| Plan | ✓ Professional ✓ Advanced ✓ Scale ✓ Enterprise |
External listening is available as an add-on |
Social listening allows you to monitor conversations both within and beyond your social media profiles using specific keywords and phrases.
This helps you gain deeper insights into your target audience and industry trends. You can identify potential customers, engage more effectively with your audience, and even uncover brand ambassadors.
How to create a social listener in Vista Social
1. On your Vista Social Dashboard, select Listening:
2. Click Add listener to create a new listener.
3. Choose whether you want to listen:
Internally (your own social profiles)
Externally (other social networks, web, or news)
4. Add a name and description to your listener
5. Now pick a source to listen to. You can pick from multiple sources.
6. Under Craft your query, add the keywords that you want to track.
7. You may create word or phrase groups and choose whether you want all (And) or any of the keywords (Or) to appear to be pulled through by the Listener. You may also exclude results that contain any keywords that you don't want by specifying them under Excluded Keywords.
8. You can also filter the conversations that will be pulled through to your listeners by Sentiment, where each conversation is automatically tagged with a sentiment icon indicating whether it’s positive, negative, mixed, or neutral.
9. Apply optional filters to refine your Listener by language, location, etc.
10. Preview results from the last 30 days (only for X). This helps you see if you need more query filters for a more focused sample before you save your listener.
Managing your listener results
1. Once you have created your listener, it should now appear on your list of listeners. Here you will see the following:
Listener overview
Activity
Listener Report
Alerts
Settings
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Note See which types of listener metrics we report in this guide. |
2. Choose the date period you want to see your listener's performance for in the upper right corner.
3. To see what your listener has pulled through, go to Results on the right-hand side.
4. To export the overall performance report of your listener, click on the downward arrow at the upper right corner → Export.
How to reply to a conversation in your listener results
To reply to a conversation pulled up by your listener, simply click on it and it should take you to the actual message in the respective social network's inbox or actual post where the comment is from.
How to pause or archive a listener
You may pause or archive a listener by clicking on the three-dot button → Pause/Archive.
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Note When you archive an external listener, it will take 24 hours for that add-on spot to be available again. After that, you can set up a new listener in its place. |
Listening data availability and limitations
Network |
Message Type |
Free Listener |
Listener add-on |
X (Twitter) |
Engagement on your profile's Tweets (Replies, Mentions, Quoted Retweets, and Retweets) that contain specific keyword(s). | ✅ | ✅ |
X (Twitter) |
Public Tweets, Replies, Mentions, Quoted Retweets, and Retweets that contain specific keyword(s). | ❌ | ✅ |
| Posts, Visitor Posts (sometimes referred to as Community Posts), and Comments on your pages that contain specific keyword(s). | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Comments on Public Pages' posts that contain specific keyword(s). | ❌ | ✅ | |
| Engagement on your profile's posts (comments, direct messages, mentions) that contain specific keyword(s). | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Posts that contain specific hashtags in the caption (comments not included). | ❌ | ✅ | |
YouTube |
Videos that contain specific keyword(s) in descriptions (comments not included). | ❌ | ✅ |
| Post and comments that contain specific keyword(s). | ❌ | ✅ | |
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Mentions and comments on posts on your pages and profile(s) that contain specific keyword(s). You can only listen to LinkedIn pages and profiles you own. |
✅ | ✅ |
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How often are listener results refreshed in Vista Social?
A: Listener results are refreshed every 4–6 hours to capture new data since the last refresh. This applies to both internal and external listeners, as long as your external listener quota still has available capacity.
Q: How do external listener quotas work?
A: External listeners use a daily result quota that resets on a 24-hour rolling window, starting from the time the listener was created. Once the quota is reached, no additional results will be pulled until the window resets.
Q: How does Vista Social fetch listener data during refreshes?
A: When listeners are refreshed, Vista Social looks at the most recent posts, working backwards from the current time (“now”) to collect new results.
Q: Can I compare listener performance across different campaigns or time periods?
A: Yes. You can select a custom date range in the Listener dashboard or your listener performance report to compare performance across different campaigns or time periods. This is useful for measuring changes in engagement, volume, or activity over time.
Q: Can I export listener performance data?
A: Yes. After selecting a date range and reviewing the results in the Listener dashboard, you can export a listener performance report for further analysis or sharing.
Need further help?
If you have any questions or need additional help, feel free to contact our awesome support team. We are here to assist you! 💙
Related Reading:
Replying to specific messages in a conversation
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