Social Listening Archives | Sprout Social

Masterclass: How to Prepare Your Brand for a New Era in Social

veronica — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:57:12 +0000

A lot has changed in social media since the early 2000s. Social has become influence–it is now the channel on which trends are born, important conversations take place and sentiments are revealed. We’re in a new era of social media. Is your brand prepared to meet the ever-evolving expectations of your audience?

Rachel Karten, Social Media Consultant and creator of the Link in Bio Newsletter, has been in the industry for over a decade and knows quite a bit about the evolution of consumer-brand relations in the social world. She worked for brands like Bon Appétit and Plated and recently worked on the famous campaign at CAVA with Youtube star, Emma Chamberlain.

Join us on Thursday, March 30th at 1 pm CT for a masterclass with Rachel Karten to learn how to best prepare for this next phase of social.

You’ll leave this masterclass uncovering:

Why your old social strategy will no longer work in the new era of social media
How your brand can optimize social content for engagement
3 campaign examples from brands Rachel helped succeed and tactics you can implement now

Your Speakers:

The post Masterclass: How to Prepare Your Brand for a New Era in Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

How to Unlock the Power of TikTok for Your Business

prasana — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:19:20 +0000

80 million people spend an average of 24 hours a month on TikTok. Your brand can use this new opportunity to revolutionize how you interact with customers to dramatically increase your brand’s visibility.

Brands that are truly “killing it” on TikTok 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.

This 45-minute discussion will cover:

How your business can gain value from TikTok
TikTok audience insights and its potential for your business
Impactful TikTok marketing tips you can begin implementing now

Featuring speakers from Sprout Social:

The post How to Unlock the Power of TikTok for Your Business appeared first on Sprout Social.

How to Build the Case for Social Media Investment in a Tight Economy

veronica — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 20:29:44 +0000

Executing on a social media marketing strategy is like completing an obstacle course. In 2023, amidst social media platform changes, budget cuts and a cost of living crisis, it feels a bit like the obstacle course is on fire.

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.

How Sprout Social helps Goally engage with and learn from parents of neurodiverse children

Justin Woods — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:26:00 +0000

Goally, based in Denver, Colorado, offers an app and electronic device that use therapy-approved methods to gradually teach neurodiverse children how to complete basic tasks in collaboration with their parents and other caregivers.

“Goally helps ease the lives of families with neurodiverse individuals,” said Kaelyn Brooks, Digital Marketing Specialist at Goally. “We help parents focus more on the fun stuff with their kids, like goodnight kisses and playing outside, rather than nagging them through routine activities.”

To better understand the complex needs of parents with neurodiverse children, Goally turned to Sprout Social for help extracting actionable insights from social conversations across various channels, including TikTok. They’ve been using Sprout’s Listening tools since the beginning of 2022, and the insights gained so far are helping the company evolve its social media strategy. Sprout has empowered Goally to build brand awareness and connect more effectively with its primary target audience: parents.

@goallyapps

No party like a Goally party 🙈 Anyone else see progress with their child? Share some hope👇 #skiptothegoodpart #talker #specialneedsmom #autism

♬ The Good Part – AJR

Sprout’s Listening tools validate the company’s vision and help answer tough questions

Social listening is essential for helping Goally confirm it’s providing technology that’s truly helpful. “We’re a social impact company, and we care a lot about making life easier for neurodiverse families,” said Brooks. “So, we listen to what people need, and we pride ourselves on making products and implementing features based on what we hear from our customers. We don’t always get things right at first, but we learn how to make it right. We chase that with everything we’ve got, and we just listen.”

Using Sprout for social listening helped Brooks surface a common need of parents raising neurodiverse kids: They want to see their children become independent.

“That learning has really validated our vision as a company,” said Brooks. “We know the problem we’re chasing is real, and we’re providing a solution—a really good one, too. Education is often lacking in the world of neurodiversity, and people don’t know where to get information. Social media channels like TikTok offer a unique and accessible way for people to ask authentic questions and get answers.”

Using Sprout is well worth your time, energy and investment because it’s one of the most helpful tools to build a community. Sprout validates social media strategy like no other tool that I’ve found.

Kaelyn Brooks
Digital Marketing Specialist

Sprout helps Goally connect with influencers and drive conversions

While Facebook is important for conversation, and Instagram is valuable for getting how-to information, Brooks said TikTok is “the go-to place” for Goally’s audiences to learn how the company’s technology works.

“TikTok is a place to share authentic stories and build trust,” Brooks noted, adding that Sprout’s Listening tools helped her understand the value of authenticity to Goally’s audience. “When they get on TikTok, they don’t want to see dancing,” she said. “They want to see a mom sharing a story about a really hard experience she had that day or what a therapist said that really helped her kid. It’s authentic vlogging that’s found nowhere else.”

TikTok is also a place for making valuable connections with creators and influencers. Through Sprout, Goally has identified relevant influencers who are bolstering brand awareness and raised Goally’s profile on TikTok. Without using Sprout, Brooks wouldn’t have found one particular influencer who helped her connect with other key influencers. “Social influencers are vital to helping with our conversions,” said Brooks. “The last two times we’ve done a major influencer push on TikTok, we saw the number of users on our website with intent to buy increase by about 4%.”

According to Brooks, Goally also saw its branded search rate increase 58% during its social influencer push in August 2022—compared to January 2022, when the company first started using Sprout. “Our subscriptions also increased 89% during the month of August when we were using TikTok and Instagram influencer campaigns,” said Brooks.

@goallyapps

Let’s 👏 normalize 👏 AAC! It’s a language that deserves to be understood by our world. #aac #autism #talker #specialneedsawareness

♬ original sound – Goally

Goally is using Sprout to track follower trends, which has helped them confirm that TikTok is a place they need to stay active. “Since April 2022, we’ve been consistently growing at 254% month over month, every month. As of December, we have more than 3,000 followers,” Brooks said. “That’s pretty small compared with most companies, but it’s a really big deal for us.”

The increase in Goally’s follower count on TikTok has been rapid since we started using Sprout. That’s given us a reason to stay on TikTok—because we’re finding that there are people incredibly interested in what we’re posting there, and they’re really quick to hit ‘follow.

Kaelyn Brooks
Digital Marketing Specialist

Sprout’s Smart Inbox enables personalized customer care and engagement

Sprout’s Smart Inbox has been especially valuable for keeping on top of Goally’s audience engagement.

If someone comments on a TikTok that we posted two months ago, I could easily miss it if I didn’t have Sprout’s Smart Inbox. It helps us make sure people feel like they’re being heard. With Sprout, I’m certain every single person who comments on our posts, whether new or old, is replied to and cared for quickly and easily.

Kaelyn Brooks
Digital Marketing Specialist

Sprout helps Brooks decrease the amount of time she dedicates to answering questions and chasing comments on individual platforms—which gives her more time for campaign planning and data collection. “I estimate that my productivity has increased by at least 50% since I started using Sprout’s Smart Inbox,” said Brooks.

As for measurement and reporting, Goally uses Sprout to track engagement rates and impressions, both organic and paid. Most of this data is tracked monthly, but Brooks and her team run reports more often to determine the effectiveness of a particular campaign or test new ideas.

@goallyapps

Halloweekend done right 👻 we love our local denver neurodiverse families! Drop the city do you think needs an event like this next year 👇 #sensoryactivities #autismacceptance #autismparents #neurodivergent #audhdtok #allthethingsshesaid

♬ original sound – Goally

Build genuine connections with your community

Brooks harnessed Sprout’s Listening tools to connect Goally’s product development to the needs of their target audience, forge influencer partnerships and improve community engagement.

Learn how Sprout Social can help your team foster impactful relationships with your followers. Request your free demo today.

The post How Sprout Social helps Goally engage with and learn from parents of neurodiverse children appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social listening: Your launchpad to success on social media

Brent Barnhart — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 13:58:37 +0000

Be honest: do you consider yourself to be a good listener? As individuals, we understand the importance of active listening and clear communication.

But what about listening to your brand’s audience?

With social listening, you can finally know exactly what your customers need without digging around endlessly for answers.

Consumer conversations are more transparent than ever in the age of social media. From call-outs to shout-outs, there are endless opportunities to learn about your audience. This includes:

Topics and trends that your customer base is passionate about
Ways for your company to outshine your competitors
Emerging pain points and challenges your customers face
Which types of marketing messages really resonate

The problem? Brands are often guessing and not listening.

Through strategic social listening, brands can analyze customer conversations at scale. The end result is a more meaningful and effective social media marketing strategy.

If you want more confident answers to the questions above, social listening can help.

Table of Contents:

What is social listening?
The value of social listening
Social listening strategies for brands
Social listening tools
How to get started with social listening

What is social listening?

