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Now we’re here: Sprout named #1 Best Software Product by G2

Ryan Barretto — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:05:49 +0000

The first few weeks of a new year are the perfect opportunity to reflect on our wins—and I’m thrilled to announce one of our biggest yet: Sprout Social has been named the #1 Best Software Product by G2’s 2024 Best Software Awards. That’s the number one spot when compared across products in every software category!

This is the eighth consecutive year Sprout has been recognized by G2. When I think about social media’s evolution over that timeframe alone, this award underscores the growing value of our product and the essential role social media management plays in businesses today.

Earning the top spot this year is a reflection of not only the exceptional work Team Sprout puts in every day, but of the way our customers are transforming their businesses with the power of social. G2’s annual Best Software Awards rank products based on authentic reviews from real users, informing the decisions of 90 million software buyers each year. I have immense gratitude for our more than 30,000 customers—we’re here because of you.

The voice of the customer is our north star

Our goal at Sprout is to be a joy to do business with. The only way we achieve that is by listening to our customers, making your problems our problems and acting on your feedback.

Throughout 2023, we were heads down expanding our integrations with industry-leading partners like Salesforce, making strategic investments in AI and delivering innovative functionality to users through our Tagger and Repustate acquisitions. And during that time, our customers were hard at work harnessing social to grow their businesses and create more meaningful relationships with their audiences.

Take convenience store chain Casey’s, which has maintained 90% faster customer response times since implementing Sprout’s Service Cloud integration:

For the first time in about five years, our Guest Relations Team reported that they didn’t have a backlog of messages to respond to. Sprout’s Service Cloud integration is a big reason for that.

Or consider how IT software company Ivanti generates $500,000 in earned media value through its Sprout-powered brand ambassador program:

We couldn’t have succeeded without the data, insight and partnership we got from Sprout. We’re up to 17,000 shares monthly with our brand ambassador program—which gives us a lot more reach and a lot more eyes. I think that through our partnership, we have created a beautiful effect.

And then there is Salesforce, which has saved 12,000 hours of work since implementing Sprout in 2022. Beyond working more efficiently, their team is using data from Sprout to power a full-funnel social media strategy:

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. 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.

Thank you

Accolades like these only happen when you are laser-focused on delivering the very best technology that is built, supported and used by the very best people. Sprout has developed a platform that champions the business impact of social, and our customers bring that impact to life every day.

To all of our customers: We see you. We appreciate you. And I can’t wait to reflect on what we accomplish together in 2024.

Access the full G2 rankings here. Not a Sprout customer yet? Let us show you around the platform with a personalized demo.

The post Now we’re here: Sprout named #1 Best Software Product by G2 appeared first on Sprout Social.

How to Use Sprout Social: Guides for Success with Sprout

Matilda Schieren — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:35:17 +0000

The post How to Use Sprout Social: Guides for Success with Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media tools for government: What your team needs for success

Hattie Wilkinson — Tue, 31 Oct 2023 14:03:55 +0000

Social media is like a 24/7 town hall meeting—news spreads, crises unfold and important questions emerge in real time. It’s a direct line to your residents and constituents, who expect you to be active and ready to engage on topics that are most important to them.

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 messages 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.

Prepping your social customer care team for the holiday rush with Sprout

Carly Hill — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 14:00:27 +0000

It seems like the holidays start earlier every year—for marketers and consumers alike. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse survey, 75% of marketers are publishing holiday content earlier this year compared to 2022. Is your holiday customer service strategy ready to start early, too?

Just as snowy decor starts appearing before Halloween has even arrived, your holiday customer service strategy must be ready ahead of peak shopping season. To keep things running smoothly, customer care teams must make the most of all available resources. Luckily, Sprout Social is equipped with tools designed to alleviate the holiday rush while strengthening customer relationships—a gift that keeps on giving well after the holiday season.

‘Tis the season to bolster your customer care strategy. Keep reading to shape your strategy, and to find out which Sprout features will set your team and customers and team up for success.

Social Customer Care by Sprout Social

The only customer care solution on the market that's built for social first. Schedule a demo today.

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Why social needs to be at the center of holiday customer service

Answering customer questions on social sits firmly in the center of the social media and customer care Venn diagram. So much so that 74% of US and UK consumers say they’re likely to reach out to a brand on social this holiday season, according to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 1,623 consumers.

Social media is a direct line to your customers. And during the holiday season, their outreach will inevitably increase, further extending social’s crossover into the customer care realm.

Let’s look at three key ways social media must be central to your holiday customer service.

Social is the home of product discovery

“TikTok made me buy it” is more than a catchy phrase. It’s a reflection of the influence social media has on buying behavior—on TikTok, and beyond. Instagram reports that 70% of shoppers look to the platform for their next purchase. And Facebook has the highest number of social commerce buyers.

Social media is a virtual mall designed for product discovery, social proof and purchasing all in one place. And consumers know this, too—55% of consumers say they rely on brands’ social media accounts when it comes to discovering and learning about new products during the holiday season, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey.

Social media must be at the center of holiday customer service because it’s at the center of shoppers’ gift hunt. Outfitting your team with the training and customer care social media tools they need makes it easier to meet customers where they are.

Customer outreach on social media will surge during the holiday season

The most wonderful time of the year is also the busiest time of the year for customer service agents. 63% of consumers strongly or somewhat agree that they are more likely to reach out to a brand on social during the holiday season vs. the rest of the year, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey. And our data shows that this outreach most frequently comes through via direct messages and in-post comments.

