We’re freshly on the heels of our second acquisition, a sentiment analysis and natural language processing company called Repustate. As we welcome the Repustate team and product under our umbrella, I’ve been reflecting on partnerships and what makes them work—and what doesn’t. When done right, partnerships make your business stronger, add value for your customers and open up a new world of opportunities.

Approach partnerships with purpose

Everyone is facing economic headwinds right now. When it comes to the tech industry, that’s compounded by the fact that the era of the single-point solution is over. As companies tighten their belts and tech stacks, their expectations for your products are rising. We all know that one company can’t provide everything for everyone, so how can you ensure your solution is business critical?

Enter partnerships. Combined efforts will always be stronger than singular approaches when your potential partners are looking to achieve the same goals you are. You can get more done when you work together, even if that means working outside of your company walls.

For smaller companies, joining forces with a larger firm can give you more resources and financial solvency. Companies can hit product roadmap milestones faster with integrations and acquisitions. Marketers looking to find new audiences in their ideal customer profile can pursue co-marketing efforts with like-minded partners to widen their funnel.

At Sprout, partnerships are just the way we do business. Whether we’re working with LinkedIn to host a webinar or launching a new network integration like TikTok, our business couldn’t thrive without our rich portfolio of partners.

Corporate compatibility tests

We’ve forged enough partnerships to be able to quickly evaluate which will work and which aren’t the right fit. There are three things we look for in a potential partner.

Customer value

If you’re a customer-centric company, you always start with how any decision will impact the customer. That couldn’t be more true with partnerships. From marketing to product, the partnership has to create additional value for the end user. Asking yourself what a potential partnership will add to your customer experience or how it will address their pain points should be the first step in evaluating any partnership.

For example, we found that most of our current (and ideal future) customers were leveraging Salesforce solutions like Service Cloud and Tableau. We partnered with Salesforce to provide greater social media control and empower our customers with a 360 view of customer interactions and data–all in the tools they know and love. In the age of the product suite, partnerships are a cheat code to level up your business value.

Complementary goals

You’re likely not going to partner with your direct competitors. But no matter what you’re selling, there’s a product or service someone else offers that’ll make yours even better. Think about your current and ideal customers. Figure out what else they need. Find the businesses that are meeting those needs and explore ways you can help each other.

Another thing to consider is complementary markets. There may be another business that solves your customers’ needs, but if they’re going after a completely different segment than you are, it won’t work out. If your business is aimed toward enterprise manufacturing companies and a potential partner is pursuing mid-sized restaurant chains, it’s not going to be a good fit—no matter how symbiotic your products seem.

Mutual benefit

It should go without saying that both partners should stand to benefit from your efforts. It’s likely that one partner may be more invested or have more to gain from your partnership, but everyone needs to get something out of the deal. An uneven partnership is destined to fail.

Doing the partnership do-si-do

So you’ve picked your partner. What comes next? Navigating partnerships can be tricky but with a solid foundation, you can set yourself up for success.

Assemble your team

Every person on your team won’t be involved in orchestrating your partnership. There is such a thing as too many cooks. But at the same time, you need to loop in the right folks from the beginning. You might have to make adjustments as your plans progress, but evaluating who needs to be involved at the start will ensure a smoother transition.

If you’re pursuing an integration or a product-based acquisition, your product team needs to be involved from day one. When we evaluated Repustate, our internal product team was invaluable in helping us determine how much upside the deal presented. They know the product inside and out. They know where you’re planning to go on your roadmap. Lean on that internal knowledge.

Get to know each other

If you’ve decided to partner with another organization, you already know their product and audience are a good fit. But what about your goals and values?

Early on in your partnership, it’s imperative to sit down and find out what you have in common. How do your cultures align? Where do your roadmaps sync? What values do you both hold? The answers to these questions will be your north star throughout the process.

Be transparent

On day one, you and your partner have to be honest with each other about what you want to gain. Maybe you’re hoping to increase your customer base. Maybe you want to offer new functionality for your customers. Maybe this project is a trial run to see if you should form a longer-term relationship down the road. Whatever the case may be, you have to lay your cards on the table at the beginning.

Having an open line of communication is key to a healthy and successful partnership. You need to be honest with each other about what’s going well and what needs improvement. You need a clear understanding of which team is responsible for what and what your expectations are on cadence and speed. Transparency is what turns good partner match-ups into great relationships.

Howdy, partner

Partnerships are one of the most effective ways to grow your business, especially in uncertain economic times. Working together increases your efficiency, provides more value to your customers and creates a more robust product. Sometimes two is better than one.

Want to see partnerships in action? Learn more about the power of social media management integrations.

The post 1+1 is more than two: How partnerships can level up your business appeared first on Sprout Social.

