That’s because social media management requires agility. Opportunities can come in the blink of an eye, but it isn’t easy to capitalize on them without the right tools and processes in place. Striking gold on social requires a little bit of luck and a whole lot of preparation.

Sprout offers sophisticated, intuitive fixes that result in more free time for ideation and execution. Let’s take a look at what’s possible when you streamline your social media management workflow with Sprout.

• What is a social media workflow?
• Why you need a social media management workflow
• How to streamline your social media workflow with Sprout
  • Your scheduling and publishing workflow
  • Your content approval workflow
  • Your reporting workflow
  • Your engagement workflow
• Tips for auditing your social media manager task list

What is a social media workflow?

A social media workflow is a repeatable, systematic process by which a business manages their social media presence and interactions. A standard workflow accounts for planning, creating, publishing, monitoring and analyzing social media content, as well as responding to questions and feedback across networks.

These processes are more than just checklists. Social media is a fluid space where the only constant is change. Valuable workflows center around adaptability to ensure the consistent and effective execution of a social media marketing strategy.

Why you need a social media management workflow

The right workflow can transform your online presence from the inside out. Here are the top three ways businesses benefit from adopting a scalable social media workflow:

More time for creativity

Switching between profiles and interfaces for native content creation and scheduling can take up the bulk of a workday. Add meetings to the mix and one day’s to-do list can quickly span many. That’s valuable time lost on repetitive tasks and inconsistent processes.

A workflow that incorporates both centralized profile management and automation frees up time and resources for more creative, high impact work. These are the efforts that allow your team to harness the full potential of social.

More quality control checkpoints

A few months ago, we asked our LinkedIn followers about what keeps them up at night.

The most common answers were typos, post performance and wondering whether or not a scheduled post ever made it to publish.

A consistent social media workflow backed by powerful, AI-driven technology puts these worries to rest by creating multiple quality assurance checkpoints. These security measures do more than just mitigate errors—they also play a crucial role in risk prevention and social media governance.

More opportunities for collaboration

Without the right tools and documentation, the average social media manager task list reads more like a novel. On top of that, it’s only a matter of time before a network change makes all that documentation null and void.

These inconsistent, complex processes can make it hard to train and scale a team. Eventually, the burden will fall to one or two team members with the historical process knowledge needed to run social. It’s a one-way ticket to social media burnout.

A well-crafted workflow can simplify processes and reduce reliance on any single individual. This cross-functional visibility is critical for future-proofing your team.

How to streamline your social media workflow with Sprout

At Sprout, our customers are our north star. That’s led to some pretty cool features designed to integrate social across a business. Here are a few fan-favorite workflow upgrades that our customers use every day:

Your scheduling and publishing workflow

The old way: Manually logging in and out of native platforms to publish social posts, minimizing visibility across teams.

The Sprout way: Scheduling content across multiple channels at once using a shared content calendar designed to boost collaboration.

The Sprout Social Content Calendar is feature-rich, intuitive and flexible. It centralizes once disjointed publishing workflows into a single location, equipped with smart tools that provide real-time insights into optimization opportunities.

Simply put, it supports smarter marketing decisions while still being easy to use.

There’s a ton you can do in Sprout’s Publishing section, but here are a few of our favorite social media workflow enhancements:

• Losing sleep wondering if a scheduled post actually went live? Set up tailored Post Notifications on the Sprout Social mobile app for real-time updates on the status of outgoing messages.

• Always on the hunt for third-party content to build out your social calendar? The Sprout Social Google Chrome Extension takes the Compose window with you as you browse for relevant articles to share. This is especially useful for brands that rely on industry-specific news to boost thought leadership.
• Waiting for details on an upcoming promotion before drafting and scheduling a post? Use Calendar Notes to let your team know you have the task on your radar and that you’re waiting for next steps.

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Your content approval workflow

The old way: Tagging stakeholders in a shared document or spreadsheet for content reviews and moving things over to email if they require further discussion.

The Sprout way: An in-app content approval process that can be tailored by need, department or client—depending on your business structure.

An ironed out social media approval process prevents needless mistakes while giving time back to marketers. It’s critical to a successful social media strategy. It’s also incredibly time-consuming.

I’d estimate that Sprout’s Message Approval Workflow is single-handedly responsible for preventing millions of lengthy email threads and shared document requests. This tool creates a shared space for feedback by allowing teams to create multi-step, multi-user workflows that meet the needs of their specific organization.

Here’s what it looks like in action, depending on your role:

• Director of Social Media: Tailored notification settings help you review content in a way that works with your schedule. Choose between hourly or daily approval request notifications to keep your day running smoothly.
• Legal Compliance Specialist: Let your social team set you up with External Approver access so you can review sensitive content for legal risk.

• Account Manager: Strengthen agency-client relationships by setting up a customized approval workflow for each of your individual accounts.

Your reporting workflow

The old way: Hours spent pulling metrics from native analytics solutions, making sense of them in a spreadsheet and creating data visualizations to explain your team’s impact across the business.

The Sprout way: Automated, presentation-ready reports that directly tie social activity to business objectives.

Sprout’s social media automation tools make quick work out of cumbersome reporting tasks. Our sophisticated yet intuitive solution combines templated reports with user-friendly customization options.

Of all our reporting features, Tagging has the most potential to revolutionize your workflows. Tags allow our customers to group inbound and outbound messages for more flexible reporting on content, creative and campaigns. Use Tags to automate data collection processes and say goodbye to cherry-picking specific post-level metrics for strategic insights.

Tagging is available to all Sprout customers, but for Advanced Plan users, it’s one of many automated reporting tools. Those include:

• Automated Rules: Automatically Tag inbound and outbound messages that include specific keywords or hashtags to ensure every post is recorded and reported on.

• Scheduled Reports: Schedule weekly or monthly PDF reports to keep stakeholders informed on campaign progress.
• Report Builder: Create custom reports with metrics that matter most to your executives, with text widgets that provide the context needed to capture social’s impact.*
• Link Sharing: Share real-time, interactive report links that provide all the necessary context and data visualizations needed to increase transparency with external stakeholders.*

*These features are available with the Sprout Social Premium Analytics add-on.

Your engagement workflow

The old way: Checking all your social inboxes first thing in the morning and at the top of every work hour to respond to messages in a timely manner.

The Sprout way: Centralizing inbound messages in a single stream, while automating the process of message prioritization, off-hours support and FAQs assistance.

The Smart Inbox is the key to unlocking relationship-building experiences on social. This tool tightens your social media workflow by unifying all your brand accounts across social networks to monitor incoming messages in one manageable location.

From there, you can triage response needs, assign tasks and work with your team to create a more customer-centric social media presence.

Brands managing a high volume of inbound messages can also benefit from the following Sprout tools:

• Bot Builder (Advanced Plan): Use social chatbots designed on rule-based logic to assure customers seeking support on nights and weekends that you’ll be back online and ready to help shortly.
• Integrations: Sprout offers social media management integrations with leading CRMs like Salesforce, Marketo and more. Use these connections to provide more tailored support to key accounts and prospects.
• Social Listening: Countless potential conversations are happening around your brand and industry every day. Use the Sprout Social Listening add-on to keep tabs on the market insights that can drive your business forward.

Tips for auditing your social media manager task list

The average social media manager schedule is jam-packed. Between content creation, campaign meetings and engagement opportunities, there’s always something to do.

According to a Q1 2023 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, 81% of marketers say that a regular posting cadence on social positively impacts their business goals. To reap those benefits, you’ve got to know what to prioritize, what to delegate and what to automate.

The best time to audit your to-do list is now. Review your daily work routine using the following criteria to figure out where you can win back more time.

Automate your social media management workflow with Sprout

Social media is fast paced and always on. It’s where brand-making conversations take place and consumer sentiments are forged. If you want to keep up, you need the right toolkit.

Sprout’s unified social management platform provides powerful data, flexible tools and an intuitive user-experience that helps you harness the full power of social data. Simplify your approach to social and try Sprout for free today.

The post How to optimize your social media workflow appeared first on Sprout Social.

Say you order an item online, and it doesn’t show up. You reach out on the company’s web chat feature for help. You get a (delayed) response that requires back and forth. Every new response you receive is from a different agent who hasn’t read your message history. Unfortunately, email brings the same problem: A different agent who doesn’t see your chat history, forcing you to explain your issue from the beginning and wait even longer for a reponse. For good measure, you also reach out via social media. The response is faster, but you get hit with the same canned response multiple times, which leaves you so exhausted. You vow to never waste your time or money with this company again.

This situation, unfortunately, is common—one that results in lost customers and revenue.

Long wait times, systems that delay escalation to a live agent and repeating information multiple times are some of the most frustrating aspects of poor customer service.

In The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, more than three-quarters of consumers expect a response within 24 hours. If a brand takes too long to respond to resolve a problem, 36% of consumers say they’ll share negative customer care experiences with friends and family. Some 31% won’t complete their purchase, while 30% will buy from a competitor instead.