If your customer service team isn’t seeing (let alone responding to) customer questions and comments on social, they’re missing the chance to build customer trust and loyalty. Over half of consumers say that the most memorable brands on social is simply respond to customers, according to the most recent Sprout Social Index™.

Having visibility and access to social is crucial for delivering strong customer service. If customer care teams are only reviewing and responding to email, phone and web form requests, they’re not getting the full picture.

Consumers reach out on social during every step of their shopping journey

From asking about restocks and order status to sharing glowing reviews, customers use social media along every step of the purchasing journey. Asking product questions and sharing positive feedback were the top two motivators for consumers to contact brands via social, according to our Q4 2023 Pulse Survey.

And when it comes to contacting brands, consumers do have network preferences. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are the top three platforms consumers expect to use to contact brands during the holiday season. All the more reason your team needs access and, if necessary, training on engaging through these channels.

Remember: A stellar holiday customer service strategy does more than just answer questions. It can convert prospective customers into lifelong customers and brand advocates. At the same time, a strategy that doesn’t account for social has the power to do the opposite.

8 tips for enhancing your holiday customer service strategy

Holiday-related spikes in support requests can be stressful. But the right process and tools can empower your team to rise to the challenge.

If you want to revisit and revise your team processes before the rush hits, here are eight tips for enhancing your holiday customer service strategy, and some ways Sprout can help along the way.

1. Plan ahead

Like we said, the holidays feel like they start earlier every year. If you’re not planning ahead for the holiday surge, you’re already falling behind.

The last thing you want during a busy holiday season is to play catch up. So plan ahead to cover all of your bases before the “season’s greetings” decor goes up in stores.

Consider the other milestones your agents should align with—think: key dates for holiday marketing, like sales and launches, that may lead to a spike in messages or tools they need to learn.

Planning ahead can mean different things to different businesses. For your team, it may mean securing budget to hire temporary holiday support staff (which we’ll get to.) Or creating a dedicated RACI model to align on social customer care. Or talking to the merchandising team about when certain sales will start and end to prepare your agents.

2. Create holiday-specific FAQs

According to the Index, 54% of marketers plan on using customer self-service tools like FAQs to scale social customer care. Add holiday-specific FAQs to your site, chatbots (more on that below) or even post captions so customers can find answers themselves.

No matter how many FAQs you provide, you will always get repeat questions. Prepping pre-written answers to common questions your team can pull from saves everyone time.

Creating one source of truth for these quick responses ensures consistency. For example, using the Sprout Asset Library, you can quickly search for and select pre-written answer templates as you respond to a question on social.

And if you want to limit or expand permissions, you can easily adjust who can access the Asset Library within Sprout.

3. Staff up

No matter how early you prepare for the holiday rush, you may simply need more hands on deck. Consider hiring temp or additional staff. E-commerce brand Threadless hires additional holiday customer service staff every season to provide additional support.

Speed is key. The quicker your new staff can hit the ground running, the smoother your holiday season will be. Ensure you provide training and tools that make onboarding a breeze. For example, Sprout has earned industry recognition as a platform with high ease of use, setup and admin—crucial elements when you need to get new staff into a tool fast. And with features like Cases, where you can assign specific messages to specific Sprout users, you can further streamline collaboration even as your team scales.

4. Employ a system to tackle the highest-priority customer inquiries

Ensuring the highest-priority messages are sorted and answered quickly is crucial. Think: complex issues, time-sensitive or negative inquiries, even positive comments that warrant a swift response.

Sprout’s Sentiment for Messages capability lets you identify and sort messages based on whether they’re positive, negative or neutral, and create inboxes based on these sentiments. This empowers you to identify opportunities for proactive engagement—especially important for developing deeper audience connections, like in this conversation with Calvin Klein.

Inbound message tagging is another way to get the most out of Sprout’s Smart Inbox. An organized tagging strategy can help you create tailored inbox views, triage customer questions and report on your efforts once the holiday season wraps up.

Make sure all your customer care agents—seasonal or otherwise—are up to speed on your strategy with thorough documentation. If you’re not tagging messages in Sprout already, here are potential use cases to consider:

Tag by urgency: If your agents are divided by support tiers, tagging messages by urgency can help ensure customers are connected to the right representative quickly.
Tag by customer concern: Understanding trends in customer questions and complaints (e.g., in relation to specific themes or products) can better prepare you for next year’s holiday season. Use the Cross-Network Tag Performance report to report on questions by internal Tag.
Tag by response need: Some messages aren’t actionable. For example, if someone promotes their own services in your replies, you’re better off ignoring it. Creating a unique Tag for messages that don’t warrant a response can help you more accurately measure your agents’ time to first response (TTFR) rates.

Use these tagging strategies individually or in combination to streamline response and reporting efforts. By proactively tagging inbound messages, your team will be able to provide excellent customer service no matter how many messages you receive this holiday season.

5. Tap into automation and AI

An impressive 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work, according to the Index. And it’s undoubtedly front-of-mind for teams wanting to ensure customer service efficiency this holiday season.

Here are two stand-out areas where automation and AI customer service tools are a game changer:

Faster responses

There will always be customer questions that go beyond your prepped FAQ answers. And fresh responses take time.

AI tools create a starting point for responses that your team can build off of, minimizing effort—having these tools baked into your current workflow streamlines your process further. Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist, for example, suggests AI-generated responses for you to choose from and customize when responding to social comments and DMs. You can even select the tone you want your response to convey.

Lean on chatbots

If you’re not already using chatbots to lighten the load for your team, this is your sign to start. And if you are, this is your sign to update them with holiday FAQs.

