LinkedIn Search: 7 Little-known Hacks to Find Top Prospects on Linkedin

There are many proven ways to find top prospects on LinkedIn.

You can upload your email list, join professional LinkedIn groups to find relevant people, use paid tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and more.

We’ve covered a lot of these tactics and more on our blog.

But nowadays, it seems everyone is running the same LinkedIn outreach campaigns!

If you’ve ever had a sales rep connect with you, saying how they came across your profile in the same LinkedIn group, and then jump into selling their product… you know what I’m talking about.

Don’t get me wrong. Leveraging LinkedIn groups to find relevant leads is a great lead generation tactic.

We’ve tried it and had a moderate-to-high success rate with finding leads.

But people can tell a sales pitch miles away today.

So, if you’re looking for new ways to find your top prospects on LinkedIn, you’ve come to the right place.

We’re going to cover little-known tactics that are vastly underused. Chances are, your competitors aren’t using them either and you can use these tactics to find highly qualified leads

Here are some little-known tactics to find people on LinkedIn:

1. People also viewed
2. Investigate competitors’ networks
3. Skill endorsements
4. See who commented
5. Browse user interactions
6. Search alert with Sales Navigator
7. Company assigned hashtags

Ready?

Let’s begin!

1. People Also Viewed

Do you know about LinkedIn private mode?

Starting with this quick hack, you’ll be able to find relevant prospects and leads simply by clicking on most profiles.

Yet, most people miss it.

How’s that?

Go to any LinkedIn profile, and on the right side, check out the ‘People also viewed’ section.

Click ‘Show more’ for an even larger list of potential prospects!

This is an incredibly simple LinkedIn hack but a great way to get started if you don’t know your prospects well.

You can use this tactic to find leads, prospects, business owners, freelancers, and more.

So, even if you’re looking for a particular SaaS solution for growth hacking, all you have to do is click on one person’s profile. Then, LinkedIn will do the work for you and offer you a list of relevant prospects on the right side of their profile.

Preferably, the person whose profile you’re checking should already be close to your ideal prospect, so your results will be exactly the people you’re looking for!

Note: Some people have the ‘People also viewed’ privacy option secured in their settings. So, while not everyone will have this section on their profiles, you can still check as it will take just under a minute.

2. Investigating Competitors’ Network

Are you paying close attention to your competitors?

There are a lot of opportunities and growth hacks you can capitalize on if you know who your competitors are.

For one, you can spy on their advertising strategy to find out what they’re not focusing on and address this in your own strategy. Fill in the blanks that they’re missing and you’ll fulfil your customers’ needs!

More importantly, investigating your competitors will open new opportunities when it comes to finding potential prospects.

Here is how you can go through your competitors’ networks and find quality leads to connect with.

Set Your Profile to Private Mode

If you’re about to start exploring your competitors’ networks, try to avoid leaving your footprint.

You don’t want to show up in their “Who’s Viewed Your Profile” section and let them know you were spying!

You can do this by changing your Profile Viewing Options. Click on your profile picture in the top right corner and go to “Settings & Privacy”. On the left, you’ll see a tab called “Visibility”. Click on that, then click on “Profile Viewing Options”.

You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Choose how you want to be displayed – either as an “Anonymous LinkedIn Member” or “Someone at”. The “at” will usually be your University.

Now you’re ready to start browsing your competitors’ networks!

Check out their page

Before you look at the individual members of their network, you might want to study your competitors’ newsfeed content.

Are there any good content ideas that you can use as inspiration?

What are they working on? Do they have an interesting active campaign?

Are they organizing or attending industry events that you should be aware of?

Do they have good results? Are there a lot of interactions on their posts?

Ask yourself these questions and try to get a good grip of what kind of approach to the LinkedIn strategy they’re taking. Maybe they’re doing something in a new way you never thought of!

Go through their connections

Looking through someone’s connections is fairly easy – it’s one click away!

Below their profile picture, you’ll see the number of connections they have. Click on that number and you’re there.

But, here’s the best thing about this approach – when you get to their connections, you’ll have the same filters and options you have in LinkedIn Advanced Search. You can click on “All filters” and find the exact prospects you’re interested in!

This can be very useful if the competitor whose connections you’re looking through has a large network of several thousand people.

Filtering out these search results will save you lots of time.

You can customize for pretty much everything from education and current employer to fields of interest. You can even enter your own keywords to find really specific people if you want to, just like with Advanced Search on LinkedIn.

But getting these results is only the first step – now is the time to start prospecting with Expandi!

In your connection message, make sure you mention the fact that you’re from the same industry as your competitor since the prospect is already familiar with it.

Prevent your competitors from doing the same

Two can play this game: if you can go through your competitors’ connections and “spy” on their leads, they can do the same to you!

However, If you want to hold on to your prospects and forbid your competitors to go through your connections to target them with offers, you can do this easily.

Go to the Visibility settings again and find the “Who can see your connections” option at the bottom. Select “Only you” and you’re done.

