How to reply when someone asks their LinkedIn network for a recommendation

The window on a recommendation post is measured in hours, not days, and most of what gets posted in reply to one makes the poster trust the category less, not more.

Published 2026-09-08 by Deberli. About 7 minutes to read.

Someone posts at nine in the morning: does anyone have a good recommendation for a tool that handles X. By lunchtime there are thirty one comments. Four are genuine peer answers naming a product they actually use. The other twenty seven are vendors, dropping their own name into a thread where nobody asked them personally, several with the exact same opening word: Disclaimer, I work at...

This is the loudest of the intent signals and also the one people execute worst, because the obvious move, commenting with your product's name, is also the move that looks like every other comment in the thread. The poster asked their network for an opinion. A reply that reads like an ad is the opposite of what they came for, even when the product being pitched is genuinely a good fit.

The comment and the DM are answering different questions

A comment is public and it is being read by everyone else in the thread, including the other vendors deciding whether to pile on. Its only real job is credibility: does this reply sound like a peer or a pitch. A comment that says what you actually use it for and admits one limitation reads as the former. A comment that leads with your company name and a link reads as the latter, and it reads that way even to people who were not going to buy anything from anyone.

Disclaimer, I work at Northwind, but we built exactly this. Happy to set up a demo, just DM me!

Been using this for about six months for the same problem. It is not perfect on reporting, but the core workflow held up once we scaled past a few users. (I work on a product in this space, so take that with the appropriate grain of salt, but the honest answer is I would pick it again.)

The second one says less about the product and more about the person writing it, which is exactly why it gets read differently. It also does not ask for anything, which matters more in a comment than anywhere else in this guide, because the poster already has thirty other people asking for the same click.

What the DM is actually for

The DM is not a second attempt at the pitch the comment avoided making. It is where the specific, slightly self interested answer belongs, the one that would look worse in public. A same day DM that references the actual question, not a generic opener, still gets read, because the poster is actively evaluating something right now and a relevant message is welcome in a way it would not be a week later.

Saw your post about X. Not going to pitch in the thread, but happy to send over how we handle the specific part you mentioned, the reporting piece, if useful. No pressure either way.

That message works because it references the actual post rather than the fact that a post exists, and because it explicitly says it is not the public comment repeated in private, which is the thing the recipient is bracing for by the time they open a DM from someone who also commented.

The window is shorter than it looks

Funding rounds stay relevant for a quarter. Hiring posts stay relevant for weeks. A recommendation post is mostly decided within a day, often within hours, because the poster is usually trying to solve something this week and starts evaluating the names mentioned as soon as a few credible ones show up. Replying on day two is not late in the way replying to a funding round a month later is late. It is late in the way arriving after the meeting already happened.

A comment or DM in the first hour is read as an answer. The same comment on day two is read as noise that arrived after the decision.

What to actually watch for

The exact wording of the ask. Someone asking for a recommendation for a category is different from someone asking whether anyone has used a specific product already. The second is a much narrower opening, and pitching an alternative in that thread usually reads as tone deaf.
Whether they already named constraints. Budget, team size, must haves stated in the post are the only personalisation that matters here, more than anything you could find on their profile.
Who replies first. If two or three credible peer names show up fast, the poster's shortlist may already be forming, and a comment ten spots down the thread on hour three is competing with an answer they already trust.

How we do it

Asking for recommendations is one of our eleven live signals, in the intent posts group alongside hiring for the problem and complaining about it in public. It surfaces the post, ranks the person behind it, and drafts a same day message built from the specific ask rather than a template, which matters more here than on any other signal we watch, because a generic message on this particular trigger is the fastest way to look like the twenty seventh comment.

Across 60 campaigns and 6,004 prospects sourced and ranked, 29 percent of invitations are accepted and 7 percent of messages get a positive reply, blended across all eleven signals. We do not have that number broken out for recommendation posts specifically, since the volume of any one signal in a given campaign is small enough that a separate figure would not be reliable yet.

If you take one thing

Skip the comment that only says your product's name. If you have something genuinely useful to add publicly, add it like a peer who happens to be involved, limitations included. Save the actual pitch for a same day DM that admits what it is, and treat the whole thing as urgent, because by tomorrow the poster has probably already moved on to the names that answered today.