Listening Topic Highlights in Sprout Dashboard

Overview 

Social Listening tracks thousands or millions of conversations across the web and social networks. While these datasets are valuable, identifying which changes require immediate attention traditionally required manually checking individual charts, filters, and top messages across each topic every day.

Topic Highlights removes this manual effort by automatically analyzing your active Listening topics and delivering daily, bite-sized narrative summaries directly to your Sprout Dashboard. 

Powered by Sprout AI, Topic Highlights identifies statistical anomalies across volume, sentiment, keywords, and entities, explains what is driving the conversation, and provides one-click paths to dive deeper into the data.

What you can do

• Review daily conversation shifts at a glance: See up to three AI-generated highlight cards summarizing notable shifts detected across your active Listening topics over the past 24 hours.
• Understand the context behind spikes: Read concise narrative explanations detailing which events, news items, or community discussions caused a volume spike, sentiment swing, or keyword surge.
• Deep-dive conversationally with Trellis: Click "Follow up with Trellis" on any card to open a contextual AI chat thread and explore trends, audience questions, or potential response strategies.
• Explore supporting messages directly in Listening: Click "View in Topic" to open the Topic Insights Report with your view already anchored to the exact two-day window and message filters driving the highlight.
• Rate highlight quality: Use the thumbs up or thumbs down buttons on each card to help Sprout refine highlight accuracy and relevance for your account.

How to use Topic Highlights

Topic Highlights requires no setup or manual rule configuration. As long as your account has the Social Listening add-on and at least one active topic generating regular conversation, highlights will appear automatically on your Sprout dashboard.

1. Open the Dashboard tab: Log in to Sprout and view your Dashboard
2. Locate the Listening Highlights section: If notable shifts were detected in your active topics within the past 7 days, up to three highlight cards will appear at the top of your dashboard. Highlights generated today appear first, followed by recent highlights from earlier in the week.
3. Review the card details: Each card displays a title, an anomaly badge (such as Volume Shift, Sentiment Shift, Keyword Shift, or Entity Spike), a narrative summary of the drivers, and the generation timestamp.
4. Take action on a highlight:
   1. Select Follow up with Trellis to ask follow-up questions and generate executive summaries or action items with Sprout's AI assistant.
   2. Select View in Topic to jump into the full Topic Insights Report in Listening, where you can inspect the individual social messages behind the spike.
5. Provide feedback: Click the thumbs up or thumbs down icon on the lower corner of the card to submit feedback.

FAQs

Why don't I see the Listening Highlights section on my Sprout dashboard?
The Listening Highlights section only appears for accounts that have the Social Listening add-on enabled and have at least one active Listening topic. If your account does not have active topics, or if you do not have permission to view Listening topics in your selected group, the section will remain hidden.

Why does my Listening Highlights widget show an empty state saying "No Notable Shifts"?
Highlights only generate when Sprout detects a statistically significant anomaly in your conversation data compared to the previous 7-day baseline. If your active topics experienced typical, steady volume and sentiment over the past 7 days, no highlights will be produced. An empty state simply indicates that no unusual spikes occurred, and the widget will update automatically once a notable shift is detected.

Why are some of my active Social Listening topics not generating Topic Highlights?
To ensure high narrative quality and statistical significance, a topic must receive at least 50 messages per day from supported public networks (Reddit, Bluesky, X, Facebook, or Web). Topics with low daily volume (under 50 messages/day) or topics that monitor private connected profile data exclusively will not generate highlights.

Why am I seeing Topic Highlights from yesterday or earlier this week on my dashboard?
Sprout displays up to three cards at any given time. If your topics did not produce three brand-new highlights today, Sprout fills the remaining card slots with the most recent notable highlights from the past 7 days. You can check the timestamp on each card to see exactly when it was generated.

Can I view more than three Topic Highlights or browse highlights older than 7 days?
No. Topic Highlights is designed as a daily briefing tool that displays a maximum of three cards from the preceding 7 days. Older highlights are retired to keep your dashboard focused on current, actionable events. To review historical conversation trends beyond 7 days, navigate to the full Topic Insights Report in Listening.

Are retweets and quote tweets included when Sprout analyzes messages for Topic Highlights?
Retweets and quote posts from X are counted in overall volume metrics across Sprout, but they are excluded from the message analysis used by the AI to author the highlight narrative. Sprout analyzes original messages only, ensuring that the written summary captures authentic discussions rather than amplified reposts.

Can I filter Topic Highlights by a specific social network or Theme?
Topic Highlights currently evaluates each Listening topic as a complete, multi-network dataset. Highlights cannot be filtered by an individual network (such as Reddit or X only) or segmented by custom Theme rulesets. If you need network-specific or theme-specific breakdowns, select "View in Topic" to explore your configured Themes and network filters inside Listening.

Does clicking "Follow up with Trellis" on a Topic Highlight card consume credits?
Yes, engaging the Trellis Chat by clicking “Follow up with Trellis” will consume credits. Check out this article for more information on Understanding and Maximizing Trellis Credits.

Is Topic Highlights available for customers hosted in the European Data Center (EUDC)?
At this time, Topic Highlights is available exclusively for customers hosted in the United States Data Center (USDC). Expansion to the European Data Center is being reviewed for future releases.

Can I export or share Topic Highlights outside of Sprout Social?
Topic Highlights cannot be exported directly to PDF or included in external Shared Links. To share data externally, use "View in Topic" and utilize Sprout's standard Listening export and report-sharing tools.

Why don’t I see the Dashboard on my account? 
This could indicate that you have not been assigned feature access to the Dashboard in your user settings. This can be identified by going to Settings > Personal Settings and reviewing the Feature Permissions you have been assigned. If you are not seeing a check mark next to the Dashboard feature, we would recommend contacting your Account Owner or an admin on the account to request that they update your permissions.