TL;DR
- Conference Intelligence follows one conference on LinkedIn for its whole cycle. It wakes up about three weeks before the first day, runs daily through the event week, winds down the week after and completes itself.
- Add it under Sources with the event name, first and last day, host and up to four hashtags. A search override covers an event known by more than one name.
- Two kinds of post are kept: people in your market posting that they're attending, speaking, exhibiting or recapping, and posts about products and topics at the event that overlap your category.
- SignalRaven can create conference signals in two ways: from qualified people engaging with relevant event posts, and directly from relevant authors who publicly say they're attending, speaking, exhibiting or recapping the event.
- Work it before the show, during it and the week after, for meetings, same-day context and the recap conversation.
A conference doesn't happen only at the booth. Some conversations happen in sessions, hallways and dinners. Others start on LinkedIn before anyone arrives. And many of the people worth knowing never scan your badge reader at all.
That post from the hotel is public. So is the "see you there" post three weeks earlier, the speaker's slide photo, the sponsor's launch announcement and the recap the following Tuesday. Every conference creates a temporary LinkedIn conversation around it. It starts before the doors open and continues after everyone flies home. Conference Intelligence treats that entire conversation as a signal source.
Conference Intelligence follows the entire lifecycle
Persistent sources watch markets. Conference sources follow moments. Most SignalRaven sources keep monitoring until you pause them. A conference has a natural lifecycle, so Conference Intelligence does too. It's a time-bound source designed specifically for events, live on every plan: it starts monitoring as activity builds, increases frequency around the event, captures the recap period, then completes automatically.
| Phase | When | What the source does |
|---|---|---|
| Before | From about three weeks before the first day | Checks every two or three days, then daily from the week before |
| During | The event days and the first few days after | Checks daily |
| After | Until about a week after the last day | Checks every couple of days, then completes itself |
The early phase is light on purpose: that's when the "see you there" posts begin and speakers announce their sessions. The daily pace starts the week before the first day and holds until a few days after the show. Then the source winds down and marks itself Completed. Nothing stays running by accident.
Missed the setup before the show?
You can add an event up to ten days after it ends. SignalRaven runs the wrap-up phase to find recap activity and relevant engagement before completing the source.
How to add a conference
In the portal, open Sources, click Add source and choose "A conference or trade show". The form asks for:
- The event name.
- The first and last day.
- The host (the company that organizes it). SignalRaven filters the host's employees out of your signals.
- Up to four hashtags separated by commas. Letters, digits and underscores only. The official tag plus its year variant cover most events.
- An optional search override for an event known by more than one name. If a fictional event is called both "RevOps Summit" and "ROS26," the override
"RevOps Summit" OR "ROS26"covers both. Leave it blank and SignalRaven searches the event name.
Add it as soon as the dates are public, up to six months ahead. The source waits for its calendar, and the Sources list shows its phase: Live now, Wrapping up, Completed. SignalRaven estimates the event's expected usage when you create the source and warns you if your remaining credits may not cover the event window. The getting started guide covers the rest of a first setup.
What SignalRaven considers event content
A post has to clear two bars to be kept.
- Event relevance. Is this actually about this conference? The post is anchored to the event by its name, its official hashtag, or its dates and venue.
- Market relevance. Is the content connected to your category or the people you care about?
Only content that clears both is retained, and two kinds of post do:
- Concrete attendance or participation posts by people in your market: attending, speaking, exhibiting, hosting, recapping.
- Posts about products, launches or topics at the event that overlap your category.
The second category is what separates Conference Intelligence from a hashtag search. SignalRaven isn't only monitoring attendance posts. It's finding the relevant topical conversations happening around the event. Competitor and adjacent-vendor posts can be particularly useful here, because they often attract people interested in the same problems, products and categories you care about. Your competitors' event activity can create signals for you.
SignalRaven filters generic event noise such as travel updates, giveaways, hiring posts, context-free badge photos, posts about other events and viral commentary that isn't specific enough to your market. Posts by the host's own employees are left out separately, because the people engaging with them are mostly the host's workforce, and engagers employed by the company that wrote a post are filtered by default, so a sponsor's booth post doesn't turn its own staff into signals.
