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.

This article contains:

• Topic Templates
• Creating a Topic
• Archiving, deleting, editing and duplicating Topics
• Social Listening FAQ

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. 

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. There aren’t limitations to listening to X.
• Facebook - you can’t listen to the entire network. You have to select certain pages to listen to instead. 
• Instagram - you must 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.
• Reddit -You can listen to most of this network per Reddit API limitations. 
• Tumblr - You can listen to this network in its entirety.
• Web - This isn’t the entire web. This looks at a curated list of websites from Social Gist.

Now build your query. To start building your query:

1. Enter keywords you want to include in the Included keywords box. You can choose from:

• Word or phrase 
• 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.
  
• Hashtag
• Cashtag - this a hashtag used for stocks
• Mentions of User - this looks for mentions of a user.
• From User - this looks for messages from a particular user.
• To User - this looks for messages to a particular user.

Once you enter a keyword, up to five additional keyword suggestions appear. Click a suggested keyword to add it to your query.

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. Click Add keyword and add 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. Click Add keyword and add 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 narrowing, 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 to get as much meaningful information as you can from what people are saying about you on social. 

Click Delete Group If you want to delete your keyword group. You can't undelete a group.

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.

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.

Themes