Incorporating AI technologies into business operations optimizes performance and pushes organizations toward success and sustainability. For long-term success, companies may face challenges when implementing this technology due to a lack of understanding and organizational experience with AI.

In this article, we’ll explore what AI insights are exactly, how they work and how they’re applied practically to progress different industries.

• What are AI insights?
• Advantages of using AI for generating data insights
• How AI insights help businesses
• Understanding how AI Insights are generated

What are AI insights?

AI insights are the knowledge and understanding gained by analyzing complex datasets using AI. This process involves a combination of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP) and AI data visualization techniques (charts, graphs, dashboards, heat maps, etc) to make the data more accessible.

The visualization helps strategists find hidden patterns, trends and correlations. Organizations use AI tools to filter big data into actionable intelligence to support better decision-making and strategies.

Advantages of using AI for generating data insights

AI analytics offers many advantages, such as seeing hidden trends in large data sets, forecasting future market behaviors, analyzing customer sentiment, making decisions faster and creating personalized experiences.

Easier decision-making

AI insights arm decision-makers with comprehensive, real-time data analysis, reducing reliance on guesswork and intuition. The AI processes and analyzes data from various sources simultaneously at a speed and scale unattainable by human effort alone. As such, the insights can give you an in-depth view of the market, customers and competitors.

Predicting future trends

AI insights provide the power to predict future trends and customer behaviors through pattern recognition in data. By analyzing historical information, AI tools can forecast outcomes, offering a clear view of customer preferences and potential market shifts. This capability enables you to adjust your strategies proactively and remain competitive. Notably, 45% of business leaders recognize predictive analytics as AI’s most valuable marketing tool, allowing for precise forecasting of future customer behavior.

Creating better customer experiences

The secret to captivating your customers is in understanding their desires, expectations and perceptions of your brand, then turning those feelings into experiences people love. For example, you can anticipate customer needs and gauge opinions through social media listening to monitor chatter around your brand or competition. This empowers you to proactively tailor your offerings and marketing communication. A study by Boston Consulting Group found that companies using AI insights for personalization saw sales gains of 6-10%, which is two to three times greater than those not using AI.

How AI insights help businesses

Let’s explore how AI insights help industries strengthen business strategies, meet market needs and boost brand loyalty.

AI insights for automotive

AI insights improve automotive manufacturers’ understanding of consumer sentiment, market trends and product feedback. Through social listening and text mining, companies can tailor their designs, features and marketing strategies to meet consumer demands, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

For example, a car manufacturer can use review and AI-driven sentiment analysis to gauge global consumer reactions to product recalls. This in-depth investigation can reveal significant regional differences in perception and enable targeted, culturally sensitive crisis management strategies.

AI insights for banking

In the banking sector, AI insights are vital for fraud detection. But they’re also commonly used in customer service and the personalization of banking solutions. By analyzing transactional data and customer feedback, banks can improve their security and offer services that truly help their customers.

As an example, let’s look at a bank that wants to improve its customer service. The bank can use AI-driven sentiment analysis to dive deep into customer feedback, collected through social media listening campaigns. This comprehensive analysis, which can be conducted in multiple languages, helps the bank identify essential improvement areas, such as mobile banking, fees and branch services. The insights can help the bank initiate targeted reforms, such as overhauling the website experience or improving branch operations to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

AI insights for call centers

Using AI insights in call center operations can boost efficiency and pinpoint problem areas. For example, a mobile carrier can utilize AI-driven sentiment analysis to tackle customer churn by integrating text analytics with their call center software. This approach converts call voice data into text for real-time sentiment analysis, allowing proactive identification of customers at risk of leaving. By offering timely resolutions and incentives, the carrier can reduce its churn rate, improve agent effectiveness and overall customer satisfaction.

AI insights for finance

AI insights play a role in understanding market dynamics and enhancing strategic planning in the financial industry. For instance, a hedge fund can enhance its trading strategy by employing real-time sentiment analysis and entity extraction to analyze international market sentiment. This involves processing extensive data from varied sources, including news in multiple languages relevant to its global operations. The hedge fund can integrate market sentiment directly into its trading models by developing a sophisticated dashboard to compare market sentiment with share prices, optimizing its decision-making process.

AI insights for government

Governments can use AI insights to improve public services and policies and engage with communities. For example, predictive analytics can help the government anticipate public service bottlenecks, allocate resources efficiently and minimize service downtimes. At the same time, text analytics can monitor public concerns on social media. Helping to monitor, analyze and extract insights from public sentiment. This approach can help officials identify similar complaints or praises, and find areas that require immediate attention.

AI insights for health and pharma

AI provides valuable insights that significantly improve patient care and drug development in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors by efficiently structuring complex medical data. An example could be a hospital network leveraging NLP-based text analytics to transform unstructured EMR progress notes into searchable and organized data. This approach helps the hospital extract actionable insights on medication effectiveness and patient outcomes. By applying named entity recognition, the hospital could analyze detailed information about medications, dosages and patient responses, enhancing patient care precision.

AI insights for hospitality

AI insights have the potential to revolutionize the hospitality industry, empowering businesses to cater to guests’ preferences in a more personalized way. One of the key innovations in this field is the semantic analysis of hotel reviews that offers highly tailored recommendations to travelers. While traditional five-star ratings are widely recognized, they often fail to capture the unique needs of individual guests.

By semantically analyzing text-based reviews, a hotel review aggregator could develop a “smart” search feature that allows hotels to be filtered based on specific attributes such as breakfast quality, internet speed or proximity to nightlife, aligning directly with the traveler’s preferences. This approach goes beyond generic ratings to provide customized hotel recommendations, improving the guest selection process and enabling people to have more personalized travel experiences.

AI insights for quantitative trading

AI insights are transforming quantitative trading by leveraging unique data sources, such as employee feedback, to predict company performance. For instance, a hedge fund might analyze employee sentiments on platforms like Indeed and Glassdoor, theorizing that internal sentiments predict market trends. Sophisticated sentiment analysis allows the fund to categorize employee reviews, unveiling trends in company health and potential. This approach uses unconventional data to give traders an edge, offering a novel angle on investment strategies.

AI insights for market research

AI insights revolutionized market research, enabling marketers to extract valuable competitive insights from a large consumer base quickly. Consider a new healthy snack brand, analyzing thousands of consumer surveys and open-ended responses about snack preferences and brand recognition. Through AI-driven data extraction, the brand can quickly categorize responses, pinpoint key themes and identify mentioned brands. This analysis offers the newcomer precise market positioning insights, including identifying indirect competitors like essential vegetables. With this knowledge, the company can strategically focus its marketing and product positioning efforts to maximize success in its core markets.

Understanding how AI insights are generated

As you can see, many industries use AI for sentiment analysis to provide an in-depth understanding of their customer behavior. As an example, this section will walk you through how AI processes numerical and textual data to give you better customer insights.

Step 1: Data collection

The first step involves collecting the data for analysis. This can be social media posts, customer reviews, surveys, customer care logs, NPS scores and emails. The aim is to gather a comprehensive dataset that reflects the sentiments and opinions of the target audience about your brand or product. The data can be uploaded directly through APIs or manually entered as CSV files.

For example, let’s say we wanted to understand people’s sentiments around Sprout Social across social media and review platforms.

Step 2: Data processing

Once collected, the AI tool processes the text or numerical data using AI and ML algorithms tailored to interpret and analyze the specific data type. For text, the tool uses subtasks like NLP and text analysis to understand the language, converting sentences into structured formats that machines can work with. It also understands emojis. This enables the AI tool to perform tasks like sentiment mining, language translation or text generation by finding patterns and relationships within the data. Numerical data is processed using statistical and ML models that can identify trends, classify data into categories or predict future values.

The neural networks (NNs) in these tools help them learn from the data they analyze and adjust their parameters to accommodate new information. This continuous learning mode improves the accuracy over time.

In the Sprout Social example, AI would use NLP and text analysis to decipher complex language nuances, emojis and sentiment within social media posts and reviews – transforming the open-ended feedback into structured data.

Step 3: Data analysis

The tool analyzes the processed data by picking out important parts or patterns it is trained to recognize from pre-processed, labeled datasets. For text, this could be things like the tone of a message or the main topics discussed. With numbers, it might look for trends or unusual patterns. The AI uses special algorithms to sift through this data and learn from it, improving its tasks over time by adjusting the internal rules to reduce mistakes.

For the Sprout Social case, the structured data gets analyzed to detect prevalent themes, such as sentiment tones and customer concerns. This step is important for understanding the broader sentiment landscape identifying strengths and potential areas for service enhancement based on the collective feedback.

Step 4: Visualizing the data

Data visualization is the last step that involves the tool transforming the data into intuitive graphs and charts, making it easier to digest and understand. Visualization helps you identify trends and outliers in the data, offering a granular view that can influence decision-making. For Sprout Social, this could mean a graph that tracks sentiment trends or compares service perceptions across different demographics. These visualizations provide a clear, at-a-glance understanding of how the brand is perceived, enabling Sprout Social to make informed decisions on service improvements or marketing strategies.

The future of AI adoption

Despite AI’s capacity to sift through and make sense of big datasets and produce actionable insights, only 20% of strategists harness AI-related tools, such as ML or NLP, within their strategies. This highlights a wealth of untapped potential, where AI’s capabilities can improve business strategies, giving adopters the opportunity to innovate and create great customer experiences.