If you’re feeling the heat, we see you and hear you. Managing social through tricky markets requires an additional layer of focus, rigor and empathy. It’s challenging to navigate but possible with extra preparation. 

Tune in to our webinar to hear about what you need to know to successfully navigate social media marketing through times of economic contraction.

In 45 minutes you’ll learn:

• Positioning statements for influencing the C-suite towards continued social media investments
• Why social matters across your entire business
• 5 ways to maximize your current social media resources

The post How to Build the Case for Social Media Investment in a Tight Economy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Sure, you may be creating awesome content. But if no one is Liking or commenting on it, there’s a good chance your account will fall through the cracks. Next thing you know, you’re struggling to get customers from Instagram, and your investment simply goes to waste.

In this guide, we show you exactly what to do to give your Instagram engagement rate a much-needed boost. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents

• What is Instagram engagement?
• How to calculate your Instagram engagement rate
• What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?
• 13 tips to improve your Instagram engagement rate
• Why a good engagement rate matters on Instagram

What is Instagram engagement?

Instagram engagement refers to a measure of how people are interacting with your content. It considers details such as your follower count along with interactions such as likes, comments, saves and shares. This metric helps you gauge how well your content resonates with your audience.

How to calculate your Instagram engagement rate

To calculate your Instagram engagement rate, you’ll need to look at the total number of content interactions. This includes Likes, comments, shares, Story replies and saves. Then use the formula below to calculate.

Engagement rate = (Total interactions/Impressions) x 100

What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?

According to the latest Instagram stats, posts typically get an average engagement rate of 0.98%. So anything around this number should be safe. That said, you’d ideally want to shoot for a higher engagement rate than the platform average.

13 tips to improve your Instagram engagement rate

Now it’s time for the fun part. The following tips will show you how to get more Instagram engagement.

1.     Actually engage with your audience

We’re starting this list off easy. To drive more engagement from your followers, you need to interact with them. Social media isn’t a one-way street. If you want to build an engaged audience, you need to acknowledge your followers. Remember, every comment you get means someone took the time to stop, look at your post and share their thoughts. After all that, why wouldn’t you respond?

If you want to build up engagement, know that it takes time and you need to start conversations on posts other than your own. Asking questions, responding to comments and replying to Stories are some of the few ways to engage more with your audience.

With comment threading, it’s even easier to know which ones you’ve missed on your posts. Not to mention, Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox lets you easily check off comments you’ve already responded to.

As your account starts to grow and you get more comments, you might not be able to respond to everyone. But that doesn’t mean you should give up entirely. You can still Like comments or just try to reply to as many as possible.

For instance, Canva has over a million followers on Instagram. The brand deals with hundreds of comments on its posts, so it’s not always viable to reply to every single comment. However, it takes time to respond to comments that ask questions or bring up an important feature.

Source

2.     Copy your top-performing posts

What works for you might not work for someone else. Take a look at your past months’ best-performing posts. Is there a common theme among your top performers?

For example, you might find that photos with bright and bold colors get a ton of Likes. Or maybe people are engaging more with Reels that have music in the background.

Use our Instagram dashboard to find your top-performing posts. Then look for commonalities between the posts and try to incorporate more of them in the future.

3.     Use Instagram Stories to your advantage

Instagram offers plenty of stickers that make it easy to drive engagement through Stories. Every time someone engages with those stickers, it counts toward your engagement.

Use these stickers to conduct polls and quizzes or get your followers to ask you questions. See how Living Stone Construction creates a simple poll asking people to vote if they like the renovation work. You could make it more fun and competitive by asking people to guess the correct answer to a question.

The question sticker is perfect for hosting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session. You’ll then be able to share a series of Stories answering those questions.

One of the latest Instagram trends involves using the “Add Yours” sticker. Use this sticker to start a challenge and get people to engage with your brand. Share a prompt and encourage people to participate in your challenge by adding their own content.

4.     Promote across networks

It goes without saying that the audience for your Facebook Page might not be the same as the audience on your Instagram account. Chances are that some of your Facebook audience is on Instagram, but they just don’t know that you exist there yet. Don’t be afraid to sprinkle some cross-network promotional posts to encourage more followers.

5.     Be strategic with Instagram ads

When Facebook added Instagram into their Ads Manager, new targeting possibilities opened up. Sure, you can boost a post or promote your account, but it’s important to be more nuanced and strategic about it.

Take advantage of the customization by using retargeting and custom audiences. For instance, if you visit a furniture store website like Pottery Barn, you’ll start to get ads from other furniture stores. After searching around for a bookshelf, we found the following ads from other brands that sell furniture.

Custom audiences can come from many sources. But to start, try using:

• Your newsletter lists
• People who have visited your store
• Those who purchased from your website
• People who’ve engaged with your Facebook or Instagram accounts

From there, you’ll then be able to find even more people similar to any of the above audiences using the lookalike audience feature.

