I monitored 1,184 buying-intent posts and most of them were useless

"I got tired of building lead lists from scratch, so I tried a different approach: monitor public posts where people were already saying they needed something.

The idea sounded obvious. Track phrases like:

- “looking for a social media manager”

- “need help with ads”

- “recommend a web designer”

- “best CRM for a small team”

I built an internal alert system and ran it for 30 days across a few platforms.

Raw numbers:

- 1,184 keyword mentions found

- 137 looked relevant at first glance

- 52 were actually worth responding to

- 21 conversations started

- 6 sales calls happened

- 2 became paid work

The humbling part: 90% of “intent” was not intent.

A lot of posts were students doing research, people venting, spam threads, recruiters, or folks asking for free advice with no budget. My first keyword list was way too broad.

What improved it:

1. I removed vague terms like “marketing help”

2. I added negative filters like “free,” “internship,” “assignment,” “template”

3. I prioritized posts with urgency words: “this week,” “ASAP,” “hiring,” “budget,” “recommendation”

4. I stopped replying with a pitch

The replies that worked were usually just useful context:

> If you’re hiring for this, ask for examples tied to revenue, not just engagement. Most portfolios hide that part.

Sometimes the person asked what I did. Sometimes they didn’t. But the conversations were much warmer than cold outreach because the problem already existed.

The hard part is deciding when to help publicly vs move to a private conversation without being awkward.

For people who sell services, how do you separate real buying intent from people just casually asking the internet?"