Track a list of LinkedIn profiles or search the whole market? How to choose your lead source

TL;DR: Track a fixed list of LinkedIn profiles when you already know whose posts your buyers engage with, and search across your whole market when you don't, or when your list stops bringing new people who fit. Most B2B teams end up running both. In traxy, Tracking watches the people, posts and company pages you choose, while social intent search covers 71M+ scanned LinkedIn likes, posts and comments and discovery runs look for new people from your targeting and signals. Every lead from either source needs a 50%+ ICP match, shows the post or comment behind it, and can go into the same LinkedIn and email campaign.

Should I monitor a fixed list of LinkedIn profiles for leads, or search engagement across my whole market?

Start with a fixed list if you know which competitors, creators and company pages your buyers follow, and add market-wide search as soon as you want the people who talk about the problem outside those audiences. The two sources answer different questions: tracking tells you who engages with the voices you picked, and market-wide search tells you who on LinkedIn shows the need, whoever they follow.

You don't have to pick one tool for each. traxy runs your entire LinkedIn GTM end to end, from finding high intent leads from social intent to enriching and researching each one, to running relevant, personalized LinkedIn and email outreach to them on autopilot once you approve the campaign (or you approve every message). Both lead sources sit in the same workspace, are judged against the same lead criteria (your ICP) and land in the same Leads table. So the choice is about where you look first, not which product you buy.

Here is the short version of how the two compare:

The rest of this guide explains what each source gives you, what it misses, how to set both up step by step, and how to compare them fairly before you move budget or time from one to the other.

What tracking gives you, and what it misses

Tracking is traxy's name for watching a fixed list. You add a LinkedIn profile, a single post or a company page, and traxy qualifies the people who engage with it. Only people with a 50%+ match to your lead criteria become leads, and each one shows the like, comment or repost that put them on your list (tracking docs).

How do you set up tracking?

1. Track people. Go to Targeting > People > New > Track profile, paste the LinkedIn URL, pick a relationship tag (competitor, teammate, influencer, investor or custom) and confirm. traxy watches that profile's posts and qualifies the people who engage.

2. Track single posts. Go to Targeting > Single posts > New > Track post, paste the post URL and choose Find leads. This works for your own posts, a competitor's or an influencer's. Review the candidate scope before you confirm: candidate counts describe people to evaluate, not a promised number of qualified leads.

3. Track company pages. Go to Targeting > Companies > New > Track company and add a company by domain or LinkedIn company page. traxy reads the posts on that page for engagers who fit your ICP.

4. Track yourself. Add your own LinkedIn URL under Targeting > People to turn engagement on your own posts into qualified leads.

5. Or do it from your AI chat. With the traxy MCP connected, you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to "track this LinkedIn profile and tag it as an influencer," and list, update, pause, remove or restore tracked profiles the same way.

If you are not sure who belongs on the list, who to track on LinkedIn to find leads walks through competitors, customers, creators, posts and company pages one by one.

What does tracking give you?

• Control. You decide exactly which audiences you mine. If your buyers gather around three competitors and two creators, that is where the leads come from.

• Context for the message. You know why each person showed up: they commented on a competitor's post, or liked your founder's post about a problem you solve. The relationship tag on the tracked profile gives you the angle for the first line.

• A score per source. Open any tracked profile under Targeting > People (or a post under Single posts) to see the leads it surfaced, their ICP match and the posts they came from. Insights shows the top profiles and posts bringing in leads over the date range you set.

• No list size ceiling. traxy has no tracking limits on profiles, posts or company pages, so a list of five and a list of several hundred work the same way. For the large version, see how to track hundreds of LinkedIn profiles for buying signals.

What does tracking miss?

• Buyers outside your list. A tracked list only sees the people who engage with the voices you picked. A buyer who follows nobody on your list never shows up.

• People who write about the problem themselves. Someone who posts "we need to fix our outbound list" on their own profile is a strong lead, but tracking only catches them if they also engage with a source you track.

• Older posts. A new tracked profile gets a first check of its recent posts, then traxy follows a window of its five most recent posts published after you added it. For an older post, paste its URL as a single post.

• Quiet sources. A tracked profile that rarely posts brings few leads, however well its audience fits.

• Whole companies. Tracking a company page finds the people who engage with that page's posts. It does not list every employee or every buyer at that company.

• Overlap. Counts across several posts can include the same person more than once. Review individual people in Leads rather than adding up post counts.

What market-wide search gives you, and what it misses

Market-wide search starts from the buyer instead of the account you watch. In traxy that is social intent search: you type who you want and the need in plain English, for example "find me founders looking for AEO help," and traxy searches 71M+ scanned LinkedIn likes, posts and comments. Each person comes back with the post or comment behind them and their fit beside the result. You can run it in traxy, or from Claude or ChatGPT through the traxy MCP (social intent search).