To incorporate AI insights into your own marketing strategy, social media data is an excellent starting point. As one of the world’s biggest readily available datasets, using tactics like social media listening will provide you with real-time insights into your customers and market.

Next, learn how marketers are leveraging AI in marketing to generate content, automate operations and create powerful campaigns.

The post How AI insights improve decision making appeared first on Sprout Social.

There are higher ed institutions prospering on the platform—attracting the attention of students and alumni alike. Our Social Media Benchmarks Report for Higher Education shows 68% of high school students use social channels to research schools. Our report also reveals 80% of alumni organizations agree that social media has the most impact on engagement. And 41% of school officials can directly attribute increased enrollment to social strategy.

We spoke to several institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bowling Green State University and Ohio University to discuss how they navigate challenges and their tips for building a presence on TikTok. In this article, we’ll also show examples from these colleges and universities leading the way on TikTok for higher education.

3 institutions leading a masterclass on TikTok for higher education

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

MIT has mastered the TikTok niche. Whether it’s showcasing a robot solving a Rubik’s cube in .38 seconds,

Or giving a behind-the-scenes look at student life, the prestigious institution does an excellent job of balancing different types of content to appeal to various audiences.

2. Bowling Green State University

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) was the first university on the “clock app” in Ohio and has been a leader in higher education TikTok ever since. They are one of the most followed institutions in the state.

Along with original content, BGSU highlights the university’s unique offerings, such as the Carillon Market, which features Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. The market is one of BGSU’s dining options and the technology used in the store enables students to shop for items by scanning a QR code or tapping a debit or credit card upon entry. Students can simply tap, walk in, grab their food and walk out without using a traditional point-of-service system:

“TikTok is a great platform for finding new audiences. We have had so many students from across the country that say they found our university through TikTok and that’s why they chose to enroll in BGSU,” says Brianna Blackburn, Manager of Social Media Strategy, Bowling Green State University.

3. Ohio University

Ohio University (OU) is one of the leading institutions in the nation for engagement on social. OU knows how to connect with their audience while also connecting the university to TikTok trends. For example, in the video below, they share their rendition of the “We’re XYZ,” trend:

They also partnered with their university communications and marketing departments to produce a Halloween themed series featuring OU’s mascot, Rufus the Bobcat:

The challenges to creating a higher ed TikTok strategy

In 2023, several states and university systems banned or restricted TikTok on their campuses, often by blocking access from campus wifi. Our benchmarks report highlights four other common challenges for higher ed organizations on social, including: multiple audience segments, departmental silos, competing interests and ineffective tools. Here’s a quick overview of those challenges:

Multiple audience segments: Colleges and universities have multiple audiences–prospective students, current students, alumni, faculty, fans—and they all want different types of content.

Departmental silos: Managing various audiences becomes more challenging when there are different departments and teams with different focuses and goals.

Competing interests: School rivalries go beyond sports. Practitioners have to understand their competitors’ social performance to benchmark and improve their institution’s social strategy.

Ineffective tools: Without the right tools to measure success, gaining a bird’s eye view of performance and impact becomes even more difficult. Despite these common pain points, there are ways social practitioners can navigate these challenges successfully.

How to build a standout TikTok presence in higher ed

Here are eight tips for building a presence on TikTok in higher education:

1. Identify your bread and butter to create engaging content

Jenny Li Fowler, Director of Social Media Strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommends centering on “bread and butter content”. This bread and butter content refers to a set of content or specific topics that everyone in your community expects and values from you, such as campus photos.

“Every university has its culture and things the community rallies around, like a sports team. For us, numbers are our love language—anything that’s nerdy or quirky we also love,” she says.

However, Fowler also encourages higher ed intuitions to embrace spontaneity as well. For example, MIT is often an answer in jeopardy, so that could be an opportunity to play on a specific moment.

“When your culture intersects with the popular culture or zeitgeist, that’s social media gold. But that is a test of how quickly your team can move and capitalize on those moments. You can create some really creative, powerful and authentic content in these moments,” she says.

“Lean into what makes your institution and your culture unique. Don’t try to do the dances or follow all the trends unless it’s a natural fit. Trends are easier to get wrong than right,” she says.

2. Focus on complementary goals and common interests

Fowler runs the flagship channel, so her primary audience is global. Although prospective students and alumni aren’t her main focus, they’re part of her audience. She explains it’s a positive that various departments have specialized goals and specific audiences because it enables teams to complement each other.

“I think that’s even better that we do because we can point to each other. For example, some departments may have similar niches like cognitive sciences or neurological studies. Some [department labs and centers] are focused on artificial intelligence, while others are centered on robotics or humanities. When people come to me for a consultation, I always recommend them to reach out to people in different departments so they can amplify each other’s work, such as for event promotion,” Fowler says.

“It’s always better to work together than trying to single handedly build a community from scratch. If you have different teams it’s nice to be able to work off of each other and share each other’s content,” she says.

“Our admissions department focuses on prospective students so they get to do a lot of really cool, edgy content that might not speak to my whole broader audience. We have more professionals, educators and academics who follow the flagship channels who appreciate more of our bread and butter content: research, science, robotics. The admissions department gets to do more fun, innovative content—and thank goodness because they’re so good at it.”

3. Embrace and empower partnerships with students

Elise Holbrook, Senior Social Media Specialist, Ohio University says the student team is a large part of their success on TikTok. While Holbrook oversees overall strategy and content approval, the student social team produces content for TikTok and Reels. Juliana Colant, is a senior member of OU’s student social media team and works very closely with Holbrook.

“The student team has always been such an important part of our strategy because students know the university and campus life super well. They have more of a pulse on what is interesting to people their age,” Holbrook says, “If you’re going to be creating content for young people, then young people need to be involved.”

In 2023, BGSU started a brand ambassador program. Blackburn meets with ambassadors biweekly to brainstorm ideas for content. They also create TikTok content during these meetings.

BGSU has leveraged a student social media intern team for years, but in 2023, they launched a brand ambassador program for student micro influencers. The students post on their personal social media channels weekly, but also have the opportunity to learn, brainstorm and create TikToks with the BGSU social team in-person twice a month.

“Having an extra layer of connection with students has tremendously helped us stay in touch with what’s happening on campus and hear new ideas and perspectives from a variety of students—we get amazing TikTok and campaigns ideas from them. It’s also a great learning opportunity for students interested in marketing or public relations,” she says.

4. Add your institution’s own spin

Holbrook and Colant recommend identifying ways you can connect popular content to your institution whether it’s a TikTok trend or sound.

“We try to see how we can blend OU into the TikTok space in a way that’s engaging and fun, but also informational for the audience we’re trying to reach,” Colant says.

For example, the team created several videos during the Barbie movie parody trend, like this one below:

But our social practitioners agree that there’s an art to hopping on trends. Blackburn mentions how they participated in the “I’m X, of course of XYZ” trend on TikTok.

Blackburn explains the “I’m X, of course,” trend was successful because they were able to post when it was first becoming popular on TikTok. Instead of making it just about BGSU students, they made the video about all college students, which captured a much broader audience. She advises teams to act fast when hopping on trends and create content that is relatable to a broad audience.

“The higher education industry is generalized as being slow to change or slow to marketing tactics. But TikTok is a unique opportunity for us to really be different from that stereotype and become early adopters,” she says.

“It’s really easy to just do a quick lip sync to an audio, but what really makes our account stand out is that we have so much variety in content.”

Along with using TikTok sounds, BGSU posts vlogs and skits. She encourages teams to become early adopters of different techniques as well, such as experimenting with editing styles.

“Have fun with editing like zooming in or adding sound effects. Really mix it up, see how your audience responds, and keep experimenting. Taking thoughtful and strategic risks as a public institution help you stand out from your peers. So that’s been our approach as a social-first focused brand,” Blackburn says.

“It’s more important to us that we create solid, consistent content even if that means posting something that’s different than anything we’ve done before or not exactly ‘perfect’ in our eyes. We always strive for progress over perfection. TikTok growth is about being all in—it’s just a matter of going for it,” she says.

5. Have fun while leaning into your audience’s interests

Holbrook explains there’s a tendency in higher ed to feel like the content has to be serious because teams have a brand to uphold, but she encourages teams to step outside their comfort zone.

“A bigger part of our strategy has been not taking ourselves too seriously. To some degree you want to present yourself as a legitimate academic institution. But people in the [target audience] of college students don’t want to see a brand–whether it’s a college or any brand—be super serious all the time,” Holbrook says.

Fowler encourages social teams in higher education to have fun when building a presence on TikTok.

“Some of the most engaging types of content are those that allow you to tie back to your community or your culture. Those are the most fun,” Fowler says.

For example, MIT created a Barbie box :

“Even just calling your audience Barbies and saying ‘Hey, my nerd Barbies,’ works,” Fowler says.

“I used to joke that one of the most difficult decisions I make a day is which emoji to use. It’s social media. It’s supposed to be fun and sometimes I think we forget that fundamental fact,” Fowler says.