Two ways someone becomes a conference signal
Path 1: Engagers. Someone reacts to or comments on a relevant event post, and SignalRaven evaluates them the same way as engagers from any other source: through the 14-stage qualification process. The host's staff are set aside, sellers and influencers are classified, and the rest are scored against your ICP on title and role, market affinity, industry, company size and location. Most event engagement doesn't become a signal. The same qualification process used across SignalRaven filters out people who don't match the configured market and ICP.
Path 2: Authors. When a relevant person publicly says they're attending, speaking, exhibiting or recapping, the author can be the signal. Waiting for someone else to react would miss the useful activity, so first-person attendance and recap posts are evaluated directly, with the author going through the same ICP review.
What a conference signal contains
Each signal arrives with the person, their title and company, the post and the engagement that produced it, the ICP breakdown, an urgency score from 1 to 10 and three contextual talking points based on the post and the activity behind the signal. Event signals add an evidence line that names the event. The event stays attached to the signal, so you immediately understand why the person appeared and what conference context surrounds the activity. The signals and scoring guide explains how each signal is scored.
Conference Intelligence isn't only for sales
- Field marketing sees the relevant people and conversations surrounding the event beyond booth traffic, and gets a view of the show's LinkedIn conversation to work with the same discipline as the booth.
- Sales understands who is attending and what they're talking about before anyone lands.
- Marketing sees which topics, competitors and launches are gaining attention around the event.
- RevOps routes conference signals into Slack, the CRM, Sheets, Clay or other workflows with the event context attached.
Before, during and after
Before the conference
Use the signals to identify relevant attendees, speakers and exhibitors, understand what topics they're discussing, prioritize target accounts, plan meetings, give AEs context and inform booth and event strategy. Each morning, open the event's signals and sort by urgency.
If outreach is appropriate, use the event topic as context rather than telling someone you monitored their reaction. Take a fictional VP of customer success at a 400-person logistics software company who posts that she's attending a revenue operations conference in November to see how other teams forecast renewals. A message might read: "Saw you're heading to the RevOps conference and looking at renewal forecasting. We'll be there too. Open to grabbing coffee between sessions?"
During the conference
Speaker and sponsor posts drive this phase. Use the signals to see which topics are gaining traction, identify relevant people active around the event, surface competitor and product conversations, and give sellers and field marketers same-day context. At the end of each day, go through that day's signals while the sessions are fresh.
After the conference
Recap posts can be particularly useful because people often describe what stood out and what they plan to do next. Use the signals to find recap posts, understand what people learned, identify emerging themes, reconnect with relevant people, update account context and inform post-event content and campaigns.
Take a fictional director of revenue operations who posts a recap saying the sessions on pipeline hygiene convinced him to rebuild his stage definitions. A reply might read: "Your point about rebuilding stage definitions after the conference caught my attention. What are you thinking about changing first?"
If you reach out in any phase, start with the topic or idea the person shared. You usually don't need to mention that SignalRaven detected the engagement. The three-talking-point playbook shows how to build the rest of a message.
Conference activity can reveal account-level patterns
A VP posts that she's attending. A director from the same company comments on a session. Another colleague engages with a competitor's launch. After the show, the VP publishes a recap. Four signals from one account around one event say more together than any of them does alone.
Conference signals become more useful when activity starts clustering around an account. Signals from the same person or company in the last 90 days raise urgency on every plan, the Companies view groups signals by account, and Pro and Scale add the signal stack view on each signal. Watch the event's signals by company as well as by person.
FAQ
Does Conference Intelligence give me a list of registered attendees?
No. Registration data stays with the organizer. Conference Intelligence is not an attendee database. It works from public LinkedIn activity around the event, so it can surface relevant people who publicly take part in the event conversation whether or not you have access to the organizer's attendee list.
Does someone have to use the official conference hashtag?
No. SignalRaven anchors content using the event name, its dates and venue and the configured search terms as well as hashtags. Hashtags improve coverage, but they aren't the only way event content is identified.
Can I add a conference that has already ended?
Yes, within ten days of its last day. The source runs the wrap-up phase, finds the recap posts and the people engaging with them, and then completes itself.
What if the event has more than one name or hashtag?
Add up to four hashtags separated by commas; the official tag and its year variant cover most events. If the event is known by two names, put both in the search override joined by OR. Leave it blank and SignalRaven searches the event name.