Social listening involves analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand. These include conversations relevant to your company, competitors and industry at large. Insights from these conversations are used to make informed marketing decisions.

Let’s be clear, though: social listening is about more than tags and @mentions. Sure, listening involves acting on direct feedback from people. But it also involves reading between the lines.

Here’s a breakdown of the five Ws (and one H!) of social listening:

Who is your audience?
What does your audience want?
When is your audience engaging with you?
Where is your audience active and engaged?
Why does your audience talk about you?
How can you better serve your audience?

Being confident about the questions above is invaluable for marketers. These answers can inform your messaging and improve your content strategy. Not to mention uncover opportunities to find influencers and brand partners.

Social monitoring vs. social listening

While these two concepts might seem identical, they’re far from the same.

Monitoring tells you what. Listening tells you why.

The food industry is a prime example of how both concepts work and why they matter. For example, restaurants need to know what customers are buzzing about. This might mean their favorite dishes or a new menu announcement.

But the “why” is arguably more important. For example, why are customers reaching out in the first place? Is it a customer service issue? Are customers piling on praise or complaints? These mentions speak to bigger issues that go beyond a single interaction.

Social media monitoring

Monitoring involves tracking and responding to messages received about your brand. Here’s an example from CAVA.

The above example illustrates a brand taking the time to engage with a customer. That initial interaction could have been a complaint or shout-out. Through monitoring and engaging, the entire interaction was positive regardless.

Social listening

CAVA could also use interactions to draw conclusions about first-time customers. They could gain a high-level perspective on how new store locations are doing, too.

Tracking and aggregating these one-off social messages through monitoring would be one approach. The better approach? Using social listening to aggregate that data.

Listening is about understanding the bigger picture. Both social listening and social media monitoring are critical for brands, though. It’s not a matter of either-or. Think of listening and monitoring as a sort of spectrum (see below).

The value of social listening

Brands big and small can benefit from listening data.

Done right, you can translate social conversations into better content and more revenue.

Imagine you work for a company like Netflix. In this scenario, you’re a creative director.

Chances are you have access to tons of data to inspire the direction of your next series. This includes viewership rates, popular genres and most-watched actors.

But let’s say you don’t have all of that data at your fingertips.

Or maybe there are some missing details holding you back from a confident decision.

That’s when you can turn to social media listening to fill in the gaps. Think about how much the average consumer loves to sound off about, well, anything. Granted you know where (and how!) to look.

Social listening provides awesome opportunities to translate these conversations into actionable business insights. Here at Sprout, we’ve narrowed down five key use cases that our customers use listening for:

Brand health: gauging public perception of your brand or products
Industry insights: analyzing discussions or hashtags within an industry
Competitive analysis: analyzing a competing brand or product.
Campaign analysis: reporting on how a campaign is performing
Event monitoring: monitor audience response to a conference or event

A social listening example from a restaurant chain

Chances are your company could leverage many of the above strategies.

Let’s illustrate how with a simple example. Imagine you’re responsible for marketing a franchise restaurant undergoing a brand overhaul. New menu, new branding, the works.

Your current focus is understanding which dishes your customers can’t get enough of. Second-guessing or going off gut feelings isn’t an option here.

So you create a social listening topic that monitors social mentions of your brand. Then, you start dig through the themes and looking for common threads. Below is a sample report pulled from Sprout’s social listening tools.

Here are a handful of insights and action items if you were marketing for the restaurant above:

Notice how burritos are a hot item that customers love to discuss. However, it’s notable that a good chunk of those burrito mentions has a negative sentiment. It would make sense to dig deeper into this data to understand what folks like and don’t like.
Quesadillas don’t get a lot of love. They’re mentioned infrequently and also have the highest percentage of negative mentions. As a result, quesadillas might be a candidate to be cut from your new menu.
On the flip side, your customers love nachos. Although they don’t get the most mentions, they earn the most positive shout-outs. An awareness campaign focused on nachos would make sense.

Social listening strategies

Have a question about your product, customers or competition?

From granular data to big-picture insights, social listening can uncover answers. Sprout has built-in social listening templates to help brands build their strategies faster.

Need inspiration and examples of how to leverage listening in the real world? We’ve got you covered!

Like we said, most brands focus on five key goals. Below we’ve broken them down in detail.

Strategy #1: Brand health

Pop quiz: how do people feel about your brand?

Public perception matters. Paying attention to positive and negative sentiments around your brand is crucial. This can clue you in on what people love about you and where you can improve.

In fact, listening data challenges you to rethink assumptions about your brand. That’s a good thing, too!

You might think your brand is untouchable when it comes to quality or service. But do your customers and industry really feel the same?

It’s easy to get stuck in a bubble when it comes to your brand and sentiment. Social listening provides the truth straight from the mouths of your target audience. Embracing these insights can help you fine-tune your messaging, product strategy and more.

Answers that listening can uncover about your brand health include:

How do customers feel about my brand or product?
Is perception trending up or down?
Which types of content do people share about my brand?
Does my social audience align with other channels?
Frequent social listening provides a pulse on common customer questions, comments and complaints. Not to mention demographics and general sentiment around your brand.

Absorbing all of this at once can be overwhelming. Our suggestion? Once you’ve gathered your conversational data, it’s time to brainstorm your next steps. Here are examples of actions you can take right away:

Find your most frequently asked questions. Then, create a FAQ document or knowledge base to answer these questions at scale.
Find your customers’ most common issues. Then, figure out streamlined solutions or create talk tracks to respond quickly.
Figure out what your customers love about you. Then, incorporate that information into your campaigns and content strategy.
Identify your key social media customers. Then, figure out how you can utilize their traits to target new social audiences.

Read between the lines of positive and negative comments. If sentiment skews negative, don’t panic. Determine if the problem is with your social presence or your company at large. For example, a social content strategy can be revamped ASAP. Issues like a poor perception of products or your service team run deeper.

Here’s the big question when it comes to brand health, though:

Are your customers happy?

If your answer isn’t a resounding “yes,” then you have work to do. Listening reports provide a gut-check on your brand health.

And sure, sometimes sentiment is hurt by factors outside of our control.

From shipping issues to service outages, sentiment can nosedive for many reasons. The key is to understand the cause for negative comments and prep for the future.

If you have slowdowns during your product updates, maybe there’s an issue with your tech stack. If your service team is bogged down with shipping complaints, find the root cause. Then, you can move towards the next steps to prevent all of the above from happening again.

It’s critical for brands to not silo social listening data related to brand health. If anything, this is the data that’s most valuable to the rest of your organization.

Listening data provides firsthand insight into what makes your audience happy (or unhappy). This includes main themes, keywords, audiences and locations. These details could lead outside teams like product or fulfillment to a major “aha” moment.

Strategy #2: Industry insights

Done right, social listening identifies industry trends before they even become trends.

Industry hashtags and discussions are invaluable for brands in this department.

There’s a lot of noise to sift through, sure. Close listening to the right conversations can clue you on ways to pivot or get ahead of industry trends.

This can likewise influence your messaging and content strategy. Adapting to industry trends can give you a serious competitive advantage.

Here as some ways to use listening for industry insights:

Keep an eye on disruptions to your space (think: new tech, competitors or legislation)
Track political and social issues to weigh in on if they’re relevant to your brand.
Find gaps in the industry that a new product, solution or workflow could solve
Look for frequently asked questions to create content your audience needs.

The current discourse over AI content is a great example. From marketers to artists and consumers, the impact is wide-reaching. Some are concerned, others are supportive and many are uncertain. There are plenty of hot takes and game-changing claims, too. Tech brands will monitor the implications for their own products and customers.

The power of social listening for industries goes beyond trends, too. Many brands use listening tools to identify relevant influencers. The boom of the creator economy speaks for itself.

With so many creators, finding a good fit requires some serious digging. Listening to specific terms or conversations can help you find influencers faster. This beats sifting through social bios or countless pieces of content.

Find your current top influencers and empower them to advocate for you
Find all of the influencers in your industry and create a list of people to collaborate with
Find your competitor’s top influencers and attempt to win them over.
Figure out the best networks for your strategy (ex: TikTok versus Instagram)

Strategy #3: Competitive analysis

Social media is fiercely competitive. That isn’t going to change.

And so many of our most popular listening reports are about competitive analysis.

New companies are constantly popping up in both B2B and B2C. Keeping up with your direct competitors is hard enough. Not to mention indirect competitors fighting for your audience’s attention.

Through listening, you can monitor conversations related to your competitors. This includes:

Determining your share of voice. This includes your volume of mentions and messages versus your competitors.
Understanding your competitors’ shortcomings. This could be related to their product, service or messaging. Then, brainstorm how you can create a better experience.
Finding competitive content that outperforms your own. Then, analyze why it resonates with your shared audience.
Quickly identifying new products or solutions. Determine how people feel about new offerings in your space. Then, consider how you can pivot or reposition yourself to outshine them.

