Can Linkedin's New Network Feed Replace a Prospect Watchlist?

What Linkedin is testing

The idea is simple. Today's feed mixes posts from your network with posts Linkedin recommends from outside it. The test splits them into two tabs. In Srinivasan's words, the Network tab is for "the people you have explicitly connected or followed," and For You is for posts "from real practitioners inside and outside your network."

What surprised me is how little the split removes. A paper by nine Linkedin engineers, posted to arXiv the same day as the announcement, says content from a member's network "makes up over 70% of impressions and engagement" in the feed. In plain words, most of what you already see comes from people you're connected to or follow. The Network tab mostly strips out the recommended posts around them.

Some things haven't been said publicly. Linkedin hasn't said whether the Network tab is sorted by time or by its ranking model, which tab opens by default, or whether the test will ship to everyone. Social Media Today pointed out that Linkedin's earlier alternative-feed tests, in 2025 and in June 2026, never got a wider launch. I wouldn't build a sales process on it yet.

Is it a watchlist?

For a seller, the appeal is easy to see. Follow the buyers you care about, open the Network tab, and you get their posts without the viral career advice in between. It costs nothing, and it lives in an app you already open every day.

If you're looking after a handful of warm relationships, that might be enough. Say you have 15 customers and champions you're already connected to, and you check Linkedin over coffee each morning. The Network tab will make their posts easier to find, and you'll probably comment on more of them. I'd use it for that.

The trouble starts when the list is prospects who don't know you yet. It gets worse when the thing you care about isn't a post.

Start with how people get into the tab. You have to connect with them or follow them. A connection request only works if they accept, and a follow shows up in their followers list. They can see it, and if they remove you, their posts stop showing up. For a competitor's executive or a buyer in the middle of an evaluation, that's usually the last thing you want.

Then there's what shows up. Linkedin describes the Network feed as posts from your connections and follows. That's useful, but in sales, comments are often the stronger signal. A VP of Operations who never posts but leaves a long comment under a competitor's pricing announcement is telling you more than a reshared webinar ever would.

Linkedin's own notifications mostly cover new posts, not comments or likes, and nothing in the announcement says the Network tab changes that. We went deeper on those smaller actions in how to monitor Linkedin comments and likes for sales signals.

The tab also isn't only your prospects. It's everyone you've ever connected with or followed. If you've collected 1,500 connections from past jobs, conferences, and recruiters, your 40 target accounts are a thin slice of it. You still have to scroll, and you have to catch the right post on the right day. Nothing tells you what you missed.

Finally, nothing leaves the app. There's no alert when the economic buyer posts, no Slack message for the AE who owns the account, and no row in Clay or your CRM. X isn't in it at all, which matters if half your buyers argue about tooling over there.

How I'd use both

My suggestion is to split the work the same way Linkedin split the feed. Keep the Network tab for people you already have a relationship with. Put the named accounts you're trying to win on a watchlist that doesn't need their permission.

That's what we built MultiFollow for. You add a Linkedin profile, a Linkedin company page, or an X handle, and we check it every second. When a Linkedin person posts, comments, or likes something, you get an alert, usually within a couple of seconds and up to about a minute when things are congested.

Company pages alert on posts only, and on X we track posts and replies, since likes there have been private since 2024. We never follow or connect, so nobody on the list is told.

Alerts go to email on every plan. On Business and above, you can also send them to Slack or to an API webhook, which is how most teams get them into Clay, n8n, Zapier, or a CRM. A Linkedin post arrives as JSON like this (from our notification docs):

{
  "platform": "linkedin",
  "profile_url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikatrautman/",
  "query": "URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikatrautman/. Track posts. Track comments. Track likes.",
  "datetime": "2025-01-19T05:52:00Z",
  "link": "https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erikatrautman_vice-president-strategy-and-business-operations-activity-7272270503808000000-OxBb",
  "content": "I've got two more great leadership positions I'm filling! I am so inspired by the vision and the culture here at Sprout. So come join me to transform how companies leverage social media to connect with their customers.",
  "activity_type": "post"
}

The activity_type field is post, comment, or like, and likes come with empty content. If a tracker gets noisy, you can give it include and exclude keywords that filter posts and comments. The table below shows our plan limits as of October 2026, taken from the pricing page.

If you're one seller watching a short list by email, Essential covers five Linkedin buyers. Once the alerts need to land in Slack or Clay, Business is the floor.

There's one thing neither tool covers well. We don't track job changes, and the Network feed won't show one unless the person posts about it. Keep Sales Navigator or a job-change tool for that, as we explained in Sales Navigator vs Linkedin activity tracking.

And if what you like about the For You tab is finding new people who talk about your category, MultiFollow won't help, because we only watch the accounts on your list. That's keyword listening, and it's what our sibling product KWatch.io does across Linkedin, X, Reddit, and other sites.