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.

Search results are displayed 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 Blue Silk™ GPT, give you real-time social and consumer insights to quickly identify recurring themes and emerging trends.

Hootsuite offers two social listening products: Listening Basics and Listening (powered by Talkwalker).

Listening Basics

Listening Basics is available to all Hootsuite customers, regardless of your plan. Listening Basics offers Quick Search functionality so you can find out how terms or topics that matter to your business are currently performing online.

The following table shows a comparison of the key functionality in Listening Basics by plan type.

Listening Basics 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

Listening (powered by Talkwalker)

Listening (powered by Talkwalker) 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 Quick Search as a topic, and monitor trends in your results over time.

The following table shows a comparison of the key functionality in Listening (powered by Talkwalker) by search type.

Listening (powered by Talkwalker) 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

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

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

User permissions for Listening 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