Social Listening with Hootsuite Streams

Hootsuite’s free platform course provides the knowledge and skills to use the full suite of Hootsuite social media management tools. Learn how to utilize these tools to boost the impact of your social media efforts, driving results and proving your ROI.

Video Transcript | Intro

Hootsuite’s Streams offer an easy way to engage with your audience, and keep track of social activities happening across all your social channels.

In one place, you monitor things like conversations, mentions, keywords, and hashtags -- and respond right away, rather than visiting all your social profiles individually.

Streams

If this is your first time in Streams, select an option and pick which Stream you want to add.

If you’re unsure, we recommend starting with My Posts and Mentions to see how people are directly engaging with your brand on social media.

Click Add to Dashboard to finalize.

After this, additional streams can be added as needed.

Once a stream is added, notice that the engagement metrics for each of your posts are also visible. From here, you can easily engage in conversations by resharing, commenting and liking posts. 

Extra Search

Search Streams empower you to undertake on-going monitoring of things like hashtags and keywords. Once you set up your searches, the search results will be continually updated in the streams.

Different networks can be searched in different ways. 

Those with Instagram business accounts can search up to 30 unique hashtags in a seven day period - and then easily join relevant conversations.  

For Facebook, you can set up streams to monitor the activities of your competitors or strategic partners.

You can search Twitter using relevant keywords or hashtags. 

For example, monitor positive mentions using terms that include your brand name and the keywords “love it”.

When adding search terms, do not use commas to separate terms. Instead, use spaces, which provide results that include all terms. To pull results that contain either term, type ‘OR’. If you’re looking for a specific phrase, use quotation marks.

Another tip when selecting your search terms is to spend time thinking about how people mention your brand day-to-day, such as popular abbreviations, as well as any common misspellings.

Once you’ve selected your terms, click Search.

After a Stream is live, you can modify your search terms if needed.

Within a hashtag stream, you can filter even further, by follower size or additional keywords. 

Tabs

Now that you have a number of Streams set up, notice that they are housed within a tab.

Tabs are useful for organizing streams. You can add multiple Tabs to group streams together by social network, campaign, engagement or search type. Each tab can hold up to 10 Streams!

To create a new tab, click the plus sign and rename it. Now add streams, within this Tab, in the usual way.

Many Hootsuite users start out by creating a dedicated tab for each of the social networks they manage. As you gain experience with Hootsuite, you’ll likely start organizing your tabs and streams in a way that best fits with your social media goals.

Check out our Help Desk to learn more How to Add and Use Streams.