Competitive shortcomings aren’t always obvious. A thoughtful social listening strategy can help you hone in on them. This is especially valuable if you’re taking on a bigger competitor. Positioning is key when you can’t outspend or brute force your way into greater awareness.

The skincare space best illustrates this phenomenon.

There are more brands and competitors than we can count. That said, there are specific terms relevant to specific audiences and their needs. This might include “acne-prone”, “k-beauty” or “retinol.”

Likewise, brands are constantly being pitted against each other by consumers and influencers. “Versus” and “this or that” posts are particularly popular. Brand advocates tend to pop off in the comment sections of these posts, too.

Paying attention to these conversations can be eye-opening. This is especially true regarding your competitors’ advantages and shortcomings.

Strategy #4: Campaign analysis

Brands spend so much energy on fresh campaign ideas.

But how can you say with confidence whether or not a campaign succeeded?

You can’t repeat your positive results if you don’t know what’s working. On the flip side, you don’t want to rely on strategies that underperform.

Listening tactics boost your campaign success dramatically. Think through the following capabilities for your next campaign.

Track the impressions and engagements around your campaign posts.
Quickly gather general sentiment around specific campaigns.
Identify the top influencers discussing your campaigns.
Understand which of your audience demographics the campaign resonates with.
Figure out the key themes behind your campaigns
Track collaborative campaigns from a single source of truth.

Social listening can finally prove to you the value of your marketing campaigns. Start by crafting listening topics to capture the conversations around your campaign. Analyzing hashtags or handles can uncover countless metrics to clue you in.

You can then break down all of these insights by:

Network
Content type
Message type
Sentiment

Strategy #5: Event monitoring

Events and conferences are prime sources of valuable listening data.

Because in-person sentiment and conversations are difficult to track at scale. The good news is that most of those conversations are simultaneously happening online.

Listening by title or terms associated with sessions and speakers is a start. Consider also how listening can open your eyes to:

Your attendees’ favorite events, speakers and sessions
Opportunities to improve the event experience
Whether your event led to meaningful business opportunities

Why use social listening for events

Want to know whether your audience is pleased and received your message?

Gathering feedback is a must-do given the legwork required to put on an event. You want to make sure your investment of time and energy is worth the effort.

From recruiting events and conferences to performances and beyond, listening is fair game. Gauging audience reactions is a common use of listening analysis. It’s an effective one, too.

Event monitoring: Predicting the Oscars with social sentiment

Sprout worked with Inc. to predict outcomes during the 2018 Oscars. We looked at three categories: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Leading Role.

We pulled data on each individual nominee to find their total social mentions. Then, we analyzed total positive mentions against total negative mentions. Each nominee’s net Positive Mentions were then used to predict winners.

Pretty cool, right? This is a prime example of the potential of harnessing user sentiment online.

Understanding Sprout’s social listening tools

Early we discussed how social listening is a spectrum.

Specifically, a spectrum that spans brand monitoring and marketing insights.

Gathering and analyzing social data seems straightforward. That said, turning that data into “What’s next?” is more complicated. Doing so requires context.

Sprout’s tools span the listening spectrum to provide those answers and insights. We balance both engagement and analytics use cases for listening.

Now, let’s dive deeper into how each of Sprout’s social listening tools can boost your business. This includes providing better service, improving your content strategy and fine-tuning your messaging.

Smart Inbox

Sprout’s Smart Inbox tracks every conversation with and about your brand. Think of it as your home base for social listening.

Our unified Smart Inbox helps businesses engage and build relationships with their audiences. This is done by organizing all of your ongoing customer communication. We empower brands to prioritize their most important messages across channels. Brands can use the Smart Inbox to:

Create a one-stop shop for social engagement. Bouncing between platforms and log-in screens is a poor use of your time. The Smart Inbox aggregates your messages in one place.
Stay focused and never miss a message. With one inbox, you’re less likely to overlook your notifications. You can likewise use the Smart Inbox to track branded keywords. You won’t miss notifications for those, either.
Maintain engagement as a team. The Smart Inbox was built with team collaboration in mind. Our platform helps brands increase their response time and reduce duplicate conversations.

Brand Keywords

The Brand Keywords feature captures Twitter conversations relevant to your brand, industry and competition.

Not every shout-out or call-out is tagged. Likewise, not every piece of content about your brand is tied to a hashtag.

It’s easy to miss out on these messages. Searching for them manually is a massive time sink, though. Catching them all is impossible without some sort of tracking tool.

That’s where we come in. Brand Keywords are custom searches that run consistently. These results display in your Smart Inbox. You can then interact with them like any other message.

The Brand Keywords feature offers strategic opportunities to:

Find your most important messages. Add keywords mentioning your company and products. Common misspellings of those, too. You can also uncover conversations that don’t @tag you directly.
Find new opportunities. A real-time pulse on branded keywords means you can influence people faster. For example, let’s say someone tweets for opinions on your brand versus a competitor. You can jump in to recommend your product or explain your company’s advantages.

Trends Report

The Trends Report highlights popular topics and hashtags related to your brand.

For example, our Twitter report shows tags and topics trending in your mentions. You can also see the people and brands that engage with your business the most.

Brands can leverage the Trends Report to:

Take the guesswork out of content creation. Quickly filter campaign and demographic data to identify top content. Then, tailor your marketing strategy to create more of it.
Identify trending topics to reach new audiences. Spot emerging trends and top content relevant to your brand, competitors or industry.
Leverage hashtag listening and reporting. For example, you can perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of keywords and hashtags. Then, you can compare your campaigns’ success and your share of voice

Keyword Report

The Keyword Report reveals basic keywords related to your brand, competition and industry.

The Twitter Keyword report instantly uncovers trends in Twitter traffic for any keyword. This includes hashtags or long-tail search queries across any date range. Consider how the Keyword Report can:

Keep tabs on your industry. Track your brand against the competition and trends.
Track effectiveness and reach. This applies to your past and current hashtag or marketing campaigns.
Discover patterns in keyword usage. Consider how some terms or trends fall out of favor. Then, adjust your marketing efforts to reflect that new language.
Track your brand’s products and sentiment. You can measure this against yourself or your competitors.

Listening

Insights from Sprout’s Listening features are among the most valuable for brands. This includes emerging trends, identifying thought leaders and deep sentiment analysis.

And with Sprout’s built-in templates, you can start listening ASAP.

These listening tools are a powerful complement to our extensive social monitoring features. You can get a comprehensive view of keywords, campaigns and brands across platforms. This includes Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and more.

Social listening offers a window into the unfiltered thoughts of your audience. When these thoughts are front-and-center, trendspotting is so much easier. You can likewise uncover threads and gauge feelings around any given topic.

These insights inform your big-picture business decisions. Meanwhile, your Smart Inbox tracks specific interactions and engagements with your customers. It’s the best of both worlds!

Here’s a snapshot of what Sprout’s Listening can do:

Empower your organization. Sprout’s listening data takes your team’s impact beyond social media. You can offer actionable insights to strengthen other departments. Sales teams and customer service, in particular, can learn a lot from listening data.
Cut time to insight and action. Learn and act at the speed of social media. Having your listening data alongside your publishing tools means hopping on trends faster.
Organize your social presence in one platform. Streamline your workflow by eliminating jumps from point solution to point solution.
Research with intention. We provide filtering options to help you get relevant answers fast. Doing so means cutting through the noise.
Create targeted Topics with ease. The Topic Builder makes it simple to set up complex and relevant queries. You can then search and research these topics over and over again.

How to get started with social listening

There are obviously a lot of moving pieces here.

To wrap things up, let’s dive into what it looks like to ease into social listening for the first time as a business.

Choose a social listening tool

A key benefit of social listening is that it takes and makes sense of millions of social messages. Synthesizing all that data requires tools.

So the first question you need to answer is: build them or buy them?

Do you want to build and maintain your own internal social listening tool? Should you look into a third-party provider to do the heavy lifting?

This really depends on your bandwidth and budget.

Determine your initial goals and desired outcomes

Ask yourself: what do you want to get out of social listening?

Goal-setting is key for any marketing initiative and listening is no exception. There’s no “right” answer here. That said, goals will guide your strategy.

Here are some of the most common goals and outcomes we see from brands:

Run a deep analysis of your brand to understand what customers and prospects think.
Monitor your industry or niche to keep a pulse on what’s new and what would make good content.
Keep an eye on your competitors’ products, audiences and marketing tactics.
Figure out what kind of content to share based on trends and data.
Identify your key social media audiences to better inform your targeting strategy.