Without backend infrastructure to create a unified view of the customer journey, your team will struggle to provide a seamless customer experience (regardless of how many tools or agents you employ).

In this article we’ll dig into how to remove these digital silos with the tools that matter most and share use cases to help you identify the right social media management integrations for your team.

How to remove digital silos in an ecosystem of tools

Marketing teams depend on an ecosystem of tools everyday. However, these tools can create silos between departments, miscommunication between teams and information gaps that detract from the customer experience if they don’t work together. The good news is that these challenges are fixable—and don’t have to come at additional cost.

Many of the technologies your team relies on were built to integrate and share data with other tools. Integrations vary per vendor and so does the quality. We recommend looking for integrations that work in one platform, streamline relevant information and have high time-to-value (i.e., an easy set up so you start seeing results fast).

The social media market is saturated with different integrations, which is why Sprout is thoughtful about our approach. We heard many of our customers’ challenges around integrating with social media management tools and took notes. Here’s what we learned:

• Prioritize prebuilt connections. Integrations should be easy to configure, without requiring additional resources.
• Build and support integrations in-house. Rather than relying on an unknown third-party developer who can disappear if something breaks or needs an update, building in-house integrations ensures our customers are always supported.
• Simplicity is key. Integrations should make your life easier, not take months and half of your team to get up and running.
• Some things in life should really be free. Many of Sprout’s integrations come at no additional cost, rather than the exorbitant fees per integration that are common in our industry.

These principles inform how Sprout builds integrations to help our users work smarter, more efficiently and collaboratively across their business.

Which integrations are right for my business?

We get it, it can be overwhelming trying to figure out which integration is right for you, and what value it even brings. We will walk through six categories of Sprout’s integrations with questions and scenarios to help you identify which your organization could benefit from most.

1. Lead management & CRM

Win new business by generating leads from social and capturing existing contacts’ social interactions.

Q: How do you currently manage incoming leads from social media? How do you connect existing customers in your CRM to their social profiles?

Leads can slip through the cracks if you don’t have a streamlined workflow from social to a lead management solution. This also can result in missed opportunities to connect existing contacts in your CRM to their social profiles when they interact with you on social media.

Scenario: A user messages you on LinkedIn about an upcoming conference your company is hosting. Even if registration for this event isn’t live, having them in your marketing funnel will help capture and attribute a future sale. While you may already have their email information, now you’ll know their LinkedIn handle, and that they had another touchpoint with your brand specifically on social media around your annual conference.

Sprout lead management and CRM integrations: Salesforce, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365

After interacting with a user in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can link existing Salesforce users to new contacts via social. If there isn’t an existing contact in Salesforce, you can create a lead directly from Sprout to capture this new lead in your marketing funnel. Once a lead has been created or a contact linked, you can see Salesforce Contact and Case info related to this specific user directly from the reply layer in Sprout’s Smart Inbox. If the user already exists in Salesforce, you can add their social interaction and profile to their Salesforce Contact.

2. Help desk

Deliver superior customer service by enabling customer care and social media teams to collaborate and co-manage incoming messages.

Q: How do your social team and customer care team collaborate today? How is customer information and context shared between these teams, or across the marketing organization more broadly?

Customer care and help desk integrations are all about passing customer tickets and information between teams. These integrations can be a great fit if you find that customer inquiries on social media often need to be passed to a different team to answer. They can also give teams visibility into customers’ previous contact history with your organization, so you can offer faster, more personalized care.

Scenario: A customer reaches out about delayed shipping of a product they ordered. In Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can see the purchase date and order information to confirm that their purchase went through. You can then send this customer directly to your help desk tool from Sprout. The service team agent who gets this ticket is able to see the customer’s communication history on social, and any internal notes you left about their shipping problem. When the agent reaches out, they will have all the context to start immediately troubleshooting.

Sprout integrations: Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365

With Sprout’s Zendesk integration, you can create new or link to existing Zendesk users, create and manage Zendesk tickets in Sprout, edit user and ticket data in Sprout, and even comment on specific Zendesk tickets from Sprout’s Smart Inbox. Note: Zendesk is available at no additional cost for accounts on the Professional and Advanced plans.

3. Social commerce

Drive more sales opportunities by extending your storefront into social networks with the collective power of social commerce.

Q: How do you encourage your social media audience to shop directly from your social profiles? How do you see order history information when interacting with a user on social media?

If you already use Shopify or Facebook Shops, Sprout’s social commerce integration is a great way to streamline order management and customer information. If your business is an ecommerce company, enabling customers to shop directly from your outgoing posts or message responses enhances their experience by removing the extra steps between product discovery and checkout.

Scenario: Like winning the lottery, one of your products just went viral on a TikTok about simple life hacks. You immediately see an uptick of engagement and traffic on your website, but customers seem to have a hard time navigating to this specific product. Add a product link to your outgoing posts to make it frictionless for these trend hoppers to find your viral product directly, rather than getting lost and giving up on your website.

Sprout integrations: Shopify, Facebook Shops, WooCommerce

With Sprout’s Shopify integration, you can look up and link customers through Sprout’s Smart Inbox to existing Shopify customers, or add a new customer to Shopify. You will be able to see all connected customer information and order history in Shopify from within the reply layer in Sprout’s Smart Inbox. You can add product links to outgoing posts and message replies in the Smart Inbox in addition to product templates.

4. Review management

Strengthen your online reputation by monitoring and managing reviews across your business and locations in one centralized stream.

Q: How do you monitor, manage and respond to reviews across different websites?

Reviews, positive or negative, come in at any time. It’s important to not only be aware of every new review, but also make sure whoever monitors the review sites is equipped to respond (or get the review to the right person). With Sprout Review management, you can see incoming new reviews (across websites) in one place for you to prioritize, route and respond to.

Scenario: You are the sole social media marketer of a retail brand with four store locations. On top of maintaining consistent customer engagement across the brand’s core social media accounts, you have to manually check review sites (including Facebook Reviews and Google My Business) for the local brick-and-mortar stores. Responding to Google reviews can increase your visibility in local search rankings, which is critical for driving store foot traffic. Sprout Reviews provides a seamless way to monitor and manage the brand’s customer engagement all in one place. Sprout saves time and keeps you organized, so you can respond quickly and never have to worry about missing a time-sensitive review.

Sprout integrations: Google My Business, Facebook Reviews, TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, Yelp

Never miss a review with Sprout’s Google My Business review management. Set up custom notifications every time a review comes in and sort reviews into custom priority inboxes (e.g., negative reviews: two-star reviews and below). Respond in real time to reviewers from Sprout to address a poor customer experience or thank them for leaving a review.

5. Workflow & Digital Asset Management

Streamline production to publishing to maximize the reach of your social content.

Q: How do you currently collaborate with creative teams to produce social media content?

This can be a tricky process depending on what design tools your creative team uses, what format they create creative assets in and how your company shares assets. Integrating your design and asset management tools into your workflow ensures social teams use up-to-date, approved content in the right formats.

Scenario: A nonprofit is reinvesting in Instagram to entice more Millennial and Gen Z engagement, with the goal of cultivating future donors. Having relied on less visual social networks in the past, the social media manager is using Canva’s prebuilt, aesthetically pleasing templates for story and feed posts. Rather than downloading from Canva, saving on their computer, then reuploading to Sprout Social, the manager can pull saved stories and feed posts directly from Canva from the Compose publishing window in Sprout.

Sprout integrations: Dropbox, Google Drive, Canva, Slack, Feedly

With an influx of emails and daily tasks, sometimes Sprout approvals or assigned tasks can slip through the cracks on your busiest days. With Sprout’s Slack integrations, you can stay up to date by customizing which Sprout notifications you want to receive in Slack and which channels you want to be alerted in.

6. Website & URL tracking

Determine the impact of your digital campaigns to track the ROI of your social content and optimize accordingly.

Q: How do you measure referral traffic from social media?

While there are a lot of incredible link tracking tools out there, having to separately build UTM parameters for your most used links every time you publish on social media can be frustrating. Sprout’s Google Analytics and Bitly integrations bake this link creation step into your publishing workflow.

Scenario: For the upcoming year, your team is launching a global brand campaign that has slightly different promotions for each target market. You need to track the performance of the campaign overall, while also comparing the performance of the more localized efforts. Setting up specific UTM parameters in Sprout, you can break down from social the web traffic and performance each target market drove, while also seeing the overall campaign performance.

Sprout integrations: Google Analytics, Bitly

With Sprout’s Google Analytics integration, you can create tracking rules to automatically append parameters to your links in the posts you share in Sprout. These parameters then add the tracking results in Google Analytics (which you can also see in Sprout’s Google Analytics Report). You can create and edit URL tracking rules within Sprout, which will then automatically be applied in Sprout’s Compose publishing window when the URL in question is added to a post.