How do you run a market-wide search well?

1. Name the person and the need in one line. "Heads of sales at software companies asking how to hire their first SDR" beats "sales leaders." The need is what separates a high intent lead from a job title match.

2. Use your buyers' own words. Search the phrases buyers write in posts and comments, not the words on your own homepage.

3. Read the source and the date. Open the post or comment behind each person before you count them. A comment from last week about the exact problem is worth more than a like on a loosely related post.

4. Check fit separately from signal. Signal strength and ICP match answer different questions, so check both before you contact anyone (qualification docs).

5. Feed what you learn back into tracking. If many good results engaged with the same creator or competitor, add that profile to Tracking so you catch their next posts too.

What does market-wide search give you?

• Reach beyond your list. You find people who never engaged with anyone you track.

• The buyer's own words. People who wrote or commented about the problem tell you what they need in their own language, which makes a better first message than "I saw you liked a post."

• A way to test a new market. Before you build a tracked list for a new niche, a few searches show whether the people and the conversations exist there.

• New sources to track. The posts behind your search results point to the creators and company pages your market follows.

What does market-wide search miss?

• 71M+ is engagements, not people. The number counts scanned likes, posts and comments. It is not a count of buyers or companies.

• You only find what you describe. A vague query brings vague results. Tracking a competitor catches people you would never think to search for.

• More to read. A wider net needs more review. The source on each result is there so you can check it rather than trust a score.

• A post is not a purchase decision. Writing about a problem shows interest. Fit score is not the probability that someone buys.

• LinkedIn activity only. Signals outside LinkedIn, such as hiring, funding and job changes, come from research on each lead in a campaign, not a live event feed.

For how this differs from brand monitoring tools, read social listening vs social intent search.

Discovery runs: letting traxy look across your targeting

Discovery runs are the hands-off version of market-wide search. Instead of one query you type, a discovery run looks for new people from your targeting and your signals, and every person it finds goes through the same 50%+ ICP match before they count as a lead (qualification docs).

1. Set your lead criteria. Under Targeting > Lead criteria, set roles, departments, seniority and locations for people, and size, industry, revenue, funding and keywords for companies. Add exclusions where needed. If you start from scratch, give traxy your website and it drafts your lead criteria and signals for you to fix.

2. Write your Signal Brief. Under Targeting > Intent signals, list the problems, topics and situations that make a lead relevant: buyer pains, product mentions, triggers and keywords. Keep them specific enough to recognize in public activity (signals docs). You can also describe a custom signal in plain English, such as companies expanding into a new market and looking for an agency.

3. Start a run. Open trax > Discovery runs and use Run now, or ask trax in chat: "discover new leads who are founders discussing their first sales hires." trax shows an approval card with the proposed values and the capacity it will use before anything runs.

4. Review the run. Open the run to see its status, profiles scanned and results, then choose View leads. The same list is under Settings > Agent runs.

5. Tune and repeat. If results point to the wrong problem, change your signal topics. If the people are wrong, revise your lead criteria. Mark leads Good fit or Bad fit with a reason to record your judgment.

You can also start a discovery run, or qualify the audience of one LinkedIn post, from your AI chat through the traxy MCP; the AI asks you to confirm capacity use first.

A note on capacity: a person uses capacity when they are first delivered as a visible qualified lead in your workspace, whichever source found them. Finding the same person again, extra signals, export, enrichment and restoring a lead don't count again. When capacity is reached, new lead discovery pauses. Current plans are on the pricing page.

A simple way to run both

Most teams get the best result by using the fixed list for depth and the market-wide sources for reach, with one feeding the other. A setup that works for a small team:

1. Write your ICP and signals once. Both sources use the same lead criteria and Signal Brief, so a lead from Tracking and a lead from a discovery run are judged by the same rules. How traxy decides what is a lead explains the 50%+ match and the Warm, Related, Activity and ICP match labels.

2. Seed Tracking with a short list. Start with your own profile, your company page, two or three competitors and a few creators your buyers follow. Tag each one so you can compare them later.

3. Run a few social intent searches in your buyers' own words, and read the posts behind the best results.

4. Turn good search results into tracked sources. When the same creator or company page keeps showing up behind good results, add it to Tracking.

5. Start discovery runs from your targeting and signals to keep finding people outside the list.

6. Prune the list. Use tracked profile insights and Insights to see which profiles and posts bring in leads. Pause the ones that bring no fits.

7. Exclude who you should never contact. Add existing customers and partners to the Blocklist so future discovery skips them, and use Do not contact for specific emails or LinkedIn profiles.

8. Save shared views. Filter your leads and save each audience as a shared view. Views update as new leads arrive, and campaigns use shared views.

