How to Use the LinkedIn Post Commenters to Emails

*For a workflow targeting 10–20 commenters, the full process typically takes around 5–10 minutes total, including exporting commenters and enriching profiles with email discovery.

Before you start

• Sorting limitation: LinkedIn defaults to “Most relevant” when showing comments. To ensure you collect all comments, switch the post’s comment sorting to “Most recent” before copying the URL.

• Awareness of LinkedIn’s safety limits:

  • Keep to ~40 profiles per day (LinkedIn).

  • Keep to ~75 profiles per day with Sales Navigator.

  • If you enable email discovery, cut this number in half, since the Workflow will perform additional page visits.

Step 1: Connect your LinkedIn account

To let the automation act on your behalf:

1. Install the PhantomBuster browser extension and connect your LinkedIn session in one click.

2. If you’re not using Chrome or Firefox, you can retrieve your session cookie manually (see our cookie guide).

Check your browser user agent
Make sure your browser is up to date before connecting your account. 
→ If your Chrome or Firefox version is outdated, your session cookie may expire much more quickly, and you’ll need to reconnect often.

Step 2: Provide your LinkedIn posts

Tell the automation which posts to process. You can provide:

• Paste a single LinkedIn post URL.

• Provide a Google Sheet with LinkedIn post URLs (make sure it’s shared with “Anyone with the link”).

• Upload a CSV file with LinkedIn post URLs (make sure it’s publicly accessible, and note that CSV upload is only available on paid plans). 

  → If you’re using a spreadsheet, the automation defaults to the first column (A). To use a different column, enter the column’s header name in the field “Name of column containing post URLs.”

Step 3: Control how many commenters are processed

Fine-tune extraction volume:

• Number of profiles to scrape per day (optional): 

  • Default = 40 profiles/day.

  • Raise to 75 if you have a Sales Navigator account.

Advanced settings (dropdown in setup)

1. Watcher mode: 

   • Enable this to reprocess the same post URLs on future runs to capture new commenters.

2. Extract comment replies: 

   • Enable this to include replies in threads. By default, only top-level comments are extracted.

Result file settings (dropdown in setup)

• Name your results file (optional)

  • You can customize the file name.

    If you rename the file between launches, the automation will create a new results file and start processing inputs from scratch. 

Step 4: Enrich your leads with professional emails (optional)

You can choose to add verified professional email addresses to each LinkedIn profile.

Not every profile will return an email address. The match rate depends on the data available, so the number of verified emails may be lower than your credits used.

1. Click on the “Select your email discovery service” dropdown.

2. Choose one of the following options:

   • PhantomBuster credits (default option)

     • Each plan includes monthly email discovery credits.

     • 1 credit = 1 attempt to find and verify an email for one profile.

     • Credits reset monthly.

   • Third-party services

     • Connect your own account by entering your API key for:

       • Dropcontact.io

       • Hunter.io

       • Snov.io

Enabling email discovery means the automation will spend more time on each profile, since it needs to process both the message and the email lookup. This increases execution time per launch.

Step 5 (Optional): Advanced settings

Advanced settings are available if you want to fine-tune how your automation runs, but by default they’re already optimized for most use cases. 

We recommend leaving them as they are unless a guide specifically instructs you to change something.

→ For a detailed overview of all advanced options (like execution limits, retries, email notifications, proxies, webhooks, and file management), see our Advanced settings guide.

Launch and results

When you’re ready:

• Toggle the ON/OFF switch to start your Workflow.

Once it finishes:

1. Open the Results tab in the Workflow console to see the data collected.

2. Download your results as a CSV or JSON file, or view them as a dynamic list on the LinkedIn Leads page.

→ To learn how to export your data to Google Sheets, integrate with other tools, or reuse it in more automations, check our Access and Export your Phantom Results guide.

Export and input limits on the Free plan
If you’re on the Free plan or Free trial, some features are limited:
- CSV exports include only the first 10 rows of results.
- CSV download links (for dynamic viewing in Google Sheets or integrations) are not available.
- JSON exports are not available.
- CSV upload as an input method is not supported.
To unlock all features, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan.

What you give (Input) and What you get (Output)

This section gives you a detailed breakdown of everything you need to provide to run this Workflow, and everything you’ll receive once it completes.

What you give (Input)

What you get (Output)

Tips and troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Using a private Google Sheet → make sure it’s shared with “Anyone with the link.”

• Expecting every commenter to return an email → enrichment depends on available data.

• Extracting too many profiles in one run, which can force frequent session cookie updates.

• No custom scheduling and not getting data right away → LinkedIn Post Commenters to Emails runs once per day and processes as many profiles from the post as possible in one launch. It doesn’t “resume” scraping on the same post across multiple runs.

  • By contrast, LinkedIn Profile Scraper launches every other hour (up to 8×/day), scraping up to 5 profiles per run depending on your daily limit.

• If the automation stops working:

  • Errors may not always appear in the Dashboard.

  • To check hidden errors and execution details, open the Logs section from the console page of your Workflow. For step-by-step instructions, see How to Troubleshoot Errors in Workflows.

If you run into issues

• Browse the Fix Issues & Troubleshoot Errors section for solutions to common problems.

• Review our Automation Rate Limits by Platform guide.

• Check our Best Practices for Social Media Automation guide.

Suggested automations

After exporting commenters with emails, you can:

• LinkedIn Outreach → manage targeted outreach campaigns to commenters, track engagement, and set automated follow-ups in one dashboard.

• LinkedIn Auto Poster → publish your own posts to attract visibility and encourage engagement from these contacts.

• LinkedIn Commenter → reply to commenters’ own posts to start building relationships.

• LinkedIn Auto Liker → engage softly with their content to stay visible in their network.