Choose relevant data sources

Pop quiz: where should you pull your listening data from?

Twitter is the go-to source of data for more social listening tools. That’s why we recommend starting with Twitter listening if even if your brand isn’t active there. Listening on Instagram and Facebook is also possible.

The trick is trying to manage all of these platforms without a third-party tool. Again, combing through mentions manually is super tedious.

Sprout pulls its social data from a variety of sources. Social apps, the web and more. This approach gives you the most comprehensive sense of where your brand stands.

Build your topics and themes to listen to

Building your actual listening topics is key to a successful strategy.

Brainstorm specific queries relevant to your rand. This includes terms you want to listen for and noise to avoid.

What to query

Keywords or phrases
Hashtags
Cashtags
Mentions of user
Mentions from user
Mentions to user

And/or logic

Listening is about more than just hashtags and keywords. You can refine the logic of your search even more with additional parameters.

For example, say you want to track sentiment around Chicago-style pizza. Your query may end up looking more like below.

Now all sorts of variations will register:

chicago pizza
chi-town pizza
chicago deep dish
chi-town deep dish
chicago pie

Exclusions

Consider how “Chicago pie” could mean pizza or baked goods. This is an example of where exclusions can be helpful. For example, you may add pie flavors to ensure that the scope of your search is limited to pizza.

Gather data to inform your strategy

After refining your topics, you can start collecting data to inform your strategies.

Let’s run with our Chicago-style pizza example. Below is a word cloud of the frequently mentioned keywords based on the query.

You can click on each keyword to get a better sense of what the messages mean. You might notice that a lot of the messages mention cold weather in Chicago. What can you do with this information?

Create social posts about whether you’re open when it’s freezing out
Write a post about how pizza sales are impacted by temperatures
Come up with a playful, weather-themed promotion
Think altruistically! Think about Chicago shelters or workers that could benefit from a free pizza

Measure the results of your listening efforts relative to your goals

How do you know if your listening strategy is working or not?

Fair question! As always, look at your data. Your priority metrics will depend on the goals of your campaign.

Here are some sample listening metrics to consider:

Clicks
Reach
New followers
Profile visits
Engagement rates
Engagement speed

Ready to start listening?

The closer you listen, the more meaningful relationships you can form with customers.

That’s why mapping out a social listening strategy matters.

Instead of doing all of the above by hand, consider how a tool like Sprout can streamline the process. Not to mention pull accurate, up-to-date data in real time.

Want to translate your customer conversations into action? Sprout’s tools can tell your team exactly how. Check out a free trial of Sprout Social to test-drive our listening features for yourself.

The post Social listening: Your launchpad to success on social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

10 effective social media automation tools to use in 2023

Jessica Jansasoy — Tue, 20 Dec 2022 14:00:44 +0000

If you feel like posting, replying to followers and manually generating reports on every social media account you own is too much, we agree.

The good news is that with social media automation tools, repetitive or manual tasks that took you hours are now done within a few minutes.

Social media automation is the process of optimizing the tasks you perform for your social media activities. Its purpose is to reduce the hours spent managing your social media networks so you can focus on other tasks like analyzing data or coming up with better strategies to grow your social media presence.

Automated tasks include scheduling posts, replying to the most common customer requests, creating reports and tracking mentions of your brand. Rather than adding these activities to your manual to-do list, using automation tools to get them done will help you:

Save time managing every social media account in one place
Stay active on social media when your audience is most engaged or outside business hours—without you being there
Check social data in real-time across social media networks
Enhance team collaboration to boost productivity with workflows

In this article, we’ll walk you through the best social media automation tools—free and premium. You’ll learn features, use cases and who would benefit the most by using them.

1. Sprout Social

It’s no surprise that Sprout Social is our favorite solution to automate social media tasks. We developed it with your best interests in mind to unlock the potential of your social media strategies.

Here are three areas of our tool that will help you automate your social media efforts:

Social management

Sprout’s social management features focus on publishing, scheduling and reporting to aid your day-to-day social media activities.

Key features:

Content Creation & Management: Schedule up to 350 posts and campaigns with a content calendar that spans all your social media networks. This feature also recommends proven times to post and generate engagement.
Conversation Management: Get messages from all your social media networks in a Smart Inbox and reply from one platform. You can delegate these messages to specific team members and automate canned responses.
Data Reporting: Analyze your performance across all your social media networks. Create custom reports and see graphics of your growth.

Customer care

Sprout Social’s customer care features help you better the experience of your customers or social media audience with your brand. With us, you can build stronger relationships and provide a responsive service.

Key features:

Bot Builder: Create chatbots to automate your customer support. This feature helps you provide information 24/7 for Twitter and Facebook.
Social CRM: Generate customer profiles and add relevant information to help your customer support team. Check conversation history from customer profiles to provide a custom experience. Sprout integrates with Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot so you can work across platforms to track the end-to-end customer experience.
Review Management: Get notifications from Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook and Glassdoor. This helps you manage your social media and online presence from a single platform.

Sprout Social Listening and Analytics

Sprout Social’s Listening and Analytics tools give you business-critical insights to help you make strategic decisions. Get deep insights and data about the general sentiment around your brand, topics your audience is interested in and specific keywords you want to monitor.

Measuring performance data across your social networks, and integrating listening data, enables you to get the big picture of your brand’s health quickly. Plus, you can automate reports using the graphs and charts Sprout creates for you. With this, you can see what people are saying without having to manually search each social platform.

Key features:

Competitor Reports: Compare your metrics against your competitors to understand your brand’s health. This feature allows you to filter topics by competitor, content type and sentiment, helping you identify trends to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout does the work for you, gathering the insights that matter to you and cutting out the need to manually audit each competitor’s social performance.
Paid Performance Report: Analyze your social media advertising across networks. Instead of monitoring performance within each platform’s ad dashboards, Sprout pulls your data into one place so you can easily see how your paid efforts are performing. You can select the accounts and campaigns you want to include during a specific period. The reports give you metrics and graphics for Paid Video Views, Paid Web Conversions, Paid Engagement and Paid Impressions. All of these can easily be repurposed into a report for stakeholders, enabling you to focus on making strategic and timely optimizations.
Social Listening: Rather than digging through millions of online conversations manually, quickly get business-critical insights from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to impact your current strategy and guide future action.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, mid-size brands, small businesses and agencies that want a full package of tools to make data-driven strategic decisions, build lasting relationships with customers and grow their social media presence.

Free or premium? Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial or a demo. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

Reimagine the role of social in your business

A powerful, all-in-one social media management platform

Start Your Free Trial

2. Sendible

Sendible is one of the social media automation tools that has all the features you need to run your social media daily activities from scheduling, posting, monitoring and analyzing on a budget.

Key features:

Publishing: Schedule individual posts on your content calendar from your dashboard or in bulk with CSV files. With Sendible, you can resize images to fit every social media network without leaving the app.
Collaboration: Add clients and team members to create workflows with approval and custom permissions.
Analytics: Generate and automatically send reports to your clients. Also, get insights about the social media networks that drive the most traffic to your website, optimal posting times and top-performing posts.
Social listening: Check data around industry keywords, hashtags and trends.

Who is this for? Agencies, brand managers or social media marketers that manage social media presence for clients or their own.

Free or premium? Sendible offers a free 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse offers an all-in-one social media automation tool that’s great for those just starting to grow their social media presence. This solution takes pride in providing great customer service with a 30-minute response time.

Key features:

Social Inbox: Manage your messages with the Inbox Assistant, which organizes or labels your items. With this feature, you can create canned responses to address the same questions multiple times.
Social Publishing: Schedule and approve content with your team and clients. Agorapulse also offers a mobile app to publish on the go.
Social Listening and Reporting: Use parameters to focus on conversations about your brand and competitors. Get custom reports of gained or lost followers and social media interactions.

Who is this for? Freelancers, agencies, small businesses and enterprise organizations that want to manage their social media presence from one platform.

Free or premium? Agorapulse offers a 30-day free trial or a demo. If you’re looking for free social media automation tools, Agorapulse offers a free plan for individuals with limited functionalities along with other premium plans.

4. ContentStudio

ContentStudio differs from other social media automation tools as one of its features analyzes the content strategy of influencers, so you can use it to your advantage. Plus, this tool covers the basics of scheduling and analyzing social media posts.

Key features:

Publishing & Scheduling: Schedule and approve content with your team or clients. You can also use the Chrome extension to share content with your audience easily.
Analytics: Get demographic information from your followers and publishing behavior data from competitors.
Social Inbox: Categorize your conversations and assign them to the right team member. You can reply to messages with canned responses and see if a teammate is already replying in real-time.
Discover: Search high-performing content and analyze it so you know what topics are trending.

Who is this for? Agencies, brands or marketers that want to grow their social media presence while boosting productivity.