7. Business Intelligence

Get a comprehensive view of your data and performance to make data-driven decisions across your organization.

Q: What is the importance of integrating social data into business intelligence?

Social data is the bedrock of business intelligence because it brings context to organization-wide data. It uncovers audience insights needed to interpret trends, develop predictions and create informed, data-driven decisions.

With Sprout Social’s Salesforce integration and Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can leverage the power of social data to create a 360-degree view of your customer and inform wider business insights.

Scenario: Your brand has a highly sophisticated social presence that’s grown to include customer care. You want to analyze agent performance across data sources to inform your marketing strategy, product development and other organizational focuses. Your team currently uses Tableau to aggregate marketing and customer care data, but without social data, a big slice of the customer view is missing.

Sprout integrations: Tableau, Salesforce

Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector combines social data with other data sources in an omnichannel view, offering a unified source of truth through automated and consolidated reporting and analytics. With customizable visuals and metric defintions, you’re able to slice the data based on your KPIs and business needs to create a compelling data story with actionable insights.

Get more from your martech stack

Integrating the tools you rely on most makes your team more informed and efficient, and your customer experience stronger. Sprout is built to remove digital silos, so our customers immediately tap into the robust power of social.

While organizing and integrating your ecosystem of tools can sound overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be.

Want to learn more about Sprout’s business integrations? Sign up for a demo today.

The post 7 social media management integrations brands need appeared first on Sprout Social.

This global partnership means Salesforce customers can make an enhanced transition to manage their full social media presence and social customer care operations through Sprout’s award-winning social suite.

As Ryan Strynatka, SVP & COO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud says, “Salesforce is excited to partner with Sprout. We’re on a journey to empower companies to create a 360° view of their customers, and by integrating with Sprout’s industry leading social media management platform we will help our customers deliver success now.”

In this article, we explain how this partnership will help you maximize your brand’s performance.

Why Salesforce chose to partner with Sprout Social

Salesforce and Sprout both care deeply about our customers’ success, and at the forefront of our decision to partner was the value we can provide our joint customers.

Social is still a young industry that evolves everyday, with new trends and use cases that lead to new business requirements. Because social is Sprout’s expertise, Salesforce recognized that Sprout can help companies elevate their social media management and take advantage of our strong network partnerships and integrations. We help more than 34,000 of the world’s best brands integrate their customer touch points, so Salesforce knows we can help their customers stay on pace with the emerging changes in the social landscape.

Sprout enables Salesforce customers to better connect with their audiences, streamline workflows, deliver excellent social customer care and turn social data into meaningful insights—all from one platform.

Here are the three core customer benefits that drove our partnership.

1. Customer care at scale

Customers are turning to social as the first line of communication with brands. Social and customer care teams must be ready to meet consumers’ changing expectations.

Sprout’s platform helps brands connect with customers quickly and efficiently so they can better address their needs and build greater brand loyalty. With Sprout’s streamlined single code base, our platform is scalable and delivers innovations faster, allowing brands the agility to onboard with ease. It is intuitive for practitioners—which makes it easy to adopt and use every day. For Salesforce customers, customer care representatives are able to respond from either Sprout or Service Cloud, with real-time synchronization between the two.

Keep reading to learn more about our comprehensive Service Cloud integration.

2. More than 100 new features every year

Given the speed at which social evolves, brands can’t afford to be left behind. Marketers and customer care representatives must be able to engage their customers across social networks. To do that, they have to stay in sync with the latest platform updates and emerging trends.

That’s why integrations with both social networks and technology partners are the core of Sprout’s platform. Our partner integrations, with platforms like Salesforce, allow our customers to easily connect tools across their technology stacks and create one simplified experience. And our network integrations with top social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn help us keep up with the speed of social–adding new functionality to Sprout as each social network evolves. In 2022 alone, Sprout released more than 120 major product launches with the help of our partners.

Sprout offers highly requested features from existing Social Studio customers.

Partner integrations:

• TikTok
• Instagram Reels and direct messages
• Yelp
• Glassdoor
• Canva
• WhatsApp
• Slack
• Reddit Listening

Platform features:

• Comments on paid posts
• Optimized publishing times
• Unified social scheduling and comment tagging
• Campaign reporting
• Customizable business hours
• Employee advocacy

3. #1 Ranked social media suite for enterprise companies

Sprout was recently recognized by G2’s 2022 Summer Reports as the #1 social media suite across enterprise, mid-market and small business, and a leader across six award categories: Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management, Social Media Suites, Social Media Analytics, Social Customer Service and Hashtag Monitoring. The winners were selected based on reviews from real social users.

Sprout was also named a Momentum Leader in each award category, a recognition that signifies our high-growth trajectory based on user satisfaction scores, employee growth and digital presence.

How the Sprout Social Salesforce partnership enhances our platform experience

Salesforce trusts that Sprout is the right platform to help enterprise companies deliver relationship-building services, reach their audience and capture data that drives strategic decision making.

Through this partnership, we will elevate our award-winning platform to continue to innovate with Salesforce products and provide an all-in-one social management and customer care experience.

Sprout’s integrations with Salesforce

To easily build a single view of the customer, Sprout offers a robust integration with Salesforce solutions integral to your business including Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, Tableau, Slack and Marketing Cloud Intelligence data.

We built a sophisticated logic layer that connects Salesforce to Sprout, which means your customer data can easily be passed and stored between both platforms. This component of our integration—paired with our product automation—makes customer care seamless for your team by creating an all-encompassing view of your customer.

For example, in Sprout, Salesforce Contact information shows you the name, social profile, email address and phone number of each person who contacts your brand on social. You can track past conversations across customer service channels so your social support team is empowered to deliver omnichannel customer care.

Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout says, “Salesforce is the global CRM leader with a footprint across sales, service, marketing, commerce and data intelligence. Powerful, elegant integrations from Sprout into Salesforce give our customers an unprecedented ability to build closer connections with customers and operationalize social at scale.”

These comprehensive integrations make it possible for customers to smoothly migrate to Sprout. With the help of our professional services team—who are well-versed in Social Studio and Sprout—you can make the transition with little to no downtime. And from now through January 2023, we’re offering that professional services support complimentary for new Sprout customers.

Plan for the future of social media management

Social media isn’t slowing down. Stay on top of your social strategy by planning for long-term social media management success.

Transform your social media management and customer care strategy with Sprout Social’s comprehensive Salesforce integration. Get in touch with our team to schedule your demo today.

The post Salesforce and Sprout Social are ushering in a new era of social media customer care appeared first on Sprout Social.

But when it comes to digging into your Instagram metrics, it may not always be clear where to start.

This article will introduce you to Instagram insights, discuss why it’s so important to measure them and showcase the top eight Instagram metrics to watch.

• • What are Instagram metrics
  • Why track Instagram metrics
  • How to view Instagram metrics
  • Instagram metrics to track

What are Instagram metrics

Instagram metrics are measurements of performance that let you in on how your Instagram content is doing and how your audience is responding to it. Instagram metrics tell you things like how many people viewed or interacted with your content.

We’ll talk about specific metrics later on, but some of the key Instagram metrics you should be measuring include impressions, reach and follower growth.

Why you should track your Instagram metrics

If you manage your Instagram account without ever looking at your analytics, you’ll be left in the dark when it comes to understanding the results of your efforts.

These efforts likely coincide with company or department goals (or even just your own Instagram KPIs), which will naturally help inform which Instagram metrics you should be reporting on.

Therefore, when answering the “why,” you’ll also reveal your key IG metrics to report on. Here are three reasons why you should be tracking your Instagram metrics.

1. Instagram metrics let you know which content your audience prefers

If you’re testing different various types of content, you need to check out your post metrics to see which types are getting the most attention. Having this knowledge helps you to build out an Instagram content strategy that resonates with your audience by consistently posting their favorite types of content.

2. Instagram metrics keep your strategy in line with company objectives

If your current goals are to increase your company’s follower count, you’ll want to make sure you’re actually making that happen. Same goes for if you’re wanting to increase story views or post engagement. You need to be able to check the metrics to measure growth to see if you’re hitting your KPIs.

3. Instagram metrics help you measure specific campaign success

If you’re running a major campaign on Instagram (let’s say for a product launch, holiday sale or important partnership), you want to know how well the campaign is performing. Your Instagram metrics let you see this so you know if you need to adjust your messaging or not.

How to view insights on Instagram

In order to view insights and metrics on Instagram, you need to have an Instagram business or creator account. There are a couple of different ways to access your insights from the Instagram app. (Keep in mind that these are only accessible on the mobile app, and not on desktop.)

First, head to your profile and tap on the Professional dashboard button. The very first option is your account insights. Tap See all to access your Instagram metrics.

Second, you can tap the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of your profile and then tap Insights to access them directly.

You can find all of the below metrics inside your Instagram Insights—or you can take advantage of a third-party analytics tool like Sprout Social to get even more in-depth reporting.