To address basic holiday customer service questions faster, we recommend using Sprout’s Bot Builder. These rule-based chatbots can manage common questions that come through Meta’s Messenger or X (formerly known as Twitter) Direct Messages.

To start, determine what conversations you want your chatbot to handle. If you need help, Sprout comes equipped with a customer care-specific Bot Template, which can be adjusted to suit your needs.

6. Give agents the context they need to succeed

To set your team up for success through the holidays, you must provide them with the right information and tools. This also means providing agents with the customer context they need to succeed.

If your team has to toggle between multiple tools just to respond to one customer message, you’re doing your team and audience a disservice. Plus, your team may miss important customer history.

Sprout supports social CRM integrations with a tools, like Salesforce, eliminating the need to bounce between systems. Details from each can be accessed directly within the Smart Inbox so you can get a better understanding of the customer you’re supporting, the issue at hand and what’s been done so far to help.

For example, Sprout’s Salesforce integration empowers users to leverage social data for a world-class, omnichannel care experience. It enables your care teams to meet customers where they are vs. sending them to other channels, like a phone line or email.

An integrated social support strategy can make a major difference when dealing with a high volume of social messages. Connecting Sprout throughout your tech stack paves the way for more exceptional support experiences for your team and customers.

7. Establish collaboration norms

Creating a frustration-free, collaborative environment can look different for everyone, depending on the needs of your company. Before you design a process, you first need to evaluate existing and potential points of friction.

If you’re new to prioritizing social as a customer care channel, here are some questions to consider:

Who will review responses from seasonal agents and new hires?

Monitoring responses from new agents is time-consuming but necessary at the start of a busy season when quality control is especially important. To build an approval process, first identify which agents can be responsible for approving messages. Pair them with newer agents to ensure all replies stay compliant and on brand. As new agents feel more comfortable in their role, they’ll be able to handle issues without an approver.

To manage approval processes in Sprout, use the Reply Approvals workflow to submit, review, approve or reject messages directly within the platform, minimizing disruptions for all parties involved. You can also create user teams in Sprout to ensure conversations and message comments are fielded to the right people for replies or clarification.

Who should agents go to with questions?

Whether all tough questions go through a single individual or you have point people for specific issues, documenting who’s responsible for what topics can help prevent confusion and frustration when dealing with social messages.

To further reduce confusion, use Sprout’s Conversations feature. This centralizes team conversations within the Smart Inbox, so questions can be answered without extra emails or direct messages back and forth.

8. Capture feedback and performance metrics in real-time to constantly improve

To refine your holiday customer service strategy, you must be able to capture feedback and measure performance. Externally, customer feedback surveys are critical to seeing the big picture of how people feel about their service.

Add surveys directly to your social platforms for customers. Using Sprout, it’s easy to configure and implement surveys that measure Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score on Instagram, Facebook and X—three major platforms for customer engagement.

Internally, analyzing customer service metrics—like reply time and messages answered—fills in the details behind why customers may feel a certain way about your service. In Sprout, the Inbox Team Report lets you easily measure team effectiveness and performance—from a bird’s eye view, and by individual team members. This report breaks down metrics like median first reply times and unique messages replied to, taking the guesswork out of refining your customer care process so you can head into the holiday season strong.

‘Tis the season to be efficient: Master your holiday customer service strategy with Sprout Social

A strong holiday customer service strategy has a long-lasting impact that continues long after decorations have been put away for the season. The folks on the front line of your brand have the power to alleviate customer concerns and earn their loyalty. Providing your team with the right tools can free them up to focus on creating exceptional customer experiences—the kind that drive repeat engagement, clicks and purchases.

Luckily, Sprout can keep your customer care team in good cheer well into the new year. Start a free 30-day trial and help bring more joy to your agents and customers this holiday season.

The post Prepping your social customer care team for the holiday rush with Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

3 ways to get more from your data with Sprout custom reporting

Carly Hill — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 15:00:24 +0000

Just as there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all social strategy, there’s no one social report that works for every team.

Data analysis and social media reporting are becoming increasingly important skills for social media marketers. Today, there’s an increased pressure, and need, to use this data in more sophisticated ways—on the social team, and beyond. According to The Sprout Social Index™ 60% of marketers plan on connecting social to business goals by quantifying the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue impact.

As brands and business leaders realize this potential, they place a growing emphasis on the need for marketers to understand and share their data in the context of specific goals and strategies. In order to do so, modern teams must be able to easily create custom reports.

In this article, learn the importance of custom reporting, and how Sprout customers are using their custom reports to empower swifter, better-informed decision-making.

What custom reporting in Sprout looks like

The value of social media and the insights that come from it has never been more widely understood. According to this year’s Index, 76% of marketers agree that their social insights inform other departments.

The more influential social insights become, the more robust, agile and focused your reports must be. Adding a custom reporting ability to your social media analytics tools enables them to serve the needs of various teams.

Sprout Social’s Report Builder and Custom Reports enable your team to feature the data that matters most to the stakeholders receiving it—at scale. With the ability to customize widgets that use data already available in Sprout, marketers can arrange their reports to tell the story that matters most.

The Report Builder enables your team to share impactful cross-org reports and recommendations that have real business impact, fast. Your team can build a report from scratch, or customize Sprout’s existing templates by selecting and adding dozens of widgets to hone in on key data. And with text widgets, write in context and recommendations based on insights or add a full analysis.

Custom reporting is available with Sprout’s Premium Analytics, which can be added to any Sprout plan. If you haven’t tried Sprout’s social media reporting options yet, request a personalized demo to get hands-on experience.