6. Build community through consistency

Colant says there’s two key things to remember with TikTok strategy: consistency and community. Consistency is important because TikTok isn’t a platform where you can just post once a month and then expect to see a great growth or response rate. You need to consistently publish content for your audience, along with viewers who aren’t following you yet, but see your content on their For You Page. She also speaks to how TikTok is often associated with the chase of virality, but building community is more important.

“Getting a million views on every single video would be awesome, but it’s about building a consistent community. We want to connect with potential students, current students and alumni, so think about how you can best connect with the current community while also receiving great engagement.”

7. Become best-in-class by analyzing performance and competitors

Holbrook says showing proof points of both quantitative and qualitative can help show the “why” behind your TikTok strategy. For example, by pulling reports where you can view relevant engagement metrics like reshares, comments and likes, you get a quantitative sense of performance. She also recommends looking to the TikTok comments to see how the content resonates with your audience to gain a qualitative sense of your posts.

Along with reviewing OU’s TikTok performance, the team has a page dedicated to following other colleges, universities and competitor institutions to see how different schools approach content.

“How are they covering their football games? Could we do something similar or different? You can really learn and grow by looking at your competitors,” Colant says.

Beyond competitor institutions, the team pays attention to posts from content creators, influencers and brands.

“That’s a really important thing to consider on [short-form video platforms] like TikTok and Reels that are competing for people’s views. How do you get on the level of those brands that are always getting the trending videos,” Holbrook says.

“I like to look at TikTok strategy as being a student of the platform. We’re always studying the platform and listening. We avoid posting just to post because we listen first and see how the general conversation is going,” Blackburn says.

8. Create partnerships with TikTok education influencers

Fowler says higher ed institutions have a built-in group of micro-influencers because current and incoming students have never known life without social media. Today’s undergraduates aren’t just scholars—they’re content creators and influencers. And of course alumni and fans have social presences as well.

“You have ambassadors who already love you and are your real fans. People get excited when their favorite institution reaches out. Many students have their own YouTube channels with several thousand followers. To me, that’s a micro-influencer. Tap into those people and pitch an opportunity to work together,” she says.

Along with using micro-influencers within their ambassador program, BGSU collaborated with their first influencer, @eliemagic in 2023. He travels to campuses across Ohio to interview students and he also has a series dedicated to Greek life and student athletes. BGSU reached out after he announced he was coming to campus, and they worked to accomplish something he couldn’t do on his own: interview a professor.

“He came in and surprised the class, so that was a cool experience to see the shock on everyone’s faces because he’s very recognizable in Ohio,” she says.

Just like TikTok trends, the higher education social media playbook is dynamic, but these tips can help you develop your presence on TikTok.

Higher education TikTok: Foster connection beyond the For You Page

The common piece of advice from all three institutions? Focus on community and connection on your TikTok and other channels to establish rapport with your audience segments. If you want to learn more ways to use TikTok for education, get inspired with our list of 15 ways to use social media for education.

The post 3 Institutions leading a masterclass on TikTok for higher education appeared first on Sprout Social.

Tuke, who is blind, long wanted to build a career in communications. And when she found that opportunity at RNIB, an organization she’d been involved with for years as a volunteer, she was excited to support her community in a new and impactful way. “I am proud to be a blind person, and I want to play a part in making the world more accessible for blind and partially sighted people,” she said. “That was a driving force for me to take on my role at RNIB.”

Despite her passion and commitment, Tuke said she started questioning her career choice because she found social media management—a core pillar of her job—so challenging. That’s because the technology tools she used for those tasks weren’t accessible enough for someone with sight loss. Tuke’s frustration inspired an extensive search by RNIB to find a platform that could be accessed by all users, leading to the adoption of Sprout Social, which Tuke calls “a game changer.”

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that is accessible—and it has quite literally transformed some of the key areas of my job.

Holly Tuke
Social Media Officer

Positive feedback about accessibility prompts RNIB to put Sprout to the test

RNIB’s social media team, which includes Head of Social Media Becky C. Brynolf, weren’t sure if the tool that Tuke needed even existed—but they were determined to try to find it. “We want Holly to be happy in her job and to feel motivated,” said Brynolf. “She has amazing skills and absolutely should have a career in communications. We just needed to find the right tool to make her work not feel like a slog.”

Tuke underscored the impact of accessible technology on her job satisfaction—and her ability to do her work effectively. “When a tool isn’t accessible, it means that blind and partially sighted people can’t do those tasks independently, or it completely takes away our chance to do them at all,” she explained. “In short, it diminishes our experiences.”

The search for an accessible social media management platform took many months. “We met with multiple providers,” she said. “We’d say, ‘We’re interested in your tool, but how accessible is it? We’d like to put it to the test.’”

That testing process was deflating at times, according to Tuke, but it was also educational. “We found social media management tools that aren’t accessible in the slightest, some that are somewhere in the middle, and some that tick all the boxes,” she said. “The range of accessibility we found made me reflect on my own experiences of working in communications as a blind person.”

Tuke said the arduous testing process is what confirmed that Sprout was the tool that could “change the game” for her as a blind social media professional. She first learned about Sprout through social media and noticed that many people were commenting positively about Sprout’s accessibility.

Tuke and Brynolf said that Sprout’s commitment to accessibility and the conversations they had with Sprout’s dedicated accessibility team further convinced them that they had found the right partner.

“Other providers didn’t offer all that Sprout did,” said Tuke. “That really stood out to us. It told us that Sprout’s beliefs about accessibility align with our own. They genuinely care. And we appreciated that the accessibility team at Sprout was very open to our candid feedback and suggestions.”

I want people to know that even if they don’t have a person with sight loss on their social media team right now, if they have Sprout, they will be ready for when that day comes. They will be set up to make people feel like they belong.

Becky C. Brynolf
Head of Social Media

Jumping on trends faster and exploring ways to expand RNIB’s reach—with help from Sprout

RNIB adopted Sprout in July 2023, it wasn’t long before their whole team started realizing benefits from using the platform—especially in terms of timesaving and productivity.

“I’m probably saving up to three hours of work per day because of Sprout,” said Tuke. “One reason is that I no longer have to navigate an inaccessible platform. But it’s also because Sprout makes things easier. In our previous platform, I couldn’t tag messages or hide or like comments. These are simple things, but being able to do them in one place saves loads of time.”

Brynolf noted that she’s a big fan of Sprout’s Reports, including profile, post and tag reporting. “So much of our work before Sprout was manual, and the tool we used for monthly reporting was nightmarish,” Brynolf explained. “Now, we can just nip into Sprout and ask things like, ‘Show me everything we’ve posted for the last two years arranged by highest engagement.’ It saves us time but also helps us spot themes and trends and be more proactive with our content.”

The competitor report that Brynolf pulls monthly from Sprout helps her team understand how their efforts on social media compare with those of other charities that focus on sight loss or eye health. She also uses that report to track organizations committed to social change that are “bold in their approach” with content. Brynolf said those insights from Sprout are helping her team to work with RNIB’s leadership on defining what “bold” means for the charity and the audiences it wants to reach.

Timesaving with Sprout allows RNIB’s social media team to focus more on work that can help support the charity’s core mission and raise its profile. That includes creating more engaging and proactive content for RNIB followers on Facebook, Instagram and other leading platforms, capturing more user-generated content and collaborating with influencers. They are also starting to experiment more with Listening in Sprout to identify opportunities to expand RNIB’s audience.

Both Brynolf and Tuke credit Sprout’s Smart Inbox and its filtering tools as a critical factor in their team’s ability to be more efficient and effective at community management. That is becoming even more important as they have seen RNIB’s inbound messaging volume grow in 2023 from about 1,000 to 2,000 messages per month to between 3,000 and 4,000. They attribute that rise partly to their team’s ability to react faster to emerging trends.

“Accessibility was obviously the top priority when we were evaluating Sprout and other platforms,” said Brynolf. “But when it comes to community management, we found that Sprout’s Smart Inbox was the best of the bunch.”

Now that we use Sprout, I can go to work every day and truly enjoy what I do because I have the accessibility, freedom and independence to perform my job in the same way as my sighted peers.

Holly Tuke
Social Media Officer

To learn how Sprout Social can help your organization with its community management while creating a more accessible workplace for your social media team, request your free demo today.

The post How the Royal National Institute of Blind People Found a Dedicated Accessibility Partner in Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

Patagonia has proven social media isn’t just about likes and shares—it can be a driving force for meaningful change, building community, and responsible consumption. When running campaigns on some of the top social media platforms challenged its ethics, their team hit pause. This is a brand that is both data informed and value led – which has proved to be both a smart and successful strategy.

In today’s world, with fleeting trends and too many brands to keep track of, it will be those who build a strong, real connection with their community and stay true to their mission that withstand the test of time. As Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard says, “A company doesn’t last 100 years by chasing endless growth. [Patagonia’s] success is based on quality in whatever we do, and we’re taking that into the future.”

Tune in on-demand to explore how Patagonia operates “business unusual”, leverages social data, and leans into authenticity and intention to drive their business strategy and growth. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

• Lean into authenticity and intention to drive your business strategy and growth
• Use your brand’s social channels to build a strong sense of community and connectedness online and offline
• Make social data work smarter, not harder, to drive business impact specific to your goals
• Get brand advocates, build strong community ties and drive engagement by putting people above products

Your Speakers:

The post How Patagonia Leads from a Foundation of Authenticity and Community appeared first on Sprout Social.

