Social Listening data availability and limitations
This feature is only available for Social Listening customers.
When you create a Listening Topic, Sprout Social automatically retrieves historical data for that Topic Query. The length of historical backfill and the time it takes to pull data into Sprout depends on the data sources you're listening to.
The following table provides a high-level view of what data is generally available.
Network - The social network you're listening to.
Message types - The types of messages Sprout can listen to.
Backfill - The amount of time or the amount of data from which Sprout can pull historical data.
Update Schedule - The frequency of updates and the amount of data pulled into Sprout during each update.
| Network | Message types | Automatic Backfill | Update Schedule |
|
X
|
Tweets, Replies, Mentions, Quoted Retweets and Retweets (shares) | 30 days or the last 200k messages | Within 2-3 minutes |
|
|
Posts, Visitor Posts (sometimes referred to as Community Posts) and Comments on Public Pages. | 30 days | Every 4 hours |
|
Instagram Business
|
Posts that include specific hashtags. Comments are not included | None | Every 4 hours |
|
YouTube
|
Video descriptions. Comments are not included | 30 days | Every 24 hours |
| Tumblr | Articles. Reblogs are not included. | 30 days | Every 24 hours |
| Web | Blog posts, Forum posts and news articles. Reviews, general web pages and content behind paywalls are not included. | 30 days or last 10k messages | Depending on the source, within 24 hours |
| Posts and comments | 30 days or last 10k messages | Every 8 hours | |
| Mentions associated with pages that are connected to Sprout, comments on those messages. You can only listen to LinkedIn pages you own. | 30 days | Every 24 hours |
Historical Backfill Limits
If you want more historical data than what is provided in the automatic backfill (default is 30 days), contact your Sprout Social Customer Success representative to purchase a 12 month backfill. Note that some limits do exist when completing a historical backfill for Listening. Those limits are outlined in the following table:
| Network | Manual Backfill | Details |
|
X |
March 2006 | Can go back to the start of Twitter |
|
|
2 years or 600 messages/year | Can get up to two years of data, however if there are more than 600 messages in a year, Facebook only returns the most important messages. |
|
Instagram Business |
None | |
|
YouTube
|
2006 | Fewer videos are returned the further in time you go back. For example, you'll get more data from recent videos than videos from 2006. |
| Tumblr | 2007 | Fewer messages are returned the further in time you go back. For example, you'll get more data from recent posts than posts from 2007. |
| Web | Up to 25 months | |
| Up to 25 months | ||
| Up to 60 days |
Social Listening Limitations
Some important limitations of Social Listening include:
- Listening queries have a 2,048 character limit across all plan levels.
- You can't build a query to listen within a specific geographic area or location. (Try drilling into keyword and operators to do this.)
- Facebook listening is limited to Facebook Pages only.
