Customizing Listening Topic Insights
This feature is only available for Social Listening customers.
After you create a Topic in Sprout Social Listening, it gathers data so you can observe trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response with regards to particular keywords, hashtags, brands or industries.
You can view Topic Insights for any Active or Archived Topic. Archived Topic data is only available for the time period that Topic was active.
This article contains the following sections:
Customizing Topic Insights
To view the insights that your Topic query pulls in, click the name of the Topic from the Listening screen in Sprout. You can also see a list of your active Topics in the Left Bar on the screen.
The first time you go to review insights for a Topic, it can feel like there’s a lot to look at. To make the data more manageable and meaningful, start by selecting the date range you want to view insights for. You can select a custom date range for comparison by clicking on your desired dates. Once you select your date range, comparison metrics appear in the Topic Summary.
If you want more details, click and then click About these Insights to get a glossary with definitions, tips and tricks about your insights.
Filter Menu
Use filter groups from the filter menu to further customize your insights. When you select filters, the message data you see throughout the Topic Insights (Performance, Conversation, Messages and Themes) gets updated based on the filters you select.
In the Profiles group, you can select which network and competitors you want to view insights from. If no network or competitors are selected, you see insights from all networks and competitors in the main screen. Select a particular network and/or competitor to only see those insights.
Use the Theme group to see only messages that relate to a certain Listening Theme. If no Themes are selected, you see insights from all Themes in the main screen. Select a particular Theme to only see those insights.
Use Keyword filters to include or exclude keywords in the message insights. For instance, if you have a Brand Health Topic for your coffee company, but only want to review insights for messages that contain your brand name, enter your brand name in this box.
Apply Advanced filter groups to narrow your insights even more by focusing on Content Type, Message Type, Sentiment, Technology or Mobile. Additionally, as you navigate through your Topic Insights, you can select data in the four sections that automatically apply filters to the insights.
If you used Themes on your Topic, you can also filter by those Themes. Select All Themes or drill into messages related to one particular Theme. To learn more about applying Themes to your Topics, review the Listening Topic Themes article.
Uncovering deeper Topic Insights
You can use data from the messages that appear in Insights to uncover trends in messages returned from your Listening Query.
Hover over charts to view all messages associated with that metric or chart.
Highlight a word or phrase (up to three words) in a message to view all messages containing that word or phrase, include the word or phrase as a filter, exclude the word or phrase as a filter or exclude the word or phrase from your Topic Query.
Click a message author name to view messages from that author or include or exclude that author as a filter.
Topic Insights FAQ
How much historical data do I receive for a new Topic?
30 days of data is pulled automatically for all networks except Instagram. This should give you enough data to decide if your Topic is set up properly.
How far can data be backfilled?
X: 30 days or the last 200k messages
Facebook: 30 days
Instagram: None
LinkedIn 30 days
YouTube, Tumblr: 30 days
Reddit: 30 days or last 10k messages
Web: 30 days or last 10k messages
Historical backfill data limitations are different. Please reference this article for more information on historical backfill for each network.
How often is data collected?
X: New tweets brought in within two to three minutes of creation.
Facebook: Checked once every four hours.
Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Reddit: Checked once every four hours.
Web: Checked once every 24 hours.
Why isn’t there engagement data for pulled tweets?
Engagement data is updated for tweets anytime there is a retweet. If we don't receive a retweet, or replies and likes happen after the last retweet, we won't have the most recent number.
Why are some messages or comments not picked up by my Topic even though they contain the keyword?
It depends on the network. X is the only network where we are confident we will receive every message. Other sources are sample based, which is a limitation of the networks.
Why aren’t some Instagram messages being pulled when the Topic keyword is in the caption?
We find Instagram messages by hashtag. Even if the keyword appears in the post, it may not contain the hashtag meaning Instagram won’t send us the data.
