Commenting Playbooks6 min read
Commenting vs Posting on LinkedIn: Which One Should You Do?
Commenting vs posting on LinkedIn: what each one actually buys you, why comments compound faster for small accounts, and how to split your time between them.
By Animesh Kudake, Co-founder, Apna Project
The short version
- Commenting vs posting on LinkedIn is not a real either-or for most people, but if you only have twenty minutes a day, commenting is the better use of it.
- A post asks strangers to care about you. A comment borrows an audience that has already decided to care about something.
- Posting is the only one of the two that builds an asset you own, so the right ratio shifts as your audience grows.
- Comments have a shorter half-life and a much higher floor. A bad comment costs you nothing. A bad post sits on your profile.
- The habit that works is boring: comment daily, post weekly, and let the comments decide which post ideas are worth writing.
What posting is genuinely good at
Ownership. A post lives on your profile. Six months later, a recruiter or a prospect can scroll it and get a sense of how you think. Comments are much harder to browse, and readers rarely go looking for them, even though they can. If you want to see how that works, finding your own comments takes more clicks than it should.
Setting the agenda. When you comment, you are always answering someone else's question. When you post, you decide what the question is. That matters if you are trying to be known for a specific point of view rather than for being helpful in general.
Compounding follows. Comments earn profile visits. Posts are what convert those visits into follows, because a visitor who sees three posts they like has a reason to stay.
Scale. A comment reaches the readers of one thread. A post that travels can reach tens of thousands. It happens less often than LinkedIn's success stories suggest, but the ceiling only exists on the posting side.
The ratio we would actually run
If you have twenty minutes a day, spend it commenting. All of it. Do not write a post.
If you have an hour a day, comment for thirty to forty minutes and use the rest to draft. Post once or twice a week, on the ideas your comments already tested.
If you have an established audience, invert it. Post two or three times a week, and use commenting to keep the threads under your own posts alive and to stay visible in your field between posts.
The sequencing matters more than the ratio. Comment first, then post, because commenting tells you what people argue about. Half of our own post ideas started as a comment that got twelve replies and made it obvious the topic had more in it.
The part people get wrong about comments
The failure mode is not commenting too little. It is commenting in a way that reads as attendance rather than contribution. "Great post!" and "Thanks for sharing" get seen by nobody and remembered by nobody, and LinkedIn's own comment surface tends to sort low signal replies down.
A comment earns its place when it does one of four things: adds a specific detail the post left out, disagrees with a reason attached, asks a question the author would actually enjoy answering, or tells a short story that matches the post's claim. Anything else is noise with your face on it. Our comment etiquette guide goes into the specific failure patterns.
Length is not the signal people think it is either. Two useful sentences beat six padded ones, and long comments collapse behind a "see more" link that most readers never expand.
Where we sit, and the honest limitation
We build Commenti, which drafts comments for you, so our bias is obvious: we think commenting is the underrated half of this. But the reason the product is shaped the way it is says something about the tradeoff.
We cap plans at 20, 40, and 60 AI comments a day ($19, $29, and $49 per month billed yearly) rather than selling unlimited volume, and the tiers are built around 20-60 new followers a day, with results that vary a lot by niche and by how good the comments are. We cap it because the strategy stops working when comments stop being specific, and volume is the fastest way to make comments generic. There is also an approve mode, because a draft you did not read is a draft that will eventually embarrass you.
Worth saying plainly: LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits third-party automation, including automated commenting. Commenti operates in that gray zone. We build in daily caps, pacing, and skip filters to reduce risk, and reduce is the only claim we will make. Nobody can promise immunity, and you should not believe anyone who does. We wrote more about that in is LinkedIn automation safe.
So which one, if you have to pick
Pick commenting for the first ninety days. It has a higher floor, faster feedback, and it puts you in rooms your posts cannot reach yet. Then start posting weekly, using what the comments taught you.
The people who grow fastest on LinkedIn are almost never the best writers. They are the ones who showed up in other people's threads for months before anyone noticed them, and then had something to say when people finally looked.
Frequently asked questions
Is commenting better than posting on LinkedIn?
For an account under a few thousand followers, commenting usually produces more visible results per minute, because you are appearing in front of audiences that already exist. Posting builds something you keep. Most people get the best outcome by commenting daily and posting once or twice a week rather than choosing one.
Do comments show up in other people's feeds?
Sometimes. LinkedIn may surface a post to your network with a note that you commented on it, and your comment is visible to anyone reading that post. It is not guaranteed distribution, and it varies by how much engagement the thread is already getting, so treat feed exposure as a bonus rather than the plan.
How many comments a day is reasonable?
Ten to fifteen genuine comments a day is enough for most people, and it is a volume you can sustain by hand. Past that, quality drops before reach improves. We cap our own product tiers at 20 to 60 comments a day for the same reason, since volume without relevance stops working quickly.
Does commenting help if I never post at all?
Yes, and it is a legitimate strategy. Profile views, follows, and inbound conversations can all come from comments alone. What you give up is the ability to set the agenda, since you are always responding to someone else's topic rather than making your own case.
Written by the team building Commenti on real LinkedIn growth data. Found an error? Tell us and we’ll fix it. Accuracy beats winning.
Co-founder, Apna Project
Co-founder at Apna Project, where he helps founders and agencies turn ideas into products. Writes here on LinkedIn growth and what actually earns attention in a comment section. Commenti is the LinkedIn comment automation tool by Ampliflow.
Commenting vs posting on LinkedIn is the question almost everyone gets to about three weeks into trying to grow. You write posts, they land on forty people, and meanwhile a two-line comment you left on someone else's post gets more replies than anything on your own profile. It feels backwards.
It is not backwards. The two activities do different jobs, and the reason comments feel disproportionately effective early is structural, not lucky. Here is what each one is actually for, and how we would split the time.
The two are not competing for the same thing
A post is a request. You are asking people who follow you, plus whatever slice of their network LinkedIn decides to test it on, to stop and care about something you decided was interesting. If your audience is small, the request goes to a small room.
A comment is a borrowed audience. Someone else already did the work of gathering attention, and the thread under their post is a place where people are actively reading. You are not asking for attention, you are joining a conversation that already has some.
That is why the early returns look so lopsided. A new account posting into a 200 person network is shouting in an empty room. The same account commenting on a post with 300 comments is standing where people already are. None of this requires the algorithm to favour you.
What commenting is genuinely good at
Getting in front of the right people fast. You choose the post, so you choose the room. Fifteen comments under posts from people in your field puts you in front of a far better filtered audience than a post that reaches whoever your network happens to be.
A high floor. A comment that lands flat costs nothing. It scrolls away in a day. That low downside is what makes daily practice possible, and daily practice is the whole mechanism. We covered the mechanics of that in how to grow on LinkedIn without posting.
Speed of feedback. You find out within an hour whether an idea has legs. Post ideas that take you two hours to write can take a week to prove themselves.
Relationship starting. Nobody replies to a cold message from a stranger. Plenty of people reply to a stranger who has said something useful under three of their posts. Comments are the cheapest legitimate warm-up there is.