What a buyer signal actually looks like

Most listening tools have one bucket. Something matched your keyword, so it goes in the feed. Your brand name, your competitor's brand name, your category, a support complaint and somebody asking which tool to buy all arrive in the same list, sorted by time.

That is why the feed stops getting opened around week three. Not because the data is wrong, but because triaging it is a job, and nobody was hired to do it.

Two different objects

A mention is a fact about the past. Your name came up somewhere. It is worth knowing, it rolls up into brand health, and on its own it is rarely urgent.

A buyer signal is a fact about the near future. Somebody has the problem you solve, they are looking for a way to solve it, and they have said so where you can read it. It has a shelf life measured in days.

Both are worth having. They are not worth having in the same list, because the person who should act on the first one is not the person who should act on the second, and the window on the first one closes.

What makes a signal a signal

Three things, and all three have to be present.

A stated problem. Not enthusiasm, not a complaint about a competitor — an actual description of something that needs solving. "Our spreadsheet is falling apart" is a problem. "Competitor X is overpriced" is an opinion.

A person with standing. Someone who could plausibly buy or influence the buy. The title in the bio matters less than what they are describing themselves doing.

Recency. A thread from March describing a search that concluded in April is history. The same thread from Tuesday is a conversation you can still join.

Scoring, and why the number is not the point

Every signal in BrandRobin carries a score. It is a shorthand for how strongly those three conditions are met, and it is useful for sorting a hundred things into an order.

It is not useful as a threshold. Teams who set "alert me above 80" and walk away tend to miss the interesting middle, where somebody is describing your problem in words your keyword list never anticipated. The score is for ranking what you already have, not for deciding what to look at.

The better habit is to ask a question instead of tuning a filter:

That question has a stable answer even as the language people use drifts, because it is asked of the conversations themselves rather than of a keyword list somebody wrote in January.

Where they should land

A mention belongs in a weekly digest. It is context, and it accrues.

A buyer signal belongs wherever the person who acts on it already is — Slack, Teams, email, or straight into a CRM through the API. If it arrives somewhere that person has to remember to visit, it is not a signal. It is an archive.