TL;DR
- Start with one question: where do the people in your ICP already spend their attention on LinkedIn?
- SignalRaven can monitor ten source types across people, companies, conversations and conferences.
- Every source feeds the same qualification process, so activity doesn't automatically become a signal. SignalRaven evaluates the person and the context first.
- Different sources serve different purposes. Your own audience tends to be more concentrated, keyword and industry monitoring cast a wider net, and conferences provide time-bound event intelligence.
- Start focused, review what each source produces, then expand around the sources generating useful signals.
Don't start by asking what you can monitor. Start by asking where the people you care about already spend their attention. The answer might be a competitor's page. It might be a practitioner's posts. It might be conversations about a problem, an industry conference, or the activity of a specific account you're already pursuing.
In SignalRaven, a source tells the system where to look for relevant LinkedIn activity. A source might be a person, a company page, a keyword, a hashtag, an industry or a conference. What SignalRaven does after finding activity is the same every time: evaluate the context, identify the people involved and determine which activity is relevant to your ICP.
Four ways to think about LinkedIn sources
Ten source types sound like ten versions of the same thing. They aren't. Some monitor conversations, some monitor audiences, one follows a known person's own behavior and one follows an event. Grouping them gives you a mental model before you pick any.
- People. Posts written by specific people. Following specific people's activity.
- Companies. Company pages. Company mentions. Topic-filtered company pages. Your own company page.
- Conversations. Keywords. Hashtags. Industry posts.
- Events. Conferences and trade shows.
The ten SignalRaven source types
Open Sources, click + Add source, and the first step asks what kind of LinkedIn activity to track. The ten choices in portal order, with paste limits where one exists:
| Source | You give it | What it monitors | When to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Posts written by specific people | Profile URLs, up to 20 at once | Everything those people post, and who engages | When a particular executive, practitioner or creator consistently attracts people in your ICP |
| Posts that mention a company | Company page URLs, up to 10 at once | Third-party posts that tag the company, and who engages | When the conversation around a company matters more than what it publishes itself |
| Follow specific people's activity | Profile URLs, up to 100 at once | Each person's own posts, comments, reactions and reposts, checked weekly | When you already know the people you care about and want to see what they do |
| A company's LinkedIn page | One company URL | Every post on the page and who engages. Its own staff are filtered out | When a page's audience includes people in your ICP, whether or not the company is a competitor |
| Posts matching keywords | A short quoted phrase | Posts from anyone on LinkedIn that match, and who engages | When you want to find relevant conversations beyond the people and pages you already know |
| Posts tagged with a hashtag | One hashtag | Posts carrying that tag, and who engages | When a community, profession or event consistently uses a specific tag |
| A conference or trade show | Name, dates, host and up to 4 hashtags | The event's LinkedIn conversation before, during and after it: attendance posts, engagement on event posts and the recaps afterward | When a meaningful share of your market gathers at a few events a year |
| Posts by people in an industry | Up to 5 LinkedIn industries and an optional keyword | Posts written by people who work in those industries | When your market is concentrated in a small number of LinkedIn industries. The broadest source of the ten |
| A company's posts, filtered by topic | One company URL and up to 5 topics | The page's posts about your topics only, and who engages | When a large company posts about many things and you care about a few |
| Your own company's posts | Nothing. SignalRaven creates it during setup | Your page's posts and who engages. Your own employees are filtered out | Every team. These people have already encountered and engaged with your content |
People
Two sources look alike and do different jobs. Posts written by specific people monitors what a person publishes and who engages with it. Use it when a particular executive, practitioner or creator consistently attracts people in your ICP. The person is the stage; their audience is what you're after.
Follow specific people's activity is the reverse. Use it when you already know the people you care about: known people at target accounts, open opportunities, customers, partners or other strategic relationships. Instead of monitoring an audience around a source, SignalRaven follows that person's own public LinkedIn activity, including posts, comments, reactions and reposts, and evaluates that activity for relevance. Because the signal is the person's own activity, SignalRaven holds this source to a higher urgency bar before it delivers.
