How does editing Topics affect available data?

You can edit Social Listening Topics at any point after building them. Editing a Topic will either update the existing Topic or create a new one, depending on the edits made. 

Edits that Update a Topic 

When using Social Listening, you can change the title or description, or set up/change Alerts, of an existing Topic in the Query Builder. Doing so will simply update the existing Topic without affecting the historical or new data it collects. The updated Topic will save immediately after you select Save Changes.

You can also edit a Topic in the Query Builder by 

• updating channel selection
• adding, removing, or editing included keywords
• adding, removing, or editing excluded keywords
• adding, removing, or editing Themes
• updating selection of 'Exclude Noise' 

Completing any of these actions will update your existing Topic. Once applied, the saved edit will remove historical messages from your Topic that no longer match your updated query. Please note: these actions will not retroactively pull in (ie backfill) existing messages that now match your updated query. This will only pull in matching messages that are published after the time in which the edit was applied.

Most changes will be applied to your Topic immediately, however, the full data in the Topic may take additional time to update in the Insights view. This is due to the fact that Sprout needs to reprocess historical data to reflect the new excluded keyword or keywords that you have added. You will be shown a confirmation modal when clicking Save Changes that lets you know approximately how long it will take for the Insights view to reflect the change.

Some details, including updates to Themes, will not be updated until the Topic is fully reprocessed. 

Edits that Create a New Topic

If you make any edits to the Apply Optional Filters (Advanced Filters) section, a new Topic will be created. Selecting Save Changes in any of these edit scenarios will show you a confirmation modal that lets you know a new Topic is about to be created and asks whether you want to delete or archive the old Topic. Once you select Delete or Archive the new Topic will be created.