Getting familiar with all the Instagram advertising options will put you ahead of your competitors. And retargeting will further help you improve conversions and lower your ad costs.

6.     Create more short-form video content

Guess what we found in the 2022 Sprout Social Index? Short-form video is the most engaging type of in-feed social content. That means your Instagram content strategy needs to change direction. And the focus should shift to creating more short-form videos.

In other words, Reels are your best friend for boosting your Instagram engagement. Who knows? It might even be just the thing you need to go viral on Instagram.

Create Reels showing how-to tips and tricks or behind-the-scenes processes, for instance. Reels can be informational as well, providing a quick list of things people might want to know. See how Drunk Elephant creates a Reel listing some reasons why a certain product is great.

Source

7.     Make the most of the Collab feature

Instagram recently introduced a feature enabling users to create Collab posts with other users. A Collab post shows up in the Feeds of both of your followers, meaning a chance to garner higher engagement. So make the most of this feature to collaborate with influencers, industry leaders and brand partners.

Source

The Honest Kitchen regularly creates Collab posts with pet influencers to promote its human-grade pet food. This allows the brand to get its products in front of a massive and relevant audience i.e., the pet influencer’s followers. As expected, these posts have managed to garner hundreds of thousands of Likes and comments.

8.     Give sneak peeks and hints

Followers love it when you let them in on a secret. Even if they’re public posts, giving sneak peeks and hints of new releases makes the audience think they’re part of a special group. It entices them to guess what’s going on and encourages them to revisit the profile to see if there’s been an announcement.

Check out how Fourth Ray Beauty shares a teaser for an upcoming product without giving too much away. The Reel gives a short close-up shot of the new product. And the caption only gives a hint by including a cherry emoji.

Source

9.     Write captions that drive engagement

Your Instagram captions give you the perfect opportunity to include a call for action. In this case, the action would involve some type of engagement. For example, asking a question in your caption would encourage your followers to share their answers in the comments. Or you could share a prompt that would make them want to share their experience or thoughts by commenting.

For example, Pottery Barn shares a carousel post showcasing different stool and pendant pairings for a kitchen island. It then asks followers to vote for their favorite in the comments. Needless to say, the post managed to rack up plenty of comments from enthusiastic followers who wanted to vote.

Source

10.  Post your content at the best times

Use our Instagram analytics to find out when the best time to post is for you. You want to post when most of your followers are online and engaging on the app. Even with the best photo and wittiest caption, you could still miss out on engagement if you’re posting at the wrong hour.

We did some research into the best times to post on Instagram, and here’s what we found for Instagram.

But keep in mind that the specific timing may be different for your account. Instagram business accounts offer analytics that tells you when your followers are most active. Use this information to schedule your posts and free up your time to engage with comments. Alternatively, use Sprout’s ViralPost feature to automatically schedule your posts at the optimal time. This feature ensures that your Instagram posts go out at a time when you receive the most engagement.

11.  Encourage customer and employee posts

Use branded hashtags to help you organize user-generated content. If you engage in these hashtags and incorporate a UGC strategy, more people will take notice and begin using the hashtags, too.

Your employees can be your strongest advocates as well. Their accounts give a more personal, unfiltered perspective of the company. Remember, people like feeling as if they’re in a secret club. If you reshare from your employees, you’re offering perspectives that your brand normally wouldn’t offer.

12.  Host a fun giveaway contest

Who wouldn’t want to win free stuff? That’s exactly why social media giveaways are so great for boosting your Instagram engagement. They get people to engage with your brand in a way you’ve never seen before.

Whether the contest involves commenting, sharing or contributing a story–you get to drive engagement either way.

That said, your giveaway contest must be strategic and intentional. Make sure to design the rules keeping your goal in mind i.e., boosting engagement. Moreover, the prize should be attractive; it should be valuable enough to get people to participate.

For example, Fenty Beauty hosted a Game Day Giveaway for a chance to win two tickets to the Championship Game. The brand would cover the cost of flights, hotels and ground transportation. As you can expect, this post saw more than 17k Likes and almost 18k comments.

Source

13.  Improve your Instagram hashtags

It’s a well-known fact that using the right hashtags helps you grow your reach. But with that increased reach comes a greater chance of boosting engagement. The more people see your content, the higher the chance that they’ll engage with it.

Use relevant and niche hashtags that will let you tap into the right audience. The goal is to get Instagram to show your content to users who have shown an interest in topics related to that hashtag. So when these users see your content, they’re likely to check it out and engage.

Why a good engagement rate matters on Instagram

So what’s the big deal about Instagram engagement? Check out these key benefits of having a good engagement rate on Instagram.

Improve platform visibility

The Instagram algorithm uses several factors to rank and display content. While relevance is one crucial element, engagement is another major consideration. Even among relevant content, posts that see tons of engagement are more likely to show up in a user’s Explore. So having a good engagement rate is essential to improve your visibility on Instagram.

