What a source is
A source is one thing we watch on LinkedIn: a company page, a person, a search, a hashtag, an event. Engagement on a source's posts is what creates signals. The source itself is never the signal, and neither is the post; the people who react, comment and repost are.
Worth saying up front, because it shapes what you can safely monitor: adding a source never involves a LinkedIn login. 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 anyone's machine. Monitor a competitor's page and the looking happens on our side, completely separate from you and your team.
Only active sources count against your plan's limit (20 on Solo, 80 on Pro, unlimited on Scale; the free trial runs at the Solo limit). Pause one and its slot is free again.
The monitor types
Open Monitors, click + Add a monitor, and the first step asks what kind of LinkedIn activity to track. These are the choices:
| Monitor | You give it | We watch |
|---|---|---|
| Posts written by specific people | Profile URLs, up to 20 at once | Everything those people post, and who engages with it. Best for thought leaders and executives your buyers follow, including a competitor's CEO. |
| Posts that mention a company | Company page URLs, up to 10 at once | Third-party posts that tag the company, and who engages. People discussing a competitor are often weighing alternatives. Works for your own brand too. |
| A company's LinkedIn page | One company URL | Every post on the page, and who engages, with the company's own staff filtered out. Usually a competitor, but a partner, platform vendor or industry player works just as well. |
| Posts matching keywords | A short quoted phrase | Posts from anyone on LinkedIn that match, and who engages. Your buyers' own words work best: "buying signals", not a category name. |
| Posts tagged with a hashtag | One hashtag | Posts carrying that tag. Authors tag deliberately, so topical fit is high. |
| A conference or trade show | Name, dates, host, up to 4 hashtags | Who says they're attending, who engages with event posts, and who recaps it after. Ramps up before the event, runs daily around it, and completes itself when the window ends. |
| Specific posts you choose | Post URLs, up to 25 at once, and a name for the list | The posts you add, and who comments on or reacts to them, for 7, 14 or 30 days from the day you add each one. Set a list to comments only to leave reactions out. For a post that already matters to you: a competitor's launch, a viral thread in your market, or one of your own. A list watches up to 100 posts at a time and counts as one monitor. |
| People posting or reposting about a subject | A search query and the kind of post | Posts on a subject you define, such as a product launch, a funding round or a new location. The signal is the person who wrote or reposted the post, never the people who only reacted. Optionally keep only people at the company the post is about. |
| Posts by people in an industry | Up to 5 LinkedIn industries, optional keyword | Posts written by people who work in those industries. The broadest source; best when your buyers cluster in a few verticals. |
| A company's posts, filtered by topic | One company URL, up to 5 topics | Like a company page, but we keep only the posts about your topics. For a large company that posts about many things. About three times the AI processing of an unfiltered page. |
| Your own company's posts | Nothing; created during setup | Your page's posts and who engages, with your own employees filtered out. One of the highest-quality sources: these people already know you. |
How every source behaves
Whatever the type, the mechanics are the same. A new source runs its first check as soon as you add it, then once a day; an event follows its own calendar. Following specific people is not a source: it lives under Intelligence as Person Activity Monitoring, checks weekly, and does not count against your source limit.
Each post a source finds is judged for relevance to your market before anything else happens. Posts with fewer than ten reactions and comments are parked at no cost until they grow. Posts that pass are harvested: every reaction and comment becomes a person, and every person goes through the same filters. The source company's own staff are dropped. Sellers and influencers are classified and kept apart from buyers. What is left is scored against your ICP, and only a pass becomes a signal. Credits are spent in proportion to the posts judged and the people evaluated, so a quiet source costs almost nothing and a noisy one is worth pruning.
The one exception is a list of specific posts. It never searches, and its posts skip the relevance check because you chose them. Each post is fetched once when you add it and costs 1 credit if LinkedIn still shows it; a deleted or private post costs nothing. From then on the people who engage with it go through the same filters as any other source's, until the window you picked ends.
Choosing what to monitor
This is the question most teams get wrong on day one. Two common mistakes:
Mistake 1: Monitoring everyone in your category. A 50-source list of every competitor-adjacent company sounds thorough, but most of those sources will be quiet, off-topic, or attract the wrong audience. Better: 10 to 15 sources you know your buyers actually engage with.
Mistake 2: Monitoring only direct competitors. Buying intent often shows up in adjacent conversations: your buyer talking shop with peers, reacting to a practitioner's post, asking a question under a conference recap. Mix competitor pages with people, keywords and events.
A starter mix that works for most B2B SaaS:
- Your own company page (added for you during setup)
- 3 to 5 company pages: direct competitors, plus a partner or platform your buyers use
- 2 to 3 people whose posts your buyers engage with
- Mentions of your 2 or 3 closest competitors
- 5 to 8 keyword searches in your buyers' own phrasing, not category words
- The next conference your buyers attend
That's 14 to 20 sources, inside Solo's limit, with room to grow on Pro.
Reading the Monitors page
The Monitors list shows, for the window you pick (the last 30 days by default), how many posts each source found, how many were judged relevant, how many signals it produced, and their strength. Each source also carries a status:
- Producing: signals are landing from it.
- Watching: healthy, still gathering. Normal for the first days and for quiet topics.
- Slow: running, but finding little. Worth a look after a week.
- Paused: switched off; its slot is free.
- Error: we could not read it. Usually a changed or private URL.
We don't change anything automatically. Every pause, resume and addition is yours.
Tuning after week one
Most teams over-monitor at first. After seven days, open the list and ask:
- Which sources found posts but none were judged relevant? Pause them. Keyword searches depend on fresh posts matching the phrase, so a quiet topic stays quiet.
- Which sources produced plenty of signals with consistently low ICP scores? Tighten the ICP; leave the source alone.
- Which sources produced strong signals? Look at their patterns: the phrasing, the topics, the people. That is the shape of your real market conversation, and the model for the next sources you add.
Plan limits
| Plan | Active sources |
|---|---|
| Free trial | 20 |
| Solo | 20 |
| Pro | 80 |
| Scale | Unlimited |
Only active sources count. Pausing a source frees its slot straight away, and you can resume it later when there is room, so pause freely while you find the mix that works.
Where to go next
- Configure your ICP → How sources combine with ICP qualification to produce signals
- Signals & scoring → What happens to each engagement after the source surfaces it