To maintain compliance with the law, government organizations must implement thorough social media archiving practices. It’s not the most exciting work, but it’s critical to protecting your agency from future risk. There are a number of social media tools that help government agencies manage this process but before making a choice, you need to understand your state’s unique approach to social media record retention.

In this article, we cover the basics of social media archiving so you can make the most informed decision possible.

Please note: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice. Please review our full disclaimer before reading any further.

• What is social media archiving?
• Why is social media archiving important for government entities?
• How and when to archive social media content
• Social media archiving best practices
• Social media archiving tools to ease the process

What is social media archiving?

Social media archiving is the practice of backing up content shared by and with an organization so it can be referenced at a later date. These backups are stored locally by an organization so they maintain compliance with public records laws.

Unlike traditional public records, social media records are instantly viewable to the public once created by your agency and your constituents. Legitimate (i.e., not spam) comments, replies, mentions and DMs can all count as public record once published on your social profiles.

Many—but not all—states have issued specific guidance around social media public records and their storage. Turn to your state department website for the most up-to-date guidelines for your social media archiving practices.

Why is social media archiving important for government entities?

Archiving social media content is a critical practice for maintaining transparency. Without a social media-specific record keeping process in place, your organization may be unable to comply with FOIA requests for that information.

FOIA may have been enacted in 1966, but its applications are broad enough to apply to modern day technology through their definition of the term “record”. Under FOIA, a record is considered any writing that is created or obtained by an agency or under agency control at the time of the request. That includes books, papers, photographs, videos—and of course, social media content.

Under social media, it includes more than just the content of a post itself. Comments, replies and likes also count as obtained records which also must be archived under FOIA. Even straightforward updates, like this post from the City of Las Vegas Facebook page, are subject to social media archiving practices.

Government agencies are responsible for setting up their own social media archiving processes. Platforms retain social media content, but only for so long. Social networks—like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram or LinkedIn—are private companies. They’re not bound by FOIA, therefore there’s no need for them to retain user content indefinitely. Once that content is gone, it’s likely gone for good.

How and when to archive social media content

Social media is considered public record across the U.S. but some states have unique public record retention laws that have implications on how and when to archive social content.

If your state does not have specific legislation on how to handle social media archiving, the National Archives and Record Administration offers guidelines on doing so properly. These methods include:

• Using RSS Feeds, aggregators or manual methods to capture content.
• Using tools built into some social media platforms to export content.
• Using platform-specific application programming interfaces (otherwise known as APIs) to pull content.

If your agency uses social media regularly across multiple platforms, you’ll want to go with the API approach. It sounds complicated, but these third-party tools and services simplify the otherwise time-consuming manual effort of aggregating and organizing outbound and inbound content.

The “when” aspect of social media archiving largely depends on your method of choice. If you plan to archive content manually, you’ll want to do so on a weekly or even daily basis to avoid letting the work become too overwhelming. However, if you’re archiving with the support of a tool, you can archive on a quarterly basis.

Social media archiving best practices

The idea of recording and retaining every post, comment and interaction across your agency’s social media presence can feel daunting, but don’t panic. Use these best practices to stay compliant without getting swamped.

Define roles and responsibilities for records management

Allowing social media archiving to be everyone’s responsibility without making it anyone’s job leaves your agency open to a lot of risk. This is especially true for organizations that manage several profiles across platforms. The more information you share on social, the easier it is for a record to go missing.

Avoid this fate by defining archiving roles and responsibilities alongside key social media stakeholders. Work together to identify the following:

• Who will be the point person for social media archiving? This individual is responsible for developing and maintaining up-to-date record keeping processes as they relate to social media. They’re also responsible for performing or delegating archiving duties at your organization’s set cadence.
• How often should posts be archived? As mentioned earlier, this is largely dependent on your preferred method of archiving.
• Where will archived content be stored and who can access it? Open files in shared storage leave agencies liable for any bad actors that may tamper with archived content. To be safe, designate where records (and their backups) can be securely stored.

Reinforce what counts as a public record early and often

When people think of ‘FOIA’, they picture documents, photos and emails. Social media posts, on the hand, aren’t usually top-of-mind. It’s up to your team to ensure every staff member across your organization understands the true definition of a public record and where social media falls into the mix.

Incorporate information on the types of content that are considered public record in your state during staff training and onboarding sessions. Update your social media policy to include explicit do’s and don’ts on social media compliance. At times, it may feel like over-communication but when it comes to the public sector, it’s always better safe than sorry.

Revisit your social media policy regularly

Social media networks change often, and those changes can look like anything—from new terms of service to new features. All these updates can result in changes to your organization’s approach to the social media archiving process. That’s why it’s imperative that you revisit your social media policy regularly.

A good social media policy addresses a number of topics, including personal account guidelines, organization association rules and legal guidelines. These topics are far from static, so it’s best to revisit them on a regular basis or when a major platform change takes place.

Social media archiving tools to ease the process

Now that you have some best practices to reference, you’re ready to check out some tools. The following platforms will help you manage your compliance needs without sacrificing efficiency.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social unifies social media scheduling, reporting, listening and archiving into one centralized tool, supporting more streamlined workflows for government agencies. In the event of a records request, marketers can surface specific posts by using the search tool in the Publishing section. Relevant comments and replies can be found using the search tool in the Smart Inbox.

Government agencies can also use Sprout’s Inbox Export to quickly export posts, messages and reviews from the Smart Inbox into a CSV file for record keeping purposes. These exports provide clear documentation of granular metadata, including message type and timestamps, the Sprout user who sent or edited each message and permalinks to the message on the original network.

Request a demo

3. ArchiveSocial

ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution powered by CivicPlus. This tool supports marketers at government agencies with real-time record retention done in compliance with public record laws. While CivicPlus offers a portfolio of solutions for public sector organizations, ArchiveSocial is a point solution focused entirely on archiving.

3. Pagefreezer

Pagefreezer is another real-time digital archiving solution that supports the proper retention of web and social media activity. The tool allows organizations of any size to permanently preserve digital content on social and beyond, then access those archives and replay them as if they were still live. While Pagefreezer offers more than just social archiving, they do not offer any social media scheduling, reporting or listening capabilities.

Streamline your approach to social media archiving with Sprout

With Sprout Social, government agencies can consolidate social media management and archival under a single budget line item, all while maintaining a robust level of compliance.

To learn more about how Sprout helps government agencies create stronger relationships with their constituents through the power of social media, schedule a demo today.

Disclaimer

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice; all information, content, points and materials are for general informational purposes. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Incorporation of any guidelines provided in this article does not guarantee that your legal risk is reduced. Readers of this article should contact their legal team or attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter and should refrain from acting on the basis of information on this article without first seeking independent legal advice. Use of, and access to, this article or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader, user or browser and any contributors or contributing law firms. The views expressed by any contributors to this article are their own and do not reflect the views of Sprout Social. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed.

The post What government agencies need to know about social media archiving appeared first on Sprout Social.

As Florence explains, “Social is a non-negotiable part of driving brand awareness and building connections with patients, physicians and community members. But it can be a challenge for the marketing teams on the digital front lines to overcome the concerns of security and privacy teams—especially at the intersection of HIPAA and social media.”

Many organizations report HIPAA compliance measures inhibit their strategy, as some of the most engaging healthcare content they create features innovative studies, patient testimonials and medical breakthroughs, which require lengthy approval processes and careful execution. In this guide, we’re breaking down what you need to know to remain HIPAA compliant on social media, and sharing examples of healthcare brands who shine on social—despite regulatory limitations.

Please note: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice. Please review our full disclaimer before reading any further.

HIPAA’s impact on your social media content

HIPAA privacy laws protect sensitive patient information from being disclosed publicly, including on social media. The HIPAA Privacy Rule expressly protects patient health information as it relates to how the data is shared, including in marketing and advertising efforts.

Sensitive protected health information (PHI) includes data about a patient’s past, present or future medical conditions, provision of healthcare to the individual and past, present or future healthcare payments. Given social media platforms gather user information, track behavior and have license to use your visual assets, it’s easy to see why these regulations exist.

In the age of sharing patient before and after photos, testimonials and other sensitive information, healthcare providers should exercise extreme caution when crafting social media content. HIPAA regulations also mandate healthcare companies carefully manage customer interactions on social media—which includes preventing patients from sharing PHI, and deleting it if they do. Failing to comply with HIPAA regulations is costly—both financially and to your brand’s reputation.

However, as Katherine Van Allen, Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, points out, the benefits of social outweigh the risks. “Social media should be part of healthcare organizations’ strategy. The people you need to reach are on social—whether it’s prospective patients or employees. Without a social presence, you aren’t a part of vital conversations happening about your system. From discourse about a team member or location, clerical mistakes and legal actions, or rapidly spreading misinformation about a disease or treatment plan. Tuning into social media listening will help you pinpoint key areas of opportunity.”

How to create brand guidelines to support HIPAA and social media

Though you should always consult your legal counsel and compliance team regarding HIPAA compliance on social media, here are general best practices to follow as you create your brand guidelines.

Craft policies and train your team

Start by consulting with your legal and compliance teams, and make them a key partner in validating the legality of your strategy, campaigns and content. Work with them to develop a social media compliance protocol, which should include instructions for corresponding with people via social media.

