Overview of stream feeds

Hootsuite Streams display the content from your connected social accounts. Here, you can monitor the activity across all your accounts and engage with your audience. You can create stream feeds to monitor your own posts and engagement, as well as social topics, trends, and profiles.

Before you begin using streams, you need to connect your social accounts. If you’re a team member in an organization, you should already have access to the organization’s profiles and don’t need to add them. If you need help connecting an account, see Connect a social account to Hootsuite.

Your first boards and streams

Go to More, and then select Streams. The very first time you visit Streams, what you see will depend on your Hootsuite plan type:

• Professional and Team users - Streams are automatically populated with the social accounts you added to Hootsuite, including a board for each account and suggested streams for each board.

• Business and Enterprise users - You have a blank slate, so you can organize your streams in the way that makes the most sense for you.

All streams are organized into boards, and each board holds 10 up to streams.

You may add and customize boards and streams however you like, regardless of your Hootsuite plan type. You might choose to create all of your streams in one board, or you might want one board per social network. You could also create one board for streams that display your own posts and another board for streams that monitor competitors or hashtags.

When creating a new board, just follow the prompts to set up the types of social streams you want to see.

See Use boards to organize your streams to learn more about board setup.

Available stream types and stream content

Each social network offers different stream types, depending on the functionality made available by them to third parties like Hootsuite.

For available stream types, stream content, and instructions for adding streams for each social network, see:

• Create a Facebook feed
• Create an Instagram feed
• Create an X feed
• Create a LinkedIn feed
• Create a TikTok feed
• Create a YouTube feed

For suggestions on which stream types to set up based on your business objectives, see Practice social listening and engagement with streams.

Many apps in Hootsuite Apps are also integrated as streams.

Hootsuite Analytics data on your posts

Every stream that includes your own social posts (with the exception of the TikTok and YouTube My Videos streams) automatically displays key metrics from Hootsuite Analytics, such as post tallies and audience engagement. To see detailed information about a particular metric, select View on Analytics below the metrics data.

At the top of each stream, you'll see metrics from the last 7 days; following this, in smaller font, metrics from the previous 7 days are displayed for comparison. The number of metrics displayed for each stream (up to three) depends on your View as mode (Standard, Comfortable, or Compact) and width of your browser window.

To hide Analytics metrics, select More options in the top right of the stream, and then select Hide analytics.

The following stream types display automatic 7-day Hootsuite Analytics data.

Stream view settings and refresh intervals

Change the appearance of your stream to change the number of streams shown on the page. You can apply different view settings to each of your boards.

Select the arrow next to the refresh button to change the refresh interval.

This determines how often Hootsuite searches for new content to display (as it becomes available). You can also manually refresh individual boards, regardless of the auto refresh interval, with the Refresh All button. When a board is refreshed manually, every stream in that board gets updated.

The blue dots next to post timestamps indicate new or unread posts since your last refresh.

To make sure your data is refreshed in the mobile version of Hootsuite, see Synchronize your Hootsuite mobile app .