Request a personalized demo

To give you some ideas, let’s look at some stand-out ways that Sprout customers are using custom reports.

3 Sprout custom reporting examples that tell a richer story about social’s impact

Some of the most important questions about social’s impact are often the most difficult to answer. What’s the ROI of our efforts? What did this influencer campaign do for us? How do people feel about our content?

Social marketers are finding creative ways to connect their social efforts to business impact through data storytelling. Here are three stand-out ways we’ve seen customers enhance their social media reporting to answer tough questions with Sprout’s Report Builder.

In-depth campaign performance reporting

Creator and content campaigns are as crucial as they are notoriously hard to report on. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 47% of respondents said their main challenge when implementing influencer marketing was measuring campaign effectiveness.

Custom reports bring clarity to this common challenge, and make it easier to confidently understand on your campaigns and influencer partnerships. They bring all of the KPIs into one streamlined report to tell a wider ROI story about your campaign.

One stand-out Sprout customer in the travel and meeting planning industry uses a custom campaign report to understand campaign performance and share it with external stakeholders. Their key to success is including widgets that provide a holistic view of their influencer campaigns. The Tag Performance Widget enables them to show data from the campaign-specific posts.

They also include social listening widgets featuring a topic summary, listening engagement and potential impressions. This enables them to show stakeholders how their influencer campaign impacted related conversations and engagements in the wider social space. Here’s what a general version of those two widgets looks like:

Beyond helping their social team make strategic partnership decisions, this report also helps them connect influencer campaigns to other business functions, sharing their custom campaign report with other teams to tell an easy-to-understand ROI.

There are endless ways to mix and match widgets to highlight social data in action. And various combinations have enabled customers to report on campaigns in different ways, to different stakeholders. One Sprout customer creates custom reports to highlight their end-of-year campaign success. Another uses theirs to share biweekly brand partnership reports across dozens of corporate partners. Combine different widgets, like listening, tag and post performance widgets to capture the full scope of your campaigns.

Tailored benchmarking and quarterly reports

Quarterly audits and benchmarking reports are two halves of one holistic story about your social strategy and overall brand health. When combined, they empower smarter decision-making by giving your strategy context against your competitors.

But the level of detail these reports carry may be overwhelming for a busy C-suite. And given that 57% of marketers share social media metrics with executives weekly or monthly, according to our Index, creating focused reports is crucial.

A Sprout customer in the SAAS industry used custom reporting to answer their C-suite’s biggest questions about Instagram, while still serving their team’s needs.

While Sprout offers a pre-built Instagram competitive report, this customer wanted to create two competitive intelligence reports: a weekly one for their team to track trends and competitor engagement surges. And a monthly C-suite report laser-focused on top-level competitive intelligence.

Their monthly report told their C-suite about how their Instagram compared to their competitors—without getting bogged down by in-the-weeds data. While the weekly report helps them stay on-trend and on-pace with platform-specific widgets that track trends. Here’s an example of what similar cross-network widgets look like:

With Sprout’s custom report builder, streamline or combine your larger audits and benchmarking reports—include cross-channel performance, competitive listening, customer care data and more for a 360-degree view of your strategy.

Pro tip: Create custom reports to hone in on the insights that matter most—for your team, or for other stakeholders—to get higher-impact insights from a lower lift. Tap into text widgets to give your data context with a SWOT analysis, and to prove ROI. Or, take this a step further by creating a custom report that serves as a social media dashboard your team and others can use to regularly enrich strategic business decisions.

A holistic view of organic vs. paid performance

According to a Q1 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, marketers rank organic and paid social as their two most valuable social tactics—with organic out-ranking paid. Organic and paid social strategies go hand-in-hand, and reporting on them side-by-side can provide a holistic view to inform strategic decisions across your strategy.

The Paid vs. Organic Network Summary widget in the Premium Analytics Report Builder enables you to compare organic and paid content in custom reports across your Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles—no extra work needed from your team.

If you want a more channel-by-channel view of your paid performance, there are widgets by network available, too. Sprout’s paid reporting options enable you to easily evaluate the success of paid social campaigns executed through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter). As well as widgets that show the performance of your owned organic content.

Use custom reporting to uncover and share the focused social insights that matter

You and your team are no strangers to reporting on social data. But social media has grown up—and reporting must evolve with it.

To uncover and share deeper insights, you need to create more sophisticated reports for your team, leadership and beyond.

Drill down on the insights that matter most to your social and business strategy faster, so you can focus on making improvements—not digging through data. Request a personalized demo of Sprout with Premium Analytics to see how custom reports simplify answering the tough and important questions for your business.

The post 3 ways to get more from your data with Sprout custom reporting appeared first on Sprout Social.

How 3 brands use a Tagging strategy for marketing to get better insights, faster

Carly Hill — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 14:00:22 +0000

What was the ROI of your influencer campaign? How does one topic perform on social compared to another? How are people responding to a campaign?

In social media, the most important questions are often the most difficult to answer or quantify. But these are questions you have to answer; not just for your team and strategy, but for your leadership and teams beyond marketing.

Luckily, there is a light at the end of the ask-hard-questions tunnel: Tags in Sprout reports. Sprout’s Tagging feature has changed the reporting game for many brands.

In this article, we’ll show you how 3 brands have created a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns, cross-org reporting and better insights. Let’s dive in.

How 3 standout brands use a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns, and beyond

To get you up to speed, Tags are a Sprout feature that act as labels you can attach to any piece of content you plan to publish. They can be the name of a campaign, the name of a creator partnership, a content bucket, a goal—whatever helps you organize content.

