Team Collaboration Archives | Sprout Social https://sproutsocial.com/insights/team-collaboration/ Sprout Social offers a suite of <a href="/features/" class="fw-bold">social media solutions</a> that supports organizations and agencies in extending their reach, amplifying their brands and creating real connections with their audiences. Thu, 16 Mar 2023 13:35:05 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://media.sproutsocial.com/uploads/2020/06/cropped-Sprout-Leaf-32x32.png Team Collaboration Archives | Sprout Social https://sproutsocial.com/insights/team-collaboration/ 32 32 Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide https://sproutsocial.com/insights/guides/how-to-choose-a-social-media-management-platform/ Mon, 13 Mar 2023 13:27:51 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?post_type=guides&p=170692/ If you aren’t investing in social media, you’re falling behind. Social is the key to future-proofing your business and propelling it forward. With customer Read more...

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If you aren’t investing in social media, you’re falling behind. Social is the key to future-proofing your business and propelling it forward. With customer insights about your brand performance, audience and industry at your fingertips, harnessing social can transform the way you do business—even in the face of tight budgets and looming uncertainty.

To drive the long-term health of your business, you need the foundational tech stack to set you up for success. The right social media management platform and its actionable intelligence will help you drive more revenue, boost team efficiency, enable strategic focus and outperform your competition.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

  • What a sophisticated social media management platform does for your business
  • Exactly where social can make an impact in your organization—from marketing and customer care to sales and product development
  • What you need to know before investing, including a checklist and essential questions to guide your evaluation
  • How Sprout Social can be your partner in unlocking the full value of social

Download this guide to receive expert guidance on how to conduct a social media management platform evaluation that prioritizes ROI, efficiency and the needs that matter most to your business.

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Social media for strategic communications: 4 ways to strengthen your brand narrative https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-for-strategic-communications/ Thu, 23 Feb 2023 16:00:54 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=170215/ Over the past few years, corporate communications has undergone quite the makeover. Today’s always-on digital world has drastically increased the work it takes to Read more...

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Over the past few years, corporate communications has undergone quite the makeover. Today’s always-on digital world has drastically increased the work it takes to craft a memorable brand narrative. When it comes to standing out, social media for strategic communications isn’t just helpful—it’s necessary.

This advice isn’t limited to promotional efforts, either. Integrating social into every aspect of your strategy drives more compelling, authentic messaging from the ground up.

Communications and social media are a match made in heaven. Keep reading to learn how social medIa can take your strategic communications strategy to the next level.

How to use social media for strategic communications

Social is the perfect vehicle for connecting with your most valuable stakeholders. Consumers, investors, employees—they’re all there waiting for you. If you want to capitalize on the opportunity, here are four ways to elevate social’s role in your corporate communications toolkit.

1. Power up public relations efforts

Once upon a time, “marketing” and “public relations” existed in their own respective lanes.

Now, social media has blurred the boundaries between the two, driving even closer collaboration between the functions. It’s no wonder almost three-quarters (73%) of PR professionals don’t think the term “public relations” as it’s defined today will describe the work they’re doing in five years.

Forward-thinking strategic communications professionals are partnering with social teams to pressure test media pitches, messaging and more. These efforts support a more cohesive brand experience that spans beyond a single channel.

To explain how communications and social media teams might work together, let’s look at a practical example. Say you’re preparing to write a press release on an upcoming campaign launching in partnership with a high-profile spokesperson.

Before starting your draft, you could use a tool like Sprout Social to run two Social Listening Topics: one to assess your current brand health and another to determine the cultural conversation surrounding your spokesperson.

A screenshot of a Listening Performance Topic Summary in Sprout's platform. In the image, you can see total volume, engagements, impressions and sentiment analysis.

Your Listening Topics will track and analyze the conversations around relevant topics to understand consumer sentiment. Review dynamic word clouds, related keywords and hashtags, sentiment data and more for information that can guide your draft.

Some key questions to ask while digging could be:

  • How are people currently talking about your brand? Has sentiment been trending up or down in recent months? What can you gather about your content or customers from these results? How can you use that information to create an exciting, highly-tailored press release?
  • How are people talking about your spokesperson? How is consumer sentiment around them trending? Is there anything that could be cause for concern? What terms and phrases are frequently coming up in these conversations?

Share these findings with your social media team to get more bang for your buck. From there, you can tailor the social arm of the campaign strategy to complement press initiatives for maximum impact.

2. Mitigate employer brand risk

An employer brand is made up of more than just approved messaging grids. It’s a combination of all the macro and micro customer, employee and candidate interactions that happen every single day. When these conversations happen online, they’re out there for everyone to see.