Free or premium? ContentStudio offers a 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media automation software that focuses on checking the general sentiment around your brand. With this, you can manage conversations with your clients and better their experience with your brand.

Key features:

Discussion Volume Chart: Check graphs of your brand mentions online. When you spot a peak, you can analyze if it’s the result of your social media efforts or a sign of an issue that needs investigating.
Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 uses AI to determine if online brand mentions are positive, negative or neutral—and set up alerts so you can act if you receive a negative mention.
Data Exporting: Automate the generation of reports on PDF, Excel and even infographics.

Who is this for? Solopreneurs, agencies and enterprise companies that want to track their online reputation.

Free or premium? Brand24 offers a free 14-day trial. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

6. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media automation tool that provides general features like scheduling, analytics and social listening with integrated AI. They scale up B2B social media by offering a People Database to get more qualified leads.

Key features:

Social Publishing: Create multiple social media posts in seconds with AI. Then approve or reject these posts using workflows with tier permissions.
Employee Advocacy: Generate a leaderboard where you can track your team’s performance metrics. Oktopost lets you filter your posts by topics so your team can share content they care about on their social media.
AI-powered Social Listening: Monitor your brand mentions across major social media networks and websites. You can also get information about influential profiles that address relevant topics.

Who is this for? B2B companies that want to scale their social media presence and show its impact on business goals.

Free or premium? Oktopost offers a demo, becoming a premium tool after.

7. Loomly

Loomly is a social media automation tool that offers content management features for both organic and promoted posts, plus live optimization tips for your content.

Key features:

Social Publishing: Get step-by-step guidance to create organic and promoted content on Loomly. Then receive notifications (email, Slack, push or Microsoft teams) every time a team member edits or comments on your content.
Ad Campaigns Creation: Create campaigns and boost sponsored posts from Loomly and schedule the date you want them to go live.
Analytics: Analyze all your social media posts, even the ones that weren’t posted from Loomly, and get insights with automated UTM codes added to your URLs.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, agencies and small businesses that want a simple and easy-to-use tool to manage their social media presence.

Free or premium? Loomly offers a free 15-day trial. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

8. CoSchedule

Different from other social media automation tools, CoSchedule helps you organize, schedule and publish all your marketing projects in one place.

Key features:

Marketing Calendar: Organize and schedule all your marketing projects (blog posts, social media, presentations and landing pages) in one place. Assign these projects to team members and monitor the progress in real-time, using easy drag-and-drop features if your plans change.
Other CoSchedule free tools: A variety of free tools to help you optimize your content like the Headline Analyzer, Email Subject Line Tester and Social Message Optimizer.

Who is this for? Agencies, small businesses and solopreneurs that want a tool tailored to the project management of your marketing content.

Free or premium? CoSchedule is one of the few free social media automation tools. It offers a Marketing Calendar that will forever be free with limited functionalities and other paid plans.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is a solution that helps you market on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest while also helping you grow with email marketing. With Tailwind you can generate ideas, design stylish content and optimize it to convert more customers.

Key features:

Plan: Get a social media plan tailored to your type of business and marketing needs. This feature provides content ideas and reminders to track your posting schedule in the social media calendar.
Create: Automatically generate multiple designs for your posts with customizable brand colors, fonts and your logo with one click.
Schedule: Schedule your post at the best times for engagement or set a reminder to manually post.
Optimize: Obtain recommendations for high-performing hashtags according to your captions. Add links to your posts to convert more customers and get sales.

Who is this for? Brands or small businesses that want a tool focused on content creation and design while covering their scheduling needs.

Free or premium? Tailwind offers a free plan and three other premium plans.

10. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a tool that offers social media automation at scale. You can manage hundreds of social media accounts across networks from a single hub. This makes PromoRepublic a perfect tool for brands with multiple locations.

Key features:

Content Creation: Have access to templates for high-performing posts and customize them with your brand colors and style.
Publishing: Use workflows to approve edits or leave suggestions and collaborate with your team.
Advertising: Create advertising campaigns that reach local audiences by using filters for zip code or city.
Engagement: Post your content at proven times to generate engagement and answer customers’ questions or comments from your social inbox.
Listening: Get data about your posts to determine the kind of content that your audience likes the most.

Who is this for? Small businesses, agencies and multi-location brands that want to manage multiple social media accounts across different business locations.

Free or premium? PromoRepublic offers a demo and then becomes a premium tool.

Automate your social media success

With social media in the game, there are a lot of opportunities to understand, entertain and communicate with your audience. But often, managing your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok in front of thousands of people online can seem like a lot for one person or even a small team.

That’s why it is imperative to use social media automation tools—not only to automate social media posts, but to enhance customer care and scale up your strategic decisions.

If you want the full experience of managing your social media accounts, customer support and deep insights into your audience, sign up for a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social.

The post 10 effective social media automation tools to use in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

How 3 top brands provide social media customer service and support

Ronnie Gomez — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 15:44:05 +0000

Social media customer service has become a consumer staple. There’s no going back on it now.

Say goodbye to the era of phone queues or endless email chains. Today’s consumers are commenting, tagging and sending direct messages. Immediate and accessible, social media provides a much-needed direct line between buyers and businesses.

Of course, what streamlines work on the consumer’s end can create some internal confusion if processes don’t adapt to keep up. Is your business ready to tackle high-volume service events across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more? If not, we’ve got the tips and tools you need to get it done.

This guide breaks down how brands can create a seamless social media support strategy. We’ve also gathered some of our favorite takeaways from brands providing great customer service across social.

Breaking down customer service vs. customer care
What does good customer service on social media look like?
6 ways to provide great social media customer service
3 Brands that provide great customer service on social

Breaking down customer service vs. customer care

“Customer service” and “customer care” are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t the same.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s make a quick distinction:

Social media customer service is the reactive support you offer your customers across social networks like Facebook and Instagram. Customers can request assistance via DM, a review site or through their own social posts. The time it takes to triage that request and respond appropriately is what makes a superior customer service experience.

For example, this customer reached out to the Spindrift social team on Twitter about a potentially sold-out product at 8:39. Spindrift responded promptly and enthusiastically at 9:07. In less than 30 minutes, Spindrift created a wow-worthy experience.

Got it ordered!!!

— Dylan (@KazuSaku1980) November 15, 2022

Customer care is about proactively meeting your customers’ needs. In terms of social customer care, that means:

Having a self-service help center
Educating customers about your product via social content
Interacting with customers consistently (even before they make a purchase)
Having answers and information on-hand before someone reaches out
Offering personalized service that goes beyond automated responses

If you’re looking for customer care inspiration, turn to Brooklinen. The direct-to-consumer bedding brand excels at proactively connecting with customers, even when they aren’t directly tagged or mentioned.

we're so happy to hear you're loving your sheets! thanks for sharing the love 🫶

— Brooklinen (@brooklinen) November 28, 2022

In short, social customer care is differentiated from service in that it starts before a customer reaches out to you about a product or service. That includes both responding to complaints and rewarding compliments.

What does good customer service on social media look like?

Great question!

Social customer service standards are constantly changing as network features evolve and people find new ways to contact the brands they love online. Staying up to date on what wows consumers today means staying on top of the social media trends that drive the most engagement.

That said, some fundamentals will never go out of style. These tips transcend networks because they’re simply standards of great customer service translated for an online audience.

Providing the best customer service on social can look like:

Keeping response times low: According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, more than half (57%) of consumers expect a response on social media within 12 hours. Tools (like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report) can provide a holistic average of your response times across network so you can ensure they’re in line with consumer standards.
Going beyond business hours: Don’t worry; you don’t need to have your inbox staffed 24/7 to pull this off. There are customer service chatbots that support automated away messages. Use these tools to properly set expectations with customers contacting your brand at night and over the weekend.

Making it easy: The best customer service creates little to no friction on the customer’s end. Pull this off by establishing a digital primary point of interaction. If you can’t solve the issue on social, direct them to another chat or ticket support solution. Customers seeking assistance online aren’t interested in dialing a call center.
Staying human: Your customers are people, who want to be treated like a person by a person when possible. Human touches, like personalizations and greetings, go far when providing service on a digital channel.

6 ways to provide great social media customer service

Let’s say you have a basic social media support strategy in place, but you want to increase your efficiency. Below are some ways you can take your approach from good to great.

1. Conduct a social customer service audit

There’s no sense in making changes for the sake of it. For a truly effective process revamp, conduct an audit of what’s currently working with your social media customer service strategy and what’s not.

A simple SWOT analysis can provide meaningful insights into where and how you can improve. What about your process is going well? Where are there roadblocks or bottlenecks? A candid conversation with your team will reveal where changes can be made.