Attract a new audience

With higher visibility comes an increased chance of attracting a new audience. Instagram will typically show your content to people who are most likely to be interested in it. If these users like your content enough, they may want to check out your profile and even follow you. In other words, a good engagement rate may help you grow your Instagram following.

Boost credibility

To the average Instagram user, a post that has tons of engagement means other people are enjoying it. As such, good engagement serves as social proof and reflects positively on your brand authenticity. People may feel more comfortable trusting your brand because so many others are engaging with it.

Start growing your Instagram engagement

These tips will give you a much-needed engagement boost on Instagram. But a one-off spike in engagement numbers isn’t enough. Make sure you’re following these tips consistently to maintain high levels of engagement.

Sprout’s Instagram integration will help you get started by managing all your comments in one place in a Smart Inbox, freeing up time for you to focus on improving your Instagram engagement.

The post 13 Ways to increase your Instagram engagement rate appeared first on Sprout Social.

When users scroll through TikTok, the brands that are truly “killing it” are creating content that’s as entertaining as it is authentic–making the audience feel closer to the brand. This trends away from the often polished and perfect posts we’re used to seeing from businesses on other social media platforms.

Join Sprout Social’s Jonathan Zuluaga and Sarah Corley as they discuss: 

• How valuable TikTok can be for your business 
• The TikTok audience
• Top TikTok marketing tips for brands

The post How to Explain the Business Value of TikTok to Your Boss [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

When I think about data, I inevitably think about social media. That might be because I spend my days working with our clients’ executives to capture the voice of their customer, but I think it’s because social media intelligence is the next data frontier.

Think about it: 4.62 billion people are on social. That’s over half of the world. Which means over half of the world is Tweeting, TikToking or livestreaming about the things that bother them, the things they love and everything in between. That data—if you can harness it—can give you actionable insights to drive your business forward.

What is social media intelligence?

Across the social media landscape, there are probably trillions of data points that are essential to your business. Data points that could impact your pricing, sales strategy, product development and, of course, marketing.

But those unstructured data points mean nothing in their raw, hashtagged format. Social media intelligence is the result of pulling these disparate points together into something measurable, whether you’re looking at volume, sentiment, content or demographics. One Tweet might not mean a lot, but the aggregation of every post on a topic that’s relevant to your business can be magical.

This vantage point is especially critical in the current economic landscape. In times like these, businesses either fall far behind or get way ahead. Social media intelligence gives you a macro perspective when you desperately need one—one that can have a major positive impact on your quarter or fiscal year. Incorporating social media intelligence will give you the edge you need to generate revenue, discover potential cost savings and reduce your risk.

According to the 2022 Sprout Social Index™, 60% of businesses are using social data weekly, across their businesses. There’s a good chance your competitors are already using this data to their advantage.

Why is social media intelligence different?

You probably collect survey data from your customers, monitor product reviews and conduct focus groups. All of that data is extremely valuable. But when you put it alongside social media intelligence, you get a clearer picture of what your audience is clamoring for. Simply put, social data is different because it comes from a wider audience, it’s unfiltered and it gives you real-time understanding of your market.

Cast a wider net

When you put out a survey, you’re getting input from your current customers. This helps you understand what you’re doing well and what you could improve on with your base. But social media intelligence captures the sentiment from anyone buying within your product category, opening the door to new audiences. You can see why consumers choose your competitor over you—a competitive intelligence play that might take months to accomplish without the power of social. You can see what’s missing from the marketplace. That kind of intel has a ripple effect across your business and you might not ever uncover it without social media data.

Leadtail, a B2B-focused social media agency, started casting that net pre-pandemic with a video-conferencing client who was being outperformed leaps and bounds by their primary competitor: Zoom. By using social media intelligence, Leadtail was able to help their client uncover Zoom’s strategy of leveraging existing partnerships to drive conversations on social and beyond. With this competitive intelligence in tow, Leadtail and their client started brainstorming strategies to forge their own partnerships to drive brand reach and community engagement.

#NoFilter

Social media, for better or worse, is where people go to express their unfiltered thoughts. Your customers might hold back on a survey that’s going directly to you, but on social media, they’re posting their thoughts as they come. Without a social data program, you might notice a few posts that go viral and address those individual concerns, but once you organize that data, you can find the commonalities and adjust your strategies accordingly.

This information isn’t only useful for customer satisfaction. Whether you’re interested in employee sentiment or investor relations, your constituents are still people with social media accounts. I know of one company that tracks both employee and investor sentiment directly after earnings calls to get an unfiltered view on how their results and commentary are being received. They can use that intelligence to shape future internal and external communications, with messaging tailored for each group.

