TL;DR
- The people engaging with a competitor's posts are a mix: its customers, employees, partners and vendors, consultants, peers and some people who fit your market. A reaction doesn't tell you anyone is evaluating anything.
- A company page source watches the page's posts and filters the people behind the engagement: company accounts, the company's own staff, competing sellers and anyone outside your ICP. A large share of the people reacting to a competitor's post work there.
- The same source works for other pages whose audience overlaps your market, such as partners and platforms, as long as their posts discuss your category.
- When a competitor's page is quiet, add its founder's posts and the posts that mention the company as sources.
- Write to the topic someone engaged with. Leave the competitor's post out of the message.
When a competitor publishes a launch, a product update or a point of view, a crowd forms underneath it. A reaction might be loyalty, curiosity, politeness or a colleague doing their part for the company page. You can't tell which from the reaction alone.
That's the problem a company page source has to solve. Most of a competitor's audience will never be relevant to you, and the few people who are need to be found without treating everyone else as a target.
Who shows up under a competitor's post
Start with the company's own people. In SignalRaven data, about 3 in 10 people who react to a competitor's company-page post work at that company. Comments carry less staff noise, closer to 1 in 6.
The rest is a mix. Customers comment to congratulate or to ask about a feature. Partners and resellers amplify the announcement. Vendors who sell to the competitor show up because the competitor is their customer. Consultants and agencies engage to stay visible in the category. Peers react because they know someone involved.
Somewhere in that list are people who fit your ICP: practitioners and leaders at companies like your customers. What their engagement shows is narrow. They responded to a post about a problem you work on.
What a company page source filters
Add a page in Sources with its company URL. SignalRaven checks it as soon as you add it and then once a day. Posts with very little engagement wait until they pick up more. Each of the others is judged for relevance to your market, and only relevant posts have their audience evaluated, so the people reacting to a hiring announcement usually never reach the later checks.
For a relevant post, SignalRaven identifies the people behind the reactions and comments. These checks matter most on a competitor's audience:
- Company accounts drop out. When another company's page reacts or comments, there's no person to qualify, so it's left out while SignalRaven identifies the people.
- Staff drop out. Anyone who works at a company whose page is in your sources is filtered, so a competitor's launch-day cheering never reaches your signals.
- Competing sellers are removed and influencers are labeled. Commercial classification removes people at companies that sell something similar to you. Consultants, agencies and systems integrators stay in with an Influencer label, unless you switch on Exclude influencers in your ICP.
- Everyone else is scored against your ICP. Title and role, market affinity, industry, company size and location each have their own minimum, and only a pass becomes a signal.
Most of a competitor's audience never becomes a signal, and that's by design. The 14-stage qualification process walks through the stages, including the title and pre-screen checks that run before ICP scoring.
Choose pages by the audience they attract
A competitor is one kind of page whose audience overlaps your market. An integration partner or the platform your customers already run can draw the same people.
The useful question is where your market already gathers. The test takes a few minutes: open a page's last few posts and look at who engaged. If you recognize the roles and the kinds of companies you work with, the page is worth adding. If the engagers are mostly the page's own staff, its vendors or people far outside your market, skip it.
The relevance check judges each post against your market, so pages whose posts regularly discuss your category work best. Publications, associations and community pages often post about their audience's world in general. At default settings, most of those posts close as low relevance, permanently, before anyone who engaged is evaluated.
The staff filter also covers every company page in your sources, paused ones included. If a partner or platform company is also a company you'd sell to, its employees won't become signals from any source while its page is in your sources. To follow the conversation around a company like that without filtering its staff, add it under Posts that mention a company instead.
When the competitor's page is quiet
Some competitors barely use their company page. Smaller companies often post from the founder's personal profile instead, and the page sits idle between funding announcements.
Two other sources cover that gap. Add the founder under Posts written by specific people, so SignalRaven evaluates the people engaging with what the founder writes. Then add the company under Posts that mention a company. It catches customers, partners and commentators tagging the company in their own posts. In SignalRaven data, people engaging with posts that mention a company qualify about 1.4x as often as people engaging with that company's own page posts. Where your prospects show up on LinkedIn compares every source type.
How to approach the signals
The awkward version of this message opens with the competitor: "I saw you commented on [competitor]'s launch." It tells the person they were watched and frames the conversation around a company they may be perfectly happy with.
Write to the topic instead. The post gave you a subject, and the person responded to it. Say a fictional RevOps manager at a 300-person software company comments on a competitor's post about forecasting, asking how it handles deals in several currencies. A short note could say: "Multi-currency forecasting comes up a lot with the finance teams we work with. If it's useful, I'm happy to share how a couple of them handle it." The competitor never comes up, because the conversation is about the problem.
Some signals shouldn't become a message at all. A comment from someone at a target account might be better as a note for the account owner. A reaction from a known customer of the competitor might simply be worth watching. If that person engages again, earlier signals from the same person or company raise the urgency of the next one, and the context is already there.
Review each page after two weeks
Give a new page a couple of weeks, then check it in the Sources list: how many posts it produced, how many were judged relevant and how many signals came out. A page whose posts are rarely judged relevant is talking about something other than your market. A page with relevant posts and almost no signals is drawing the wrong crowd. Replace either with a page your market actually gathers around.
FAQ
What does SignalRaven read from a competitor's page?
Only public activity: the page's posts and the public reactions and comments on them. Your LinkedIn account isn't involved, and nothing is posted, liked or sent on your behalf.
Does SignalRaven filter out the competitor's employees?
Yes. Anyone who works at a company whose page is in your sources is filtered before ICP scoring, along with company accounts and people who sell something similar to you.
Will I get signals for my competitor's customers?
Sometimes. A competitor's customer can fit your ICP like anyone else. Treat the signal as interest in a topic, write about the topic if you write at all, and don't criticize the product they chose.
How many company pages should I monitor?
Start with three to five: your closest competitors plus the platforms or partners your market already uses. Review them after a couple of weeks and replace the weakest.
Sources
- SignalRaven data, aggregated across customer workspaces
- SignalRaven: Sources & Monitoring guide
- SignalRaven: the 14-stage qualification process
- SignalRaven: 10 places your prospects show up on LinkedIn