For example, if you’re managing a high volume of messages split across multiple networks, it may be time to level up to a tool that aggregates them in a single location, like Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox.

In addition to incoming mentions, the Smart Inbox can pull branded keywords to cast a wider net on online conversations. That will help you find indirect mentions and other key terms for your brand quickly and easily. Sprout’s chatbot functionality also lets you keep an eye on chatbot-based conversations in the Smart Inbox, so a human team member can jump in when needed.

2. Create an internal tracking system

Good customer service creates a feedback loop that improves processes and products.

You need a way to monitor common issues that should be addressed at a company level, such as correcting an ongoing problem in your shipping process or identifying a recurring product defect. You also need to generate reports to make sure your plan is succeeding. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet.

The Tag feature in Sprout allows you to tag incoming messages with any created tag, such as “feature request” or “product complaint.” This way, you can quickly run a report on these tags to see what’s trending.

Any service report you generate should also include how quickly you can respond and, if enabled, how pleased someone is with your service. This feedback loop encourages you to continuously improve your quality of service.

3. Use canned responses for consistent, speedy replies

If you’re looking to standardize your social customer care responses and address more customers ASAP, canned responses can do the trick.

Canned responses are saved messages support reps can roll out when responding to customers. Rather than write every reply from scratch, canned responses provided an approved, brand-friendly starting point. These replies can cover anything from general “thank yous” to specific concerns.

Create various customer service response templates based on your customers’ frequently asked questions. Check out this round-up of direct message templates for inspiration if you need a starting point.

4. Standardize your brand’s customer service voice

Having multiple people manage social media means that there’s more chance of your voice getting diluted.

You want your social approach to be cohesive across promotions, posts and service responses. It’s possible to have a “pun-tastic” attitude for original Tweets and a more conciliatory tone for customer complaints. Alternatively, you could go the Discord route and incorporate conversational cues directly from your audience.

Oh no!! What happened to your account? 😮

— Discord (@discord) December 2, 2022

However you approach it, document and create a brand voice strategy, so everyone on your team knows how to represent the brand on social media.

5. Document an escalation management strategy

There may be times when you can’t resolve a situation in the public sphere. Those instances call for a documented escalation management strategy.

Outline what types of situations should be escalated to a private channel like DMs or ticket support. For example, if a conversation gets contentious or personal information needs to be shared, it’s probably time to take things off the feed.

Hello, Mauricio. Thanks for the mention. Please send us a DM on our Twitter support page so we can assist you further.
Refer here: https://t.co/O7rI15uCPI

— Belkin (@belkin) October 31, 2022

This will help ensure that reps only handle challenges within their wheelhouse and that customer issues are solved quickly and efficiently.

6. Uncover crucial customer conversations with monitoring and listening

Social listening is becoming increasingly crucial for the sake of social customer service.

With so many conversations happening via social, keeping track of every mention is often chaotic. That’s why so many brands today rely on monitoring and listening tools to uncover:

Brand mentions that aren’t directly @tagged (or misspelled brand mentions)
Competitor mentions related to your business, such as call-outs or comparisons
Compliments and shout-outs that could result in more positive customer sentiment

Listening is also invaluable for uncovering your customers’ frequently asked questions. For example, you might notice an uptick in volume about a specific feature or bug. You may realize that customers are stuck on the same few product features or questions. Tracking these changes via listening and writing canned responses to address them is a win-win for your social team.

Gathering voice of customer data gives you a more comprehensive understanding of what your customers want and need. A listening tool makes the process much easier.

3 Brands that provide great customer service on social

Now that you know the basics of providing stellar social media customer service, let’s check out some examples. Here are three brands that have mastered the art of creating lasting customer connections on social:

1. MeUndies

At MeUndies, the average time to first response on social is just under 20 minutes. That’s impressive, but it’s astounding when you account for the fact that they received more than 12,000 messages in just two months.

Providing high-quality service quickly is no easy feat, but it’s essential to delivering on the MeUndies brand promise. Social Media Support Coordinator TK Lynch believes doing so on social is key to meeting customers where they are.

“We want to create an experience that doesn’t feel like you’re dealing with a customer service representative. Social allows us to create a customer experience that’s personable and casual, while still being effective.”

To create these experiences, the MeUndies team relies on the Sprout Social Smart Inbox. The tool consolidates all inbound messages—including DMs, mentions and comments—within a single stream.

For a business managing an Instagram following of more than 481,000, that’s huge.

2. Grammarly

More than 30 million people worldwide use Grammarly to punch up their personal and professional writing. Many turn to social media when they have questions or feedback on the product.

The Grammarly social customer care team recognizes this as not only an opportunity to provide excellent customer service but also as an opportunity to collect meaningful consumer insights. However, synthesizing feedback from more than 13,000 messages per month is no easy feat. To pull it off, they use Sprout’s Tagging feature.

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

These reports make social media customer service data a cross-functional resource that informs product and service improvements. It’s no wonder many of their customers sing their praises on and off social.

Aw, thanks for your tweet! We're thrilled to hear that it's making a difference in your writing. 🤗

— Grammarly (@Grammarly) December 5, 2022

3. Allegiant Air

As a direct sales brand, Allegiant Air knows that being accessible on social media is a crucial component of their customer care and engagement strategy. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Allegiant Air found itself triaging an influx of inquiries on social as customers looked to get questions answered or rebook travel plans.

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

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. With help from the Smart Inbox and a robust tagging strategy, the Allegiant Air team collaborates smarter and responds to fliers faster.

At your service with expert tips

Brands today can’t wing it when it comes to social media customer service. Without a plan or the proper tools, you’re inevitably letting your customer’s questions and concerns fall by the wayside.

Use the tools and tips above to help ensure that you’re actively listening to each customer and responding promptly. Remember that you have to walk before you can run. Attempting to implement multiple process changes at once might set you back instead of driving your strategy forward.

If you haven’t already, check out this roundtable featuring social experts from Subaru of America and Sprout Social. They’ll walk you through everything you need to know to take your social customer care strategy from reactive to proactive.

The post How 3 top brands provide social media customer service and support appeared first on Sprout Social.

Spotify Wrapped: What marketers can learn from the viral campaign

Katie Woods — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:20:55 +0000

The end of the year is a time of reflection. As one chapter comes to a close, people look at where they’ve been in preparation for where they’re going. After all, you can’t make a New Year’s resolution without knowing what you want to accomplish. It’s the time of year where people buy planners, get gym memberships and write holiday letters recapping their year for friends and family. This is the backdrop that makes Spotify Wrapped so successful.

Think about it. Just as you’re reflecting on everything 2022 has brought, Spotify provides you with the soundtrack that got you through it. Whether your year was full of confident and upbeat pop songs or maybe one too many break-up ballads, the music you listened to is a reflection of the year you’ve had. Whether you were surprised by your Wrapped or knew exactly what was coming, this year’s edition had something for everyone.

Pretends to be shocked 🙈 #SpotifyWrapped pic.twitter.com/Z66oIzq0v7

— aira 🍊🐱⁷ (@meanyoongi0309) December 2, 2022

Spotify Wrapped through the years

Spotify Wrapped has been showing users their musical year in review since 2016. With stats on the amount of time you’ve spent listening, your top artists and a playlist of your top 100 songs, the annual round-up has become a staple for users.

It’s also become a hot topic on social media. Spotify Wrapped comes in an easily shareable format with quick links to repost to your favorite social media platforms.

“nobody cares about your spotify wrapped” i do. i do care please post it everywhere.

— lu (@thelasstime) November 22, 2022

For Spotify users, Wrapped is another way to share who they are and what they like with their friends and followers. For Spotify, it’s a viral marketing tool. To see just how effective the Spotify Wrapped campaign is, we dove into the Sprout Social Listening tool. Every year, Spotify Wrapped gets bigger and bigger on social media, with massive engagement gains between 2020 and 2021.

While 2021 might have been a banner year for the Spotify Wrapped campaign, 2022 has been even bigger. Total volume of posts, engagements, potential engagements and unique authors hit double-digit percentage increases over 2021 with the first three days alone bringing in over 400 million Tweets.

It’s clear that Spotify’s unique combination of personalization, shareability and seasonality is hitting the right notes with their audience.

What marketers can learn from Spotify Wrapped

As marketers look forward to 2023 planning, there are three key lessons to take away from Spotify’s Wrapped campaign.

Sharing is caring

Spotify Wrapped is extremely sharable. The content is optimized for social media and the in-app experience prompts users to share to social media. Creating personalized content that your audience wants to share is a winning strategy. Give your audience a conversation to join and the engagement will follow.

