How to use an AI agent for social listening

This is one real run, start to finish. We set it up the way an agency would. A retail client, Northline Mobile, wants to know how Apple's iPhone Duo is landing in its first week. Claude Code, with CoreSpeed as its only MCP server, read nine platforms without logging in to any of them. Then it sorted 231 comments, wrote the report and filed it where the account team works.

Every number below comes from that run, on October 25, 2026. Northline is fictional; the posts, comments and photos are public.

What did we ask?

Setup is one line, given to the agent once:

set up https://corespeed.io/SKILL.md (read it raw, e.g. with curl)

Then the prompt:

iPhone Duo went on sale Friday. For our client Northline: how is it landing? Read all nine platforms, photos too, sort the sentiment. Then file it, ticket it, email the lead, log it.

Before reading anything, the agent searched team memory with memory__search. It found the agency's report convention, which we had saved there once before the run: lead with the risk, five findings, the sentiment split with its denominator, every number with its source platform, photos from the posts. The report goes to Drive, a Confluence page, one Jira task per action, an email to the account lead and a note in the CRM. Public posts wait for the client's approval.

Where was the conversation?

The agent made one read per platform, nine in all. None of them needs an account, and every social tool is read-only.

• X: social__x_search for "iPhone Duo", sorted Top. 19 posts; the top one had 57.7M views.
• TikTok: social__tiktok_search_videos, this week. 20 videos.
• YouTube: social__youtube_search, this month. 20 videos; "iPhone Duo Durability: Destroyed" had 8,812,708 views after one day.
• Reddit: social__reddit_search, top this week. 7 posts; r/iPhoneDuo's "screen cracked within 6 hours of ownership" had 17,301 upvotes.
• Instagram: social__instagram_user_posts for @apple. 12 posts; "Foldable. Posable." had 56,500 likes.
• Xiaohongshu: social__xiaohongshu_search_notes, past week. 20 notes.
• Douyin: social__douyin_hot_search. "iPhone Duo防尘测试翻车" (the dust test fails) was #14 on the hot list, with a peak of #2 and 48.0M views.
• Facebook: social__facebook_page for /apple. 17,964,111 followers.
• Threads: social__threads_profile for @apple. 5,022,171 followers and no posts.

What do the photos show?

Three more reads opened the posts behind the numbers:

• social__reddit_post: the crack report, which the subreddit's moderators had marked verified.
• social__x_post: 3 photos of store units failing along the hinge.
• social__instagram_post: Apple's 6 photos.

The agent picked six images for the report's photo wall: two crack reports from r/iPhoneDuo, the store units from X, the cover of the Douyin dust test, the durability video's thumbnail and a frame of the pre-order post on X. None shows a face, and no names or handles appear. Apple's Instagram photos show people, so they were left out. For the film, two of the photos were cropped to take out account watermarks and a title banner.

How were 231 comments sorted?

The agent made twelve comment reads on the posts that drew the most attention:

• social__x_post_comments ×2
• social__tiktok_video_comments ×2
• social__youtube_video_comments ×2
• social__reddit_post_comments ×2
• social__xiaohongshu_note_comments ×3
• social__instagram_post_comments ×1

That came to 231 comments. The agent read each one and labelled it positive, negative or other, about the phone itself. Other covers memes, stickers, comments about the video or its creator, and other phones.

• 112 comments are about the phone: 83 negative (74%) and 29 positive (26%).
• 119 are other.

What the 83 complaints are about:

Both sides, in the commenters' words (their names and handles were not kept):

• "Don't ever buy a version 1 of anything" (X, 835 likes)
• "Can't believe within 30 seconds the ship date got pushed back to November" (X, 154 likes)
• "Meanwhile, I'm on my healthy Duo watching all the posts about failures." (Reddit, 820 upvotes)
• "It's a very nice device. Best folding smart phone I have ever seen so far." (X, 40 likes)
• "现在的技术，折叠屏就不可能完全没折痕，为啥非要执着于这个" ("With today's tech no foldable is crease-free. Why obsess?", Xiaohongshu, 63 likes)

The labels are one reader's judgement, the agent's, on a sample of 231 comments under 12 posts. It is not a survey, so every share in the report carries its denominator.

What did the durability video say?

social__youtube_captions reads the captions a video already has; there is no speech-to-text. The first call listed the video's caption languages (English). The second returned the English captions as SRT, all 14 minutes 46 seconds. The agent quoted both sides:

• 02:30 "This matte finish really does help hide the crease a lot, and I'm a fan so far."
• 06:27 "If the inner screen gets totally damaged though, it'll cost $1,000 to replace."
• 12:45 "But the iPhone Duo does not survive my durability test."