8 Instagram metrics you need to track performance

If you’re still feeling a little lost, don’t worry, we’ve outlined several key Instagram metrics to help you get a feel for what to look for and where to find it.

And as a bonus, we’ll even make sure you know exactly where to capture most of these Instagram metrics within Sprout Social.

1. Impressions

What this metric tells you: How many times your content is being seen.

Your impressions let you know how many individual times a piece of content has been viewed.

This is useful because a lot of impressions can mean that a certain piece of content was well-liked, and people wanted to come back to it. However, when it comes to Instagram ads, too many impressions can lead to ad fatigue and reduce conversions.

Quickly locate impressions in Sprout

To find your impressions in Sprout, head over to your Instagram Business Profiles Report. Within the Instagram Impressions section, you’ll see the total and percent change over the specified time frame.

2. Reach

What this metric tells you: How many people are seeing your content.

If you think reach sounds a lot like impressions, you’re not alone.

These two metrics are similar but confusing enough that we’ve dug deeper into these topics in great detail via Reach vs Impressions and Instagram Impressions (if you’re inclined to learn more).

To keep it brief here, all you need to know is that your Instagram reach indicates actual views of your content while impressions means it was displayed but may not have generated a click or any other form of engagement.

Quickly locate reach in Sprout

Your reach is located in the exact same space as your impressions. You can see total and percent change right below your impressions metric, making it easy to see both at once.

3. Engagements per follower

What this metric tells you: Engagement with your content relative to your follower count.

While it may be tempting to compare your Instagram performance to that of the big guns (think Oreo, Starbucks, Nike, etc), you don’t want to do that unless your audience size is roughly the same.

Why?

Because brands with millions of followers should be racking up thousands of likes. However, if you have just a couple thousand followers, you’re naturally not as likely to accrue similar results in sum, but that doesn’t mean you’re not still performing exactly as you should be.

And that’s where engagement rate (or engagements per follower) comes in and can help make sure you’re evaluating your account fairly.

The formula for measuring engagement rate on Instagram looks something like this:

Total Engagements / Follower Count * 100 = Engagement Rate

Reporting on this metric over time will give you a sense of overall performance trends, though you can certainly calculate it for specific posts as well to get an idea of the types of content that resonates with your audience.

How to measure Instagram engagement rate with Sprout

In order to find this Instagram metric, you’ll want to first gather the total amount of engagement you received for a given time frame.

Within Sprout, navigate to the Reports tab and under Profiles by Network, click Instagram Business Profiles.

Near the bottom of the Overview tab, you may notice a section with engagement rate already calculated, but note that this rate uses impressions (not follower count).

4. Follower growth

What this metric tells you: Whether your follower count is steadily increasing or declining.

When evaluating a growing (or shrinking) Instagram follower count, context is important, especially if you’re experiencing random spikes or drop offs due to something like a one-time promotion or paid social ads.

Make sure to measure your follower count over time and keep the above context examples in mind so you know exactly what has contributed to the growing numbers. Ideally you’re seeing sustained, gradual growth over time, which indicates that people are liking what they see from your content and they want to make sure they see more of it.

Additionally, understanding what is or isn’t working is also essential within the context of your overall Instagram marketing strategy. You want to make sure you know the types of content to continue creating and which may need tweaking.

Though total followers may be seen as a vanity metric to some, it ultimately represents the potential reach of your content. This impacts the performance of other IG metrics like engagement, so continued focus on organically growing your audience is still as important as ever.

How to measure follower growth with Sprout

Sprout enables you to see all kinds of information about your follower growth, from a comprehensive growth chart to percentage growth. Select the time period during which you want to measure your follower growth and then see the differences in followers gained and lost for that reporting period with the Instagram Business Profiles overview. You can then dive into the Post Performance Report, using the same time period, to specifically see what content resonated and what didn’t perform so well.

5. Comments received

What this metric tells you: How engaging your content is.

There’s a major difference between likes and comments when it comes to evaluating Instagram performance metrics.

Likes are fairly easy to dish out and oftentimes you can’t be 100% certain a post was truly seen by your followers. With comments, it’s crystal clear. Whether positive or negative, comments left on your posts are an indication that your content had some kind of impact, or at least enough for the individual to take the extra step to leave feedback.

This type of engagement, especially when positive, is a strong factor in community building and establishing a loyal fanbase. Anyone can double tap with ease but those who go out of their way to comment are the ones to keep an eye on.

Managing comments in Sprout

Depending on the size of your Instagram account, it may be manageable to simply review your posts one by one to view and record comment counts. But with Sprout, the work is done for you.

Using the Instagram Business Profiles Report mentioned earlier, comment totals over a specified time period appear alongside other engagement metrics. You can then cross-reference comment counts with the actual feedback being received to determine sentiment and whether or not your content is working as desired.

6. Most engaged hashtags

What this metric tells you: Hashtag performance.

While the fickle Instagram algorithm may sometimes wreak havoc on your content strategy, hashtags have proven to be one of the most reliable ways to keep your momentum going.

By using hashtags that are relevant to your industry or what your audience is searching for you can help keep reach and engagement in check.

Instagram users can include up to 30 hashtags on each post, but be sure to use that quota wisely through research and learning from performance over time. You may be surprised by how often less is more when it comes to hashtags.

Measuring hashtag performance in Sprout

To maximize this particular IG metric, you’ll want to spend time reviewing your Instagram Outbound Hashtag Performance within Sprout.

As displayed in the following chart, you get a full breakdown of your hashtags organized by both usage and engagement in the Instagram Business Profiles Report. You can use this data to inform future hashtag decisions, especially when it comes to engagement performance relative to other efforts.

7. Referral traffic

What this metric tells you: Instagram’s impact on your website traffic.

Referral traffic describes the people who come to your domain from other sites, without finding you on a search engine. When someone visits a link from social media or a website and they end up on your, Google analytics recognizes the visitor as a referral. You can also use UTM codes to track precisely where these visits come from.

A common tactic for social media posts involves linking out to a website’s specific landing page, product page or even just the home page depending on the type of action you’d like your followers to take upon seeing your post.

But on Instagram, this can be a bit more challenging because the only place to display a clickable link is inside your bio. You also have the option to include URLs within your captions, but either way, tracking referral traffic from Instagram can be tricky.

How to track referral traffic

As mentioned, because Instagram doesn’t allow clickable links within your posts, one great way to track referral traffic from a particular campaign is with UTM parameters. UTM parameters are tags you can tack onto a URL that lets Google Analytics (or other tools) know exactly where the user referred from.

If you’re implementing any landing pages specifically for an IG campaign, you’ll want to read up on how to set up your own UTM parameters to ensure they’ll work correctly.

You can also check your social network referral traffic in Google Analytics to see how much traffic Instagram has sent your way, including distinguishing between Instagram (your bio link clicks) and Instagram Stories (your story swipe ups).

8. Instagram Stories metrics

What this metric tells you: How popular and engaging your Instagram Stories are.

Arguably one of the most essential components to current Instagram marketing strategies involves the use of Stories.

These are useful in a number of ways, most notably because they provide another dimension of content for your audience. The disappearing nature of the photos and videos gives you even more freedom and flexibility than your feed does.

When it comes to Instagram Stories, there are a few good metrics to keep tabs on such as Story Replies, Story Taps Back and Forward, Story Exits and Impressions.

Using Sprout to view Instagram Story stats

If any of the above metrics interest you, locate the Instagram Stories Performance section of the Instagram Business Profiles Report in Sprout to view data for each connected profile.

Start tracking your Instagram metrics today

With all the essential IG metrics in hand, you’re ready to start reporting on progress. Be sure to use Sprout’s full offering of Instagram Analytics to go even deeper into your performance.

If you’re not already using Sprout, take advantage of a free 30-day trial or request a personalized demo to get started today.

The post 8 essential Instagram metrics to measure performance appeared first on Sprout Social.

Once it locks into place, you’re left with more than just a complete picture of consumer needs.

When searching for your company’s missing piece, an informed decision is the best decision. Kicking off your selection process with a dedicated research phase can pave the way for better process and performance outcomes.

The tool that takes your team’s efforts to the next level is out there. Keep reading to find out what you need to know when choosing an enterprise social media management software.

3 things you need to know before choosing enterprise social media management software

Enterprise software purchases are a team sport. Throughout the buying process, you’ll likely have to work with several stakeholders across your business, from IT to HR and beyond.

You can ensure that all stakeholder concerns are addressed during the vendor selection process with just a few hours of prep work. Here’s what to outline to set your company up for social success:

1. Your goals

Why does your business need a new enterprise social media management software?

This may sound like an easy question, but asking it is a major step in ensuring everyone is on the same page. For example, your customer service team may have different priorities than those operating on the marketing side. Defining your goals creates clarity, which leads to more informed decisions.