Me on Friday when #SpotifyWrapped drops pic.twitter.com/3aUCx3xy3r

— brandon ♡ (@brandonwong1004) November 28, 2022

Rinse and repeat

Even though the format of Spotify Wrapped generally stays the same, it gets bigger on social every year. Annual campaigns–especially around the end of the year–create a sense of ritual that your consumers will crave. Give your audience something to look forward to with ritualized content.

Me waiting for my Spotify wrapped be like: pic.twitter.com/wG7BS8v7Om

— Momin Rehan || Anuvjain stan (@Momin_Anuvstan) November 29, 2022

Join in the fun

When other brands create viral content, there’s no reason you shouldn’t join in on the fun. Creating brand specific versions of popular content is a great way to join the conversation. Guinness Beer built out brand specific content using the Wrapped format to engage with their audience. It’s a low-lift way to jump on a trend.

Guinness #SpotifyWrapped
🤝
A long wait pic.twitter.com/SAcyq7d7o9

— Guinness GB (@GuinnessGB) December 2, 2022

Sustaining your success

Spotify has proven that sticking with your proven formula for success can work wonders for your social strategy. Wondering how to find your own formula for going viral? This article will tell you everything you need to know for your next viral campaign.

The post Spotify Wrapped: What marketers can learn from the viral campaign appeared first on Sprout Social.

Data storytelling: Adding meaning to metrics

Rachael Samuels — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 16:00:32 +0000

Your comments and likes are up month over month, and your new campaign hashtag has been used over 1,000 times, but what do those numbers mean? And, once you figure that out, how do you convey it to stakeholders? If you’re asking these questions, you’re not alone.

According to The Sprout Social Index™, brands’ top use cases for social data include sales strategy, product development and content strategy. But without the right context, social and bottom-line business metrics exist in a state of disconnect. To bridge this gap, we need stories.

What is data storytelling?

Data storytelling is the art of translating raw data into a holistic narrative that describes the impact data has on an organization. It merges data science, graphic visualization and storytelling by providing necessary context.

As a social expert, you already have storytelling skills. Let’s talk about how to incorporate them into your approach to reporting and analysis.

Where is the value in the data?

In order to earn buy-in from executive stakeholders, you need to weed out and highlight the value in the data, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantitative data storytelling

In social media, quantitative data refers to the numbers behind social media metrics such as engagement, awareness, share of voice, ROI and customer care. These numbers focus on the “how many” of social media, as in how many:

new likes, comments or shares your content received
impressions you’re achieving
posts you’re mentioned or tagged in comparison to competitors
purchases driven by a social media referral
comments and questions about your brand that your team responds to

These are just a few examples of performance metrics. But, numbers can be deceiving. One viral post or brand crisis can skyrocket your numbers for a month (for better or worse), which could set unrealistic expectations for key performance indicators (KPIs) like impressions or engagements, if you don’t put the data in context.

Bad data presenting: "Here are all my numbers. I'm very clever. Got it?"

Good data presenting: "Here's the story my numbers tell and THIS is why you should care about it".

Data storytelling is the difference between audience action and audience confusion.

— Tessa Davis (@TessaRDavis) November 23, 2022

Quantitative data storytelling

Comparing data month-over-month or year-over-year is meaningless without the story behind the trends. Plus increases and decreases aren’t always black and white. For example, maybe your comments are way up this week. Sounds awesome, right? Not exactly. If they’re mostly positive, that’s great. If they’re mostly negative, that’s a problem.

There needs to be an explanation for changes over time. This is where qualitative data comes in. Think of your quantitative data as the plot of your story, and your qualitative data as the juicy details that help set the scene.

In other words, qualitative data gives context. Your interpretation of what it all means gives both types of data a narrative. If influencers are posting about you, what are they saying? Are mentions raving about your products, or are they pointing out a serious customer service issue? If comment threads are accumulating, what’s driving the discussion, and what’s the overall sentiment?

Use social listening tools to analyze trends in discussions about your brand, which can be particularly helpful if you’re seeing a major spike. This can show you what people are talking about, sentiment, keywords and trending topics.

But even without social listening tools, you can look at your results and start to dig into the “why.” Look at individual messages to identify what people mentioning you are talking about the most, what they’re saying and so forth. Those specific examples will help you craft a report that puts your numbers in context, and allows you to identify future opportunities. This is where your story begins to develop.

Delivering analytics and metrics: Why is it important?

Executives and other stakeholders like quantitative data because it reflects how social impact’s the brand’s bottom line. They especially enjoy seeing a translation of social media numbers into revenue dollars, or growth in metrics that correlate with an increase in conversions. Although they might want to see quantitative data first, qualitative data is just as essential to telling your story.

Data doesn’t exist in a factorless vacuum. Remember that qualitative data provides potential influencing factors that are likely contributing to performance metrics. Plus qualitative data can support persuasiveness. For example, seeing concrete examples, such as screenshots of @-mentions or positive comments can make your points stick.

A balanced combination of qualitative and quantitative data is what separates dry data from an enlightening data story that leads to executive buy-in and actionable strategy.

Using data driven storytelling can help you develop credibility because you’re simplifying complex information into digestible key points and action items.

Without data storytelling, businesses are unlikely to have the ‘a-ha’ moments they need and want. Critical information may be lost and – importantly – data not encased in story form may not inspire action and change. #data #storytelling pic.twitter.com/VLehy4UZ1G

— DINMA 🦋 (@DINMA_GURL) November 27, 2022

Steps towards effective data storytelling

To ensure your data story demonstrates value, follow these steps before diving into creating your presentation:

Define your hypothesis. What do you think the data will tell you? What do you want to prove or disprove? Is there a trend or pattern you think will continue?
Collect the data. Gather all the data you need to shape your story.
Give purpose to your story. After reviewing and analyzing your data, summarize the goal of your story in one to two sentences. What is the data telling you and what story can you communicate?
Plan what you want to say. Outline everything you want to say in your presentation, including your intro, major data points and conclusion.
Ask questions. Does the data prove or disprove your hypothesis? Did you discover anything new that shapes your narrative? Your audience will likely have questions too so this is a good exercise to prepare.
Identify a goal for your audience. What would you like your audience to do after hearing or reading your story?

While there are creative writing workshops abound, few cover the artistry behind presenting numbers in an elegant, comprehensible way. If you’re not sure where to begin, here’s a step-by-step guide with a data storytelling example:

1. Identify the most interesting points

If you have a large data set(s), it can be overwhelming at first. Put on your author cap and ideate the structure of your data story.

You should already have a main objective in mind, whether it’s relaying campaign status or justifying a bigger budget. What pieces of quantitative and qualitative data best support the main idea you want to convey? What data points directly contradict what you thought was going to happen? Perhaps the amount of website traffic driven by social has risen in conjunction with sales.

Even if you aren’t using UTM tracking to map your social efforts all the way through to purchase, understanding which content drives traffic (and what kind doesn’t) will provide some insight into what’s fueling the fire.

2. Lead with your second most interesting piece of data

You don’t want to show your whole hand, but you do want to demand attention right at the beginning. For instance you might say something like, “As you already know, sales are up this quarter. What you may not have seen is that this trend correlates with our increase in traffic from social.” Include any other interesting points after this, but don’t use your best one yet.

3. Leverage visual aids as you present

Lean on data visualization to drive home your points. “As you may already know, sales are up this quarter,” (graph of this quarter’s sales appears). “What you may not have seen is that this trend correlates with our increase in social media traffic,” (the second graph of traffic by social platform appears as an overlay to the first graph). Accompanying your story with visuals would drive the impact of your data in this scenario.

4. Predict questions or challenges

Naturally, your audience will analyze what they are seeing. In the example we’ve used so far, they may ask something like, “How do we know sales are up because social traffic is up, and not the other way around?” Depending on whether you’re presenting data to a group live or emailing a written report, incorporate slides or bullet points that answer the questions you expect your audience to ask. These questions are good: They keep your audience engaged long enough to deliver your grand finale data insight.

5. Share the most interesting piece last

Leave your audience with takeaways they will remember by sharing your most interesting piece of data last. For instance, you could say, “We considered that correlation might not indicate causation, so we dug a little deeper and looked at the shares, social referrals and conversions. We were able to trace 33% of our new customers this quarter to one particular influencer’s post,” (screenshot of post here) “in which she raved about how our product helped her. She has over 700,000 followers, many of whom also shared the post and clicked through to our site from it.”

Notice how this example answers the question from the audience while providing both quantitative and qualitative data. This sweet spot is what will make your data story memorable and impactful.

6. Get to your next steps and the “so what”

Just because you’ve shared the data doesn’t mean your analysis is done. Round out your presentation with why this matters to your overall social media and business goals. Then share how you will be using this data to inform new ideas moving forward. For example, because this one influencer post did so well, you’re looking to partner with other influencers who have similar audiences.

Boom. Mic drop.