Companies
A company's LinkedIn page doesn't have to be a competitor's. Complementary platforms, integration partners, industry associations, media brands and other ecosystem companies can all attract people in your ICP. The selection criterion is one question: does this page attract people you want to reach? The page's own staff are filtered out, so a competitor page produces signals from its audience, not its employees.
Posts that mention a company is for when the conversation around a company matters more than what the company publishes itself. It can surface third-party posts mentioning competitors, partners, platforms or your own brand, then identify and qualify the people engaging with those conversations.
A company's posts, filtered by topic narrows a busy page. If a large cloud provider posts about dozens of subjects and you only care about cloud cost management and AI infrastructure, a topic-filtered page focuses the source on those themes. Topic filtering uses additional processing, so use it where narrowing a busy page adds real value.
Your own company's posts is created for you during setup. The people engaging there have already encountered your content, and the company page playbook covers how marketing and sales can use what they produce together.
Conversations
Posts matching keywords finds relevant conversations beyond the people and pages you already know. Good searches often reflect the language practitioners use to describe problems, workflows, technologies or changes in their market, and the keyword monitoring guide shows how to write them.
Posts tagged with a hashtag works best when a community consistently uses a specific tag. Broad generic tags produce little. A hashtag that identifies an event, a profession, a niche or a recurring conversation can be worth a slot.
Posts by people in an industry is the broadest source of the ten. It's useful when your market is concentrated in a small number of LinkedIn industries, but it casts a wide net, which means more discovery and potentially more noise. Pairing the industry with a keyword makes the source more focused.
Conferences
Conferences behave differently from always-on sources. Conference Intelligence is time-bound. SignalRaven begins monitoring ahead of the event, follows activity around the event window and continues through the post-event recap period, then completes the source itself. That surfaces people discussing attendance, engaging with event-related content and taking part in conversations around the conference, not just the people on an attendee list.
It's particularly useful when a meaningful share of your market gathers around a small number of industry events each year. The Conference Intelligence guide covers the setup and the before, during and after phases.
What happens after SignalRaven finds activity
Adding a source doesn't mean every reaction or comment becomes a signal. SignalRaven first evaluates whether the post is relevant to your market, identifies the people engaging with it, removes obvious noise such as the source company's own staff and people at competing vendors, then evaluates the remaining people against your ICP. Only qualified activity becomes a signal.
Signals include an urgency score from 1 to 10 and context explaining what happened and why it may matter. Most engagement never becomes a signal. The 14-stage qualification process explains each step.
Different sources solve different problems
A known audience gives you precision. Keywords and industries give you discovery. Following specific people gives you targeted intelligence on people you've already chosen. A conference gives you time-bound intelligence around a moment.
Sources closer to your existing audience tend to qualify at higher rates, and broader discovery sources trade precision for reach. In SignalRaven data, engagement on a company's own page had the highest qualification rate among the source types compared, and qualified about 3.7x as often as activity found through keyword searches. That doesn't make keywords worse. They solve a different problem by finding conversations outside the audiences you already know.
People, event, hashtag and industry sources vary too much by setup for a single figure, so judge them by your own Sources list after a week.
Why more sources aren't always better
A huge monitoring list creates noise and consumes credits, because credits are spent in proportion to the posts judged and the people evaluated. A competitor-only strategy is too narrow: competitor pages draw that company's staff, partners and other vendors, and the filters remove all of them, while the person asking peers for a recommendation under a practitioner's post never touches a competitor page.
For most teams, a focused list of sources you know your audience engages with is a better starting point than filling every available slot.
An example starter mix, not a formula
A fictional 200-person payroll software company selling to finance and HR leaders at firms with 500 to 5,000 employees might start with:
- Its own company page. SignalRaven creates this source during setup.
- 3 to 5 company pages: direct competitors, plus the HR platform most of its target accounts already run.