Using Tags allows you to filter social media reports to see specific content pieces, themes and posts, enhancing your social media insights. Think: honing in on campaign performance, uncovering how specific content themes perform on different platforms, seeing how your audience responds to different topics—the possibilities are endless.

We’re constantly impressed at the creative use cases people create for Tags—and the insights Tags help them uncover. Here are 3 brands who have developed a creative Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns and beyond, and how it empowers them to streamline otherwise complicated reporting processes.

Report on UGC and influencer content with Tags—River Island

There’s no denying the importance of creator and influencer partnerships. However, quantifying their success is difficult. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout pulse survey of 307 US-based social marketers, 47% of respondents said their main challenge with influencer marketing is measuring the effectiveness of campaigns.

London-based retailer River Island uses Tags to make this reporting process easier. In fact, they cite Sprout’s Tag Report as one of the most useful reports in Sprout for their team.

One of their stand-out use cases is how they use their Tagging strategy for marketing campaign reporting. For their team, this includes highlighting the performance of owned content vs. influencer content—a stellar way to showcase the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

@riverisland

The modest fashion haul of dreams, thanks to @Iman | Fashion, Beauty & food 😍 #riverisland #imwearingri #modestdressing #modestfashion #fashion #fashiontok #ootd Modest outfits Outfits of the week Autumn outfits 2023

♬ original sound – ✨🇬🇹2000s&2010s throwbacks✨

As River Island’s team explains, “With the Tag Report, we can test and report on user-generated content (UGC) versus campaign imagery and determine which are more engaging. This helps us confidently allocate budgets to different creative assets.”

Apply it: Label influencer content you reshare or share with campaign-specific Tags to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your influencer, creator and UGC campaigns.

Analyze the social conversation to create community-first content, faster—CareSource

Social media teams are no strangers to content audits. To truly create impactful content, you must be able to analyze and make data-driven content decisions more frequently—not just on a quarterly or yearly basis when larger content and strategy audits occur.

Healthcare non-profit CareSource has fine-tuned its content analysis to be more agile and to get more granular with content reporting. To do this, they tap into Tagging.

As CareSource’s Senior Director of Digital Strategy Sarah Chapman explains, “If we notice a trend in our monthly Tagging reports, like a sudden influx of questions about ID cards in August, then we realize this is likely related to parents needing back-to-school sports physicals and immunizations. So we plan ID card-related social content in August.”

This strategy uses customer care questions to inform content, and vice versa. Not only does CareSource tag their content depending on what content bucket—that is, what content theme and topic—they fall into; but they also tag incoming comments with the same tag as the original post. Using a specific Inbox Rule automates this process.

“When I produce a piece of content and tag it as a member benefit post when someone comments on that content, I have an Inbox rule that ensures the comment shares the same tag as the post,” Sarah explains.

Flu season is coming! Be prepared and get your flu shot to protect you and your loved ones!

Posted by CareSource on Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Beyond helping them understand how content buckets perform on various platforms, this also enables them to get a pulse on their community’s conversation for enhanced reports.

As Sarah explains, “My team creates a monthly PowerPoint that shares insights, ‘ah-has’ and provides a high-level view and volume numbers of what the community was talking about last month. We get our insights directly from Sprout’s Tag Performance report to see what topics spiked—we can see if they spike on a day or around an event, and give insights that feel grounded in the community and don’t require someone to understand social speak.”

Rapid reporting leads to a smarter strategy and share-friendly stats. And their Tagging strategy has been a major time-saver, too. “It’s hard to quantify, but I would easily guess our team saves 10 hours a month just on having ready answers available for our team and others,” Sarah explains.

Apply it: Create a robust Tagging system for all of your content—including tags for each of your content buckets, campaigns and the platform each is posted on, for starters. Then, set up Inbox Rules that automatically tag any comments on specific posts to track what topics, content and themes may be driving the conversation, what that conversation might be and what the overall sentiment is in the comments section. This enables you to get more granular insights faster.

Get department-specific insights and report across your org—Grammarly

Social media has come a long way. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree their social insights inform other teams. And yet, 43% of marketers say they still feel siloed.

The value of social media extends far beyond the marketing team and has the power to inform and bolster every team at your org, but it’s important to tailor insights to other teams.

The Grammarly social team has incorporated cross-departmental report sharing into their process, breaking down social team silos. This has been especially impactful for their user experience, product and leadership teams.

Their robust Tagging strategy enables them to group incoming messages, like comments, based on the content—much like CareSource does—helping them tailor insights for specific teams, and to employ full enterprise reporting.

As Grammarly’s Community Manager Emma Hanevelt tells us, “Once a month, we combine Tagging insights from Sprout with Zendesk reports to create a deck that gets shared across the organization. It’s how we keep others up to date on trends and opportunities we’re seeing in customer support.”

But this Tagging strategy also enables the Grammarly team to filter department- and request-specific feedback to empower different teams. As Emma explains, “Tagging is one of the most important features for us. We can quickly pull specific feedback when needed. If any of our product managers come to us asking for messages on a certain product, we have it.”

Apply it: According to the Index, 57% of marketers share social metrics with executive leadership weekly or monthly. Use Tags to filter insights for in-depth and tailored reports for your leadership, and to create reports tailored for teams based on the insights that are most useful and relevant to their work.

How to implement Tagging in your marketing campaign reports today

Honing in on insights granular and broad. Providing cross-org knowledge. Speeding up decision-making. Proving the ROI of influencer partnerships; we’ve already highlighted the key benefits of Tagging on social media. Now let’s get into how to use it.

