Custom Signals vs Social Signals
How the Custom Signals trigger differs from the Social Signals trigger, and when to use each one.
Trigify exposes two signal-based workflow triggers. They look similar in the UI but fire on very different kinds of events.
Signals: the ABM layer behind both triggers
Both triggers sit on top of Trigify's Signals feature — our ABM (account-based marketing) layer for monitoring specific accounts and profiles and surfacing the signals they share. You'll find Signals in the left-hand sidebar of the Trigify app, where you configure which signal types to track, which accounts and profiles to monitor, and review everything that's been detected.
Social Signals
Fires when Trigify automatically detects a configured signal on the accounts and profiles you're monitoring — for example a buying-intent post on Business Network, a hiring announcement on X, or a competitor mention on Reddit.
- Source of truth: Trigify's own evidence collection across monitored sources.
- You configure: which signal types, sources, target accounts/profiles, score thresholds, and date windows count.
- Where you set it up: the Signals tab in the sidebar (for what to monitor) plus the Social Signals trigger node in your workflow (for which signals to react to).
- Typical use: alerting reps to high-intent activity, routing buying signals into CRM, kicking off enrichment when a tracked account or person posts.
Custom Signals
Fires on signals you define yourself. This is the upgraded version of the older manual signal trigger; it has been relabelled to make the distinction with Social Signals explicit.
- Source of truth: whatever you decide qualifies as a signal — an external webhook, a manual flag, a CRM event, or your own scoring logic.
- You configure: the signal definition (name, payload shape, optional scoring) and how it's delivered into Trigify (typically a webhook or API call).
- Typical use: stitching together signal logic that doesn't come from monitored social sources — CRM stage changes, product usage events, or signals from third-party tooling.
Which one should you pick?
- If the trigger event is "an account or profile we monitor did something on a social source" → Social Signals.
- If the trigger event is "something happened in another system and I want a workflow to react" → Custom Signals.
- If you want both — for example, fire on a real social signal but also on a manual flag from your CRM — build the same workflow with one trigger of each.
What gets passed downstream
Both triggers expose their payload through the Output tab. Social Signals carry Trigify-detected evidence; Custom Signals carry whatever you posted into them. In either case, use copy-valid-path from Output to reference fields in later steps — typed-out variable references are a common source of silent failures.