Familiarize your team with this protocol by co-creating HIPAA compliance training programs that feature social media education. In your training, highlight proper usage of customer data on social media and common HIPAA violations.

Follow de-identification best practices

When crafting new social media content, remove all PHI from your posts. PHI includes health information used alongside the following identifiers:

• Names (first, middle and last)
• Geographical indicators smaller than a state
• All elements of a date (except year)
• Phone and fax numbers
• Email addresses
• Social security numbers
• Medical record, health plan beneficiary and account numbers
• Certificate or license numbers
• Vehicle identifiers
• Device attributes
• URLs and IP addresses associated with patients
• Biometric identifiers
• Photographs of full faces and other unique physical identifiers
• Any other numbers or codes that could identify an individual

For more context, while a patient’s name paired with their vital signs is considered PHI, their vital signs alone are not.

Monitor for HIPAA violations

Even if you take every precaution to limit the use of PHI in your content, patients can still put your compliance at risk by sharing personal information themselves. Prevent this by adding disclaimers to your direct message interactions and brand profiles. Ask patients to refrain from sharing any PHI and inform them where they should route inquiries.

If a patient should mention or DM you and compromise PHI, delete the message immediately, and route them to a more appropriate channel. Florence advises, “Even if you add a disclaimer to your profile or DMs, some patients will still seek out medical advice. To combat this, some organizations use chatbots and triaging tools to automatically alert them of potential PHI, and respond to or delete sensitive content.”

By using a tool like Sprout Social’s Saved Replies, you can use pre-written replies to quickly respond to customers and redirect the conversation to a secure channel. You can also use Sprout’s chatbot builder to automatically reroute social users to an email address or other secure channel for healthcare-related conversations.

With Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can use tagging and filtering to flag messages that contain PHI, and build workflows that delete those messages.

Build a process for patient approvals

There might be some cases where patients (or their families) are interested in sharing their stories with your audience, like this adorable Halloween TikTok from Cleveland Clinic’s NICU.

Have a streamlined and clearly documented process in place for gaining written consent and HIPAA authorization to disclose PHI from a patient before sharing those stories, photographs and/or videos.

Stay up to date on legislative changes

Make it a regular practice to stay up to date on legislative changes at the federal and state levels. Regularly review resources like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. You can also follow the HHS and National Law Review on social for real-time updates, including case rulings regarding HIPAA data breaches.

Looking for more resources? We put together a HIPAA compliance on social cheat sheet that can help you remain compliant, while executing an effective and creative social strategy.

Common HIPAA violations and social media’s role

While HIPAA compliance on social is complex, the monetary, reputational and, most importantly, patient well-being risks are too steep to get it wrong. Here are the most common HIPAA violations you should avoid.

Hiding patient details in plain sight

Even if you don’t explicitly include faces, names, dates or other obvious identifiers, some situational details can reveal a patient’s personal information. Both Florence and Van Allen advise close review of photography and videos before posting. Ensure there is no protected information in the background of your media.

Van Allen warns, “Something that seems as innocuous as a photo of a staff room can be a violation. Someone could zoom in on a patient’s chart sitting on the table, and be able to identify their name or other PHI.”

Validating health information

“A lot of patients message healthcare brands thinking their message will reach their doctors—which means they include sensitive PHI in their outreach,” Florence says. As we mentioned in the previous section, it’s critical to delete any PHI, even when the patient provides it unprompted.

But one critical nuance many organizations miss is that you should also refrain from validating PHI. For example, if a patient comments on your post and reveals they have an illness, you should not acknowledge that illness in your response. It could be a HIPAA violation. Here are a few example scenarios:

Example patient message: @Hospital, I have recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and I was wondering which of your doctors specializes in diabetes care?

Not HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we know navigating a new diabetes diagnosis can be challenging, and we’re here to help. Call Dr. Smith’s office directly to schedule a consultation.

HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we have deleted your comment to protect your privacy. Please call or reach out to our team via email for help.

Limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel

By limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel, healthcare organizations create knowledge gaps that can cause major fall-out. For example, an excited intern could post a selfie with a patient. Or a residency student could accidentally reveal PHI in a funny TikTok.

Healthcare organizations should remember that HIPAA applies to everyone under the control of a covered entity—including volunteers, students and unpaid personnel. It also encapsulates social profiles beyond the corporate account, including the personal accounts of staff members.

What HIPAA means for your social media vendors

HIPAA compliance and security should be top of mind when selecting software vendors and tools. During your platform evaluations, expect your security and privacy teams to be vigilant about the ways data is used when it’s integrated into larger tech stacks.

Find a management solution with permission levels and message approval functionality to ensure only responsible parties can post. Ensure that cybersecurity measures are in place to protect PHI on electronic devices such as encryption or firewalls.

Take it a step further and find a social media management solution that is willing to sign a business associate agreement (BAA)—a legally binding contract that specifies each party’s responsibilities when it comes to PHI and HIPAA compliance. As Florence details, “You should work with a partner like Sprout Social that can sign a BAA, and take on the risks and responsibilities with you.”

Healthcare brands to learn from

These four healthcare organizations demonstrate that having an active social media presence is still possible and important, even in regulated industries.

Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic, the top-ranked hospital in the nation, uses social media to build their employer brand. Like when they reshared a post from a Transplant Chair who celebrated a successful month. Notice how the post doesn’t reveal any sensitive patient information, but instead focuses on the accomplishments and high caliber of the transplant team.

Mayo Clinic also shares profiles of their volunteers, physicians and other personnel to further humanize their company, like this heartwarming video about a Holocaust survivor-turned-volunteer.

The hospital system supplements these posts with general health and lifestyle tips to inspire their followers, and promote well-being, like in this carousel about the benefits of daily movement.

Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic, a leading academic medical center, stays on the pulse of trending healthcare conversations and uses their expertise to keep their community informed of new public health reports.

Like in this Reel where they investigate the benefits of the latest social media health craze, cold plunging or cold showering. The post breaks down how to reap the rewards of the trend, while staying safe and healthy.

The medical center also shares top-of-mind public health reports produced by their organization. They typically briefly summarize the key findings of the report, while including the link so people can read more, like they did in this post.

Boston Children’s Hospital

Boston Children’s Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based pediatric research program in the world. The organization uses their social channels to highlight groundbreaking research (and the researchers behind it) like they did in this post about a top clinical geneticist advancing children’s health outcomes.

They also feature the patients who benefit from their state-of-the-art treatments by interviewing their families, like in this feature on Facebook about the power of genetic testing for children with epilepsy.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield is a trusted health insurance plan provider. On social, they share meaningful statistics about the value they offer their members, including this post about the return on investment employers gain from investing in workplace addiction recovery and support.

They also share awards and accreditations that demonstrate their commitment to member care and excellence, like this post about their recognition by NCQA.

As a popular insurance plan provider, they receive a lot of inquiries about member policy details on social. Their care team illustrates how to route conversations from public forums to more appropriate, secure private channels, like in this reply where they ask a member to email their help center.

Navigate HIPAA and social media with confidence

HIPAA compliance on social media is a multi-step, ongoing process that involves closely aligning with your legal and security teams, and developing interdepartmental education. By following key best practices that protect patient data and your organization’s brand health, you will be equipped to navigate complex HIPAA protocols and develop your social presence with confidence.

Next steps: Now that you’ve read this article, put a meeting with your legal and security teams on the calendar to start planning your org-wide education efforts, and brush up on healthcare social media benchmarks to better understand social’s role in your community engagement toolkit.

Disclaimer

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice; all information, content, points and materials are for general informational purposes. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Incorporation of any guidelines provided in this article does not guarantee that your legal risk is reduced. Readers of this article should contact their legal team or attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter and should refrain from acting on the basis of information on this article without first seeking independent legal advice. Use of, and access to, this article or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader, user or browser and any contributors or contributing law firms. The views expressed by any contributors to this article are their own and do not reflect the views of Sprout Social. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed.

The post A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

One of those new opportunities is social commerce, or the ability to promote and sell products on social media. With millions of people logging onto social media apps each and every day, it presented the ideal outlet for growing a business.

Throughout this article, we’re going to touch more on what social media ecommerce is, benefits of using this ecommerce channel and how your brand can create its own social media ecommerce strategy.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• What is social media ecommerce?
• Benefits of social ecommerce
• 3 Examples of social media ecommerce
• How to create a social media ecommerce strategy
• Create your own social media ecommerce strategy today

What is social media ecommerce?

Social media ecommerce is the practice of marketing an ecommerce business using social media through generating brand awareness, increasing online recognition, growing a customer base and even increasing sales.

We mentioned social commerce, which is a facet of social ecommerce — the act of selling products on social media. There’s another facet called mobile commerce, which is the act of selling products on mobile devices (think: dedicated apps, mobile browser transactions, etc.).

Social media ecommerce comes into play often as 99% of all social media users access the apps from their mobile devices.

Benefits of social ecommerce

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that exist solely online and retailers shifting to an online-first presence, you need all the tools in your arsenal to push sales on your website. You can’t rely on foot traffic so social media replaces this tactic.

Social media ecommerce brings in new customers and provides you with a ready-made online platform — but those aren’t the only benefits.

