We research the LinkedIn conversations your social listening tool wasn’t built to read.
Competitors talking. Experts posting. Industries arguing. Events carrying on long after the stage clears.
Much of that conversation never makes it into the social listening setup you’re already using. We collect the LinkedIn data around a specific question, analyse it, and show you what matters.
LinkedIn doesn’t provide the same listening access as most other social networks, and large-scale automated collection is heavily restricted.
That makes the usual always-on listening model a poor fit. So we work around specific questions: these companies, these people, this event, this topic, this period.
That’s also why Rare Signal works project by project, rather than as a software platform.
Pick the question that sounds like yours.
We compare performance first, then look at what the numbers can’t settle: what they talk about, how they talk about it, who they seem to be talking to, and whether any of it fits what you’re trying to do.
We analyse competitors’ LinkedIn content to identify the messaging pillars they repeatedly invest in, how much content sits behind each one, their proof points, and the territory nobody seems to own.
The agenda tells you what was scheduled, but LinkedIn data will tell you what people decided was worth repeating.
We analyse which themes travelled, which voices drove them, and what gained momentum.
We map the conversation underneath the headline: where momentum is building, where scepticism remains, which arguments keep coming back and what nobody seems to be talking about.
What this work looks like in practice.
The best clinical expert was the wrong pick.
A pharma company came to us with a list of 50 clinicians for a women’s-health campaign. They wanted us to find two or three people they could work with.
The first step was about numbers. We looked at reach, engagement and how often they posted. That took the list from 50 down to 10.
The second step was about content. We collected everything those 10 had published and looked at what they actually talked about. Some did not cover the subject enough, so we ruled them out. We kept the five best potential partners.
The third step was strategic fit. The table below shows how the five compared.
But her audience was other clinicians, so her style was technical and scientific. This campaign needed to reach patients.
We recommended ruling her out. The two we picked instead were names the client had no particular view on.
Send us your question. We’ll tell you how we’d answer it.
Talk to usEveryone was making the same claims. Almost nobody was backing them up.
The head of content of a global payments company came to us. Her CMO kept forwarding her competitor posts, asking why they weren’t doing that.
She wanted to know what the competitors were actually doing that they weren’t.
We analysed 376 LinkedIn posts from four competing brands, including theirs.
These companies sold more or less the same services, but each of them had a different communications focus on LinkedIn. The table below shows a summary of our analysis.
| Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C | Competitor D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn positioning | Cross-border payments for large companies, built to fit the systems banks already use | Payments and accounts for fast-growing companies trading internationally | Payments for small businesses selling to customers abroad | Payments built into other companies’ products and workflows |
| Language they all used | global · growth · scale · faster payments · innovation | |||
| What they post about | Mostly conferences and panels. Travel is the industry they use to show the product working. They describe what they sell as easy to plug in, compliant and cheaper. | A quarter of posts are about the sports team they sponsor, talking about speed and winning, not payments. The rest is founder story, funding and growth numbers. | Mostly profiles of business owners who use them: outsourcing firms, software shops, exporters. The rest is awards, quarterly earnings and the CEO. | Mostly trade shows for accounting and travel. The topics are payroll and paying suppliers. They name the software they connect to, and show surveys of client issues. |
| Their top three topics | Industry events 37% Travel vertical 22% Leadership visibility 17% |
Sports sponsorship 24% Industry events 18% Executive visibility 17% |
Founder spotlights 20% Industry events 13% CEO visibility 12% |
Industry events 40% Accounting industry 30% Travel industry 27% |
| What’s missing | Big partner names carry the weight: Visa, J.P. Morgan. What they delivered for a business is harder to find. | Many numbers to describe how big the company is, none to show what a client got out of working with them. | Real customers, named and on video, speaking for themselves. What the product changed for them rarely comes up. | The surveys show how much the problem costs across the industry. What improved for a business that used them is left out. |
| Share of posts containing… | Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C | Competitor D |
| Names a specific customer problem | 12% | 17% | 18% | 25% |
| Names a specific product or feature | 8% | 12% | 6% | 32% |
| Shows a measurable result | 2% | 3% | 0% | 5% |
| All three in one post | 0% | 0% | 0% | 3% |
Looking at the table, we notice that all four brands were missing the same piece of the proof. None of them regularly showed a measurable result. One almost never explained how the product worked. One described the problem and the product well, and still stopped before the result.
Even on its own, each piece of proof was rare. The customer’s problem appeared in one post in five. How the product worked, one in six. A measurable result, one in forty.
Every brand in the category was already saying all three.
Only 15% of posts explained how the product actually worked. Without that, there was no reason to believe the claims.
Even fewer LinkedIn posts told the full story. Only 2% carried the customer’s exact problem, the fix, and the measurable result.
The content territory nobody had taken was proof. So they started partnering with their customers to tell those stories.
Send us your question. We’ll tell you how we’d answer it.
Talk to usHow far do you want us to go?
We define the collection, gather the relevant LinkedIn data including post performance, clean it and hand it over.
We collect and clean the data, then organise it against an agreed coding structure.
We handle the collection, coding, analysis and interpretation, and deliver the finished research report.
Questions people ask us.
So, is Rare Signal a tool?
There is no Rare Signal platform to log into. You give us the question, we do the collection and research, and you receive the data or finished report.
How does a project actually work?
Three stages, from question to answer.
We agree what we’re trying to understand and what needs to be included: companies, people, topics, events, markets, time periods, and what should be excluded.
We gather the relevant LinkedIn material, clean it and, where the project requires it, code it into themes, messaging pillars, audience, stance, tone or other categories built around the brief.
We compare the patterns, go back into the actual posts, test the exceptions and pull out the things a chart alone won’t explain.
Do we need to know which study we want?
Tell us the question. We’ll tell you how we’d approach it.
Can we just buy the data?
Data-only projects start at $3,000. Data + tagging starts at $6,000. Full research studies start at $14,000.
Do you work with agencies?
We work directly with organisations and with agencies.
Can the work be white-labelled?
Tell us at the start and we’ll structure the delivery accordingly.
Researcher
Media buyer
New business
You don’t need a brief.A question will do.
- You need to find the right influencers to work with, or cut down a list you already have.
- You want to know what your competitors keep posting about, so you can do something else.
- You took part in an industry event and want to know what was discussed on LinkedIn, and which competitors were most visible.
- You want to know how professionals discuss a topic on LinkedIn, and what opinions are out there.
Or something else entirely. Send us your question.
We’ll tell you where we’d look and how we’d approach it. A short call settles the scope and the price.