How to Create Themes in Sprout Social Listening | Sprout Bites

Hi, my name is Britney and I'm excited to walk you through themes in Listening topics in this Sprout Bites video. We have a Listening topic for apples, which will allow us to monitor conversations online about apples. When creating my query, I'll choose my sources, give it a title, and then select what I call my top-level keywords. I want to understand what people are saying about apple and apples. Because there's a company called Apple, I've excluded some keywords around technology and made sure that only messages about apples will come in if they also use terms like eat, food, eating, and so on. Now, on to themes. Themes allow me to get very specific about the kinds of apples people are talking about. I have a theme for Granny Smith with its relevant keywords, a theme for Gala, one for Honeycrisp, one for Cosmic Crisp, and so on. The important thing to understand about themes is that if someone mentions "Granny Smith" in their message but doesn't mention the word "apple" or "apples," it won't get pulled in. Think of your top-level keywords as the bulk of the messages you're going to see, while themes allow you to segment within that bulk. Only messages that contain both "Granny Smith" and "apple," or both "Gala" and "apple," will appear. Once your themes are in place, you can select them as filters in the dashboard. From the last 28 days, there are nearly 78,000 messages about apples. But if I want to understand what people are saying specifically about Honeycrisp, I can filter to that theme and the results drop to 163 — allowing me to really drill down into that conversation. I can do the same for Granny Smith apples or any other theme. By selecting and layering themes, your data will change based on those selections, which is great for reporting and for understanding the nuances within your Listening topic. The next time you build a Listening topic, add some themes and see how granular you can get.