Expand your reach and generate brand awareness

There are nearly 5 billion social media users worldwide. And while not every single one of those 5 billion will be your target customer, social media gives a massive opportunity for those who are to discover your business. When you post on your social profiles, you’re giving users a chance to find your brand, follow your accounts and potentially share your products with others they know.

Engage your target audience

Through both organic and paid social means, you can create content directly for your target audience to reach and engage those most interested in what you’re selling. Create social media posts that elicit some kind of response from your audience, such as a comment, message, like or share. Always interact with comments in order to facilitate conversations amongst your target customers.

Drive additional traffic and revenue to your business

And finally, drive traffic to your website—and even better, drive sales. Promote your products. Showcase how they can be used and what pain points they solve. Make your audience want to purchase your product—then make it easy for them to do so.

3 Examples of social media ecommerce

Curious what social media ecommerce looks like in action? Let’s take a look at three of the top B2C social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

1. Solo Stove

Solo Stove sells portable, smokeless fire pits, and it uses social media to help promote its products, mostly through video.

Here’s an example of one of these videos.

What makes this video stand out is the fact that it’s promoting a major sale. Both text overlay on the video and the video’s caption share details about a promotion: customers can get bonus items after spending at least $200 (more or less the price of a new Solo Stove, anyway).

Videos like this do a great job of drumming up new business and leading interested parties to your website. Solo Stove could even have taken this a step further and set up its Facebook Shop so viewers could immediately make a purchase directly from the social media platform.

2. WallyGrow

WallyGrow is a company that sells wall-hanging planters online and on social media. It uses Instagram as a place to promote its products—and even has an Instagram Shop set up for social commerce.

However, one great tactic the brand uses on its Instagram is a plethora of giveaways. Not only does WallyGrow share stunning photos of its products in action, but they’re always giving away planters as well, like we see below.

As an up-and-coming brand, regularly hosting giveaways is a great way to let potential customers test out your product. If they love it, they’re likely to buy more as well as tell their friends and family about it.

3. Spikeball

Spikeball is a company with a fun, easy-to-play outdoor game. And it has a great presence on TikTok to promote its game. It also has its own TikTok Shop set up—though the brand doesn’t always tag its products in its video content.

One of its recent videos promotes a fun idea for playing its game—at night with glow gear on.

Because Spikeball is an active game, using video to promote the product is a smart tactic. Showcasing people having fun while playing is the perfect way to inspire potential customers to want in on the action.

How to create a social media ecommerce strategy

Curious how to start promoting your own business and products on social media? Let’s walk you through our six-step strategy.

1. Set up social ecommerce channels

Shopping within a network is easier than ever on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Use these platforms’ features to make shopping and product discoverability on social media a seamless experience for your customers.

Instagram and Facebook share the same backend operation for shopping, called the Meta Commerce Manager. After loading in your product catalog or linking your website’s ecommerce platform (such as Shopify and WooCommerce), you’ll be able to start tagging products on your posts.

When products are shown on Instagram posts, they can be tagged, allowing customers to view purchase details with a tap. Clicking on the tagged product will lead you to the product’s website page for you to purchase. The browser pops up within Instagram so when you close out or finish your purchase, you can go right back to browsing.

TikTok also allows you to create your own shop and is a great place to promote your products. And while Pinterest removed its in-app shopping features, it remains a place where people research products, so your ecommerce store will also want to have a presence there.

2. Find your authentic voice & be unique

Five years ago, DTC brands in the furniture retail segment were few and far between. Now, there are dozens of mid-century furniture manufacturers alone vying for your social attention. The same story has been repeated with DTC brands specializing in dozens of different market segments. How do you set yourself apart when the field is so crowded?

One way to do this is to find a brand voice that is authentic to your company. Paired with brand visuals, this is one of the first steps to getting noticed. Next, identify what makes you unique and different from others in your field. It could be your company’s story, a specialization or even your customer service.

Research has found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. If all of your products are similar to your competitors’, then providing excellent social customer service can set you apart from the pack.

3. Use organic and paid strategies

On social media, a combination of organic and paid strategies is usually the preferred way to go. Paid social media can help you reach an even wider audience—but your organic content is what’s going to keep them coming back.

Here are a few tactics your ecommerce business can use to combine these two powerful strategies.

Organic social media strategies for ecommerce

• Presence of and use of product reviews on your social media accounts
• Adding relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your brand
• Personalized interaction with customers on your accounts and theirs
• Providing excellent social customer care
• Using user-generated content to further your social proof
• Use social listening to improve your product and discover new customers

Paid social media strategies for ecommerce

• Paid advertisements and post boosts
• Using lookalike audiences and website visitors to supplement your advertising
• Running influencer marketing campaigns
• Creating a brand ambassador program
• Forming brand partnerships
• Creating a referral or affiliate program
• Running advertisements and boosts of any of the organic strategies mentioned above

4. Use social proof

Word-of-mouth and reviews are still tried-and-true tactics for encouraging purchases, and are great examples of social proof. Social proof is a concept in psychology that declares consumers are more likely to buy from companies they see other happy consumers using.

So things like customer reviews, user-generated content and influencer marketing helps in gathering social proof to share with your audience.

For networks like Facebook that allow reviews as a feature, it makes business sense to allow your customers to leave reviews. Ask for more reviews from your customers on a continuing basis and you’ll be supplemented with social proof. Reviews are even better when they’re managed and responded to from the brand.

Another way of boosting your social proof is to use an influencer marketing strategy. Pair Eyewear does a great job of influencer marketing all over TikTok, and using those influencer videos for both paid and organic content (shoutout to our last point here).

5. Use social listening

Social listening can benefit all departments of your company. But for sales specifically, you can use social listening to identify gaps in your competitor’s strategy and see what your industry’s customers are talking about. These discussions can lead to new products, strategies and better customer service.

For an online-only company, social listening is imperative because you rely more on interactions and online activity to guide your strategies. Which leads us to setting yourself apart from others in an increasingly crowded social space.

6. Use analytics to guide your ecommerce sales

We mentioned social listening before but there are additional analytics you can take advantage of when approaching social selling. Using social media data to inform your sales plans on an ongoing basis will only help your ROI.

From social media analytics, you can find a multitude of ecommerce-related data:

• Website clicks
• Profile visits
• Social shares from your website
• Mentions from customers
• Ad offers and click throughs
• Mentions of new products or campaigns

Some analytics, like Instagram impressions from the Explore page, are part of an organic ecommerce social strategy. Others, like website clicks or social-only offers, are more specific analytics that can help define your social ROI.

Create your social media ecommerce strategy today

There are many tactics an ecommerce or DTC company can use on social media. But what most would agree with is that a social media presence is necessary to elevate your marketing. Social media helps your customers discover your brand, look at reviews, receive referrals from trusted sources and shop.

To make sure you have all the right tools in your arsenal, give Sprout Social a test drive. Access tools that can help you monitor your online presence, market to the right audience and keep an eye on your social media analytics.

The post How to use social media ecommerce effectively in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media has democratized access to medical information and empowered patients to take charge of their health. But it also has negative consequences. Like increasing the spread of misinformation and excluding healthcare workers from vital conversations with their patients. It has pushed some hospital systems, professional societies and pharmaceutical companies into an unflattering limelight, as patient and provider criticisms go viral. Risks like this have caused healthcare organizations to recoil, and grow cautious of being present on social channels.

The reality is that the future of the healthcare industry will be a hybrid of online and offline experiences. People will use social media networks to look up health information, find care providers, search for employment and receive updates from their healthcare team and hospital systems. They expect you to show up on social—and social data can provide value for your company, too.

By using social listening tools, you can keep an eye on trending conversations in your community, stay ahead of crises and receive real-time patient feedback that helps you improve your care. Keep reading for examples of social listening for healthcare in action.

The benefits of social listening in healthcare

The sheer volume of social content published hourly makes it tough for healthcare companies to find their patients, providers and community members. Social listening enables you to cut through the noise, hone in on relevant conversations and share valuable timely insights with your leadership team.

Here are specific ways teams can use listening to monitor and analyze audience conversations in an efficient, centralized manner, featuring advice from Sprout Social experts.

Proactive crisis management

The best things a social team can do when it comes to responding to an impending crisis are: already have a crisis plan in place and catch minor crises before they spiral out of control. According to Jill Florence, Director of Enterprise Sales at Sprout Social, “Unfortunately, PR crises are common for healthcare systems and other healthcare organizations. Many have gone through a challenging event themselves, or have seen it happen to other companies and they’re afraid of it happening to them. Whether it’s a patient who had a negative experience, a violent threat or mishandling patient data, leaders want to know about it in real-time.”

Of course, crises can be external, too. Katherine Van Allen, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, adds, “Healthcare organizations can also use listening to pay attention to government decisions, relevant current events and specific bills and or lobbying conversations that will impact care units beyond the marketing team.”

By including Sprout Social tools like Listening Spike Alerts in your crisis plan, you will be alerted to shifts in conversations around topics like your hospitals, facilities or supply chain, plus trending news. These alerts will help your team stay on top of current events, and be the first to know if a crisis is about to unfold. As Florence explains, “You don’t want to be in a situation where the CEO is the one informing you about a situation, and you’re just reacting. Getting listening alerts right away is critical to proactively managing crises, and leading the charge at your organization.”