This will prevent your competitors from doing the same thing we’re doing right now.

3. Scroll through skill endorsements

Skill endorsements are one place where you might not expect to see a lot of useful leads but you’d be wrong – there’s value to be found here!

Here’s the thing: only active LinkedIn members endorse skills.

What does that mean? When you go through your competitors’ (or your connections’) endorsed skills, you’ll find some active members there. You’ll find people who are on LinkedIn every day, engage in conversations, and might be willing to hear out your offer.

And, if you do things the right way and go through those connections that are relevant in your industry, you’ll find some high-quality leads!

Simply visit the page of the person whose endorsements you want to study, scroll down to endorsements, and, you’ll see this:

As you can see, we chose a popular LinkedIn profile in our industry with lots of connections and endorsements. But, here’s the best thing: clicking on any of these “99+” numbers gives you a new screen with all the people who endorsed these skills.

That can be more than hundreds of people or, in our case, 928!

4. See who commented on posts

Another way to search LinkedIn for people who are more active is to look who comments on posts from your industry.

Going through your competitors’ pages can again be useful here. But, a more effective strategy might be to find an influencer in your industry with a lot of followers and check out their posts.

Chances are they’ll have hundreds of comments from people actively interested in the topic!

Go to “See all activity” and select “Posts” at the top of the screen to see what the influencer/prospect you choose has been posting. Click on “comments” underneath any of their posts and you’ll see lots of potential prospects!

Any of these users can be a good connection since they are active in the community and follow an influencer from your niche.

The best thing? You can reach out to all of these people in a few moments with Expandi!

Here’s how it works:

• Find a post with a lot of engagement, click on the three little dots in the upper right corner, and select “copy link to post”.
• Log in to Expandi, create a new search, select ‘Post engagement’ and paste the link you just copied.
• Create a connector campaign in Expandi and make sure you mention how you follow the same influencer and you like their ideas.

It’s as easy as that!

5. Browse user interactions

If you post content regularly (which is something we always recommend), you likely have lots of people interacting with your posts.

If you aren’t getting interactions, you can work on your content strategy or you might make use of LinkedIn advertising – but let’s not get sidetracked.

So, how do you make the most out of those interactions you have and turn them into valuable prospects?

You can do this manually: simply schedule a time to go through your profile every day and see if there are any new engaged users.

But, if you have a lot of connections and too much engagement on your page, you can always use the “post engagement” option on Expandi we mentioned in the example above!

6. Create a search alert in Sales Navigator

Do you want to know how to find people on LinkedIn without even moving a single muscle?

Creating a search alert in Sales Navigator might be just what you’re looking for.

We’ve already written about LinkedIn Sales Navigator and the amazing ways in which it can help your prospecting efforts. You can use its advanced search to reach pretty much anyone you want and get some great results.

One thing we love to do in Sales Navigator is to create search alerts so that we get new leads while working on other things or even sleeping!

It’s simple:

• Sign in to your Sales Navigator
• Use the Advanced search to find prospects – play around with it!
• Click the “Save search” button in the top right of your screen
• Give your search a name and, under “Alert”, choose how often you’d like to get alerts when there are new results for that search.

That way, you’ll have a steady supply of new leads that fit your criteria perfectly.

7. Follow company assigned hashtags

Do you follow any companies on LinkedIn for their content?

Whether or not you’re interested in the activity of a company, you can still benefit from following their activity.

How? By getting to the people that are interested in what that company has to say.

And we don’t mean just their followers – you can identify the people that are interested in the same type of content but don’t actually follow the company.

This can be done by following hashtags. Browse through the company’s page and see if they have dedicated hashtags that they always use. Click on these hashtags and follow them!

You’ll get instant access to content directly from your industry and people who are interested in these topics.

Connect with Expandi

Knowing how to search LinkedIn for valuable leads is just the beginning – to make the most out of this endeavour you need to start reaching out effectively.

You don’t want to use the same templates people keep seeing every day.

Here at Expandi, we are firm believers in hyper-personalization: the use of dynamic content like images and GIFs that use personalization techniques to create a stunning message.

Here’s an example:

This approach allows you to completely customize the content of your message using not only your prospects’ names but their job titles, company names, and even website screenshots!

And here are the kinds of responses we got:

The best thing about or work with Hyperise is that it allows you to do all of this – with ZERO coding knowledge!

The Conclusion

There are lots of inventive ways to use LinkedIn to search people and they all share the same logic: be creative and find prospects that are interested in what you have to say.

Feel free to add these LinkedIn search techniques to your arsenal and remember to always engage each prospect with personalized messages to make the most out of your outreach efforts.

Do you want to get ahead of your competitors with advanced personalization?

Start your 7-day free trial of Expandi and see just how easy it is!

Read more:

15+ LinkedIn Cold Message Examples That Get ~49+% Reply Rate

5+ LinkedIn Lead Generation Strategies That Brought Us 500+ Leads

LinkedIn Outbound Sales – 5+ Tactics You Want to Follow During the Holiday Season