Schedule a kickoff meeting with all your stakeholders to decide on top priorities. Remember to keep longevity in mind so you won’t have to repeat this process at the end of your contract terms.

2. Your governance and compliance policies

When you think of all the bells and whistles you want out of your next enterprise social media solution, governance features probably don’t come to mind. While they’re not the flashiest tools, they are incredibly important when it comes to eliminating risk.

Work with your IT team to outline the social media governance concerns and requirements you’ll need to discuss with potential vendors. Preparing and sharing a compliance-focused scoresheet before signing up for demos can save both parties time and effort.

Pro tip: Outlining these concerns in a social media RFP helps vendors to remove themselves from your process if they can’t meet your security needs.

3. Your priority integrations

Social data can revolutionize how your business seeks and acts on consumer insights. But if it lives on software that’s isolated from your tech stack, you won’t be getting the full picture.

Identify which social media management integrations matter most when creating wow-worthy customer experiences online. Rank them by importance and mark which are non-negotiable. As you move through vendor evaluations, this will help you identify which software will be most able to meet your needs.

The enterprise social media management tools your business needs in 2022

By now, you should have all the information you need to choose a tool that complements both your existing processes and tech stack. It’s finally time to create your vendor shortlist.

Sprout Social offers a full suite of tools that can elevate your social media strategy in 2022 and beyond. We work with a roster of partners to ensure your social media processes are integrated into everything from internal communications to customer retention.

Here’s how Sprout can work alongside the rest of your enterprise toolkit to help your business measure and show social media impact.

Enterprise social media management: Sprout Social

Brands like Allegiant Air, Purdue University and more use Sprout to power cross-functional social strategies that support a variety of outcomes. Our unified platform provides flexible tools and an intuitive user experience to scale social across departments and business units.

We could provide you with a whole laundry list of reasons to consider Sprout when selecting a new enterprise social media management tool. In the interest of time, we’ll stick to the top three features enterprise organizations need for org-wide strategic alignment:

• Data analytics: Sprout’s analytics tools provide deep metrics, flexible customizations and features that increase transparency for faster reporting across all social networks (even TikTok).
• Market intelligence: Our social listening tool can help uncover business-critical insights that identify industry gaps and improve brand health.
• Customer care: Integrations with CRM and commerce tools support superior social customer service experiences that align with the expectations of the modern consumer.

Enterprise organizations can schedule a demo to discuss their needs and goals with a member of Team Sprout. From there, we’ll take you on a live product tour so you can learn more about how to get the most out of the platform.

Enterprise social network: Slack

What is it? Slack is a team collaboration tool that is basically the professional equivalent of AOL Instant Messenger. Companies use this enterprise social network to promote internal communication through direct messaging and group channels.

How does it work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s pre-built integration with Slack helps social teams keep up with approval processes and task flows in real time.

Once a Slack Workspace is connected to a Sprout instance, users can choose which Sprout notifications they’d like to receive via Slack. This is a game changer for time-sensitive engagement opportunities and lengthy approval workflows.

Lead generation: Marketo

What is it? Marketo is a lead management platform that helps marketers nurture prospects and target qualified lead-to-revenue opportunities.

How does it work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s integration with Marketo helps social teams send warm leads over to sales quickly and with all the necessary context needed to get the conversation started on the right foot.

Users can create and edit leads from within the Sprout platform. This creates a richer lead profile that accounts for a prospect’s full experience with your brand.

CRM: Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HubSpot

What are they? Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are like digital rolodexes that house all of a business’ prospect, lead and customer data.

Sprout integrates with three enterprise CRM tools: HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce.

How does Salesforce work with Sprout Social? Earlier this year, Sprout Social and Salesforce announced a partnership designed to help enterprise organizations manage their end-to-end social media presence.

Sprout’s integration with Salesforce allows users to edit leads, cases and contacts through the Sprout platform. This easy-to-use, pre-built integration supports alignment between marketing, sales and support teams so everyone can take advantage of critical social insights.

How does Microsoft Dynamics 365 work with Sprout Social? Our enterprise social media management solution integrates with Dynamics 365 to assist with lead generation and support case management.

How does HubSpot work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s bi-directional integration with HubSpot helps social support agents provide superior customer care across networks.

Agents can quickly check in on the status of a support request through both Sprout Social and HubSpot. Marketers and support staff can use this visibility to apply a personal touch throughout a customer’s interaction with their brand on social.

Workflow and digital asset management: Dropbox, Feedly and Canva

What are they? Creating a single piece of content can require several video clips, graphics and reference materials. Workflow and digital asset management tools centralize these files in a single location for easy storage and sharing.

Sprout Social integrates with three workflow and digital asset management tools: 

• Dropbox is a cloud-based file hosting service that helps teams share files and folders easily.
• Feedly is a news aggregator that allows users to organize and research stories by topic.
• Canva is an online graphic design tool that can be used to create social media posts, videos, presentation decks and more.

How does Dropbox work with Sprout Social? Sprout’s integration with Dropbox streamlines content creation by allowing users to access Dropbox files from directly within the Compose tool.

How does Feedly work with Sprout Social? News aggregators can level up an enterprise social media management tool by creating a direct stream of content inspiration in one, centralized location.

Users who connect their Feedly account to Sprout Social can access their personal RSS feeds from the Feeds tab. This content can be used as third-party social shares or for extra doses of inspiration.

How does Canva work with Sprout Social? If your team relies on Canva to punch up your visuals, then a Canva integration is a must-have.

Sprout’s Canva integration allows users to import design files from design folders for beautiful, on-brand social creative, every time.

Customer experience: Zendesk

What is Zendesk? Zendesk is customer service software that streamlines support processes and productivity.

How does Zendesk work with Sprout Social? Findings from the 2022 Sprout Social Index™ show that taking too long with social customer care can have serious consequences. When it happens, more than one-third of consumers say that they’ll share the negative experience with friends and family.

Sprout’s integration with Zendesk supports frictionless customer care experiences for both your customers and internal teams. The two-way integration allows social teams to open a support ticket from the Sprout platform with all the context needed to create high-quality customer experiences.

Reputation management: Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business

What are they? Social proof is a psychological phenomenon in digital marketing that has both risks and rewards. While seeking feedback can open your company up to critique, positive feedback is too powerful to miss out on.

Enterprise businesses face a unique challenge when it comes to reputation management. The larger your company, the more customer touch points. More customer touch points leave more opportunities for feedback.

Using social media reputation management tools like Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business can help enterprise businesses be proactive with reviews, even at high volumes.

How does Sprout work with Glassdoor, Tripadvisor, Yelp and Google My Business? The Reviews tab in Sprout Social centralizes feedback from all four sites.

Enterprise businesses can create multiple filtered views to triage and respond to reviews across channels. You can also report on reviews by volume and star rating from the Reports tab.

Social commerce: Shopify and WooCommerce

What are they? Social commerce—the buying and selling of goods and services within a social media platform—is creating brand new revenue opportunities for enterprise organizations.

To sell directly on social media, marketers typically must link their ecommerce platform to their enterprise social media management tool. Sprout integrates with two ecommerce platforms: Shopify and WooCommerce.

How does Sprout work with Shopify and WooCommerce? Marketers can set up their social commerce shops by integrating their preferred ecommerce platform with Sprout Social.

Once the platforms are connected, you can curate your shop by selecting which listings you’d like to promote on social. Listings can also be promoted in scheduled content using custom product links, turning social into your new storefront.

Enterprise social media management is your tech stack’s missing piece

Social data can do more than just connect the dots between strategy and ROI. When it’s used in collaboration with other enterprise tools, it can provide the insights needed to drive proactive decisions.

To put it simply: When you invest in social data, you invest in future-proofing your business for the road ahead.

Use Sprout Social to create clear links between your social strategy and business impact. Learn more about our enterprise-level social media management software today.

The post Enterprise social media: 15 tools your organization should use in 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

That’s where Twitter scheduling comes in.

Scheduling Tweets ensures your content is posted when your followers are more likely active and can significantly improve your Twitter engagement and reach. It also ensures you don’t have to be “on” at all times of the day to manually Tweet when your audience is most active.

In this guide, we’ll discuss the importance of scheduling Twitter posts and why it makes sense for your Twitter marketing strategy. And to help you get started, you’ll also learn how to schedule Tweets—with and without Sprout Social’s powerful scheduling tool.

Why should you schedule Tweets?

Why should you care about scheduling posts on Twitter and why does it matter for your business? Let’s break down the reasons Twitter scheduling makes sense for businesses.

1. Improved organization and productivity

Scheduling Twitter posts ahead of time allows you to organize your Twitter publishing efforts so you can remain productive during the day. For example, if you have to Tweet multiple times throughout the day, scheduling Tweets means you can continue your daily tasks without interruption.

With Twitter scheduling, you can dedicate a couple of hours each day or week to schedule your content in batches. This keeps you and your content organized well ahead of time and helps maintain productivity.

