📡 Listening
Listening turns your connected X account into a signal source. Fren One watches the account's mentions around the clock, searches X for the keywords and accounts you choose, and uses AI to surface only the conversations worth your time — as alerts in your project inbox.
Listening is available to the project Owner and Project Admins only. Other project members don't see this page.
Overview
With Listening configured, Fren One can:
- Search X for up to five watch keywords and surface the most relevant posts as engagement opportunities
- Follow the posts of up to ten watched accounts you don't own
- Alert you to mentions worth replying to, high-value mentions, and questions that go unanswered
- Warn you when your follower count moves significantly, up or down
- Filter everything through your business context and a sensitivity bar, capped by a daily limit, so the inbox stays useful
Configuration
To configure Listening:
- Open your project in the Fren One webapp.
- Select the X account.
- In the sidebar under Agent Configuration, select Listening.
The page has three tabs — Configuration, Sources, and Notifications — and each tab batches its own save.
Configuration tab
This tab sets the AI's frame of reference: what your account is about, how picky the relevance filter should be, and how many opportunities per day you want to see.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Business context | What you do, who your audience is, and what a good engagement opportunity looks like. Up to 2,000 characters. Required before any source can be enabled — the Sources toggles stay locked with the tooltip "Add business context to enable listening." until you fill it in. |
| Listening sensitivity | Three cards: Broad ("Surface anything plausibly relevant. Expect noise."), Balanced (the default), and Strict ("Only strong, high-reach opportunities."). Each step up raises the minimum AI relevance score a post must reach before it becomes an alert. |
| Daily limit | The maximum number of listening opportunities per day, across all keywords and accounts. 1–50; default 10. |
The better your business context, the better the filtering — it's the yardstick every candidate post is scored against.
Sources tab
Sources are the proactive side of Listening: posts that don't mention your account but might still matter to you. Both source types require business context to be set first.
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Watch keywords across X | Toggle on to search X for terms you care about. Up to 5 keywords. Each keyword takes an optional comma-separated list of Exclude terms (up to 3) — posts containing any exclude term are skipped. Retweets are never counted. |
| Watch specific accounts | Toggle on to follow the posts of accounts you don't own — competitors, partners, industry voices. Up to 10 accounts, added by @handle with a live lookup that confirms the profile. Only the account's own posts are considered, not their retweets. |
| Ignored accounts | A mute list. Posts and mentions from these accounts never generate notifications — useful for silencing your own team accounts or known noise. |
Notifications tab
These per-signal settings govern the always-on mention signals — the alerts about people talking to you — not just keyword listening. Each signal has its own toggle and thresholds.
"Notify me of mentions worth replying to" — Default: on.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Minimum author followers | Mentions from smaller accounts are skipped. Default: 1000. |
| Sentiment | Positive only (default) or Any. |
"Notify me of high-value mentions" — Default: on.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Minimum author followers | The follower bar for a mention to count as high-value. Default: 5000. |
"Notify me when questions go unanswered" — Default: on.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Count questions from | Only questions directed at you (default) or Any question mentioning you. "Directed means top-level mentions and replies to your own posts." |
| Alert after unanswered for (hours) | How long a question can sit without a reply before you're alerted. 1–48 hours; default 6. |
| Minimum author followers | Default: 0 — every unanswered question qualifies. |
"Notify me of significant follower changes" — Default: on.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Alert on change of at least (%) | The percentage move, up or down, that triggers an alert. Default: 5. |
How it works
Monitoring runs roughly every two hours. On each pass, Fren One:
- Ingests new mentions of your account and scores each one's sentiment.
- Checks mention signals against your Notifications thresholds. Signals only fire for mentions the account hasn't already replied to, and each mention alerts at most once.
- Runs the listening pass: posts matching your keywords and fresh posts from watched accounts are AI-scored against your business context. Only the best candidates surface — your sensitivity setting is the minimum score bar, and the daily limit caps how many get through, best first.
The resulting alerts appear in your project inbox with these titles:
| Alert | When it fires |
|---|---|
| High-value mention on X | A mention from an author above your high-value follower bar. |
| Mention worth a reply on X | A mention matching your worth-replying-to thresholds. |
| Unanswered question on X | A question aimed at your account with no reply after your configured delay. Fires once per question, checked between 6 and 48 hours of the question's age. |
| X followers spiked / X followers dropped | Your follower count moved by at least your configured percentage. At most one follower alert per day. |
| Engagement opportunity on X | A listening match — a post from your keywords or watched accounts that scored above your sensitivity bar. |
Opportunities land in your project inbox, and each project member controls email delivery per alert type under Manage notifications. Alerts can also route to a Slack channel — see 🔌 Integrations.
The unanswered-question detector is English-first today — questions in other languages may not be recognized yet.
Saving your changes
Each tab batches its own save — edits stay local until you select Save in the bar that appears at the bottom of the page. Leaving a tab with unsaved changes shows a warning first.
Best practices
- Write the business context like a brief for a new hire: what you sell, who buys it, and what a great conversation to join looks like.
- Start on Balanced with a modest daily limit, then loosen toward Broad only if you're missing conversations you wanted.
- Use Exclude terms to strip recurring false positives from a keyword — a competitor name, a common unrelated meaning.
- Add your own team's accounts to Ignored accounts so internal chatter never pages you.
Troubleshooting
The Sources toggles are locked?
- Keywords and watched accounts require Business context on the Configuration tab — the tooltip reads "Add business context to enable listening." Fill it in and save first.
No listening opportunities are coming in?
- Monitoring runs roughly every two hours, so a new setup takes a cycle to produce results.
- Check that your sensitivity isn't set to Strict with a niche keyword — try Balanced or Broad.
- If a scoring pass fails, nothing is emitted that run; the same window is retried on the next run.
Follower alerts never fire?
- The change must reach your configured percentage, and very small absolute moves don't trigger alerts even when the percentage is met.
- Follower alerts fire at most once per account per day.
A mention I expected an alert for never showed up?
- Signals only fire for mentions the account hasn't replied to.
- Check the author's follower count against your minimum thresholds, and make sure the author isn't in Ignored accounts.
Related features
- 🔗 Connecting an account - Listening needs a connected X account to monitor
- 📊 Statistics - The Overview page charts the same mentions and follower data Listening watches
- 📆 Tweet Scheduler - Turn an opportunity into a scheduled reply or post
- 🔌 Integrations - Route listening and mention alerts to Slack