Real-time patient and clinician feedback

While receiving feedback from patients and clinicians on social might seem daunting, it’s the best way to source unfiltered intel. By intercepting this feedback, the social team accesses voice of customer knowledge that can help improve multiple aspects of your organization.

With social listening insights on hand, it’s possible to understand the needs, opinions and feelings of patients, physicians and community members. And understanding them translates to better content, care, and recruitment and retention strategies. As Van Allen puts it, “The [healthcare organizations] who use social listening make more informed decisions about their content strategy.”

By making brand health a part of your listening strategy, you can consistently monitor audience sentiment on social. A platform like Sprout enables you to visualize overall sentiment trends and zero-in on key audience pain points. With this presentation-ready business intelligence, you’re empowered to share audience feedback—like how patients feel about your current wait times and the care they receive, to how physicians would describe your culture—with the rest of your organization.

“Comparative” intelligence

In the healthcare industry, it’s common to consider other healthcare systems and companies “comparators” rather than competitors. While you might not consider other organizations your direct competition, you can still use them as a barometer to measure your performance—from patient care and satisfaction to talent recruitment and culture.

Van Allen describes, “Use listening to understand your share of voice and how people are talking about comparators. Ask yourself: What kinds of specialties, hiring conversations and patient feedback are they getting? How does that compare to us?”

This is especially helpful amid an industry-wide staffing shortage and quickly evolving patient expectations. “The hiring landscape is so competitive that customers need to understand why other companies are being chosen over them,” says Florence. Social listening delivers key learnings that can help you reach (and exceed) care benchmarks on social and beyond, and rethink how your company approaches hiring and workplace culture overall.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis report aggregates social data from your comparators, including impressions, engagements, sentiment and overall share of voice. You can dig deeper into specific audience feedback in the Conversation and Messages tabs.

5 examples of social listening for healthcare in action

We researched examples of ways real healthcare companies use social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement, while balancing growing needs around hiring and patient care standards. Here’s what we found:

1. Guide expansion

As hospital systems and other healthcare organizations expand, real-time audience feedback gleaned from social listening empowers marketing teams to provide a strategic vision.

Florence cites a specific example of a hospital system she worked with that used customer feedback from social listening to guide expansion. “They were completely maxed out. They didn’t have large enough facilities or enough clinicians to accommodate their community, and they felt the backlash on social. Customers complained about long wait times, poor physician care and overall bad experiences. As their company increased capacity, the social team was on the front lines. They managed customer pain points and kept decision makers abreast, while using that feedback to influence expansion in a way that maintained positive brand reputation long-term.”

2. Provide audiences with relevant content

Social listening insights give you a window into issues that matter to your patients, community members and physicians, and enable you to craft an audience-centric content strategy.

Van Allen describes how organizations can use listening to adapt their messaging to meet the needs of their audience. “We see healthcare organizations use social listening to research trending conversations and industry topics, and use that intel to inform their content strategy. For example, a hospital system could create a Listening topic about going “back to school” and surface that parents within their community want more tips to prepare for cold, flu and RSV season.”

3. Route audience intel to the right department

At some healthcare organizations, multiple social marketing teams work together—each representing a different department (e.g., cardiology, dermatology, oncology, etc.). Using a robust and intuitive platform like Sprout makes it possible for these teams to share social listening insights with one another, and facilitate stronger communication and cross-team collaboration.

Florence adds, “Using Sprout’s custom Listening reports lets healthcare marketers generate and share insights with other functions.” By creating department-specific Listening topics, social marketers at healthcare organizations—like hospital systems—can find the specific insights they need to reach their unique goals, like increasing cardiology patient satisfaction. Sprout’s centralized platform houses all of this data in one place, making it possible for marketing teams to work in harmony.

4. Track awareness campaigns

Healthcare organizations can use social listening to gauge how effective promotional campaigns for emerging research and timely initiatives are.

For example, a medical society specializing in cardiology ran a major awareness campaign centered around American Heart Month. To measure the performance and impact of their work, they created a listening query around their organization name and the branded campaign hashtag. By analyzing this Listening data, they were able to identify key strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, resulting in valuable strategy refinements for upcoming initiatives.

You can also use listening data to find advocates who were vocal during a past campaign, and tap them for future partnerships.

5. Increase share of voice

Listening is a valuable tool for healthcare organizations who want to improve their credibility and rise up to the level of other comparators.

In one instance, a children’s hospital looking to raise its national ranking through strategic media opportunities created a competitive listening topic to track its share of voice against higher-ranking hospitals. While analyzing the Listening data, they identified opportunities for submission-based awards and event sponsorships that might help bolster their reputation. They also established new competitive benchmarks for engagements and impressions.

In healthcare, you hope that people never need certain services (especially emergency/urgent care). But you do want to be top of mind, in the moment, when they do.

Social listening shows your audience you care

Your audience expects healthcare brands like yours to be present on social media. Despite its reputational and compliance risks, social offers a wide variety of insights that enable you to manage crises effectively, gather real-time patient and provider feedback, and stay on par with your comparators.

Finding value in social as a healthcare organization requires tools that capture actionable insights and mine value from social to drive exceptional patient and provider experiences.

Want to start turning social data into elevated patient care? Request a demo of Sprout Social’s Listening solution today.

The post The power of social listening for healthcare organizations appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s no longer an anomaly to see public sector accounts going viral. But managing the social media presence of a government agency comes with a unique set of challenges. Complex platform security and governance requirements. Staff who balance multiple responsibilities beyond social. Ever-evolving strategies that can shift overnight.

Choosing the right social media tools for government agencies and other public sector organizations is a non-negotiable part of proactively reaching and engaging your citizens, saving your team valuable time, creating internal visibility and, ultimately, serving your community better. Use the criteria shared in this article to help your team harness the full power of social.

4 things to look for when evaluating social media tools for government entities

Investing in an intuitive social media management platform is an essential step toward building a strong relationship with your constituents. Yet, many agencies only use native tools to manage their accounts—leaving valuable insights and opportunities to connect untapped. Less than half of public sector entities use software to manage or execute their social media strategy, according to ArchiveSocial. The report also revealed agencies not being able to centrally manage their entire presence is the fastest-growing detriment to success on social.

Yet, not all social media management platforms are created equal. When evaluating social tools to help your agency make waves on social, look for one that:

1. Gives your team time back

Like in many industries, managing government social media is more than a 40 hour per week job, especially when staff members juggle other disciplines like communications, PR, digital marketing, content and more. This not only puts teams at risk of burnout, but prevents agencies from maximizing their presence on social and forming stronger relationships with their citizens and communities.

By using a centralized platform like Sprout Social, you’re enabled to make quick work of delivering social content, so your team can focus on engaging your constituents and refining your creative strategy. A recently commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Sprout’s tools helped a composite organization representative of interviewed customers drive $973,000 in social media team productivity and efficiency savings over three years, and a 55% increase in year 3.

Here a few Sprout highlights that help teams collaborate more effectively:

• Shared calendar: Plan your strategy and maintain oversight from a central hub rather than disparate apps or spreadsheets. Organize posts across profiles, networks and campaigns using a visualized calendar to support a long-term strategy. For example, you can map out your posts for the upcoming week and month to assure your content lines up with priority community events.
• Publishing and scheduling: Boost collaboration between staff and increase productivity with campaign planning tools, automated workflows, and scheduling and monitoring tools. Automatically publish your content at the times most likely to reach constituents and receive real-time engagement updates.
• Message Approval Workflows: With internal and external approver features, ensure content is always approved and compliant with your agency’s communication guidelines—all within the Sprout platform.

2. Puts you in control of crisis management

Whether it’s important local events, public safety emergencies or otherwise, crises are an unavoidable part of government social media efforts. Teams need to be able to pivot their publishing quickly, respond to a surge in inbound messages and be proactive to avoid misinformation from spreading.

Stay on the pulse of social media conversations trending in your constituency to prevent minor risks from spiraling into large-scale crises. When evaluating social media tools for government use, look for powerful social listening and audience engagement solutions that do the heavy lifting for you.

The Sprout platform enables you to stop a crisis in its tracks. We offer a suite of tools designed to help you perfect your crisis response strategy—from easily monitoring your incoming messages to zeroing in on key conversations happening online.

• Pause All Content: In the face of a crisis, this feature enables you to pause all outgoing messages with one click—which saves you time and ensures your entire team is on the same page.
• Message Spike Alerts: If your message volume spikes, that could be indicative of a looming crisis. These alerts automatically send email or mobile push notifications when incoming messages exceed your hourly average, so your team doesn’t have to manually monitor your inbox 24/7.
• Social Listening: Sprout’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology can help you gain critical intel about key public figures, trending misinformation and constituent concerns. The platform sifts through millions of social media data points in seconds, helping you access and share actionable findings with leadership and prominent government figures you work with.

3. Supports stronger, more meaningful citizen engagement

Your core mission is to serve your community—which includes serving them on their channel of choice: social media. To do so, you need to understand their preferences, concerns and communication needs, and be responsive and authentic when they reach out to you. Strengthen your citizen engagement by using social media tools that provide your team with valuable intelligence about your audience, and empower swift, proactive communication.