React in real time

If there was a problem with your product, you’d want to know immediately. Social already holds that information for you. When you establish a trendline of social sentiment, if there are any sudden deviations from that line, you can investigate quickly. Consumers post to social as soon as they have a problem, giving you a real-time window into how your product is being received. By implementing social media intelligence practices, you can keep an eye on problems faster than you could by monitoring your internal customer care.

For example, one of our agency customers discovered the value of social data after their client’s moisturizer sales started dropping and they couldn’t figure out why. By setting up a social listening query, they had their answer within minutes instead of months. While customers still loved the product, they hated the packaging. The social team was able to pass the feedback on to R&D so they could redesign their packaging based on real customer insights.

Making social media intelligence actionable

We’ve established that social media intelligence has a direct impact on your bottom line. So how do you create a social data program that works for you? There are some simple steps you can take to make social media intelligence a reality for your organization.

Empower your social media team

Social data should be owned by the people with their hands on the keyboard every day. Period. Your social media team already understands the landscape and probably already have a few insights from their day-to-day work. The next step is giving them the tools they need to surface that information to the rest of your organization. Keep them informed on the metrics and goals of the business in the next quarter, year or even five years. Make sure your social media team knows what matters to the business so they can mine and present insights to your leadership that will fuel your strategy.

Create a data dashboard

Social media intelligence is most powerful when it’s paired with other data sources. Placing the insights you glean from social with your CSAT or NPS survey results, reviews, customer support tickets and other data sources gives you a clearer view of the total landscape. All of your business data is valuable and it can’t live in a silo. When you give social media intelligence the same weight as data from your CRM or ERP, you see everything more clearly.

As we move through this turbulent economic time, listening tools can be especially helpful to make game-time decisions. For example, retailers who need to make difficult decisions about their inventory can use social media intelligence to decide what to discount and what might be useful to keep on hand. Having all of that information in one place can help you make the tough calls.

Be proactive, not reactive

I mentioned the real-time nature of social as a benefit earlier, but it’s a double-edged sword. You don’t want to fall into the trap of using social data solely as a crisis management tool. You’ll get your best results from your social data program by making sure it’s ongoing. It’s easy to let one viral Tweet drive the direction of your strategy, but you have to think of posts as data points. That one point may be an outlier. Having a robust, always-on social data program is the best way to make sure your leadership is seeing the whole picture and not just one loud voice.

See your data differently

The sheer amount of data that social can provide can be intimidating. But if you approach it intentionally, the impact it can have is unmatched. Implementing a social media intelligence program is one of the best things you can do for your business.

Want to know more? Check out some examples of how other brands use social media intelligence to create tangible change.

The post In bull or bear markets, social media intelligence makes all the difference appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to the 2022 Sprout Social Index™, over 80% of marketers check their social data on a daily or weekly basis to inform everything from content strategy to market research. These decisions aren’t made with owned data alone. Competitor data is essential to getting the full picture.

Using Facebook data to bolster your competitive intelligence can provide you with the insights needed to zig where others zag. It’s no wonder Facebook is the most-used platform by marketers worldwide.

If you’re ready to engage in some old-fashioned competitive sleuthing, you’re in the right place. Here’s everything you need to know to start monitoring your competition on Facebook.

What is a Facebook competitor analysis?

A Facebook competitive analysis is the process of evaluating your competitor’s Facebook activity for benchmarking data. These reports also provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor’s social media strategy overall.

Conducting a Facebook competitor analysis involves reporting on key brand growth and engagement metrics for your brand and its rivals. Your team can use this social data to set a baseline for audience growth, publishing and engagement goals.

These findings can help you define what it means to offer superior content and service on social media, increasing the business impact of your presence on the network.

Why should you do a Facebook competitive analysis?

If you plan on conducting a social media competitive analysis, make Facebook your top priority. Over two-thirds of consumers anticipate spending more time on Facebook over the next year, making it a goldmine of strategic insights. If that’s not enough, here are some other reasons to consider:

Establish more relevant KPIs

Competitive benchmarking on Facebook can take the guesswork out of goal setting.

For example, say you’re trying to set a new engagement goal. Looking at your historical data can help you set an achievable target, but without competitive insights, you risk setting goals that aren’t in line with industry standards.

Your Facebook competitor analysis can motivate you to aim higher with your social content while keeping your strategy attainable and actionable.

Identify content gaps

Competitive analyses can illuminate cracks in your content strategy while supplying the information needed to fill them.

For instance, an oral health care brand conducting a Facebook competitive analysis might notice that Quip incorporates month-long observances and hashtag holidays into their content strategy.

Since these posts do well from an engagement standpoint, that brand may consider how they can put their own unique spin on similar events.

Create better content for your followers

Coming up with new content ideas is a top challenge for many social media marketers.

