Social Listening

Stop guessing what to write about. Social Listening scans Reddit, X, Hacker News, and YouTube for what people are discussing right now in your niche, then feeds the best ideas directly into your content calendar.

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Why Social Listening?

The Problem

Most content teams rely on two sources for ideas:

• SEO tools tell you what people searched last month
• Newsletters tell you what other creators published last week

Both are lagging indicators. By the time you publish, the conversation has moved on.

What’s missing is the real-time signal: what are actual people asking, debating, and sharing today?

The Solution

Social Listening monitors 4 platforms simultaneously and identifies the topics worth writing about before your competitors do.

Traditional Approach	With Social Listening
Manually browse Reddit and X	Automated scan across 4 platforms
Miss trends outside your usual feeds	Cross-platform convergence detection
No idea which topics have real demand	Engagement-ranked with velocity scoring
Hours of manual research	One API call, dozens of ranked ideas

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How It Works

1. Multi-Platform Collection

Social Listening scans four platforms for your topics:

Platform	What It Captures	Signal Type
Reddit	Subreddit discussions, upvotes, comment counts	Community engagement
X / Twitter	Tweets, threads, engagement metrics	Real-time buzz
Hacker News	Stories, points, discussion threads	Tech/startup signal
YouTube	Videos, views, descriptions	Long-form interest

Each platform reveals a different facet of audience interest. Reddit shows what people ask. X shows what people share. HN shows what technologists care about. YouTube shows what people want explained.

2. Cross-Platform Convergence

This is where it gets powerful. When the same topic trends on 2+ platforms simultaneously, that’s a strong signal.

"AI content marketing" trending on:
  Reddit (342 upvotes, 47 comments)  ──┐
  Hacker News (180 points, 45 comments) ──┤── Convergence detected!
                                          │   Score: 1.5x boost
                                          │   Tag: "converging"

A topic that only trends on Reddit might be a niche discussion. A topic that trends on Reddit and HN and YouTube? That’s a content opportunity you can’t afford to miss.

3. Engagement Velocity Scoring

Not all trending topics are equal. Social Listening ranks ideas using a composite score:

Factor	Weight	What It Measures
Engagement	40%	Upvotes, likes, points, views
Recency	30%	How fresh the conversation is
Convergence	30%	Cross-platform presence

A post with 50 upvotes in 2 days scores higher than one with 200 upvotes over 30 days. The velocity matters more than the absolute numbers.

4. Question Detection

Social Listening automatically identifies posts that are questions from your audience:

• Posts containing “?”
• Titles starting with “How”, “Why”, “What”, “Is there”, “Can I”, “Should I”

Question signals are gold for content strategy: they represent explicit demand. Someone is actively looking for an answer you could provide.

5. Deduplication

Before injecting ideas, the system removes near-duplicates using trigram similarity matching. If three Reddit posts ask essentially the same question, you get one idea with the highest engagement — not three noise entries in your calendar.

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What You Get

Every idea injected into your calendar includes:

{
  "title": "How to use AI for content marketing",
  "priority_score": 72.5,
  "trending_signals": {
    "platforms_found": ["reddit", "hn"],
    "total_engagement": 520,
    "engagement_velocity": 17.3,
    "convergence_score": 1.5,
    "question_signal": true
  },
  "tags": ["social_listening", "reddit", "hn", "question", "converging"]
}

Rich Metadata

• Source URL — link back to the original discussion
• Platform — which platform it came from
• Engagement metrics — upvotes, comments, points
• Author — who started the conversation
• Snippet — first 300 characters of content
• Convergence data — which other platforms have the same topic

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Use Cases

Content Calendar Fueling

Set up a weekly job to scan your niche topics:

Topics: ["content marketing", "seo automation", "ai writing"]
Days back: 7
Max ideas: 30

Every Monday, your Idea Pool gets 30 fresh, ranked ideas based on what people actually discussed that week.

Trend Validation

Have an article idea? Check if the social signal supports it:

Topics: ["headless cms comparison 2026"]
Days back: 30

If the topic has high engagement and convergence, write it. If not, pivot to something with more demand.

Competitor Gap Analysis

Monitor topics your competitors haven’t covered yet. Combine Social Listening with your SEO data to find the sweet spot: high social demand + low competition.

Question-Driven Content

Filter ideas by question_signal: true to find every question your audience is asking. Each one is a potential FAQ entry, how-to guide, or comparison article.

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Getting Started

Via the Dashboard

Navigate to Ideas > Ingest > Social Listening, enter your topics, and click Run. Results appear in your Idea Pool within seconds.

Via the API

curl -X POST https://api.contentglows.com/api/ideas/ingest/social \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "topics": ["content marketing", "seo tools"],
    "days_back": 30,
    "max_ideas": 50
  }'

Response:

{
  "source": "social_listening",
  "ingested": 34,
  "sources": {
    "reddit": 12,
    "x": 8,
    "hn": 7,
    "youtube": 7
  }
}

Scheduled Automation

Set up a recurring job to run Social Listening automatically:

Frequency	Best For
Daily	News-driven niches, fast-moving topics
Weekly	Most content teams (recommended)
Bi-weekly	Evergreen content strategies

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Supported Platforms

Platform	Status	Data Source
Reddit	Available	Exa AI
X / Twitter	Available	Exa AI
Hacker News	Available	HN Algolia API (free)
YouTube	Available	Exa AI
TikTok	Coming soon	Planned for v2
Instagram	Coming soon	Planned for v2
Bluesky	Coming soon	Planned for v2

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Pricing

Social Listening uses your existing Exa AI credits. Hacker News scanning is completely free (no API key required). A typical scan with 3 topics across 4 platforms costs approximately 4 Exa API calls.

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Next Steps

• Content Quality Scoring — Check readability before publishing the articles you write from Social Listening ideas
• Link Previews — See rich previews for the source URLs attached to each idea
• SEO Deployment — Turn your best ideas into full SEO-optimized articles

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Last updated: March 30, 2026