Add a Twitter stream

Create streams for monitoring certain activity on your connected Twitter profiles. Streams help you keep an eye on engagement with your own tweets and let you monitor tweets from users in a Twitter list. You can also create search streams based on keywords or Boolean queries to focus on important conversations and opportunities to engage with customers. To learn more about streams, see Overview of Streams.

Add a stream to a new board

When you select New board, you have three options for creating streams: My posts and mentions, My industry, and Browse all streams.

The first two walk you through creating streams specific to your own posts and search streams based on keywords and hashtags in your industry. The Browse all streams option lets you get straight into building streams on your own.

Under Browse all streams, select Get Started, select a profile from the drop-down, and then select from the available stream type and streams for that profile.

Add a stream to an existing board

You can add a stream to an existing board at any time (boards have a limit of 10 streams).

1. Go to Streams.
2. Create or select the board that will host the stream.
3. Select Add Stream.
4. Select Twitter from the list on the left.
5. Select a profile from the drop-down.
6. Select the streams to add.

Create a Twitter Search or Keyword stream

There are two types of Twitter search stream: Search and Keyword. Both options return results the same way. With Keyword, you can easily search up to three search terms at once. With Search, you can use more powerful search filters to create advanced queries, or do a geo-search to monitor activity around a specific business location.

1. Go to Streams.
2. Create or select the board that will host the stream.
3. Select Add Stream.
4. Select Twitter from the list on the left.
5. Select the Search or Keyword tab, and then select a profile from the drop-down.
6. Enter your keywords or search query.
   For Search streams, select Show examples to see how to format search queries. The search field supports up to 1,000 characters, but avoid using more than 10 keywords and filter operators. Also see Twitter search queries and filters, later in this article.

Create a Twitter geo-search stream

Geo-search streams provide Twitter search results within a specific geographical radius for a specific location. A tweet’s location is preferentially taken from Twitter’s geotagging API but will fall back to the location in the user’s Twitter profile. To create a geo-search stream, use Google Maps to get the coordinates for the location you want to monitor.

Find location coordinates in Google Maps

1. Open Google Maps.
2. Right-click a location on the map, and then select What's here? for its coordinates.
3. Copy the coordinates (Command + C on Mac or Ctrl + C on PC).

Add a geo-search stream

1. In Hootsuite, go to Streams.
2. Create or select the board that will host the stream.
3. Select Add Stream, select Twitter from the list on the left, and then select the Search tab.
4. Select your profile from the drop-down.
5. Enter a search query, followed by a space and geocode: and then paste in your location coordinates (Command + V on Mac or Ctrl + V on PC). There should not be any spaces after the word geocode.
6. Enter a comma and then enter the radius of your search, followed by km for kilometers or mi for miles.
   Example: Hootsuite geocode:49.264046, -123.104358,10km
7. Select Add Stream.

Example

Say you run a barbecue restaurant and you want to find people in your area (in this example, within 10 kilometers of Vancouver, BC) who might be looking for the type of food you serve. You could create the following Twitter geo-search stream:

(need OR want OR wanna OR buy OR get) AND (ribs OR bbq OR burger) -RT geocode:49.282729,-123.120738,10km

Create a Twitter Lists stream

Twitter lists let you group users together, to focus the conversations you’re monitoring. Add streams for existing Twitter lists, or create public or private Twitter list streams from scratch. These lists can also be accessed on Twitter.

1. Go to Streams.
2. Create or select the board that will host the stream.
3. Select Add Stream.
4. Select Twitter from the list on the left.
5. Select the Lists tab, and then select a profile from the drop-down.
6. Select an existing list, or select Create a new list, give it a name, and make it Public (anyone can view) or Private (only you can view).
7. Select Add Stream.

Available stream types and stream content

The types of streams available for Twitter, and what you can do with them, depend on the functionality made available by Twitter to third parties like Hootsuite. Expand the following table to see detailed descriptions of each Twitter stream type.

Twitter search queries and filters

When entering your search queries, don’t use commas to separate the search terms. Instead, use spaces, which act like AND, so results will contain ALL the terms. Put OR between terms to pull results containing either term. See the filter table below for more options.

You can add filters to the end of your search queries to narrow your results. For example, you can search for tweets in a specific language, or from a specific user.

The query pizza lang:fr min_retweets:5 min_faves:10 filter:images will display all tweets in French mentioning pizza that have at least 5 retweets and 10 likes and contain an image.

Expand the following table to see detailed filter examples.