Rather than starting to brainstorm from a blank slate, use industry data to create some much-needed guardrails. That’s where your Facebook competitor analysis comes in.

The analysis will help you identify your rival’s content themes. As you notice them, ask yourself how your brand might approach something similar. What would you do differently? What opportunities are they not taking advantage of?

Eventually, you’ll come up with a unique piece of inspired content that stands independently from its source material.

Understand the strength of customer service efforts

More than half of US consumers turn to Facebook the most for customer service needs, making it the preferred network for customer care.

A quantitative and qualitative review of your competitor’s Facebook pages can help you clearly define what they are and aren’t getting in terms of customer service. This will show you exactly what it takes to gain a competitive edge on social.

Facebook competitive analysis tools will help you keep a pulse on what your audience expects from brands on the network. Eventually, you’ll find ways to one-up their service offerings, cementing your spot as the brand people turn to for a better customer experience.

Test new Facebook features

Facebook started as a social network for college students. Now, it’s a social network, a marketplace, a media platform and so much more.

This creates an ever-flowing river of new opportunities for marketers. The only downside is, it can feel overwhelming to keep up.

A Facebook competitor analysis can help you identify which Facebook features are worth embedding into your strategy. If a competitor seems to be gaining a lot of traction from using a specific tool, that’s a clear sign to get in on the action.

How to analyze competitors on Facebook with Sprout

You could do some of this research manually, but Sprout will make the process much more efficient. Sprout’s Facebook Competitors Report lets you track metrics for any Facebook page to compare them against your own. Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: Set your filters

Use the Filter Menu to customize the data you want to see in your report.

You’ll find three different filters within the menu: Pages, Competitor Pages and Date Range.

• Use Pages to select which owned Facebook pages you’d like to include in the report.
• Use Competitor Pages to manage and select competitor Facebook pages
• Use the Date Range date picker to select a time period for your report.

Step 2: Check the summary

The top widget in the Facebook Competitor Report is a summary table. This features averages of key metrics including Fans, Public Engagements and Public Engagements per Post.

Use the trends highlighted in the summary as starting points for your competitive investigation. For example, if you notice that your fan average is lagging behind, that may be the first item to review and cover in your report.

Step 3: Dig into the numbers

You’ll find three different chart widgets in the Facebook Competitor Report:

• The Audience Growth chart shows how your audience grew compared to your competitors’ during the selected time period.
• The Publishing Behavior chart shows the different types of posts you and your competitors published during the selected time period.
• The Engagement chart evaluates how people are engaging with posts based on publish date.

Each of these charts goes deeper into the high-level metrics available in the Summary table. They also provide averages of each metric for both owned and competitor Facebook pages. Use this information to benchmark your performance against your competitors’ averages.

Step 4: Review post-level data

Use the Top Posts widget to review the most popular posts published during your selected time period.

The Top Posts widget will help you analyze published content across all competitors to understand what’s resonating within your shared audience. As you review the data, stay on the lookout for qualitative trends as well. What type of visuals and messaging drive the most engagement? Are there any topics people seem particularly excited about?

Understanding these trends will come in handy during your next brainstorm.

Step 5: Share findings

There are a few different ways you can distribute your report from Sprout.

If you’d like to limit the number of disparate files floating around people’s inbox, try the link sharing option. This will allow you to share reports with multiple stakeholders regardless of whether they have a Sprout account or not.

Understanding your Facebook competitor analysis

Numbers are nothing without the right context.

For example, what if one of your competitors ran an enticing social media contest during your reporting period? That would definitely have an impact on either their engagement or audience growth. If your report lacks that context, it can result in an unfair assessment of your team’s performance.

Use storytelling to give your data meaning. Include the “why” behind your most interesting numbers so that your teammates understand the full story behind the report as well.

May the best brand win

A Facebook competitor analysis can be exactly what you need to level up on the network. Understanding where their strengths and weaknesses lie is the first step to understanding how to outperform them on social.

Compiling that data takes a lot of work, especially when analyzing multiple competitors. Sprout Social can eliminate all the data collection work so you can focus on planning your next steps. Sign up for a trial today to test out the Facebook Competitor Report free for 30 days.

The post How to conduct a Facebook competitor analysis report appeared first on Sprout Social.

Sprout Social has partnered with Reuters to bring you a diverse panel of marketing and social media experts to discuss social strategy.

In this session, you’ll hear from marketing experts about how to extract real business value from social media marketing and how to focus your social strategy to meet your needs.