Jumpstarting your Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns in Sprout is easy—in fact, the process is baked into your publishing process, streamlined as part of the content creation process.

Start your free Sprout trial

Once in Sprout, all you need to do is:

Navigate to the “Compose” icon—the paper and pencil image in the upper right-hand corner. Or click “Compose” on any day on the Sprout publishing calendar.
Once you’ve added the copy and visuals for your post, click on the tag icon to select from a dropdown of your existing Tags, or to add new ones. If you’re in the full-screen compose window, navigate lower in the display to the “Sprout Tags” field and add Tags under “Labels.”
To automatically tag incoming messages with the same Tags as the posts they’re attached to, set up auto-tagging: Navigate to your name in Sprout > Settings > Click Automated Rules under Global Features > Click Create new rule > Enter a rule title and description of what it does > select Inbox message for the Rule Type.
Once you start tagging your content, dig into the data. You can filter general reports—like the Post Performance Report—by Tags to hone in on how topics or campaign posts perform. And the Cross-Network Tag Performance Report empowers you to filter and analyze Tag performance across platforms over your chosen time period.

Pro tip: This report is also shareable. This means next time leadership or teams outside of marketing ask you about how specific topics or campaigns perform, or what people are saying about a specific topic, you can quickly pull and send those insights directly from Sprout.

More impactful insights in less time: Try Sprout to simplify and streamline your reporting

New platforms, changing content formats, shifting algorithms, tight bandwidth—social teams are strapped for time as it is. But social media is an invaluable wealth of insights, for your marketing team and beyond.

Enabling your team to quickly answer tough questions from leadership, be more agile and share social insights with other teams is more than just a nice-to-have; it’s essential as social media becomes more influential.

To empower your team to work faster and smarter, try Sprout free for 30 days to see how a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns changes your team, and entire business.

The post How 3 brands use a Tagging strategy for marketing to get better insights, faster appeared first on Sprout Social.

Salesforce’s social media team saves 12,000 hours in first year using Sprout Social

Justin Woods — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 17:48:13 +0000

Dreamforce is the flagship conference for Salesforce—and one of the world’s largest technology events. Held annually in San Francisco where Salesforce is based, Dreamforce attracts more than 40,000 in-person attendees and millions online. That includes tens of thousands of “Trailblazers,” brand advocates who are considered the “heart and soul” of the company because of their commitment to innovating with Salesforce.

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.

The post Salesforce’s social media team saves 12,000 hours in first year using Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Automating dependency updates with Dependabot

Shivam Mehrotra and Ryan Phillips — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:43:32 +0000

Sprout Social’s Android mobile app is a powerful native application that keeps our customers plugged in to their social media presence on the go. As part of our Android app, we maintain over 35 dependencies managed by the open source community that provide useful building blocks for our application.

Our dependencies provide myriad functionality such as frameworks for making network calls, async image loading, testing tools and other existing solutions that solve common Android development challenges. Some of these dependencies are required to leverage core Android libraries while others help solve common software challenges without having to write all the code from scratch. Each dependency allows us to leverage functionality without having to reinvent the wheel.

At the same time, each comes with a responsibility to keep them current to ensure we know of new performance, security, and feature updates. This sounds great on paper, but as any mobile developer knows, manually tracking these updates can be a real burden.

One of our values on Sprout’s engineering team is to act with purpose and focus. In that spirit, we decided to implement a smarter solution so we could spend more time building impactful features for our customers. To accomplish this, we used the automated dependency management first party plugin, Dependabot. Dependabot reduces our volume of outdated dependencies, simplifies the effort needed to update them, and streamlines our overall development process.

Moving away from manual dependency maintenance

In native Android development, dependencies are declared in a build.gradle file. By specifying the dependency we need with its version, Gradle will resolve it from a central repository and retrieve it for us to be able to use within the application. If an Android app is multi-module, each module has its own build.gradle file that declares the dependencies for that module.

Maintaining these dependencies efficiently is critical for a smooth development process and providing customers with an effective social media management application that can keep up with the speed of social. But keeping dependencies up to date becomes a daunting task that requires an assessment of work, version compatibility checks, potential code changes and testing.

Before Dependabot, we had a manual dependency management process. As the complexity of our application increased, so did our time spent on dependency management. It took significant effort for the team to identify the need for a dependency, then process it through our agile development workflows to get it prioritized and up to date. We’d often discover that dependencies needed updates during feature development, which introduced the always dreaded project scope-creep. We needed a better way.

Introducing: Dependabot

Dependency management is not a new concept. Given that most of the work required to manage dependencies is repetitive and monotonous, our team thought this would be the perfect candidate for something that could be automated (without falling into the trap of having to write the automation ourselves).

We found Dependabot suited our needs well—it is a GitHub first-party tool that automatically detects newer versions of dependencies and accounts for any compatibility issues that may be caused by upgrading them. It surfaces any version upgrades as they become available and creates pull requests (PRs) containing information about the upgrade, which we were able to seamlessly integrate into our normal engineering workflow. Suddenly, we didn’t have to spend long hours manually making sure everything was current.

Implementation

Dependabot intelligently analyzes our build.gradle files to determine our dependency tree and creates PRs for any dependencies that need to be updated. In order for the implementation to be a success, we needed a way to carefully review each PR and streamline the merges of the PRs.

During any application release of our Android app, we assign a release manager. We decided to integrate this responsibility into the release manager’s process, with the expectation that up to five dependency upgrades be completed during each release cycle. The release manager reviews the dependency updates uncovered by Dependabot, ensures that our continuous integration tests on the PR pass and there are no breaking library changes, then reviews the upgrades provided by this version bump, and brings the list of PRs to the team for approval to be merged.

