Overview of Insights

Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch is a social listening solution that helps you monitor the online conversations that matter most to you.

You can use Insights to track conversations about your brand, and your competitors. You can create searches to gather and review all social mentions that match your queries. With mentions from a variety of sources, including social networks, blogs, and news sites, you can focus on important conversations and get valuable insights into your audience and industry trends.

Access to Insights is assigned at the team level, and then at the individual team member level. If a team is enabled with Insights, no one in the team has Insights access until the admin gives Insights permissions to individual team members. Team admins have edit/write access to Insights, while default team members have read-only access.

Team members have access to Insights searches for the teams they belong to. If all members in your Insights plan need access to the same searches, you can create and add searches to a specific team.

To learn more, see:

• Create or delete a team
• Add a member to a team

Data and site coverage

Insights uses the Brandwatch Data Library, a shared collection of public data acquired by Brandwatch, to match mentions to user search queries. Brandwatch gathers the data using custom web crawlers, search APIs, data streams from third-party data providers, and direct relationships with specific sites.

Insights returns mentions from a wide variety of platforms, including the sites listed in the following table:

Mention classification

Insights provides additional information about each mention so that you can understand relevant online conversation on a deeper level.

Insights uses custom statistical classifiers (built in-house by Brandwatch) that predict sentiment and emotion based on a training set of millions of pieces of data, including words, phrases, emojis, and other patterns. In addition, Insights infers gender and location for each mention, where possible.

Sentiment

Insights performs sentiment analysis on every mention, using an AI-driven model based on a training sample of 500,000 mentions. Insights assigns a sentiment of positive, negative, or neutral to each mention. 

Team admins can manually change the sentiment assigned to a mention. See Filter and analyze your saved searches for more information. 

Emotion

Insights performs emotion analysis on every mention, using an AI-driven model based on a training sample of approximately 2 million tweets, manually labeled with emotional categories.

Insights classifies mentions based on six emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, surprise, and sadness. If no emotion is detected, Insights does not assign an emotion to the mention.

Location

Location data is sometimes provided directly by the platform or by the author of the mention. When an author or mention has no explicit location, Insights attempts to infer a location based on the keywords in the author’s bio.

Gender

Insights infers gender for a mention using a statistical method based on the binary gender distribution of author names in census data and other public records.

Supported languages

Insights detects and returns mentions data in the following languages. Languages marked with an asterisk (*) are not supported for sentiment analysis. Emotion analysis is supported for English mentions only.

Data visualization

Insights provides rich data visualization components to segment mentions that match a search query into different categories, such as demographics, emotion, and sentiment.

You can filter the mentions by a variety of attributes to zero in on particular audience traits. You can also view trends in volume over time, and discover the top sites and authors for mentions that match your search query. See Metrics in Insights for more information.