How to Build Your First Social Listening Topic | Sprout Bites

Hi, I'm Laura and in this Sprout Bites video, we're going to discuss how to set up your first Social Listening topic. Social Listening is the process of analyzing social conversations to uncover the why behind audience chatter, turning candid feedback into actionable business strategies. When you first open Social Listening, the immediate temptation is to type in your own brand name to see what people are saying. But building an industry topic gives you the full picture of the market, validates your strategy, and unlocks entirely new insights you might have missed otherwise. Get started by giving your topic a name, then choose your sources. Next, we will craft our query. The query is a tailored search that tells Sprout exactly which conversations to pull in. In this example, I'm representing a plant fertilizer brand. My goal is to dig into the why behind the hobby so we can build marketing campaigns that actually resonate with plant parents. Craft your query from the perspective of how your audience would talk about your industry and with the question you're trying to answer in mind. We get the most value out of Social Listening when we approach each use case with a hypothesis to test. In this scenario, we want to understand the habits of plant parents when it comes to plant care. Add keywords, phrases, and hashtags to your query. You can type keywords directly or select the backslash key to see all the options for crafting your query. Recommend by AI Assist offers related keywords when you need some inspiration. If you want to build more complex Boolean queries, the AND and OR operators are available to expand or narrow your results. Preview your query at any time to go through the messages and see if your topic needs any tweaking — look for keywords you may have forgotten or irrelevant words to exclude. Themes are essential to Social Listening and allow you to build qualitative filters to help segment your data. Think of themes as a way to organize your query by specific categories, making it easier to filter and view insights within your existing search query. In our example today, I'm going to create a theme for flowers and another for herbs so I can filter the data for each. Next, set up the types of alerts you want to receive. You can apply optional language filters, but for the remaining filters we recommend leaving them blank unless you have a very specific use case — applying these filters will limit your results. After that, give it one more preview, then start listening. Once your data has had time to populate, open up Trellis to gain quick access to trends, or navigate the report by applying filters across each tab. Remember, the best insights come from the best questions. Building your industry topic is the first step to seeing the full picture of your market. Head over to the Listening tab in Sprout Social and start your first query today.