With Sprout’s platform, you can exceed your constituents’ expectations and deliver more tailored experiences on social media—while saving your team time. According to the Total Economic Impact™ study, for the composite organization, customer service specialists saved time equal to $142,000 over three years by using Sprout to respond to incoming me​​ssages and inquiries.

These Sprout tools are designed to help you foster connections with your citizens:

• Smart Inbox: Unify your social channels into a single stream so you’re empowered to monitor incoming messages, cultivate conversations and respond to your audience quickly. By tagging and filtering messages, you can prioritize what’s most important and discover unique engagement opportunities. Built-in collision detection notifications make for seamless collaboration, so you can see who has replied to a message and prevent duplicative work

• Brand Keywords: Often, people talk about your agency on social without tagging you directly. If you aren’t actively searching for these messages, you may miss important conversations. Brand Keywords are custom Twitter searches that constantly run and display results in your Smart Inbox, so you can see and respond to these highly relevant posts as easily as any other message. You can also set up alerts based on high priority or crisis keywords, so you’re always one step ahead.
• Custom VIP lists: Within the Smart Inbox, you can add the VIP label next to the avatar of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn users who messaged you. This feature helps you track correspondences with key players in your constituency, like reporters, elected officials and business leaders.
• Listening: In addition to helping you manage a crisis, Sprout’s social listening solution helps you keep up with relevant trending conversations and influential community leaders. The tools gather honest feedback about your agency’s performance on social and beyond. With these insights, you will be empowered to produce more meaningful content and ladder-up your learnings to decision makers.

4. Reshapes perception of what social can do

In the public sector, social is still largely misunderstood. Many hold onto the lingering belief that it does more harm than good, while others see it as a wild west of misinformation. The right tool will help your communications team quantify the impact of your social efforts and change the way your agency’s stakeholders see social media (even if they aren’t social savvy).

Using a social media management platform makes it easy to create clear reports that demonstrate how your social strategy translates to agency goals. For example, with Sprout’s Analytics tools, you can eliminate the time-consuming manual data collection processes in favor of automated, presentation-ready reports. The Total Economic Impact™ study found that Sprout eliminated manual data aggregation to prepare monthly reports by 75%, resulting in $39,000 in savings over three years.

By using Sprout, you can automatically generate:

• Tag Reports: Access an overview of your inbound and outbound tagged messages to easily analyze campaign effectiveness, volume and performance patterns.
• Post Performance Reports: Analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what messaging and formats resonate with your constituents and why.
• Profile Performance Reports: Access a high-level overview of performance across all connected profiles to quickly evaluate social growth, and how that growth correlates with key initiatives.

5. Supports internal compliance

Compared to other industries, government entities have to balance their social media strategies and workflows against a host of compliance requirements.

For example, a 2014 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) bulletin mandated that federal agencies follow several best practices for managing social media records. Though the definition of what constitutes a “record” can vary by agency, social media posts that communicate policy information or even open-ended prompts that invite user engagement may all constitute records that must be archived properly. A 2023 NARA audit of 10 agencies found that most lack the tools and staff to handle social media record retention.

Government organizations can leverage Sprout’s inbox export to quickly export posts, messages and reviews from the Smart Inbox into a CSV file, and our customer audit trail to export a myriad of user and admin actions. These exports provide clear documentation of granular metadata, including message type and timestamps, the Sprout user who sent or edited each message, and permalinks to the message on the original network. 

Find the right social media tools for your agency’s workflow

When evaluating social media management software for your government agency, to paraphrase JFK, don’t hesitate to ask what the tools will do for you. With the right social media management platform, you can do your best work more efficiently, proactively curb crises, create more time for citizen engagement and confidently demonstrate the value of social at your agency.

For a more comprehensive look at the value social media provides, download The Total Economic Impact™ of Sprout Social study, and learn how Sprout delivered a 233% return on investment over three years.

The post Social media tools for government: What your team needs for success appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media engagement is an essential piece of the Dreamforce experience and integral to Salesforce’s customer relationships year-round. So, in 2022, Salesforce made the enterprise-wide transition to a new social media management platform. The move to Sprout Social has paid off, according to Mikaely Quaranta, Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy, for the customer relationship management (CRM) software company.

“Sprout is such an intuitive platform,” Quaranta said. “Our social media practitioners were excited to jump onto Sprout and start using the Reports and Listening features right away. We were also confident going into Dreamforce because we knew that Sprout’s automation and workflow features would allow us to move at the speed of social during our biggest event of the year.”

Tracking trends and securing real-time approvals on the go

Marissa Kraines, Vice President and Global Head of Social Media at Salesforce, said social media plays an integral role in helping the company build excitement for Dreamforce.

“We want to bring the magic and conversation of Dreamforce to all our audiences on social media,” she explained. “First, we’re looking for ways to amplify the in-person experience through content and interactions across our social media channels. Second, we’re determining how to translate the nuances of the on-site event to the virtual and on-demand experiences.”

With Sprout, Kraines and her team can easily track mentions from conference attendees and other interested parties, including the media, as well as keep tabs on announcements happening online and offline during the event.

Social listening is especially important during events like Dreamforce. Sprout allows us to understand when our audience is online, when they want us to engage with them and how we can assist them throughout their conference experience. Sprout also helps us stay on top of trends and be more strategic with our planning.

Mikaely Quaranta
Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy

Sprout’s mobile app also quickly emerged as a crucial time-saving tool for the social team, according to Kraines. She said it helps them to get approvals from stakeholders for content and messaging “in real time—easily and concisely,” whether they’re running around at events or on the Salesforce campus.

Forging and fortifying one-to-one relationships with Salesforce’s greatest champions

Sprout’s reporting helps Salesforce stay close to what drives their audience engagement. “It’s so important to measure engagement to ensure we continue creating content our audience loves,” said Max Benesi, Salesforce’s Associate Manager, Social Media and Community. “With Sprout, we can do that quickly—reporting out at any time so we always know where things stand.”

Through social listening, analytics and other features in the Sprout platform, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Saleforce’s social media team is learning even more about the Trailblazer community, and how to engage with them effectively via the company’s 150+ social channels.

“We’ve learned that the best way to build relationships with our Trailblazers is through one-on-one engagements on social—and Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps us to accomplish that,” said Benesi.

Salesforce’s Trailblazers and other highly engaged social audience members are open to having Benesi and his team test-drive new content with them. “They’re very honest—they will tell us what they like and don’t like,” Benesi said. “We use their feedback to inform our content creation.”

With other social media management platforms that we’ve used, the reporting was not intuitive. We often had to pull reports natively and work with spreadsheets. When our team started using Sprout, all that manual work went away.

Max Benesi
Associate Manager, Social Media and Community

Accelerating speed to insights—and eliminating thousands of hours of manual work

The business intelligence Salesforce gains from using Sprout helps them evolve their marketing strategies far beyond specific events. “We can’t just make decisions on a hunch. We need accurate data to understand where we’re finding success,” said Kraines. “The insights we get from Sprout allow us to have confidence in our decision-making.”

Quaranta underscored further just how game-changing Sprout’s reporting capabilities have been for the social media practitioners at Salesforce. “We saw immediate value following our implementation,” she said. “We’re reporting faster, and in real time, and sharing information continuously with our stakeholders.”

She added, “We’re also moving 10 times faster per day with community management by using Sprout’s automation and workflows. That gives our team more time to focus on strategy and bring our creative vision to life—the things that we do best.”

“When my team is able to automate simple tasks, it enables them to take that bandwidth and focus it toward innovation,” said Kraines. “We’ve saved over 12,000 hours this year by using Sprout, and our team is having a lot more fun with their work.”

Making plans to leverage a 360-degree view of Salesforce’s social media audience

Kraines underscored that while Sprout is a valuable tool for tracking social media around events like Dreamforce, her team uses Sprout’s capabilities to help them deliver on their year-round mission to increase brand awareness. That means helping customers truly understand what the global CRM software and applications provider does, and how it impacts their businesses—as well as their customers.

“Salesforce is focused on helping businesses become ‘customer companies,’” said Kraines. “We provide them with a 360-degree view of their customers so they can bring those ‘wow’ moments to life. I believe that social is the bread and butter of delivering that 360-degree view of the customer.”

Looking ahead, Kraines said her team is eager to see what impact Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce will have on how they craft social strategies and create new campaigns. “Sprout has already made it easier for the Salesforce social team to share insights with our leadership about what our customers are talking about, and what their needs and issues are,” she said. “This information helps to shape our company’s marketing, sales and operational strategies. And now, with Sprout’s integration across our platform, we can bring social insights and data everywhere across Salesforce.”

Kraines said her team is confident that Sprout is the right partner to help support Salesforce’s growing social media practice. “Sprout has great products,” she said. “But more importantly, they’re evolving and scaling along with our team. By partnering with us and listening to our input, Sprout allows us to be at the forefront of social media.”

I recommend Sprout to other social leaders because they have been such an amazing partner. When you’re onboarding a critical component of your Martech stack, it’s so important to have people alongside you who want to see you succeed.

Marissa Kraines
Vice President, Global Head of Social Media

To find out how your social media team can be more productive, free up time for innovation and never miss a moment to engage meaningfully with customers, request your free demo of Sprout Social today.

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