The voices your market actually follows on LinkedIn

The method is short. We already hold your market as a list of named people. We look at what those people reacted to and commented on across public posts in the window, then count how many of them appear around each public creator.

The output is a ranking of creators by overlap. Not follower count, and not engagement rate inside their own audience. How many of your people.

A creator with 90,000 followers and 4 of your market on their posts is worth less to you than a creator with 6,000 followers and 30 of your market. Both numbers are checkable, and we print the sample size next to them.

This is the finding that surprises people. Here is the voices table from a revenue tooling market in the Nordics, pulled 27 August 2026. 170 most active people from a 642 person sample, 90 day window.

The top voice is a working account executive with a newsletter, ahead of four CEOs and a CMO. He does not run the category's biggest company. He writes about the job the market does every day.

The ecommerce customer service market, pulled in London in August 2026, went further. The single highest overlap was not a person at all. The CX Professionals Association reached 50 of the 170 most active people, roughly double the top individual, who was a vendor co-founder at 26. A professional association out-reached every vendor in the category.

In the same market, one vendor's two founders reached 40 of the sampled people between them. Their company page reached 3. That ratio holds everywhere we have pulled: a person out-reaches the company page they work for by roughly ten times.

Engage. The cheapest move and the one nobody does properly. Your founder comments on the posts from the top voices, under their own name, with something worth reading. The market sees your name in a room it already trusts. No budget, no negotiation.

Partner. A named overlap number is a negotiating position. You can tell a creator exactly how many people in your category engaged their content in the last 90 days, and which of their posts pulled hardest. That is a different conversation from a flat sponsorship rate card. Trusted-voice partnerships sit in Tier 2.

Sponsor the post. Take the post of yours that already earned reactions from the market, and run it as a thought leader ad through a voice the market follows. LinkedIn requires the creator's permission, and public text, image, video, article and newsletter posts are eligible while polls, documents, multi-image posts and reposts are not (as published on linkedin.com, September 2026).

The hard part of creator outreach is usually the first message. You have nothing specific to say, so you send a rate enquiry and get ignored.

With an overlap number you have one fact and one observation.

The fact: how many people from your named market engaged their posts in the window. The observation: which two of their posts pulled the most reactions from that market, and what those posts were about.

That message is short, it is checkable, and it tells the creator something they did not know about their own audience. Most creators have no idea which industry sits in their comment section.

We run this on ourselves. Our market is 3,472 named people. When we ranked voices against a 200 person sample of it, the top creator overlapped with 4.5 percent of the sample.

That is a diffuse market. There is no single person our category gathers around, which means the partner play is weak for us and the engage play carries most of the weight.

We publish that because it is the honest read of our own data, and because a diffuse result is a finding. If your voices table comes back like ours, spending on creator partnerships would be a mistake, and you would only know that after running the numbers.

We measure public creators on public posts. A creator's name, role and overlap number appear in your readout because their posts and the reactions on them are public. Private people never appear in a published table, and we do not publish or imply an engager list.

Overlap is measured against a sample, and the sample size is printed on the table. Our own number came from a 200 person sample, the Nordics numbers from the 170 most active of 642.

Overlap measures attention. It is not endorsement, and a creator whose posts your market reads may compete with you.

A voice with a low overlap number is not a bad creator. They may reach a different market very well. The number only describes their relationship to yours.