The benefits of automation

Automated dependency management is a powerful tool that significantly enhances our development process, and the quality of life of our engineers. It also provides users with high value and the latest features within our native mobile application. With a tool like Dependabot, we streamlined the retrieval, integration and versioning of dependencies, reducing the amount of manual effort engineers have to spend and lowering the chance of conflicts in our dependency tree.

As the complexity of Android projects continues to grow, adopting automated dependency management was a high-value step in order to ensure a world-class development process for our team, and a world-class Android application for our customers.

To learn more about Sprout’s engineering team and culture, visit our careers site.

The post Automating dependency updates with Dependabot appeared first on Sprout Social.

Sprout Social named to the 2023 Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology list for a second year

Aaron Rankin — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 13:00:08 +0000

Successful technology relies on innovation and adaptability, and at Sprout Social, these attributes run deep in our DNA. We’ve always believed that our intentionality is what sets us apart from the rest, and today, I’m thrilled to announce that our commitment to excellence has been recognized with our inclusion on the Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology™ list.

Keeping up with the ever-evolving nature of social media requires more than quick fixes and short-term solutions—it requires curious and purpose-driven people who think about the challenges of tomorrow. Whether it’s reimagining our own systems to scale efficiently or conducting research to help businesses navigate the ever-evolving world of social, Team Sprout rises to meet complex problems and sees change as an opportunity for growth.

The technology sector has had its fair share of ups and downs that presented challenges and opportunities to rethink how we accomplish our best work. As a global distributed team, we’ve proactively sought ways to maintain our vibrant culture and foster connection in a remote work setting. This renewed focus has not only helped us navigate the current landscape, but has led to more effective and inclusive workplace practices. As a result, we’ve emerged stronger, more connected and more innovative than ever.

Our commitment to the well-being of our team remains steadfast. We’re continuously exploring new ways to learn and thrive in the pursuit of building intuitive and impactful software.

Ready to join a team at the forefront of social technology? Explore our open positions today and apply for the role that’s right for you.

The post Sprout Social named to the 2023 Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology list for a second year appeared first on Sprout Social.

5 ways to use social media more efficiently

Aubree Smith — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 14:00:24 +0000

There’s something awe-inspiring about watching #CleanCore videos on social media. The ones where they reorganize the space underneath a bathroom sink, reimagine the use of closet storage or deep clean a grimy surface. Maybe it’s the ASMR quality of the videos that draws us in, or the enviable storage containers and cleaning devices. But I think they offer something even more intriguing: efficiency.

When I watch those videos, I aspire to live in a home that is so clean and well-organized, I move seamlessly through my day feeling free from distraction and inconvenience.

You and the rest of your social team can achieve that same covetable feeling when you operate with social media efficiency. Managing a brand’s social media presence is time-consuming, so removing the clutter that overcomplicates your processes improves your team’s output and makes room for more meaningful work. With the right optimizations and tools, you can maximize your brand’s social ROI and make best use of your time and resources.

1. Optimize your social media workflow

Planning. Creating. Publishing. Monitoring. Engaging. Listening. A lot goes into a social media workflow, requiring teams to balance multiple tasks, navigate unique channels and even perform different roles simultaneously.

Optimizing your social media workflow means clearly defining processes and ownership, and alleviating manual tasks when possible. To get back to the cleaning analogy, it’s like using a chore chart that lists all responsibilities and who will complete them, and using tools like dishwashers and robot vacuums to save time.

You can optimize your social media workflow at every stage—from content creation and publishing to monitoring incoming messages and ongoing social conversations. For example, with a solution like Sprout Social, publishing and scheduling tools alleviate the manual work of executing a social content calendar. Here are a few of Sprout’s tools that will accelerate your workflow:

AI Assist: Generate engaging captions in seconds using AI, and get time back for campaign strategy development.
Optimal Send Times: Determine best times to post for engagement and impressions based on a list of suggested times generated via ViralPost® AI technology.

Message Approval Workflows: Create a multistep and multiuser review process, where your team can submit, review and approve content from one place, and clearly visualize where content stands in the approval process. You can also incorporate external approvers to enable collaboration with reviewers outside of Sprout.

These tools translate to real-world time and resource savings that add up. A recently commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Sprout Social 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.

2. Automate social media reporting

Manually gathering social metrics and insights is technically possible. You can log into the networks natively and pull data into spreadsheets, consolidating basic raw data like follower count, likes and engagements by hand. But it slows your team down and limits your ability to provide valuable findings to stakeholders.

By automating and speeding up data collection and distribution, you can demonstrate your impact, influence decision making and share data the C-suite is looking for (i.e., competitive intel). It’s like cleaning with a power washer instead of scrubbing with a toothbrush.

By using a social media management platform like Sprout, you can quickly gather and explore detailed data, and generate automated, presentation-ready reports. Here are a few highlights of the Analytics tools that help put insights into action:

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.
Post Performance Reports: Analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what messaging and formats resonate with your followers and why.

Tag Reports: Access an overview of your inbound and outbound tagged messages to easily analyze campaign effectiveness, volume and performance patterns.
Paid Performance Reports: View your key performance metrics like cost per impressions, engagements, clicks and conversions, and explore how your paid performance changes over time.
Competitor Reports: Compare your engagements, follower count and audience growth to your competitors to determine whose content resonates more with your target audience.

Reports like these make it easy to demonstrate how your social strategy translates to company goals. 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.