You will:

• Understand your audience and engage your community:
  Streamline your social monitoring and uncover actionable insights from social data to inform brand and business strategy
• Stand out in an over-saturated digital space:
  Create authentic, personalized, relevant content that cuts through the noise with impactful interactions that inspire and connect
• Measure performance, prove ROI and gain buy-in:
  Identify the key metrics and critical reporting you need to drive strategic decision-making across the business with rich social data and dashboards

Panelists:

• Bianca Shaw, VP of Enterprise Social Media and Digital Brand Reputation at Caesars Entertainment
• Michael Lamp, VP of Digital and Social at Hunter PR, a Stagwell company
• Emily Sly, VP of Global Marketing at Crocs
• Jamie Gilpin, CMO, Sprout Social
• Laurel Mintz, CEO and Founder, Elevate My Brand

The post Supercharge your Marketing Strategy with Social [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

Nine years ago, we released the first Sprout Social Index, a trends data report helping social marketers understand how social media has transformed both sides of the marketing equation. With every report since, we’ve learned that social moves quickly. Trends, platforms and use cases are constantly changing and it’s hard to keep up.

In one of Sprout’s most popular webinars, we’ll share key findings from our 2022 Index report, chat about shifts in consumer behavior and discuss how marketers can overcome the changing nature of social media to more deeply align with their consumers.

Walk away from this webinar understanding:

1. Consumer and marketer trends for 2022
2. How to build trust through your brand
3. New tech and platforms to keep an eye on

The post Sprout Social Index: Social Media Trends for 2022 and Beyond [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

For competitive intelligence to make an impact on your business, it needs to be embedded into your culture. Across departments, every employee in your organization should be a competitive analysis detective, constantly looking for clues on what’s coming up in your industry. But they also need a central team of experts to share those clues with. If competitive data is everyone’s job, it’s no one’s job.

In order to build a competitive marketing intelligence culture that sticks, you need a team of high-achieving analysts who live and breathe your industry.

But first, what is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is the accumulation of data on what’s happening in your industry. It can be your competitors’ social media presence, brand positioning, pricing strategy, product tiers, or even their recent job postings. These individual data points paint a clear picture of who your competitors are, where they’re going and how your company needs to respond.

Assembling a competitive intelligence team: Selecting your players

I spent five years in public relations before moving into competitive intelligence strategy. The exciting thing about this field is that a wide variety of backgrounds make a stronger team. The key is looking for a few core traits.

Relentless researchers

Competitive data doesn’t come easy. It is a fallacy to think that all of your competitor’s key information will be readily available on the first page of Google search results. Every member of your team needs to be a little too curious and prepare to dive deep into the backlinks to find the information they crave.

Conscious communicators

It’s easier than you think to get stuck on one interesting piece of information about a competitor–especially if you have a hunch that it could be a game-changer. But competitive intelligence strategy is a long game. Your team has to be okay with holding back information until they have the full story. You need people who are methodical and won’t jump to conclusions based on one juicy bit of intel.

Jack of all trades

Competitive analysis touches the entire business, so you need team members who can speak everyone’s language. Each member of the team needs to be just dangerous enough to understand everyone’s role—whether that’s product, sales, marketing, customer success—and what information might matter to them. They need to know the core competencies, goals and needs of the teams that they work with.

Master distillers

Simply put, you need good writers. If you’re creating a competitive intelligence system that works, you might end up with 100 small pieces of information that tell a larger story. It’s imperative that your team is able to synthesize large amounts of data into a short memo for a busy executive. All of your research is useless if you can’t succinctly disseminate it.

The best sources for competitive intelligence

Once you have your team, it’s time to start compiling your competitive data. It’s tempting to choose every competitor in your industry, but you’ll get better results by focusing in. Especially when you’re first building out your program, hone in on your top two to three competitors and let the others go. Once you identify your targets, there are a variety of sources you can use to start building your competitive analysis library.

Your CRM

Setting up your CRM to capture who your brand goes up against is a great way to benchmark against your competitors. At Sprout, we capture the competitor products prospects currently use and who else they’re evaluating. When we win a deal, we know that we’re competitive with both their last system and the other competitors in the deal. Keeping score is a great way to measure your success and prove the ROI of your competitive intelligence team.

Your sales team

Sales calls can be a treasure trove of information about the way your prospects perceive your competitors. Listening to recordings gives you a direct line of sight into how customers feel about certain product features, brand positioning, and pricing structures compared to your competition. Plus, you can get some great pull quotes for internal briefings.

Social media

Social media happens in real-time, which makes it a great place to get up-to-the-minute information on what your competitors (and customers) are prioritizing. Checking out your competitors’ strategy and engagement metrics can give you a serious edge and help uncover new opportunities. If you pair your manual search skills with a tool like Sprout Listening, you can get detailed reports on how well your content is resonating compared to your competitors.

Creating a culture of competitive intelligence

Once you’ve built out your team and started creating your library of competitive analysis, you’ll be ready to create a culture that thrives on competitive data. Equipped with this information, you can prepare your teams to think about how your organization can beat the competition in every decision they make.

Competitive analysis is the investment that keeps paying dividends. With a solid competitive data foundation, your business will be positioned to win across every department.