2. Maintaining your posting schedule

Planning and scheduling your Tweets can be useful if you’re trying to establish or maintain a content calendar. By planning out Tweets for the week or month ahead, you have the opportunity to create a consistent posting schedule where there’s no risk of forgetting to send out a Tweet at a certain time.

So rest easy knowing you can publish your Tweets based on your pre-planned schedule, whether it’s around a specific campaign or seasonal content.

3. Consistent cross-platform messaging

If your social media strategy involves sharing a similar message across all your social media accounts, Twitter scheduling simplifies the process. This also makes sense when you’re managing multiple Twitter accounts. You can schedule your posts to go out at the same time across all social media channels to maintain consistency.

4. Running tests on optimal post timing

Schedule Tweets to go out at different times throughout the week to find out which timing works best for your audience. You might be surprised to discover when your audience is most active. Using Sprout’s research on the best time to post is a good starting point but can vary based on your industry or audience.

5. Geo-targeting Tweets

Scheduling Twitter posts also makes sense when you have to target audiences in specific locations. You can schedule your Tweets to go out at the optimal send times for different time zones. This improves your chances of reaching the right audience at the right time no matter where they live. This goes back to finding the best time to Tweet according to your audience, and testing on social media can help.

How to schedule Tweets on Twitter

As of May 2020, users are now able to schedule Tweets through the Ads section of the Twitter dashboard. Scheduled Tweets can either be organic or Promoted, but users will need a Twitter Ads account to use the scheduling feature.

Step 1:

Log in to your Twitter Ads account and select the Tweet Composer option under the Creatives tab.

Step 2:

Write out your Tweet, add any media you want to it and uncheck Promoted only if you want this to be an organic Tweet on your feed.

Step 3:

Select the drop-down menu right next to the Tweet button at the top right of your screen and click Schedule.

Step 4:

Select the date and time when you want your Tweet to go live.

Step 5:

Click Schedule to finish the scheduling. Check the Create another option if you want to immediately schedule a new Tweet.

How to schedule Tweets with Sprout

The native Twitter scheduler is a great tool for the platform, but if you have to manage brand accounts across various social media platforms, it’s nice to have something more comprehensive. Sprout is a robust social media publishing platform that you can use to schedule your posts for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Using Sprout, you can schedule your social posts weeks and months ahead. And since you can visualize your posting calendar, it’s much easier to work on campaigns and promotions. The tool even lets you schedule recurring posts to simplify your planning and productivity.

Here’s how you can use Sprout to schedule Tweets:

Step 1:

From the Publishing dashboard, click on the blue Compose button at the top right-hand corner of the screen. This will open up a New Post window, where you can compose your Tweet.

Step 2: 

If you’ve connected multiple Twitter profiles to Sprout, choose the Twitter profile where you want to publish your Tweet from the Profile Picker drop-down menu at the top. Then compose your Tweet, including images and/or videos as well.

Step 3:

Under your post in the Composition window, you’ll find a When to post option next to a drop-down menu. Click on the drop-down button and select a Specific date and time.

Step 4: 

Select the date(s) and time when you want your Tweet to publish. If you’re not too sure about what time to schedule your posts, select Use Optimal Times, and Sprout will provide you with options for the best time to post based on your Tweet performance history. You can also select multiple dates and times for recurring Tweets.

Step 5: 

Click Schedule. And that’s it! You’ve scheduled your Tweet using Sprout.

How to schedule Tweets on mobile

It’s just as easy to schedule Tweets via the Sprout Social mobile app. Start by downloading the app from the App Store or Google Play Store and log into your Sprout Social account. Then follow these steps:

Step 1:

Tap the Publishing dashboard from the top dropdown menu.

Step 2:

Tap the Compose icon in the bottom right corner of your calendar.

Step 3:

Type out your Tweet and add any additional media.

Step 4:

Tap Schedule from the top dropdown menu, select your preferred date and time, then tap Save.

How to view scheduled Tweets

Looking back at your currently scheduled Tweets can help you make sure that you haven’t left any out from your planned content calendar. You also may want to go back and edit or reschedule your scheduled Tweets if a new promotion suddenly comes up and you need to create new content.

How to view scheduled Tweets on Twitter

To view any Tweets you’ve scheduled through Twitter itself, you’ll need to head back to your Twitter Ads account. Click the Creatives tab, then click Tweets from the dropdown.

At first, it automatically shows you your Promoted Tweets. But if you click the Tweets: Promoted only dropdown, you’ll be able to switch to see your scheduled Tweets.

If you hover over each Tweet, you’ll see the option to edit, duplicate or preview that Tweet.

How to view scheduled Tweets in Sprout Social

After scheduling your Tweets using Sprout, you can view them in the Publishing Calendar. There are a number of different ways you can view these Tweets, depending on what makes the most sense for your needs.

List view

Here, you can view your scheduled posts in list format in order of when they’ll go out.

Week view

Or you can use the week view to visualize the posts you’ve scheduled throughout that particular week. The weekly view also helps you visualize the post volume for the current and upcoming week, and what order posts will be published, in case you want to make some adjustments.

From here, you can easily switch things around by moving the cards. For instance, if you see that you have too many Tweets going out on Tuesday, you can drag one of the cards to schedule the post for another day of the week.

Month view

If you select the month view, you can visualize your publishing schedule for the entire month. You’ll be able to see how many posts you have scheduled on a certain day and on which platform. This is a great way to review your monthly publishing calendar and find out if there’s any need for adjustments, especially based around different marketing campaigns or holidays.

How to schedule multiple Tweets

If you have a lot of Tweets to schedule, the idea of sitting at your desk and scheduling one by one likely seems like a bit of a nightmare. Luckily, with Sprout’s bulk scheduling capabilities, you don’t have to worry about that.

When creating your content, do so in a spreadsheet. You can use either Excel or Google Sheets, but if you’re incorporating emoji into your Twitter content, you’ll want to opt for Google Sheets to avoid formatting issues.

You’ll need to format your spreadsheet with the following column headers:

• date: In dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy format, depending on your import preferences.
• time_24hr: Place in 24-hour format. Each of your Tweets must be scheduled at least 10 minutes apart from each other as well as at least 10 minutes after the time you’re uploading your spreadsheet to Sprout.
• message_text: Your Tweet content. Remember that it must be less than 280 characters. If you need to include a link, paste it into this column.
• public_image_url: If you’re adding an image to your Tweet, use this column to paste the link to your public image URL. Consider uploading it to your CMS and grabbing the link from there.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet, export it as a CSV. Then you’ll head to the Publishing dashboard in your Sprout Social account before clicking to the Calendar view. Then click the three dots to access Bulk Post Import.

Once you click that, you’ll be taken to the Import Posts dashboard so you can drag and drop your CSV to upload your Tweets. Select your Twitter account then make sure you have the correct date format based on how you formatted dates within your spreadsheet.

Then click Start Import to begin importing your newly scheduled Tweets.

If there are any issues with some of your Tweets, you can download a CSV of any that weren’t able to be imported so that you can fix the formatting errors and re-upload the remaining content.

This makes it incredibly easy to schedule an entire month’s worth of Twitter content at once, without having to spend your entire day scheduling Tweet after Tweet.

Why wait? Schedule Tweets today

The post How to schedule Tweets to drive more engagement appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to the 2021 Sprout Social Index, 31% of customers prefer to leave feedback on social media—and Allegiant’s social-dedicated Customer Relations team knows the importance of staying on top of customer comments.

We have drastically increased how many messages we’re replying to across platforms, especially on Facebook. And we’re servicing more customers even though our team has been consistently the same size.

Alyssa Salazar
Customer Relations Manager

“Having social media allows us to respond to and help retain our customers, as well as build brand loyalty,” said Allegiant’s Customer Relations Manager Alyssa Salazar.

The airline industry has been hard-hit during the pandemic, with ticket sales dropping and customer needs skyrocketing. Since 2020, Sprout Social has helped Allegiant organize thousands of messages, collaborate more easily and focus on customer retention. Amid the pandemic, Sprout empowered Allegiant to continue to connect people.

Forwarding the gold (wings) standard of customer care with Instagram DMs

With around 15% of their customer inquiries coming through social, Allegiant’s team knows that a seamless customer care experience is crucial—to them and their customers.

Salazar manages a team of customer service agents who provide coverage seven days a week answering messages on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The sharp increase in messages has meant an increased need for speed. In Q3 2019, the Customer Relations team responded to 8,185 messages across their social channels. In Q3 2021, that number nearly doubled to 14,490.

Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox helped them take off.

“We have drastically increased how many messages we’re replying to across platforms, especially on Facebook,” Salazar said. “And we’re servicing more customers even though our team has been consistently the same size.”

Having Instagram Direct Messages (DMs) in the Smart Inbox has also helped them, especially considering the fact that 35% of US consumers turn to Instagram for customer service. Salazar’s team used to answer Instagram messages natively on an iPad, limiting responsiveness and speed.

