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  Article updated: January 15, 2025

Create an X feed

You can create feeds to monitor activity for your connected X (formerly Twitter) accounts. These are referred to as streams in Hootsuite. Streams help you keep track of engagement with your posts and monitor posts from others in an X list. You can also create search streams based on keywords or Boolean queries to focus on important conversations and connection opportunities. Learn more about Streams.

Some of these tasks can be completed in both the web version of Hootsuite and the Hootsuite mobile app. These tasks are indicated by Web and Mobile tabs.

Create a new X stream board

In Hootsuite, you organize your social media feeds into boards and streams. Boards are categories, and streams are social feeds within those categories. Boards act as containers that you use to organize streams by topic or keyword, or to keep track of competitors. You can add up to 20 boards, and each board can hold up to 10 streams.

When you select New board for an X stream, you have the following options:

  • Monitor my own content - Create streams specific to your own social accounts.
  • Discover new content - Create streams for following trends and competitors.
  • Follow personalized feeds - Get straight to building custom streams based on any theme or activity.

The options for creating a new board.

To browse all available streams, select Follow personalized feeds, select an X account, and then select one of the available streams for that account.

Add an X stream with Home, Lists, My Tweets, Mentions, Lkes, and Scheduled.

Add a stream

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

Web Mobile
  1. Go to More, and then select Streams.
  2. Create or select the board that will host the stream.
  3. Select Add stream.
  4. Select an X account.
  5. Select the streams to add.

Create an X (formerly Twitter) search stream

Use powerful search filters to create advanced queries, or do a geosearch to monitor activity around a specific business location. You can only create search streams in the web version of Hootsuite.

X indexes their search based on how popular the search term is. At this time, this index can return posts for the past seven days. X’s search service is not meant to be an exhaustive source of posts, so not all posts will be indexed or made available.

  1. In Streams, create or select the board that will host the stream.
  2. Select Add stream.
  3. Select an X account.
  4. Select Search, and enter your search query.
    The search field supports up to 1,000 characters, but it's best to avoid using more than 10 keywords and filter operators. Also see X search queries and filters, later in this article.

Tip: To easily identify complex X (formerly Twitter) search streams, select the stream title to rename it.

Create an Advanced Search stream

Much like the advanced search feature in X, you can create a stream in Hootsuite based on a more narrow X search, including things like specific words, people, locations, and more.

  1. In Streams, create or select the board that will host the stream.
  2. Select Add stream.
  3. Select an X account, and then select Advanced Search.
  4. Scroll through and select from the available options, and then select Add stream.

Create a geosearch stream

Geosearch streams provide X search results within a specific geographical radius for a specific location. A post’s location is taken from X’s geotagging feature. X restricts results to posts tagged with the specified location or X place ID. So, in order to search your stream by geolocation, you'll need to tag it with a location.

  1. In Streams, create or select the board that will host the stream.
  2. Select Add stream.
  3. Select an X account, and then select Search.
  4. Enter a search query, followed by a space and one of the following operators:
    • place: - Enter place: and then enter a your location. For example, Hootsuite place:Vancouver. Multi-word place names, like "New York City" should be enclosed in quotes (for example, Hootsuite place:"New York City").
    • place_country: - Enter place_country: and then enter a country character code (see a list of character codes on Wikipedia). For example, Hootsuite place_country:CA.
    • point_radius: - Enter point_radius: and then enter the longitude, latitude, and radius coordinates in kilometers (km) or miles (mi) with a space in between each coordinate. You can get a location's coordinates in Google Maps. For 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 use this operator to create the following stream: (need OR want OR craving OR buy OR get) AND (ribs OR bbq OR burger) -RT point_radius:[49.282729 123.120738 10km

Create an X (formerly Twitter) lists stream

X lists let you group users together, to focus the conversations you’re monitoring. Add streams for existing X lists, or create public or private X list streams from scratch. You can also access these lists on X.

  1. In Streams, create or select the board that will host the stream.
  2. Select Add stream.
  3. Select an X account, and then select Lists.
  4. 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).
  5. Select Add Stream.

For more about X Lists and how to use them, see How to Set Up and Use X Lists: 9 Great Ideas. Visit the Hootsuite blog for news, tips, tools, and tactics to help you succeed on social media.

Available stream types and stream content

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

Notes:

Tip: Select the timestamp on any post in a stream to open it in X and view it there.

X search queries and filters

Create X search streams based on keywords or Boolean queries to focus on important conversations and connection opportunities. X search streams must not exceed 500 characters and may be limited by their complexity.

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 following filter table for more options.

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

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

Tip: To find your quoted posts, create a search stream for your own X handle plus the filter:quote. Example: “X.com/hootsuite filter:quote”. Then select the title of the stream to rename it ‘Quoted posts’.

Expand the following table to see detailed filter examples.

 

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