For Agencies · Multi-client teams

Social listening for agencies — FishOut

The agency problem is not finding mentions, it is that six clients times ten platforms is sixty feeds and one person. What makes it work is separation — per client, per keyword set, per channel — and not paying per seat for it.

[01] THE JOB/ AGENCIES

What agencies are actually trying to do

Everything an agency needs from this category is a boundary. A client’s mentions must not appear in another client’s queue. A junior must be able to read without being able to archive. A client contact must be able to look without having a licence bought for them. The tools that get expensive here are the ones that charge per seat and price the boundary as an upgrade.
[02] WHERE TO LOOK/ PLATFORMS

Reddit

The platform clients most often have not been watching, and the one where a single well-timed answer is worth reporting on. It is also where you can most easily show the value of the retainer in a screenshot.

LinkedIn

Where B2B clients expect you to be looking, and where the buyer, not the user, does the talking. Slow, but the mentions are attributable to a company and a job title, which reports well.

Google News

The PR half of the brief. A client being named in coverage is the thing they will ask about on the call, and it is worth catching before they send you the link.

YouTube

Reviews and comparison videos, where the comments outlive the video. For consumer-facing clients it is often the highest-volume source you have.
[03] WHAT TO TRACK/ KEYWORDS

Four keyword shapes that work here

A keyword is a search FishOut runs continuously across every platform you have enabled — a Brand, Competitor or Topic keyword, with an optional Means… line and filters that apply before any AI reads a post. The shapes below are ordered by how much they tend to be worth, which is almost the reverse of the order people add them in — a brand name is the first one everybody adds and the smallest source of anything new.
keywords · agencies
client brand and product names

One keyword set per project, which is what keeps client A out of client B’s inbox. Adding them all to one project is the mistake that makes the whole thing unreportable.

client executives by name

The mention a client is most likely to see before you do, and the one that generates the most urgent email. Cheap to watch, expensive to miss.

their competitors

What the monthly report is actually made of. Share of voice is a comparison, and you cannot make one from a single brand’s mentions.

category phrases

The lead generation half of the retainer — people describing the client’s problem without naming anyone. It is the one keyword shape that produces new business rather than reporting.

[04] HOW TO SET IT UP/ VIEWS AND AGENTS

The setup that survives a busy month

An agent is a rule you write: when a post matches conditions on relevance, label, Reply call, sentiment, keyword or platform, then label it, assign it, notify a channel or draft a reply. None ship pre-built. The one below is the one worth writing first for this job, and it takes about a minute.
1

One project per client

Projects are unlimited on every paid plan. Each carries its own Brief, keywords, agents and alert channels, so nothing crosses over and each client’s numbers are their own.

2

Write each client’s Brief

Two to six sentences on what the client does, who it is for and what to ignore. Every post in that project is read against it, which is how a client whose brand is also an ordinary word stops pulling in the other meaning — those posts go to Filtered and never count toward your plan.

3

Add the whole team, and the client

Team members are unlimited and not priced per seat, so a client contact who wants to look at their own queue costs nothing. That is a deliberate difference from the seat-priced tools in this category.

4

One Slack channel per client, one floor per channel

A retainer client at a lower relevance floor, a client on a watching brief at a high one. Each channel has its own floor, and a burst arrives as one digest rather than twenty pings, which is how a small account stops generating more noise than a large one.

5

Start the day from the Daily brief

Once a day per project: the posts worth engaging with today, plus Spikes — a keyword suddenly getting far more posts than usual. It is the account-management to-do list, and the built-in Advocates view (brand keyword plus Praise) is the screenshot for the monthly report.

agent · client escalation

When a post on the client’s brand keyword is labelled Complaint or reads as negative

Then assign it to the account lead, send it to that client’s Slack channel, and draft a reply for the lead to edit

[05] WHEN WE ARE THE WRONG ANSWER/ HONESTLY

Brand24 may suit you better

Brand24 is an established PR and reputation suite with the client-facing reporting and white-label output agencies buy this category for, and it covers more sources than we do. It starts at $249/mo where we start at $19, and we do not offer white label. If polished client reporting is the deliverable rather than the queue, that is a real reason to choose them.

What this costs. Unlimited team members on every plan and unlimited projects on every paid plan — there are no per-seat charges. Business at $99/mo covers 500 keywords, 40,000 relevant mentions a month, agency funding of client organisations and scheduled reports.

Questions