Social Listening Query Builder

New to Sprout Social? Learn about our social media Listening suite here.

Sprout’s Social Listening tool is a great way to listen to conversations happening on social media. You can listen in to conversations about your brand, your competitors, campaigns and other current events important to you.

You can use the Query Builder to create a Topic that contains a query to listen to conversations. You can also apply Themes to your Topics to group portions of the messages into saved segments.

See these related pages:

• Topic Themes
• Topic Insights

Topic Templates

The easiest way to build a Topic is by using Topic Templates. These pre-built templates provide tips and examples for five popular Listening use cases. These use cases include:

• Brand Health
• Industry Insights
• Competitive Analysis
• Campaign Analysis
• Event Monitoring

Topics are driven by queries that you set up to listen to conversations happening on social that are relevant to the subject of your Topic. For instance, if you build a Brand Health Topic, you create a query to listen to conversations about your brand happening on social.

Creating a Topic

Let’s use a scenario to walk through the process of building a Listening Topic. 

Let’s say you work at Sprout Coffee Co. and you want to get a pulse on the conversations happening around your brand. You’re going to create a Brand Health Topic to analyze the health of your brand across social media networks.

To create your Brand Health Topic:

1. Click Listening in the Left Bar.
2. Click New Topic from either the left bar under Archive Topics or click the Brand Health tile on the Listening home screen. The Query Builder appears.

     3. Enter your brand name as the Topic Title. 

     4. (Optional) Enter text for your Topic description. 

     5. Select all the networks available for your sources. You don’t know what you don’t know, so while you might not have an active social account on say, Tumblr, there might be conversations happening there related to your brand. Don’t limit yourself to a particular network unless it’s a part of your social strategy. 

You can add LinkedIn and TikTok profiles into the Connected Profiles section of Pick Your Sources so that you can more easily distinguish between owned and public data once your query collects data. To learn more about Connected Profiles, check out this article.

Before you start thinking about the keywords and other terms you want to add to your query, it’s important to understand the type of data you’ll be listening to with the networks you selected. Let’s break down what each network provides:

• X - This network brings the most information to your queries and includes most of the data on X.
• Facebook - Select up to 250 pages to listen to.
• Instagram - Include hashtags in your query to listen to Instagram.
• YouTube - This network brings in descriptions of YouTube videos, Tags and/or video titles, not the comments.
• LinkedIn - You can listen to mentions associated with a page you own. To learn more about querying LinkedIn, see this Help Center article.
• TikTok - This network supports:
  • @ mentions of your connected profile in Video Captions and Video Comments
  • Comments on your connected profile's video posts
• Reddit -You can listen to posts and comments. 
  • You can exclude specific subreddits when querying all of Reddit, or limit your search to specific subreddits.
  • You can also stream all posts and comments from specific subreddits. 
• Tumblr - You can listen to articles.
• Web - This includes a curated list of 100k+ sources across the web.

Building your query

Entering keywords

Now that you have set up your Topic and sources, start building your query by entering keywords.

Enter by using slash commands

Slash commands are built-in keyboard shortcuts that make it quicker to search for keyword filters that you can then add to the query.

To start, press the forward slash  /  to open the list of keyword filters. When the menu is open, you can type to search for a specific filter. For instance, typing /m will return Mentions of User, From User‌ and Proximity Match. Or, scroll through the list or use the keyboard to see what’s available.

Once a filter is selected, any necessary formatting will be added to ensure the keyword is recognized correctly. For example, selecting “From User” adds the from:@ to the input field. To continue, just type the username and press Return.

Enter by using shorthands

As you become familiar with each keyword's formatting, you can directly type the shorthand of any keyword filter.

Skip the menus and leverage keyword filter shorthands to quickly add any keyword filter. Each filter requires a unique format to be recognized correctly. Simply type the shorthand followed by the keyword value.

Keep in mind, formatting matters. For example, the shorthand for "From User" is from:@. If a typo was added such as fro:@sproutsocial, it would be accepted as a Word or Phrase.

Setting up a query

Build the rest of your query by adding keywords to your Topic.

1. Enter keywords you want to include in the Included Keywords box. From the slash menu, you can choose from:

• Word or phrase
• Hashtag
• Mentions of User - this looks for mentions of a user.
• From User - this looks for messages from a particular user.
• Replies to User - this looks for messages to a particular user.

• Cashtag - this is a hashtag used for stocks.

• Proximity Match -  this will return results where the 2 terms you enter are within a specified number of words from each other. You can select the desired spacing to search, and by default, Sprout will search for terms within 1 word from each other.
  

You can also add keyword filters by their shorthands:

Suggestions are only available for words or phrases of at least three characters in queries, not hashtags, cashtags, mentions of users, etc. Additionally, Sprout filters out any keyword suggestions that break OpenAI’s terms of service. As a result, you may see fewer than five suggested keywords.

2. Continue typing keywords or click to open the menu of keyword filters. Add any variations of your brand name. This ensures no matter how audiences are talking about you, your query will capture it. Remember, any keywords you enter will be looked for exactly as they are entered. For example, if you enter “coffeee” on accident, your query will pick up messages with “coffeee” even though you meant “coffee.”
3. Add additional keywords or hashtags that are specific to your brand or brand campaigns. If you add general hashtags, you’ll get too much noise in your listening results. 

For example, if you want to see messages focused on your holiday drink campaign, you’d construct your query with AND operators like this: Sprout Coffee Co. AND #SCCHolidayDrink AND latte. This means you ONLY see messages that contain Sprout Coffee Co. exactly, #SCCHolidayDrink exactly and latte exactly.

If this is too narrow, you might decide you want to see messages focused on your holiday drink campaign, but you want to see different variations of your company name. You’d construct your query with OR operators like this: Sprout Coffee Co. OR Sprout Coffee Co OR Sprout Coffee. This means you’ll see messages that contain Sprout Coffee Co. or Sprout Coffee Co (without the period) or Sprout Coffee.

Remember, there’s no perfect query for listening. It’s about you as a practitioner getting as much meaningful information as you can from what people are saying about you on social. 

Click the Delete icon if you want to delete your keyword group. Keep in mind you can't undo this action once a group is deleted.

Creating groups

You can create groups in your query to better organize it or to get very specific in your querying. For instance, you could create multiple groups to put all your keywords in one group, hashtags in one group and Mentions of User in another. 

Or you could use groups to look for a message that contains ANY of these keywords but also ONLY if those messages contain latte. This can make your results less noisy.

Excluding keywords

You can input keywords you want to be excluded from your query. These might include your brand from user mentions so that you don't pull in your own brand's posts. You could also include other brands with names similar to yours or that go by the same acronym as your brand.

Managing noise

Sometimes your topic may contain messages that are spam or aren’t relevant. You can select keyword groups in the Exclude Noise section to filter out these messages using common noise categories.

Click Learn more about noise management to see a list of excluded keywords and phrases by category.

Exact Match 

This option allows Listening users to utilize quotes to enforce strict keyword matching, ensuring that Sprout only collects results that contain the precise word or phrase entered, without the standard "fuzzy" matching or word conjugation typically applied to Listening queries.

When you select Exact Match, Sprout will only pull in results that contain the precise word or phrase you entered — no variations, no plurals, and no unwanted noise. 

Themes