LinkedIn comment-to-DM

01What comment-to-DM means on LinkedIn

You write a post that gives something away: a checklist, a template, an application link. Instead of posting the link, you ask people to comment one word, like SCHOOL. Everyone who comments that word gets the link in a private message.

Doing this by hand means reading every comment, opening every profile, and pasting the same message 60 times. On Instagram, ManyChat does it for you. ManyChat does not run on LinkedIn, so on LinkedIn it has meant a lot of copy and paste.

02Setting up your first one

1. 1
   Write the post

   Say what you are giving away and ask for one word. Keep the word short and easy to type on a phone: SCHOOL, GUIDE, SEND.

2. 2
   Tell Drop the post and the word

   Paste the post link, type the word, and say what you are sending with its link, like the application, stanley.com/apply.

3. 3
   Check the three messages

   The DM, the reply for people who got it, and the reply for people who need to connect first. Change any of them, or keep the defaults.

4. 4
   Launch

   Drop starts checking your post within 5 minutes and runs for 14 days.

03What happens for people you are connected to

LinkedIn lets you message your connections directly, so this path is simple. Within a few minutes of their comment, they get your DM with the link. Then Drop replies under their comment, by default with just sent you a DM with it.

The public reply does two jobs. It tells the commenter to check their messages, and every reply is a new comment on your post, which keeps it in front of more people.

04What happens for people you are not connected to

This is most people. LinkedIn does not let you send a normal message to someone you are not connected to. The only ways around it are InMail, which costs credits, or an Open Profile, which the other person has to have switched on.

So Drop sends them a connection request from your account and replies under their comment saying so. The moment they accept, the same DM goes out. If they send you a request instead, Drop accepts that too. Nobody who asked for the link is left out; some of them just get it a little later.

05What it looks like on a real post

One post we ran it on, an application for the Stanley in School programme, got 215 reactions and 150 comments. 60 of those comments were the keyword. Of those 60, 8 people were already connected to the author and could be messaged straight away. The other 52 had to connect first.

That split is normal for a post that travels beyond your own network. It is also why the not-connected path matters: without it, 52 of 60 people would have been left waiting.

06How fast it goes, and the limits

Drop sends at a pace a person could keep up, from 8am to 6pm in your time zone. Per LinkedIn account, per day, a warmed account sends up to 100 DMs, 75 public replies and 40 accepted requests, never more than 180 actions in total. A new account ramps up from 15 DMs a day.

Those limits mean a very big post takes more than a day. A post with 300 keyword comments takes a warmed account about four days of public replies. Drop keeps going until everyone is done or the 14 days are up, whichever is first.

07After it runs

Every commenter is listed with what happened to them: link sent, asked to connect, connected, or replied. You can export the list as a CSV. Replies to your DM appear in your Drop inbox, next to the post they came from.

After 14 days the Drop stops by itself, because comments on a LinkedIn post slow to almost nothing after the first week. You can run it for another 14 days with one tap.

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