3. Share social media resources and tools company-wide

As your brand’s social presence grows and evolves, so too does social’s impact across your business. No longer just a tool for building awareness, social is now pivotal across the customer journey and audience segments. If you only relegate social resources and tools to the marketing team, you silo key insights, miss out on the benefits of cross-collaboration and minimize the impact of social.

Even the most optimized social workflow will be underutilized if other departments aren’t tapping into it. It’s like having an immaculately organized closet and never wearing anything inside it.

According to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, 53% of customer service teams, 32% of HR teams and 20% of R&D teams weigh in on social strategy—evidence that these departments already work with their social teams to help achieve company goals. Here are a few key ways each department can use social:

Sales: Use performance data to learn how customers respond to different marketing messages and content, investigate how your brand stacks up to competitors and analyze social listening insights to understand audience pain points. Sprout’s AI-driven listening solution makes it easier by sifting through billions of data points in seconds and outputting actionable learnings around your brand, competitors, industry and consumers. Listening empowers your sales team to zero in on the key insights they need to refine their strategy and close more deals.

Customer care: Answer questions, foster engagement and provide responsive customer service functions for your community on social. Apply valuable learnings gleaned from customer care insights like sentiment, common issues, frequently asked questions and team efficiency to improve their performance. For Sprout users, that includes monitoring the Smart Inbox, a single home for all incoming social messages, and looking at the Inbox Activity Report, a report that tracks internal performance metrics like average time to action.

HR and recruitment: Use social to foster a strong employer brand, dig into competitive analysis, widen your candidacy pool and build ongoing connections with prospective candidates. With the help of unified social media management software like Sprout, talent teams are empowered to create, manage and report on the success of recruitment content—even if they aren’t social pros. For example, with Tag Reports, the HR team can distill down the results of their campaigns to see how their efforts moved the needle.

Product development: Translate existing conversations happening about your products and industry online into new launches, product refinements and stronger go-to-market strategies. For example, with Sprout’s listening solution, product teams can gauge audience response to specific keywords, products, competitors and more by using the Topic Summary Report.

As a more diverse set of stakeholders gets involved, core social teams will need to adapt. Figuring out who owns what, and which proficiencies are needed across teams, has to be addressed as social strategies become more sophisticated.

The Grammarly support team demonstrated how impactful it can be when teams outside of marketing take ownership over certain aspects of social. After starting to use Sprout’s Smart Inbox to perform customer care functions, Grammarly reduced their average time to first response by over 80%. Even with teammates across time zones, their internal collaboration was much smoother.

“We love the team Conversations feature [in the Smart Inbox]. If someone working out of Kyiv isn’t able to solve an issue by the time they log off, they can leave a note. Then, the Vancouver team can pick it up and continue the conversation with all the necessary context.” – Emma Hanevelt, Grammarly, Social Media Insights Analyst

4. Integrate social media tools with the rest of your tech stack

Streamlined tech stacks lead to an improved, uninterrupted customer experience by empowering marketing and customer care teams to respond swiftly and delegate tasks clearly, without clicking through multiple tools. This also prevents headaches and collisions internally, and preps your team with all the intel they need to provide best-in-class support to your customers. With the right integrations, it’s like having a vacuum, a mop and a dry duster all in one.

For example, Sprout’s integration with Salesforce consolidates touchpoints between social media and your CRM to give you an in-depth understanding of your audience, and makes it easier to respond promptly to incoming messages. The intelligent case routing feature improves agent productivity through automated case creation and routing. Which ensures that inbound messages reach the right agent—right inside of Salesforce. The integration enables you to respond to customers faster and come up with better solutions to meet their needs.

To see it in action: When Casey’s switched from Social Studio to Sprout Social, they optimized their use of the Salesforce integration. The convenience store chain increased their response time by 90%, improved communication between their guest relations and social teams by tenfold, and improved their overall guest satisfaction scores by 3%.

“The integration has been a game-changer. It’s opened a floodgate of communication right within the tool between our social and Guest Relations Teams.” – Jasmine Riedemann, Casey’s, Social Media Manager

A streamlined tech stack also enables stronger reporting, making it possible to combine social data with other data sources and communicate in one centralized place. Using a social media management platform that is equipped with business intelligence (BI) and workflow management tool integrations helps break down silos. Sprout’s integrations with Tableau and Slack are two examples of essential tools that scale insights across teams and consolidate communication.

5. Simplify influencer management

Refining your process internally is just the beginning. For next-level social media efficiency, you should also optimize how your team interacts with external partners like influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout pulse survey, 64% of social marketers work directly with an influencer’s agent or representative when managing influencer marketing campaigns—which can result in thousands of one-off email threads and chaotic workflows. Manual influencer management makes it challenging to quantify ROI, and extremely cumbersome to balance discovery, approvals and reporting.

By unifying influencer marketing and social media management, you can simplify influencer relations and connect your influencer marketing efforts to the rest of your social strategy. It’s like having a washing machine installed instead of washing your clothes by hand or having to go to a laundromat.

With a solution like Tagger by Sprout Social, you can maximize workflow efficiency and seamlessly manage influencer relationships—from discovery to onboarding and project assignment to execution. Tagger empowers your team to collaborate with influencers and manage social campaigns through one centralized workspace.

Start improving your social media efficiency today

Cleaning up your social media workflow requires looking critically at the way your team spends their time. Are there opportunities to automate you can take advantage of? Does your reporting demonstrate the complete value of social? Are vital insights going untapped across your org? Is working with incompatible tools creating unnecessary work? Asking the hard questions today will set you up for a more efficient tomorrow.

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