Authentic social conversations can’t be restrained by a multi-step approval process, but that doesn’t mean you need to accept any and all risk. The right toolkit can empower your team to strive for cohesion and accuracy when discussing your company with their extended network.

Graphic with text that reads 72% of engaged users would post about their company if content was written for them

More than half of engaged social users would post about their company if somebody wrote the content for them. Tapping into this opportunity can elevate your brand message in a way that feels authentic to potential hires, consumers and other stakeholders.

Brands using Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social curate pre-approved employee advocacy content right alongside their brand social media posts. Brands navigating social in highly regulated industries can even require the use of pre-approved messaging on specific posts, so compliance is never left up to chance.

Advocacy content populates in a centralized feed where employees can pick and choose what they’d like to share with their personal networks.

A screenshot of the Compose window in Sprout Social. There are four drop down menus below the text editor: 'Publishing Workflows', 'Sprout Tags', 'When to Post', and 'Send to Advocacy'. The 'Send to Advocacy' drop down is expanded and selected.

These curated content round-ups benefit both communications teams and their cross-functional colleagues. They keep people up to date on need-to-know announcements and content offerings, empowering colleagues to advance their social presence in a brand-friendly way.

3. Empower your executive team

Delivering on a strong executive brand presence is a unique challenge for strategic communications teams. You want your C-suite to share sharp, incisive thought leadership, but that can often fall to the wayside in favor of running a company.

That said, executive communications is too important to slip through the cracks. According to a recent report from FTI Consulting, 82% of business leaders agree that there is a wider reward for the company if they have an active leader on social media.

Don’t just meet executives in the middle on drafting or brainstorming, meet them at 80% and give them something to react to. Time is an exec’s most valuable resource, so if they’re investing it in comms, you need to maximize the ROI.
Hannah Fleishman
Director of Executive Communications, HubSpot

Efficient workflows are at the core of executing an executive communications strategy. Members of your C-suite should be able to review content, provide feedback and approve messaging in just a few clicks.

Sprout’s External Approvers workflow supports this process by allowing collaborators who do not have a seat in the platform to review, approve and reject content.

This type of teamwork can have a lasting impact on everything from marketing and sales to investor relations. It’s a great way to support your C-suite as they step into their role as a face of the brand.

4. Control the narrative around potential crises

There’s nothing more anxiety-inducing than a potential brand crisis. The first bits of chatter on a defective product or out-of-touch statement can kick off a snowball effect that feels impossible to stop.

That’s where social media comes in. Social plays two significant roles in any successful crisis communication plan. It’s both a proactive monitoring tool and a reactive engagement tool.

Social media is a consumer go-to for voicing concerns when a brand crisis strikes. A social media listening strategy can help your brand stay on top of messages across networks to ensure you don’t miss any red flags.

A screenshot of a sentiment summary of Sprout that demonstrates changes in sentiment over time on a bar graph.

Sprout helps both communications and social media professionals keep tabs on brand health with a sentiment analysis tool that provides immediate context around the conversations surrounding your brand and industry.

In the event of a crisis, brands can use those insights to inform their response to the situation. Sharing a public apology from the brand account may seem straightforward, but an insensitive response can land your brand in even more hot water.

Hopefully, you’ll only ever need to use social media’s proactive crisis management benefits. Still, it never hurts to be prepared.

Harness the power of social media for strategic communications

A social-first approach to strategic communications has the power to reinvent a brand in the eyes of the people who matter most. Ground your strategy in real-time social insights to ground your strategy in the voice of your ideal customer.

Sprout Social offers a suite of tools designed to help brands strengthen their market position with actionable insights. Sign up for a free trial today and future-proof your brand for tomorrow.

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What is social media management? Everything you need to know https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-management/ Mon, 23 Jan 2023 14:59:21 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=163287/ A business’s social media presence can make or break a brand. Well-timed posts can create lasting audience connections. Creative visuals and copy can change Read more...

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A business’s social media presence can make or break a brand. Well-timed posts can create lasting audience connections. Creative visuals and copy can change how consumers perceive an organization. That’s the power of social media management.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched businesses like Wendy’s, Duolingo and more earn new fans—and customers—off their innovative brand accounts. This success isn’t random. It’s all a part of a carefully crafted approach to building and maintaining a social media marketing strategy.

In this article, we’re breaking down all the moving parts that go into making those strategies run smoothly. Use these social media management fundamentals to inform your company’s processes so you can build a follow-worthy presence across the platforms that matter most.

What is social media management?

A blue text-based graphic that says “What is social media management? Social media management is the ongoing process of creating and scheduling content designed to grow and nurture an audience across social media platforms.”