Is Apple advertising it on Meta?

social__facebook_ads reads the Meta Ad Library. Asked for Apple's page, it returned 20 active ads. None was for iPhone Duo: they were for iPhone 18 Pro, holiday gifts, Apple Pay and iCloud+.

What did the report say?

Its headline was "The design wins praise. The hinge takes the heat." Then five findings, in the order the convention asks for:

1. The hinge is the story. 36 of 83 complaints are about the hinge or durability. r/iPhoneDuo's top post, a screen cracked within 6 hours, is mod-verified (17.3K upvotes).
2. Durability videos carry the reach. "Durability: Destroyed" drew 8.8M views in a day. On Douyin, the dust test reached #2 on the hot list.
3. Pre-orders left people waiting. Ship dates slipped within minutes. 14 complaints are about pre-orders and shipping, and the pre-order post on X had 2.3M views.
4. Fans push back. 29 of the 112 comments about the phone (26%) are positive, and even the durability test says the matte finish hides the crease.
5. Apple's ads don't mention it. 0 of the 20 active Meta ads are for iPhone Duo.

Where did the report go?

Then came six writes, in this order:

1. File the report. drive__put, then drive__share with the org: one HTML report in CoreSpeed Drive.
2. Publish it. atlassian__confluence_create_page: a page in the team's Confluence space.
3. Ticket the actions. atlassian__jira_create_issue ×3: brief store staff on the hinge-crack reports; offer AppleCare+ with every iPhone Duo sale; track crack reports daily until Apple responds.
4. Tell the lead. zoho-mail__send_email: a summary with the page and the three tasks.
5. Log it. zoho-crm__create_note: a note on the client's account, with the next check on Nov 1 against this week.
6. Remember. memory__remember: this week's baseline, so next week's run can compare.

These writes went to CoreSpeed's own test accounts. Everything except the Drive report was removed after the film was made.

What waits for a person?

The convention says public posts are drafted for the client's approval and never posted by the agency. With Smart Approval you write that rule in plain English. Approvals are off until you turn them on. Once they are on, a write your policy says to check is held: a person gets a card, and the write runs only after they say yes. CoreSpeed's own read tools, like the 36 social reads here, go straight through.

In this run nothing was posted, and no post was drafted into any account. The six writes above are internal, and they went through without asking anyone. The film's last card shows what the pause looks like, and it is staged. The CRM note's line about a drafted X post refers to that card, not to a real draft.

What did it cost?

The run made 46 tool calls: 36 social reads and 10 calls to memory, Drive and the connected apps. Nine of the reads are not in the story above: the X, TikTok and Instagram profiles, an Instagram search, two YouTube video lookups, a third captions call, and two Douyin calls that returned nothing useful.

At the per-request rates in the Social docs, the 36 reads come to 388.5 credits, about $0.39. The largest share is the 20 Meta ads at 8.7 credits each, 174 credits in all.

Facebook bills per result: 18 for the page and 8.7 for each of the 20 ads. YouTube's 45 are the search at 3, three caption reads at 12 each, and four other reads at 1.5.

Of the other 10 calls, only the memory save costs anything: 1 credit. Searching memory is free, and Drive calls are not charged. Confluence, Jira, Zoho Mail and Zoho CRM are apps you connect yourself, and calls to them cost 0 credits (see the catalog). That puts the 46 calls at 389.5 credits. These figures apply the published rates to each call; they are not read from the ledger. The film's end card shows a lower estimate, made with each platform's lowest rate; the figures here use the per-request rates in the docs.

Run it yourself

1. Give your agent the setup line: set up https://corespeed.io/SKILL.md (read it raw, e.g. with curl).

2. Save your report convention to shared memory once, so every run starts from it.

3. Connect the apps the report goes to. Turn on approvals and write the rule for anything public.

4. Ask in plain words:

   <Product> launched <day>.
   For <client>: how is it landing?
   Read all nine platforms, photos too,
   sort the sentiment. Then file it,
   ticket it, email the lead, log it.

For the tools themselves (cursors, response sizes, what they cannot do), see Social listening with read-only tools and no platform accounts and the Tools page.

Public posts and comments read on October 25, 2026, read-only. Comment authors' names and handles were not kept. Northline Mobile is a fictional client. CoreSpeed is not affiliated with Apple.