This is just the beginning of what competitive analysis can do for your business. Read more about how social listening can help you go even further with your strategy.

The post How to build a competitive intelligence system that wins appeared first on Sprout Social.

With this in mind, we’re excited to share that we’ve released a powerful new template for Competitive Analysis in Sprout Listening. This update provides a comparative insights view that makes it much easier to compare and contrast your social performance with competitors across key metrics, including SOV, engagement and sentiment. These metrics are crucial for understanding who is dominating the conversation, how your audience feels about your competitors and, most importantly, how you stack up against them.

While Listening gives you insights into competitors’ organic presence in broader conversations across social (aka “earned content”), our Competitor Reports provide performance data for content published by your brand across social platforms (aka “owned content”). Together, these tools offer a holistic solution to understand where your brand stands against the competition and where you should be investing your social efforts. Below we break down the key strategic elements of a strong competitive analysis strategy and discuss how you can leverage the Sprout platform to strengthen your brand position and grow your share of voice.

1. Benchmark your social performance

Benchmarking is the foundational step in a good competitive analysis strategy, as it helps you gain critical context to understand your social performance and brand health. Without it, you’re essentially measuring data in a silo. For example, let’s say you double your audience engagement over a six month period. That’s great news, right? What if you then learn that your top competitor has quadrupled their engagement over the same period? It certainly impacts the way you view your own performance and likely will motivate you to learn how your competitor achieved such impressive results.

When benchmarking your social performance, there are two key aspects that you need to examine: owned content and earned content.

Owned content refers to content that brands publish from their own social profiles. Sprout’s Competitor Reports, available in our Premium and Advanced plans, give you in-depth data around your competitors’ content performance within major social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can track key metrics like audience growth, post volume and engagement, and then filter down by date range, profile and content type for a more focused analysis. This gives you a better sense of how your competitor’s social content is resonating with your shared audience and how strongly they’re performing within individual platforms, which we will discuss in more detail in the next section.

On the other hand, earned content refers to brands’ organic mentions in broader social conversations, so this is where listening comes into play. Our new Competitive Analysis template makes it easy to compare SOV data, which is one of the most powerful social metrics you can use to gauge your brand’s competitive position and industry relevance. You can also analyze sentiment scores and trends to see how your audience feels about your competitors (and relevant topics) compared to your own brand. As you track SOV and sentiment, you can now filter down by competitor to analyze smaller subsets or conduct a head-to-head comparison, in addition to using existing filters such as network, profile, content type and demographics. 

Once you compile this benchmarking data, you will have much more meaningful context for your brand health and content performance. These insights will help you understand where you’re performing well and where you should be investing more efforts to improve your social game.

2. Learn what content works—and what doesn’t

The next step in your competitive strategy is to analyze your competitor’s content and how it’s performing to learn what resonates with your audience and industry.

Since each network is unique, start by looking at content across each individual social network. For example, the curated photo and video content that performs so well on Instagram may not have the same resonance on Twitter, where content is geared more towards short-form text dialogue and timely updates. Using Sprout’s Competitor Reports, you can evaluate in-depth content performance and engagement data for your competitors across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

It can also be helpful to evaluate your competitor’s content by a specific topic or campaign. That’s where social listening comes back into play. Our Competitive Listening template helps you identify top keywords and hashtags in competitor-related conversations, so you can easily spot common topics and industry trends. You can then click into the Messages tab for more detailed insights on individual posts, including the content, profile and engagement data.

3. Discover new business opportunities 

Beyond just measuring your brand health and marketing performance, social listening is an extremely powerful tool for gaining insights around industry trends, product feedback and customer pain points. When it comes to your competitive strategy, you can and should be leveraging these listening insights to spark new marketing ideas and identify product and business opportunities that will help you differentiate your brand. 

James Hardie®, a leading brand in the building materials industry, is a great example of leveraging listening to improve business strategy across an organization. Using Sprout Listening, James Hardie is able to engage in audience and trend analysis, research sentiment regarding their products, identify industry influencers and conduct competitor comparisons. Even better, they can take the insights they uncover and use them to optimize their business operations outside of digital marketing.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams. We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates, but brand advocates for our competition. It’s been good from so many perspectives.” 

– Bridget Kulla, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at James Hardie

Get started with competitive analysis today

No matter your business size or industry, competitive analysis is one of the most important tools you should be utilizing to differentiate your brand and grow your share of voice. Sprout’s platform makes it easy to benchmark your performance, analyze competitor content and gain deeper insights around your industry, products and customers. Not only will these insights help improve your marketing strategy, but they will also provide significant business value across your organization.

Visit our website to learn more about Sprout’s competitive analysis offering. 

The post Strengthen your competitive analysis strategy with social listening appeared first on Sprout Social.