Social media management is the ongoing process of creating and scheduling content designed to grow and nurture an audience across social media platforms. This includes, but is not limited to:

  • Social media content strategy
  • Online reputation management
  • Community management and programming
  • Paid social media strategy and execution
  • Team member management and development

The benefits of social media management go far beyond raising brand awareness and staying current on the latest internet trends. The channel is key to building more personal connections with target audiences at scale. The rapport developed on social can build brand trust, affinity and best of all, loyalty.

The evolution of social media management

The definition of social media management is anything but fixed. Platforms and trends are constantly changing, meaning the responsibilities that go into managing a brand account are always changing as well.

For example, in less than a few years we’ve seen the creator economy completely transform how we post on social. The rise of social messaging has brought conversations from public to private, creating more personal connections between people and the brands they love. Social commerce has revolutionized how business leaders perceive the channel, taking it from awareness-focused to a full-funnel experience.

These developments prove one thing: social is driving how consumers interact with businesses, making social media roles business critical.

The role of a social media manager

Social media managers are responsible for developing the strategies that maintain and grow a social presence, on top of administrative and team development tasks. Any given day might involve content creation, campaign strategies, career planning, analytics reporting—the list goes on.

Being successful in such a fluid role requires a unique set of skills, including but not limited to:

  • Adaptability
  • Organization
  • Creativity
  • Curiosity
  • Critical thinking

Combined, these talents help social media professionals manage the evolving needs of this business-critical channel.

How to manage social media profiles

It is both an art and a science to manage social media accounts. Your data can give you a good idea of how to spend your resources—in terms of both money and time—but social moves quickly. The platform delivering results today might take a dip tomorrow.

Diversifying your network strategy is a reliable way to ensure that you’re ready for whatever challenges are thrown at you. An algorithm update on one platform is less of a shock to the system if you have a well-maintained presence across the social landscape.

This is where a social media management tool becomes a must-have. Posting natively (requiring logging into each social network individually in order to post) across social media profiles is a huge time commitment. Factor in engagement and monitoring, and it becomes more than a full-time job.

Tools like Sprout help businesses scale social operations sustainably. Publishing workflows support customization by network while minimizing risk. After all, managing quality control is much harder when your team is running social natively.

A screenshot of the Sprout Social Smart Inbox. The Compose window is open and has a post drafted to publish to the Sprout Coffee Co. Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles.

These features automate and complement existing processes so you can get out of the weeds and into the bigger picture.

Finding your brand’s target audience on social

The key to creating impactful content is identifying your target audience. These are the people that sit within your brand’s total addressable market. Zeroing in on these individuals will allow you to create more effective messaging across your social media profiles.

To better find and appeal to your brand’s target audience, ask the following questions:

  • Who is your current audience?
  • What kind of information are they looking for and why?
  • Where do they go for this information?
  • What topics and cultural moments interest them?
  • Which brands do they trust, and what can you learn from them?

The answers to these prompts will inform your approach to social—what platforms you’re present on, how your brand sounds online, what trends appeal to your audience and how you connect with customers.

Getting to know your audience is not a one-time-only practice. Asking yourself and your team these questions on a routine basis can keep everyone in a customer-first mindset.

Social media content creation

Content creation is a fundamental aspect of social media management. People may log on to their favorite social networks to connect with friends and family, but more than one-third (36.3%) stay to fill time.

You can use these spare moments to create lasting connections with your audience, but the competition is stiff. On social, you’re not only up against direct competitors, but other elements vying for attention on these platforms. Marketers need to account for other sources of content, like media outlets, publications and creators.

To stand out, you need to know what people want.

Is your audience looking for entertainment? Commentary on trending topics? A community? Tips and tricks? There are a lot of different reasons consumers turn to brands on social. Finding out where you fit can help your business maintain relevance in an always-on social landscape.

A data chart that reads the most engaging types of in-feed social content. It demonstrates that short-form video, images and live video are the most popular.

When it comes to formats, the most engaging type of in-feed social content is short-form video. It gained popularity thanks to the meteoric rise of TikTok and has now spread to every major social platform in some way or another.

Short-form video is a powerful way to capture your audience’s attention without requiring a major time commitment on their end. However, a diversified social media marketing strategy makes use of all types of content. This may seem overwhelming, but it’s actually an opportunity in disguise.

You can use a single live video stream to create dozens of short-form video clips, GIFs, text posts and more. At Sprout, we use our See Social Differently podcast to inform posts across networks like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok.

Team member management

Data from The Sprout Social Index™ 2022 shows that more than three-fourths (88%) of marketers anticipate expanding their team over the next two years.

