
Core lesson — step-by-step workflow
Phase 1: Start a new watchlist
Go to Signals from the left sidebar, then click New watchlist. This opens the watchlist builder where you’ll define what engagement to monitor and how to act on it.
In the signal selection step, choose Engaged with a profile on LinkedIn, then click Next. This signal is designed for tracking people who react to or comment on posts from specific LinkedIn profiles.
Phase 2: Configure the profiles and engagement you want to track
Enter a clear watchlist name, add the LinkedIn profile URLs you want to monitor, and click Add profiles. Add one profile per line so lemlist can validate them correctly and calculate the monthly credit usage.
After your profiles are validated, choose the type of engagement to track:
Likes on their posts if you want broader engagement signals.
Comments on their posts if you want stronger buying intent or more thoughtful engagement.
Likes & Comments if you only want people who do both.
This choice defines how narrow or broad your watchlist will be.
Best practice: If you’re targeting warm outreach, start with Comments on their posts or Likes & Comments. These signals usually indicate stronger interest than a simple like.
Phase 3: Choose which contacts to monitor
Select the segment scope for the watchlist. You can monitor:
All segments to capture every matching contact.
Contact list to limit tracking to an existing list in lemlist.
Specific segment to restrict tracking using a more targeted audience definition.
Choose the option that matches how tightly you want to control lead intake.
Refine your segment using criteria such as job titles, companies, locations, industries, and company sizes, then click Next. Use these filters when you only want engagement from a specific ICP rather than everyone interacting with the monitored profiles.
If needed, add profiles or company pages to the Exclusion list and click Next. This is useful when you want to ignore internal team members, known partners, irrelevant companies, or any engagement you don’t want included in results.
Phase 4: Decide how signals should be processed
Choose how lemlist should handle identified signals:
Manually process the identified signals if you want full control before taking action.
Create a task for the identified signals if your team works from a task queue.
Push to campaign automatically if you want immediate automation.
If you choose campaign automation, select the destination campaign and review the duplicate-handling options carefully so leads aren’t re-added where they shouldn’t be.
Note: Campaign processing settings apply at the campaign level. If multiple watchlists are linked to the same campaign, they can share these settings.
Phase 5: Review and launch the watchlist
Review the Watchlist summary to confirm the monitored profiles, engagement type, billing, signal processing method, and segment rules. Once everything looks correct, click Next to finalize the watchlist.
Practical application
Here’s one simple way to use this watchlist in a real workflow:
Monitor posts from 3 to 10 thought leaders, competitors, or recognized experts in your niche.
Track comments first if you want stronger engagement signals.
Filter the audience to your ICP using job title, industry, location, and company size.
Automatically push matched contacts into a campaign or send them to a rep for manual review.
Example: A sales team selling to B2B SaaS companies could monitor posts from well-known GTM influencers and competitor founders, then only capture contacts with titles like Head of Sales, VP Sales, or SDR Manager in companies with 50 to 500 employees.
Troubleshooting & pitfalls
Issue: No signals appear right away
Root cause: New watchlists can take some time to start collecting data.
Fix:
Wait a few days for the first signals to populate.
Double-check that the monitored profiles are active on LinkedIn.
Make sure your audience filters are not too restrictive.
Issue: Too many irrelevant contacts are being captured
Root cause: The segment is too broad, or you selected a wide engagement type such as likes only.
Fix:
Add criteria like job title, company, location, or industry.
Switch from Likes on their posts to Comments on their posts.
Use the exclusion list to remove unwanted profiles or companies.
Issue: Expected profiles are not being added
Root cause: The LinkedIn URLs may be formatted incorrectly or not validated.
Fix:
Add one LinkedIn profile URL per line.
Click Add profiles and confirm they appear as valid.
Remove broken or incomplete URLs and try again.
Issue: Leads are not entering the campaign as expected
Root cause: Signal processing is set to manual handling, task creation, or duplicate protections are blocking import.
Fix:
Open the watchlist and review the Signals processing settings.
Confirm the correct campaign is selected.
Check whether the option to avoid importing leads already in another campaign is preventing entry.
Key takeaway
A LinkedIn profile engagement watchlist helps you find warm contacts based on real activity around profiles that matter to your market. When you combine the right monitored profiles, the right engagement type, and focused segmentation, you can turn public engagement into a highly relevant outbound motion.