Introduction to Listening
Sprout Social’s Listening tools are a powerful complement to Sprout’s extensive social monitoring features, helping you get a comprehensive view of keywords, hashtags, brands, industries and multimedia content to analyze sentiment and uncover trends on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr and the Web.
Listening helps you observe trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response around any topic, whereas you might use monitoring tools, such as the Smart Inbox, to monitor for and engage with conversations happening specifically about your brand.
The Listening toolset has two main components: the Query Builder, which helps you build Topics, and Topic Insights, where you go to understand the data behind the queries you’ve created.
The articles in this guide will help you learn everything you need to know to get up and running with Listening in Sprout, so you can discover and execute campaigns, get inspiration for new content and track brand health.
Getting Started with Listening
Listening is an add-on feature for Professional and Advanced plans. Accounts on these plan levels can choose to include Listening by speaking with an Account Manager.
Visit our Plan Details page for more information on pricing for Listening
Note: A Topic is Sprout’s term for a query you build in the Listening section. These searches constantly run and gather information while they are Active.
Once Listening is enabled on your account, you can determine who has access to Listening in Users & Social Profiles.
Topic Insights and Twitter Search will be a dropdown available in the Choose Listening Access dropdown.
Any user with the Listening features enabled will be able to see Listening in the left navigation bar. These users can also view active and archived Topics.
Additionally, any user with Listening enabled and who has Manage profiles & permissions receives the following abilities:
- Create, edit, delete and archive Topics
- Control visibility of Listening for other users