A statistic call-out that reads “62% of organizations anticipate hiring between 2-6 social media team members over the next two years”.

This type of growth can be an amazing opportunity, but it does come with a learning curve. Developing your team’s talent also means committing to your ongoing development.

Here are four skills to work on as you build out your social media team:

  • Reporting and analytics: As you move into a people management position, you’ll find yourself having to speak on behalf of your team’s efforts more often. Understanding how to gather and synthesize data is key to explaining the impact of your social media management strategy.
  • Time management: This one is especially critical in hybrid or remote work. Stand-ups, one-on-ones, project kickoffs and all the other meetings that need to happen to execute a strategy can quickly eat away at your calendar. Protect your time by scheduling designated focus hours and conducting regular meeting audits.
  • Feedback: Being able to give and receive constructive feedback is more than a skill. It’s a superpower. The majority of HR leaders (89%) agree that ongoing peer feedback is the secret to better business outcomes.
  • Empathy: Most social media professionals have to stay online through brand crises, world tragedies and times of uncertainty. Don’t wait until someone is battling burnout to start taking preventative measures. Advocate for your team by keeping mental health at the forefront of your conversations during the good times and the bad.

Reputation management

Have you ever thought about buying from a company only to find out they have poor online reviews? Did you follow through on that purchase? If you didn’t, you’re not alone.

According to a study from BrightLocal, just 3% of shoppers say they would consider using a business with an average rating of two or fewer stars.

Social media reputation management is a critical yet often overlooked aspect of social media management. While it may not fall under a social professional’s core responsibilities, it’s vital to the success of all businesses.

If you’re new to online reputation management, here are three rules that can guide your strategy:

1. Ask for reviews with tact

You don’t have to wait for reviews to roll in on their own. Sometimes, you just need to ask.

Reach out to fans and power users to see if they’d be interested in sharing their experiences with your product or services. Be sure to make the process as easy as possible. Providing a specific prompt or template can increase customer follow-through.

2. Respond to both the good and the bad

That same BrightLocal survey found that more than half of consumers are unlikely to use businesses that don’t respond to reviews.

Responding to negative reviews can be difficult but it’s also a powerful way to let consumers know that you hear and respect their feedback.

3. Be proactive about risk management

Feedback won’t always come through direct channels. People often will talk about your business on their personal profiles without tagging or mentioning your brand account.

A screenshot of the Sentiment Summary table, available in Sprout Social’s listening tool. The Sentiment Summary shows that the Sprout Coffee topic has an 82% positive sentiment score. It also shows how the brand’s sentiment has trended over time.

A social listening strategy can help you stay on top of the many conversations surrounding your business and industry. Use a social listening tool (like Sprout’s!) to support an opportunity-driven brand reputation management strategy that helps you create lasting connections with your audience.

Management and scheduling tools

Managing an active social media presence with native publishing tools was challenging five years ago. Today, it’s virtually impossible to do alone.

Between sharing content, responding to consumers and managing paid initiatives, social media calendars are more jam-packed than ever. Businesses must invest in social media management and scheduling tools to keep up with the demands of a modern social media strategy.

These tools can do more than save time. The benefits of a social media management tool include the following:

  • Increased brand awareness with optimized post times for improved performance.
  • Better engagement by consolidating inbound messages into a single location for faster response times.
  • Improved analytics that provide a more holistic view into the overall performance of your social strategy.

Adopting a social media management tool can enrich your entire marketing tech stack, making it easier to connect the dots on social’s impact across your organization.

Managing a social media calendar

Your social media content strategy outlines the overarching themes that inform your publishing schedule and how it relates to business goals. Your social media content calendar provides a more granular look at what you’re posting and when across platforms.

In an ideal state, your content calendar can support organization and brainstorming. A bird’s eye view of your upcoming social media posts can help determine if you’re hitting the content mix outlined in your strategy.

For example, say recruiting top talent is a high priority for your business. A look at your social media content calendar can tell you whether or not you have enough employer brand posts scheduled over the next week or month.

A screenshot of a Sprout Social publishing calendar set to month view. The calendar displays posts scheduled for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as reminders for tasks and important dates.

This visibility will make it easier to identify which content themes need more attention. Pro tip: if you’re using Sprout, you can use the Calendar Notes feature to keep track of potential content ideas.

If you’re weighing the merits of relying on organic vs. paid social media, don’t worry—there’s no need to choose.

Your organic efforts support long-term relationships with your followers. Your social media advertising strategy, on the other hand, will help you reach new audiences quickly and reliably through targeting.