If profile views matter in your market, turn on the "Profile views" switch on the LinkedIn activity card under Targeting > Intent signals, then filter Leads by "Viewed any profile" for any time or the last 7, 30 or 90 days. LinkedIn does not reveal viewers who browse in private mode, so those won't appear.

How do leads from both sources reach outreach?

Finding the lead is half the work. The other half is the outreach, and it is the same whichever source found the person. Build a campaign under Outbound > Campaigns, or ask trax, and give it a shared lead view, your offer and the research you need. The campaign researches each lead for the facts you ask for, filters out who doesn't fit, groups the rest by signal and prepares a personalized message variant for each group, using the post or comment behind the lead as evidence.

Then you check it before anything goes out:

• Test on sample leads. traxy runs the plan on a few leads so you can read the research and drafts; nothing is sent.

• Launch review. Before launch you see who joins, who is skipped (held by another campaign or contacted before), the sender, the steps and the delivery mode.

• Choose how it sends. Approve every message in a review queue, or let the approved campaign send on its own. That is what on autopilot means in traxy: the campaign runs by itself after you approve it.

• Your own accounts. Messages go out over LinkedIn and email from the sender accounts you connect, with each sender's limits, active hours and ramp-up.

• Stops and one inbox. Replies, unsubscribes and hard bounces stop the sequence. Replies land in one inbox, with one conversation per lead across LinkedIn and email.

• No double outreach. Campaigns run in priority order so one lead never gets two campaigns at once, which matters when the same person is found by both a tracked profile and a discovery run.

You can run the whole thing by hand in the app, through trax, or from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor or Grok through the traxy MCP, where the AI waits for your yes before anything sends or launches. See LinkedIn outbound with traxy for the full outreach side.

How to compare the two sources fairly

Compare qualified leads and what happened after outreach, not raw engagement. A tracked creator with a large audience can produce many engagers and few fits, and a narrow search can produce a short list that replies well.

Three rules keep the comparison honest:

• Keep the message the same. If the tracked list gets a sharp first line and the search leads get a generic one, you are testing copy, not sources.

• Give both the same time. A tracked profile that posted once in the period had little chance to produce leads.

• Tag at the source. Select the leads from a discovery run or a tracked profile and add a tag, so the source survives when leads move into campaigns.

One more check: a missing signal does not prove someone has no interest (signals docs). A source that finds fewer leads may still find the right ones.

What are the limits of each approach?

• Neither source promises a number of leads, meetings or revenue. Candidate counts describe people to evaluate.

• Both sources work from public LinkedIn activity. Hiring, funding, job changes and custom signals beyond LinkedIn come from research on each lead in a campaign.

• Sending needs connected sender accounts. LinkedIn sets its own rules for outreach, so keep sender limits and active hours sensible; no tool can promise zero restriction risk.

• If your lead criteria are wrong, both sources return the wrong people. Fix the ICP before you blame the source.

If you only want updates on leads and accounts you already saved, a saved-lead alert tool such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator can fit better than either approach here.

FAQ

How many LinkedIn profiles can I track in traxy?

There are no tracking limits on profiles, posts or company pages. A long list is fine, but prune profiles that bring no fits so your lead views stay useful.

Do tracked profiles and discovery runs use the same capacity?

Yes. A person uses capacity when they are first delivered as a visible qualified lead, whichever source found them. Finding the same person again does not count again. See the pricing page for current plans.

What if the same person is found by both a tracked profile and a search?

They are one lead with more than one signal. Campaigns run in priority order so one lead never gets two campaigns at once, and the launch review shows who is skipped because another campaign holds them or they were contacted before.

Can I see older posts from a profile I start tracking today?

A new tracked profile gets a first check of its recent posts, then traxy follows its five most recent posts published after you added it. For an older post, paste its URL as a single post under Targeting > Single posts.

Does tracking a company page give me everyone at that company?

No. It finds the people who engage with that company page's posts and fit your ICP, not every employee or every buyer there.

Can I run tracking, search and discovery runs from ChatGPT or Claude?

Yes. Through the traxy MCP you can search social intent, update tracked profiles, start a discovery run and run campaigns from Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor or Grok. The AI asks for your yes before discovery uses capacity and before anything sends or launches.

Does traxy send the outreach without me checking it?

Only if you choose that. You test the campaign on sample leads with nothing sent, review the launch, then either approve every message in a review queue or let the approved campaign send on its own from your connected sender accounts. Replies, unsubscribes and hard bounces stop the sequence.

Which should a small team start with?

Start with a short tracked list (your own profile, your company page, two or three competitors and a few creators your buyers follow) and run a handful of social intent searches in the same week. Add discovery runs once your lead criteria and Signal Brief produce mostly Good fit leads.