“Access to Instagram DMs has helped us tremendously,” Salazar said. “Our agents have all given us positive feedback about how this is pushing us forward, making our team more efficient and serving our customers faster.”

We have certain types of responses that we use for different questions. Tagging based on specific keywords clarifies what the issue or concern is about so we can quickly respond.

Alyssa Salazar
Customer Relations Manager

Tagging to avoid turbulent teamwork

With hundreds of messages divided across agents, staying organized is crucial. On top of maintaining speed with pre-crafted answer templates, Allegiant Air uses Sprout’s robust internal tagging capabilities to identify duplicate messages, prioritize DMs and organize workflows.

“When the agents start their day, they remove any duplicate messages and start assigning messages to themselves to work on,” Salazar said.

Using a tagging system featuring rules built around keywords helps them quickly identify what a customer needs and how to respond.

“We have certain types of responses that we use for different questions, so tagging based on specific keywords clarifies what the issue or concern is about so we can quickly respond.”

Building brand loyalty with customers on the ground and 30,000 feet up

“We’re not necessarily an everyday type of product,” said Content Marketing Specialist Tiana Schenk. “But we want to be top-of-mind when someone books a trip, so that we can connect travelers to the people, places and memories that matter most.”

It’s tough to build brand loyalty when your product isn’t one you use every day. “COVID-19 has definitely shifted how we operate and function as a company overall,” Salazar said.

Staying on top of inquiries on social has helped Allegiant better communicate options available to customers based on company policies and other factors. In some cases, that means offering customers options that allow them to maintain their ticket for later use, while allowing the airline to maintain crucial sales.

Sprout is also integral to another piece of the brand loyalty puzzle—celebrating customers who celebrate Allegiant. Sourcing and sharing user-generated content has become a smoother, more collaborative process between the Content Marketing and Customer Relations teams by assigning tasks in Sprout.

“When folks on the Customer Relations team interact with customers or when we search for content to publish on our social channels, having the ability to simply assign a task over to the Content Marketing folks so that we can ask for the rights to use those photos is a seamless process,” Schenk said.

Sprout Social helps Allegiant Air keep customer service flying high

With Sprout Social, Allegiant Air stays steady. Using the Smart Inbox has made their customer relations strategy and team collaboration smoother, giving them more time to focus on nurturing their social channels and customer loyalty. Above all, they’ve found new ways to put the customer first by more quickly identifying their needs.

If you’re interested in seeing how Sprout Social can help make your customer service team’s and customers’ experience more seamless, request a personalized demo or start your free 30-day trial today.

The post How Allegiant Air’s customer relations team is taking flight with Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Navigating holiday customer service spikes is always a tough task. When you throw in supply chain delays, shipping lags and 10% year-over-year growth in online shopping, it’s a whole new ball game.

To keep things running smoothly, customer care managers need to make the most of all available resources. Luckily, Sprout Social is equipped with tools designed to alleviate the holiday customer service rush while strengthening customer relationships in the process—a gift that keeps on giving well after the holiday season.

Keep reading to learn which Sprout features can help you give your customers and your team a better experience during the last few months of the year. But first, what exactly is in store for customer care agents this holiday season?

What social customer care teams can expect from the 2021 holiday customer service rush

The pandemic continues to impact global supply chains, leaving warehouses empty and retailers scrambling for inventory. Massive growth in ecommerce demand has overwhelmed shipping and delivery carriers, which experts believe will continue into 2022.

This holiday season, customer experience disruptions are an expectation rather than an anomaly.

As customers turn to social to leave feedback, questions and reviews, your customer care team will notice an uptick in inbound messages. Last year brought retailers an 18% increase in social messages during the holiday season. This year, consumer preferences for online shopping and the lasting impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are still holding strong, signaling that we’re in for yet another busy season on social.

Supporting customer care agents as they navigate this influx of support requests is paramount to your team’s success. After all, better agent experiences create better customer experiences.

According to Zendesk’s 2021 Customer Experience Trends Report, 55% of agents say that a supportive work environment is the most important thing needed to do their job well. Agility, improved technology and additional communication channels also top the list. Making changes with these needs in mind is the modern customer care team’s secret to a successful holiday season.

How to prepare for holiday customer service spikes using Sprout Social

Holiday-related spikes in support requests can be stressful, but the right tools can help your team rise to the challenge. If you want to revisit and revise your team processes before the rush hits, here are four ways Sprout Social can help:

1. Document a tagging strategy to scale responsiveness

Inbound message tagging is the best 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 comes to a close.

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 some potential use cases to consider as you develop your strategy:

• 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 customer questions and complaints by volume can better prepare you for next year’s holiday season. To report on questions by internal Tag, use the Cross-Network Tag Performance report.

• 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.

2. Establish collaboration norms across a distributed team

Whether you’re figuring out how to navigate peak seasons while remote or you’ve outsourced seasonal help, establishing collaboration norms plays a critical role in minimizing inbox chaos.

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 using 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. This crucial part of the onboarding process is easy to forget at the start of a busy season—which coincidentally is when quality control is needed the most.

Seventy-two percent of consumers are more likely to increase their spending with a brand or a company after a positive interaction on social. Creating stellar support experiences during holiday customer support rushes can set your company up for more business in 2022.

To build out 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 start to 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. This allows agents to submit, review, approve or reject messages directly within the platform, minimizing disruptions for all parties involved. Approvers can also leave comments on accepted or rejected messages, creating valuable coaching opportunities for new agents.

Who should agents go to with questions?

Unfortunately, you can’t train for everything. That’s why it’s so important to have an established point person (or people) to help when a particularly tricky message comes in.

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 any email or direct messages back and forth.

How will we distribute social messages among agents?

When customer questions come in through a dedicated customer experience platform, they’re often automatically assigned to an available support agent. On social, things are a bit trickier.

Social media interactions come in many forms, including DMs, comments, tagged posts and more. If you handle social messages natively within each network, you risk sending duplicate or conflicting responses to the same person. To avoid any overlap, invest in a social media management tool equipped with Collision Detection.

Sprout’s Collision Detection feature displays real-time notifications when you and another coworker are interacting with the same message. Once a message receives a response, the reply icon becomes shaded, so all team members know it’s been handled.

3. Set up saved replies and chatbots to manage frequently asked questions

“Where can I find my tracking information?”

“Will this ship by early December?”

“What are your holiday hours?”

Even with a robust FAQ page, site banners and email updates, repeat questions like these are inevitable. Although they’re easy to answer, they often take up more time than necessary when addressing manually.

Documenting responses to these common questions will not only make your customer care team’s lives easier—it will also speed up your social media response time. Speedy responses are a foundational part of great customer service, which consumers say defines a best-in-class brand on social.

Use saved replies to manage repeat questions

Every network has different character limits and standards of engagement. That’s why drafting approved responses is so important. After all, who wants to spend time editing a lengthy shipping update so it can fit in a Tweet?

In Sprout, Saved Replies can be managed and stored in the Asset Library. Pro tip: give each of your Saved Replies clear titles that explain its use case and intended networks. This will help your teammates find them easily when responding to social messages.

Once a Saved Reply has been created, team members can insert them when drafting replies directly from the Compose window. This convenient alternative to copy and pasting ensures messages stay accurate while leaving room for personalization.

Level up with rule-based chatbots

If you really want to address basic holiday customer service questions faster, we recommend setting up customer service chatbots using Sprout’s Bot Builder. These rule-based chatbots can manage common questions that come through Facebook Messenger or Twitter Direct Messages.

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

4. Give your reps the context they need to succeed

It’s impossible to provide personalized customer service without the right context. Easy access to details on order history, shipping fulfillment and previous customer care interactions can mean the difference between an exceptional support experience and one that falls flat.

If you receive a social message from a disgruntled customer, you could piece together the situation by gathering details from your ecommerce, CRM and helpdesk platforms. But if you’re using Sprout Social, the process becomes much cleaner.

Sprout’s breadth of martech integrations with systems from Salesforce and Shopify to Zendesk eliminates the need to bounce between tools. Details from each platform 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.

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.

Go forth and conquer with Sprout Social

Customer care teams can’t control supply chain troubles or global shipping delays. But as the folks on the frontline of your brand, they have the power to alleviate customer concerns and earn their loyalty. Providing your team with the right technology solutions can free them up to focus on creating exceptional customer experiences—the kinds 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 your customers this holiday season.

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

When it comes to stand-out customer communication on social, Grammarly uses Sprout. With Sprout Social, the Grammarly social support team can manage user questions, product concerns and audience conversations across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This streamlined approach helps them create a dialogue with current and potential users while finding opportunities to surprise and delight as they go.

“We want to help people be even more confident that they can achieve effective communication, whether they’re writing for school, professionally, or even through text message. We use Sprout to help make those connections possible,” said Emma Hanevelt, Social Media Insights Analyst.