This flexible format can be repeated as needed and applied to just about any medium from presentations to reports and emails.

It is important to note the common data point threaded throughout this story: social traffic. Additional data points can help complement or emphasize your main point. Think of these related data points as significant moments in the running theme of your story. And your main data is your key plot point.

You may have lots of data to comb through to find the right points to cover. That’s why the first step is picking out the most interesting ones. It’s up to you to gather the data that best illustrates your main idea and use it to focus your audience on your key message. Here’s how Lindsay Bruce, Marketing Manager at Twitter Business, approaches using data to both understand her target audience and create more impactful reports (serious reporting pro tip at 1:13).

Examples of effective storytelling with data

Get inspired with these data storytelling examples:

1. User Interviews

The State of User Research 2022 report by User Interviews uses plain language in the report copy and has informative illustrations throughout, along with a clickable table of contents to keep the audience engaged.

2. The Pudding

As a publication that specializes in data journalism, The Pudding is a master class in data driven storytelling. In How Artists Get Paid From Streaming, the Pudding breaks down the mechanics of the music industry and streaming platforms.

The story is scrollable, and as you maneuver down the page, animated data visualizations appear. Notice how the copy is short, simple and complements the graph to the right. Also note how the graph is colorful and vibrant, but isn’t too distracting.

3. Sprout Social

I don’t mean to toot our own horn, but Sprout has some excellent data storytelling as well. Our data reports, like the Creator Economy, feature digestible narratives and visual aids. Remember that your visuals don’t have to be graphs and charts. You can use a graphic to emphasize a stand-out data point.

What to avoid when creating your data story

Social data in action is a beautiful thing, but there a few things to avoid when developing your data story:

Not considering your audience. Consider what information is the most relevant to your audience. If you show data that isn’t valuable to them, your story will get lost.
Highlighting too many metrics. Again, consider your audience and what is the most important. Too many metrics can feel overwhelming.
Not using qualitative data to provide more context. Don’t disserve your audience by leaving out necessary information that qualitative data provides.
Using data visualizations that are too distracting. Stick to simple, fresh visuals that are easy to interpret.
Omitting data visualizations altogether. Many people are visual learners, as visuals can make intaking information easier. Plus, graphics will make your presentation more engaging.
Using only text formatting. Avoid using text formatting (think: color, highlighting and font-weight) to emphasize key points.
Providing negative or lackluster results without context. Not every story has a happy ending, and that’s okay. Instead provide more context or a solution to your audience.

The power of data visualizations

To tell a story with data, you need to show not just tell. Storytelling with data visualization can illustrate those findings. Data visualizations like graphs and charts synthesize complex data and make it easier to digest with a quick glance.

Social media networks offer native analytics tools that provide plenty of platform-specific data to work with. However, strong storytelling comes from a big picture view that takes all your social media marketing into account at once. Compiling that information takes a lot of work!

Fortunately, software like Sprout can alleviate the workload. Sprout pulls all of your metrics from various social media platforms into one place. It even provides presentation-ready reports and enables you to compare your metrics over time and to competitors.

When quantitative data is pulled together into one place, it leaves you with more time for strategic storytelling.

Sprout presents a bird’s-eye view of what content is working, who is talking about your brand and the sentiment behind it. You can also uncover audience demographics, the best times to post and which platforms have the highest ROI.

Ready to get started? Sign up for a free trial and explore our data analytics and reporting features so you can write your brand’s data story.

The post Data storytelling: Adding meaning to metrics appeared first on Sprout Social.

Data-driven marketing strategy: Why social insights are key

Aubree Smith — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 15:00:44 +0000

Engagement. Awareness. Share of voice. ROI. Customer care speed. All tried-and-true metrics that play a pivotal role in proving the effectiveness of your social strategy.

But those data points only scratch the surface of what social can offer your company. Imagine if you could monitor and analyze all social media conversations happening around your brand, and tap into consumer insights that prove crucial for growing your business. That’s what social listening offers.

Listening makes creating data-driven marketing strategies more accessible, and gives your entire organization the tools to outpace the competition, improve your content strategy, iterate on new product designs and build more impactful campaigns.

At Sprout, we believe in the power of social data to transform every part of an organization—whether that’s using insights to change customer care processes, revamp your hiring plan or create new product lines. Using our Listening tool gives everyone on our team the opportunity to explore and define how listening can provide insights for their disciplines and strategies.

Alicia Johnston
Director of Content, Sprout Social

Team Sprout uses data to create stronger strategies, make more impactful decisions, and unlock and understand social media trends.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is when you inform your marketing strategies with consumer analysis (examples: customer demographics, pain points, interests and shopping habits). It’s crucial for predicting future target audience behavior and gaining insight into the success of your campaigns and product launches.

For social marketers, creating a comprehensive data-driven marketing strategy involves more than digging into profile metrics—you must incorporate the breadth of consumer data available on social. By tapping into social listening, you can build a deeper understanding of your audience and gather honest feedback about your brand/products.

Find data-driven marketing solutions to your toughest challenges (on social and beyond)

According to The Sprout Social Index™, 65% of brands use social data to inform their sales strategy, 48% use it to improve their product development and 46% use it to optimize their content strategy.

Many marketers already turn to listening to better understand their industry, target audience and competitors.

Take a peek behind the curtain to see how Sprout’s marketing team uses listening to protect our brand, optimize our content strategy and refine our product development.

Protect your brand

A single negative customer experience can turn into a full-blown crisis if not addressed appropriately. Sprout’s Listening tool enables our social team to keep a constant pulse on our brand health and sentiment. We track data trends related to our share of voice, conversation volume and positive sentiment ratio.

This allows us to swiftly respond to customer care inquiries and manage crises with grace.

Listening also makes it easy to monitor all conversations about/around our brand and the social media industry as a whole.

For example, we use listening data to inform our recruitment strategy and attract top talent by paying close attention to our brand image. We’re able to answer questions like:

How do we compare to our competitors?
What are the sentiment trends on social regarding our organizational culture?
How much social volume do our PR efforts and thought leadership content generate?

Optimize your content strategy

Trend cycles have never moved faster, making it difficult to tell what will resonate with our audience and what will flop. That’s why our team uses Listening data to vet topics before we develop content.

According to Alicia, “Listening data helps us validate whether trends we’re seeing on our feeds and from customers are resonating with a wider audience, and uncover additional conversation themes and subtopics to dig into. This means we can create more relevant, high-performing content. It helps us respond promptly to trends—like ‘It’s corn’ and quiet quitting.”

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Social insights also help us create more compelling evergreen content. From our social profiles to our blog, we enrich our content with Listening data that supports our thought leadership, empowers our sales team and helps us relate to our audience more effectively.

For example, at the onset of the COVID pandemic, our Senior Manager of Social Media, Rachael Goulet, pulled Listening insights that helped us determine what messaging was overused by brands. The findings helped us adjust our positioning to make sure Sprout’s content was relevant, engaging, helpful and authentic, rather than robotic and impersonal.

Refine your product development

We’re always making updates to our platform based on customer feedback. Recently, we expedited the launch of Dark Mode after the social team noticed a lot of conversations/questions about it across social and in our comments and messages. They were able to use Listening and qualitative data to inform the need for the new product feature.

Don't get spooked. Dark mode has arrived. ✨ https://t.co/lne7s8TcGm pic.twitter.com/ht9jR0tZHv

— Sprout Social (@SproutSocial) October 24, 2022

Remember: when people talk about your brand, your product or their pain points, they usually don’t tag you. Listening helps us stay vigilant and tuned into all the conversations that can help us improve our offerings.

As Mike Blight, Sprout’s Senior Market Research Manager, puts it, “Listening is like Pandora’s Box. Once you open it, you will find a source of truth/constructive feedback that will help you improve your brand and products. For better or worse, data doesn’t care about your feelings.”

Level-up your data-driven marketing strategy with Sprout’s Listening tool

Listening can be done manually using the native platform tools, but the raw data leaves gaps that make it difficult to analyze the findings.

As Mike says, “You’re fighting an uphill battle when you’re not using Listening because you’re not giving yourself enough information to do your job.”

Sprout’s Social Listening tool harnesses the full power of data and makes it accessible for all teams—regardless of their experience with social.

In the tool, you can easily extract insights and trends from global conversations, and quickly get business-critical, data-driven marketing insights from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to impact your current strategy and guide future action.

Use social media insights to become a data-driven marketing leader

Take the guesswork out of developing effective strategies, making important decisions and reaching your target audience by using social listening data across your marketing team and wider organization.

By factoring millions of conversations across social into your strategy, you will form a more complete picture. See the impact for yourself. Try Sprout Social for free with a 30-day trial.

The post Data-driven marketing strategy: Why social insights are key appeared first on Sprout Social.