Sprout’s ViralPost Awarded US Patent

As a technology organization, Sprout is proud to announce that we were awarded our first US patent for the technology behind ViralPost® for Twitter. Developed in 2012, ViralPost®–available in Standard plans and above—determines the best time to publish content to a brand’s social channels.

Unlike other social media scheduling tools, ViralPost® doesn’t consider when your followers are publishing. Instead, it recommends times when your audience is actively engaging and simultaneously identifies when others are least active.

When your fans are online and engaged, and when the rest of the social chatter is at a minimum, your messages aren’t drowned out. This overlap is crucial. With changing algorithms and content saturation, now more than ever brands want their content to live on an audience’s newsfeed long enough for their most active and influential followers to see it. ViralPost® ensures the greatest probable impact by suggesting distribution times that correlate with when brand’s fans with the largest networks are commenting, liking and sharing.

Software patents were common to obtain in the dot-com bubble era and early into the new millennium. However, after intense scrutiny, the US Patent and Trademark Office has since changed course and become very strict. Special congratulations go to the lead “inventor” (in the patent parlance), Joel Booth, Sprout’s Data Scientist, whose patience and hard work helped guide this process.