Clear, consistent customer care

Hanevelt works with a team of 10 led by Manager Beth Hibbert. Together, the team is responsible for engaging with the Grammarly audience, answering user questions and analyzing social data for business insights. With Sprout, they’re able to respond to messages across networks quickly and efficiently.

“We’re in the Smart Inbox daily, managing posts and DMs from Twitter and Facebook, as well as Instagram comments,” said Hanevelt. “We’ve also launched Brand Keywords tracking, so we can respond to users who mention Grammarly without tagging our account.”

Grammarly’s social support team spans two time zones, with support agents based in both Canada and Ukraine. In less than two years (during which they brought Sprout on), their average time to first response (TTFR) decreased more than 80%.

“We love the team Conversations feature,” said Hanevelt. “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.”

Streamlining their social support process to a single platform has also helped surface data that Hibbert can use internally to manage and grow her team. Insights from Sprout inform coaching conversations across the social support team, which ultimately lead to stronger customer service.

“With the Inbox Team Report, we can see our overall message volume across channels and better measure agent productivity,” said Hibbert. “If I’m having a one-to-one with someone, I can use their specific report to highlight their performance or dig into growth areas. It’s been a game-changer for us. ”

Delivering product insights with tags

The Grammarly team leveled up their Smart Inbox use by developing a comprehensive tagging strategy that allows them to organize incoming messages based on their content. Tags empower Grammarly support agents to do the foundational work needed to uncover advanced customer insights.

“It’s one of the most important features for us,” said Hanevelt. “Because every message that comes into our inbox gets tagged, 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. We also build quarterly reports on themes we find in our social messages.”

So far, their approach to tagging has helped surface valuable user stories for the Grammarly product and user experience teams, as well as company leadership.

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

Setting the tone with listening

In 2021, Grammarly began using Sprout’s Social Listening tools to monitor brand health and competitive share of voice. Since then, they’ve been able to extract even more product insights from priority platforms like Twitter and Reddit.

These insights have driven further collaboration between the social support team and the rest of the business. Hanevelt’s long-term goal is to make Listening a key lever for the broader marketing, product and user research teams.

“Right now, I’m focused on making social listening a more known resource,” said Hanevelt. “If I see someone share a slide deck in Slack, I’ll go to them and ask ‘How can I support you with social insights?’ We’ve set up monthly syncs with our consumer insights team, as well as our user experience team, so I can complement their work with listening data from Sprout.”

Hanevelt sees major opportunities for social listening at Grammarly, and has been creating slide decks to share insights from Sprout with the wider organization.

“Hopefully, we’ll start hosting more hands-on workshops so we can bring social stories to the forefront of the conversation,” said Hanevelt. “We want to share our social data so we can help shape product decisions across Grammarly.”

Grammarly is rewriting the rules of customer care by sharing industry and competitive insights that inform proactive decision-making. If you’re interested in seeing how your social data can do the same, request a personalized demo or start your free 30-day trial today.

The post How Grammarly delivers engaging customer care with Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Customer experience is at the heart of the NJ TRANSIT brand. “Our company’s goal is to give customers the best experience possible through social media so they have everything they need for an enjoyable trip,” said Carol Mack, NJ TRANSIT’s Director of Events and Social Media. To deliver a great customer experience, NJ TRANSIT needed a social media management solution that would help them optimize customer care efforts, streamline response management and provide timely updates about their services. They needed Sprout Social.

When people think of transit, we don’t want them to think of just equipment and stations so we use social to give our employees a voice and to humanize them to the public.

Carol Mack
Director of Events & Social Media, NJ TRANSIT

Supporting cross-functional strategies 

While NJ TRANSIT uses Instagram as their primary platform for branding and LinkedIn is for more professional purposes, they’re most engaged with their customers on Facebook and Twitter. What’s unique about their Twitter strategy is that in addition to their main NJ TRANSIT Twitter account, they also run 14 accounts that are each dedicated to a specific transit line.

Their content strategy for each line account is simple: provide real-time updates for travelers. Having service-specific accounts keeps important, relevant information organized and accessible for transit riders. It also means that the NJ TRANSIT social team can focus their corporate Twitter handle on their brand messaging, news, initiatives and anything else that’s important to the customer.

Another important characteristic of NJ TRANSIT’s customer care and social strategies is how they draw attention to the people behind their brand. “When people think of transit, we don’t want them to think of just equipment and stations so we use social to give our employees a voice and to humanize them to the public,” said Mack.

For example, the NJ TRANSIT Police Department does much more than provide high-quality safety and security for the transit system. They also have an outreach program staffed by five outreach officers throughout the state that helps connect the homeless with necessary social and medical services, as well as housing opportunities. The police department’s Twitter account gives them a platform to share those lesser-known efforts, which has made a major impact on humanizing the department.

The Police Department has an intelligence division that uses Sprout’s powerful Listening features to monitor conversations across social. Using keywords and location-based searches provides the department with timely access to conversations occurring across the transit system. This intelligence gathering allows them to deploy resources to maintain the safety of our customers and employees systemwide.

Highlighting their people and initiatives also helps shape NJ TRANSIT’s employer brand and influence recruitment. “Hiring qualified people is very important to us. We’ve taken extra efforts to make sure we use social media to help our human resources department get the best talent that they can,” said Mack. “When we started using social to assist with hiring bus operators, we saw a 60% increase in resumes.”

We work directly from Sprout’s Smart Inbox and it’s straightforward just like a Twitter stream, so it’s also very easy to get people up to speed on how to use it.

Kevin Minott
Senior Communications Coordinator, NJ TRANSIT

Keep your wheels turning on social

While the content strategies differ between the line accounts, the police department account and their main account, the entire NJ TRANSIT social team uses Sprout’s Smart Inbox to monitor each account in a single feed. Before using Sprout, the team would have to log in natively to each line account to respond to customers, which negatively impacted response time—an important metric for the team’s customer service strategy.

The confusing, disorganized user interface of their former platform negatively impacted response time. “We work directly from Sprout’s Smart Inbox and it’s straightforward just like a Twitter stream, so it’s also very easy to get people up to speed on how to use it,” said Kevin Minott, NJ TRANSIT’s Senior Communications Coordinator. “I was able to get our SVP of communications and customer experience up and running on Sprout in just one day.”

I am in love with the Task feature. It ensures that all the information we need in order to respond stays with the right message.

Carol Mack
Director of Events & Social Media, NJ TRANSIT

Don’t lose your train of thought

Whether customers are asking about a technical issue or need information about a schedule change, they want to know they’re being heard. The NJ TRANSIT social team works to respond and communicate with empathy and accuracy, which often requires collaboration with other departments. For example, they are currently working with their IT department to build a comprehensive response team in Sprout. Sprout’s Tasks feature in the Inbox helps make that collaboration seamless.

If, for instance, they receive a message on social about a problem with their mobile app, the social team can assign a Task to the IT Sprout user. Then, that person will look into the issue and provide context or an answer to the social team in Sprout. The social team will polish the copy and respond to the customer.

“I am in love with the Task feature. It ensures that all the information we need in order to respond stays with the right message, ” said Mack. “Before using Sprout, we’d have to copy and paste from the platform we had into email and vice versa.” For someone like Mack, who gets around 400 emails a day, keeping that thread of information separate within Sprout is essential.

The results are in

According to the Sprout Social Index™, 76% of customers expect a response from a brand in the first 24 hours of sending their message. In the first half of 2021, NJ TRANSIT exceeded those expectations maintaining an average first reply time of 30 minutes.

It’s not just the Smart Inbox that speeds up processes for the NJ TRANSIT team. “Sprout has amazing analytics tools that we didn’t have access to with our last management platform. Now, we run engagement reports for our senior vice president of communications and customer service, monthly reports for our board, weekly communication reports, response reports and more,” said Minott. “Sprout has allowed us to do this with ease.”

“To give you an idea, Kevin used to spend three days on reports that now take three hours,” Mack continued. “We used to have to calculate response time manually because in our old platform, it would count us as being non-responsive when we were offline. With Sprout, we can put work hours in so the Engagement Report calculates our real response rate for us.”

Sprout Social, at your service 

Customer care and experience are what NJ TRANSIT’s brand is all about. When selecting a new social media management platform, they were looking for a software and team that would give them the same level of support. High-quality customer care was an important deciding factor in their decision to work with Sprout.

“Where Sprout came out on top was understanding us and treating us as individuals. They didn’t give us a one-size-fits-all approach or treat us like anyone else. We’re a transportation agency, so we have different needs, and that understanding of who we are really matters,” said Mack. “Every time we reach out, Sprout gives us the same customer care that we were promised from the first time we spoke to them. They really are just 100% there for us.”

Our team of experts will always respect your unique needs and treat your business with care. Start a free, 30-day trial today or request a demo to get a customized tour from our team.

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