Listening Data Sources and Covered Content
Supported data sources
You can listen for data from the following sources:
Facebook
Instagram
X (formerly Twitter)
YouTube
Web
Downloading and processing listening data
Every source is crawled at least once every 24 hours after publishing, and some of them are crawled every hour. Emplifi requests the crawled data for new mentions in a dynamically changing frequency. Listening queries receiving a lot of mentions provide new mentions every hour, while some niche queries can be refreshed in up to every 12 hours.
Historical backfill is available for all data sources except for Instagram hashtags.
For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
The scope of data sources
When setting up a listening query, define what scope of data from each data source you want to monitor.
You can choose one of the following options:
Wide range listening
This is the widest possible scope of data to monitor where you can select one or more supported data sources (the social media platforms and web).
To narrow down the results, you can apply global filters to the selected data sources:
Filtering by country
Filtering by language
For each selected social media platform, you can also specify the profiles that should be excluded from listening.
Specific social profiles
Explicitly specify the accounts on the social media platforms that you want to monitor. Those can be the accounts that you added to your Emplifi account as profiles (see Add a Profile as Owned (Private) or Public or any other accounts that you can find by their name or URL.
Data sources
The Facebook data source is an extensive, growing database of social media content. It includes billions of posts from more than 500,000 Facebook pages, but still not all Facebook content.
What is collected
Posts (except for ads posts)
User posts
Comments
Data availability
The data is collected almost in real time. The listening mentions are available for analysis no later than an hour after the content has been published. Data starts gathering from the point a query is set, up to 365 days in the past. For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
Configure the data source
Here is how you set up the Facebook data source with the Wide range listening option or the Specific social profiles option selected, correspondingly (see “The scope of data sources” earlier in this article):
The Instagram data source is an extensive, growing database of social media content. It includes billions of posts from more than 500,000 Instagram Business and Creator accounts, but still not all Instagram content.
You can include Instagram hashtags in the scope of the monitored data. Instagram hashtag search is a way of getting access to Instagram public content tagged with a specific hashtag. It searches in the content of Business and Creator accounts and also personal accounts that are public. For more information, see Listening - Instagram Hashtag Search.
What is collected
Posts (comments are not included)
Data availability
The data is collected almost in real time, and the listening mentions are available for analysis no later than an hour after the content has been published. The listening mentions coming from the hashtag search are shown immediately after a post with the hashtags is published. Data starts gathering from the point a query is set, up to 365 days in the past. For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
Hashtag search has no historical backfill.
Configure the data source
Here is how you set up the Instagram data source with the Wide range listening option or the Specific social profiles option selected, correspondingly (see “The scope of data sources” earlier in this article):
X (formerly Twitter)
Because X (formerly Twitter) works differently than other social media platforms, you can access all public X content without any limitations.
What’s collected
Posts (formerly “tweets”)
Replies
Mentions
Reposts (formerly “retweets”)
Reposts with comment (formerly “quote tweets”)
Data availability
The data is collected in real time, and the listening mentions are available for analysis immediately after the content has been published. Data starts gathering from the point a query is set, up to 365 days in the past. For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
Configure the data source
Here is how you set up the X data source with the Wide range listening option or the Specific social profiles option selected, correspondingly (see “The scope of data sources” earlier in this article):
YouTube
The YouTube data source is an extensive, growing database of social media content. It includes billions of posts from more than 100,000 YouTube channels pages, but still not all YouTube content.
What is collected
Videos (the title and description are included)
Shorts
Data availability
The data is collected almost in real time, and the listening mentions are available for analysis no later than two hours after the content has been published. Data starts gathering from the point a query is set, up to 365 days in the past. For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
Configure the data source
Here is how you set up the YouTube data source with the Wide range listening option or the Specific social profiles option selected, correspondingly (see “The scope of data sources” earlier in this article):
Web
The web data source is an extensive, growing database of web content. It monitors billions of websites daily.
Emplifi scans and extracts data from over a million websites every day and over 10 million posts are indexed daily. If you want to know whether a certain domain is covered, contact Emplifi Support at support@emplifi.io.
What is collected
News
Articles published in established news media outletsBlogs
Articles published by self-published authorsForums
Online discussions, conversation threads on message boards, forums, and review sites
Data availability
The data is collected with a dynamically changing frequency. For more information, see Downloading and Processing Listening Data.
Configure the data source
The web data source is available only with the Wide range listening option selected (see “The scope of data sources” earlier in this article):
