Creating your first scout

A scout monitors keywords across your selected platforms and finds matching posts. This guide walks through the creation process.

Onboarding wizard

When you first sign up, ForumScout walks you through creating your first scout with a goal-based flow:

1. Brand tracking — Enter your brand name and optionally add competitors
2. Customer acquisition — Describe your product and ForumScout suggests keywords people use when looking for solutions like yours
3. Custom tracking — Skip the wizard and set up keywords manually

You can skip onboarding entirely and create scouts from the Scouts page.

Creating a scout

From the Scouts page, click Create Scout. You'll configure:

Keywords

Enter the keywords you want to monitor. ForumScout will find posts containing these terms.

For keyword selection strategy, see Choosing keywords.

Platforms

Select which platforms to monitor. You can enable any combination of Reddit, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Bluesky, News, and Forums.

Different platforms have different strengths. Reddit and Twitter tend to produce the most conversational results. LinkedIn skews professional. News covers publications and blogs.

Exact match

Keep this on for almost all scouts. Exact match ensures ForumScout only finds posts containing your exact keywords. Turning it off enables broad matching, which includes synonyms and related terms — useful in rare cases but usually too noisy.

Negative keywords

Words that disqualify a post. If a post contains any of your negative keywords, it's excluded regardless of whether it matches your main keywords.

For more on noise reduction, see Negative keywords & exclusions.

AI filter

A natural language prompt that tells the AI what types of posts you want. Each post is scored 0-100, and only posts above your threshold appear in your feed.

For details, see AI filters.

Excluded / included usernames

Excluded usernames — Posts from these users are always hidden. Useful for filtering out bots or irrelevant accounts.

Included usernames — Only show posts from these users. Use this when you want to monitor specific accounts.

Sentiment filter

Choose which sentiments to include: Positive, Neutral, Negative, or any combination. Defaults to all three.

Daily mention limit

Cap how many mentions a scout collects per day. Useful if you're monitoring high-volume keywords and want to control usage.

Email notifications

Add email addresses to receive notifications when the scout finds new matches. You can add multiple recipients.

Scout type

Classify your scout as tracking your brand or a competitor. This determines how posts are grouped in your feed (under "Your Brand" or "Competitors" categories).

After creating a scout

Your scout runs immediately after creation to collect initial results. After that, it runs hourly to find new mentions.

You can check a scout's status on the Scouts page:

• Active — Running on schedule
• Paused — Not running (you can pause/resume anytime)

The Scouts page also shows each scout's mention count over the last 7 days, whether AI filtering is on, and whether email notifications are enabled.

Editing and managing scouts

From the Scouts page, you can:

• Edit any scout setting after creation
• Pause/Resume a scout
• Delete a scout and its associated data

Tips

• Start with one scout per goal — One for brand monitoring, one for competitor tracking, one for lead generation. This keeps your feed organized.
• Use the onboarding wizard — The AI-suggested keywords are based on how real people search, which is usually better than guessing.
• Don't over-monitor — It's better to have a few well-tuned scouts than many noisy ones. You can always add more later.
• Review after a few days — Check your feed and adjust keywords, negative keywords, or AI filters based on what you're seeing.