- 2 to 3 people whose posts its target audience engages with: a payroll compliance voice and a competitor's CEO.
- Mentions of its 2 or 3 closest competitors. Setup drafts a switched-off one for each competitor it finds.
- 5 to 8 keyword searches in practitioner language, such as "off-cycle payroll" or "year-end corrections".
- One relevant upcoming conference. The criterion is whether its ICP gathers there.
Pick the low end of each range and that's 14 sources. The Solo limit is 20 active sources, Pro allows 80, Scale is unlimited and the free trial runs at the Solo limit. Only active sources count, so pausing a source frees its slot.
This mix skips followed people, hashtags, industries and topic-filtered pages on purpose. You don't need one of every source type. The point is to choose the types that match where your audience actually appears.
Review your sources after a week
After seven days the Sources list answers the opening question with numbers: the posts each source found, how many were judged relevant and how many signals it produced. Match what you see to the likely cause.
- Posts found, few relevant. A source or topic problem. Rewrite the search, narrow the page or pause the source.
- Relevant posts, wrong people. A source audience problem. The page or person attracts peers, staff or a different market.
- The right people being filtered unexpectedly. An ICP configuration problem. Check the exclude titles and the dimension that's failing them.
- Strong signals. Study what the source has in common with your other successful sources, then expand from there.
Don't evaluate sources only one at a time. Look for people and accounts appearing across multiple sources. A company that surfaces through a competitor page, a keyword conversation and a conference may deserve more attention than any one signal suggests by itself.
When sources start to overlap
The real value of using several source types isn't simply generating more signals. It's seeing when activity starts to overlap. A person might first appear under a practitioner's post and later engage around a conference. Several people from the same company might appear across different sources. SignalRaven uses that history as additional context: 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.
The ten sources aren't ten independent generators. They're ten lenses on the same market, and their value rises when they start producing context around the same people, companies, topics and events.
What to do when a source starts working
When a source consistently produces relevant signals, don't just increase volume. Look at why it's working. Which people are posting? Which topics are attracting your ICP? Which companies keep appearing? Then add adjacent sources that reflect those patterns, and route the signals to the destinations your team already works in.
FAQ
How many LinkedIn sources should I monitor?
Start with a focused list like the example mix above, roughly 10 to 15 sources your target audience already engages with. Add more once the first week shows which ones produce.
Should I use all ten source types?
No. Use the types that reflect where your audience actually spends attention. Most teams start with their own page, a few company pages, a few people and a handful of keyword searches, and add an event when one is coming up.
What's the difference between following a person and monitoring their posts?
"Posts written by specific people" monitors what a person publishes and the audience that engages with it. "Follow specific people's activity" monitors what a named person does across LinkedIn: their own posts, comments, reactions and reposts. The first is about the audience. The second is about the person.
Should I monitor competitors only?
No. Partners, platforms, practitioners, associations and other companies may attract more of your ICP than a direct competitor does. The question for any page is whether its audience includes the people you want to reach.
How long should I test a source?
Give an always-on source a week, then read its posts found, relevance and signals in the Sources list. A conference source runs its own cycle, from about three weeks before the event to the week after, so judge it after the event completes.
Does monitoring a competitor's LinkedIn page use my LinkedIn account?
No. SignalRaven reads public activity from its own infrastructure under its own access. Nothing ties a source you add to a personal account, and nothing runs on your machine.
What counts against my plan's source limit?
Only active sources. Solo allows 20, Pro allows 80 and Scale is unlimited; the free trial runs at the Solo limit. A paused source keeps its settings and past signals and frees its slot, so you can resume it when there's room.
Sources
- SignalRaven data, aggregated across customer workspaces
- SignalRaven: Sources & Monitoring guide
- SignalRaven: the 14-stage qualification process
- SignalRaven: LinkedIn Keyword Monitoring
- SignalRaven product page: urgency and the signal stack
- SignalRaven pricing