Overview of social listening in Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers real-time social listening and analytics that allow you to track and analyze conversations across various social media channels. You can monitor mentions of your brand, your competitors, and industry-related keywords, gaining valuable insights into consumer sentiment.

Lumen (formerly Listening (powered by Talkwalker)) displays search results in a set of widgets, so you can quickly assess performance and impact from a variety of angles, like sentiment, demographics, top themes, and more. AI-generated summaries, powered by our proprietary AI models, give you real-time social and consumer insights to quickly identify recurring themes and emerging trends.

Baseline social listening functionality

Basic social listening functionality (formerly Listening Basics is available to all Hootsuite customers, regardless of your plan. You can use Quick Search to find out how terms or topics that matter to your business are currently performing online, and compare search results, depending on your play type.

Basic social listening features by plan

Feature	Professional, Standard, Team, and Business plans	Advanced and Enterprise plans
Number of searches allowed	Unlimited	Unlimited
Historical data	7 days	30 days
Search comparisons	2	5
Filters
Benchmarking against previous period
Peak detection (highest engagement)
Forecasting
AI-powered summaries
Download reports

Full social listening functionality

Lumen is Hootsuite's full social listening tool for Enterprise plan members. In addition to Quick Search (with 30 days of historical data), you can also save a search as a Topic, and monitor trends in your results over time.

The following table shows a comparison of the key functionality in Lumen by search type.

Lumen features by search type

Feature	Quick Search	Topic Insights
Number of searches allowed	Unlimited	5 (with incremental bundles of 5 as add-ons)
Historical data	30 days	13 months
Search comparisons	5	10
Filters
Benchmarking against previous period
Peak detection (highest engagement)
Forecasting
AI-powered summaries
Download reports
Social media channel monitoring
Data export
Alerts and reports scheduling
Mention tagging

User types and permissions

Lumen supports two levels of user permissions: default user permissions and administrator permissions. The following table summarizes the permissions required for different Lumen features.

Note: Administrator permissions in Lumen are separate from Hootsuite administrator permissions. If you or someone on your team requires administrator permissions in Lumen, please contact our Customer Support team for help.

User permissions for Lumen features

Feature		Default User	Administrator
Accounts and channels	Connect a social account
	Add a public channel
Topics	Create a topic
	View topic results
	Delete a topic
Reports	Download a report
	Schedule a report
	Delete a report
Alerts	Create an alert
	Delete an alert
Tags	Create a tag
	Tag a mention
	Delete a tag
Widgets	Export a widget
	Embed a widget
General settings	Change project settings