Managing your organic and paid efforts together can keep a brand top of mind with existing and prospective customers. If you can manage them within the same tool, that’s even better.

A screenshot of Sprout Social’s Facebook & Instagram Paid Performance Report. The report key metrics including total spend, impressions, CPM, clicks, CPC, engagements, CPE, web conversions and cost per conversion.

For example, Sprout supports in platform paid social promotion and reporting so marketers can keep their finger on the pulse of their performance. That way, you can ensure money is being spent effectively and make any necessary adjustments if it’s not.

Social media community management

Online communities have been around for a while, but they’ve never been more important than they are today.

Take Canva’s Facebook group for instance. Canva Design Circle is home to more than 250,000 members seeking peer-to-peer design advice.

A screenshot of the Canva Design Circle Facebook group with the "About" tab open. Their “About” section describes the group's purpose and rules.

The conversations happening within the group might not always be product-focused—they don’t have to be. Posts that aren’t product-related still provide their team with an invaluable look into the needs of their audience.

Thanks to the rise of communities like these and vertical social networks, more and more people are taking their online interactions behind the walls of private groups. If you want to stay connected to your target audience, the best thing you can do is give them a place to make connections of their own and build a social community.

Like Rome, an active social media community can’t be built in a day. If you’re launching new programming or an entirely new community, take a slow and steady approach.

Start with an invite-only beta program designed for loyal customers and power users to test drive your strategy. Once you’re in a groove, you can expand to a larger audience.

Additional social media management resources

If you’re looking for more resources on social media management, we’ve gathered additional reads below that can be found throughout our site.

Navigate the changing world of social media management with confidence

Social media provides businesses with the insights and intelligence needed to understand where they fit in today’s cultural landscape. A strong social media management strategy does more than just maintain an online presence. It can help a brand gain relevance, earn fans and future-proof itself for years to come.

When you take native publishing out of the equation, you open your team up to a world of possibilities. Sprout’s intuitive social media publishing tools minimize manual efforts so you can focus on strengthening your strategy and connecting with your customers.

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5 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-dashboard/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-dashboard/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2023 14:54:22 +0000 http://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=32563 Picture this: You’re in a meeting with top executives and stakeholders. They ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts, Read more...

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Picture this: You’re in a meeting with top executives and stakeholders. They ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts, and explain how your performance influences company goals.

You know raw social data is complex, and sharing it with people who have limited hands-on-the-keyboard social experience is ineffective.

So instead of getting granular, you provide them with a digestible overview of your most important KPIs. You tell a compelling data story that helps them visualize how your customer care, awareness and engagement efforts matter to your company’s big picture. You captivate your audience and prove the power of social.

Slam dunk.

Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time. In this article, we’re highlighting examples of social media dashboards you can use to illustrate the value of social media across your business.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is a tool that aggregates your crucial social media metrics across networks to quickly measure the performance of your posts/campaigns, customer care interactions and community engagement.

Social media dashboards empower you to dissect results, iterate strategy, demonstrate value and influence decision making.

A definition of social media dashboard that reads "Dashboards compile crucial social data in one place and empower you to automatically measure results so you can spend more time iterating on strategy, demonstrating impact and influencing decision making."

What should you include in a social media dashboard?

Every data dashboard serves a different function—from tracking brand awareness to aggregating marketing metrics in one place. Your social media dashboards should be built with your unique use cases in mind. While the ingredients for each dashboard might be different, the core component is visualized metrics that help explain why your brand did or didn’t meet a goal.

To help determine the specifics you should include in your dashboard, ask yourself these five questions:

  • What is the goal of this dashboard? (Example: demonstrate positive changes in brand reputation)
  • Which metrics matter most to achieving this goal? (Example: sentiment)
  • Who is the audience and how much do they know about the topic? (Example: CMO and R&D)
  • Which channels need to be measured? (Example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)
  • What is the duration of time needed to effectively measure change? (Example: one month)
A screenshot of a sentiment summary of Sprout that demonstrates changes in sentiment over time on a bar graph.

Ultimately, you should have multiple social media dashboards for different stakeholders and purposes. For example, one for tracking monthly changes in brand reputation and sentiment, as seen in the example above. Another for sharing quarterly customer care productivity.

By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can access and create custom social media dashboard templates that save you time and efficiently deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.

Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization

Here are five types of social media dashboard templates designed to help marketing leaders level-up their reporting and refine their data-driven strategy.

Social customer care dashboard

Customer care is an essential function of social media. A social customer care dashboard measures, benchmarks and analyzes your team’s efforts, and reveals any critical opportunities to improve customer support. This dashboard is especially important for enterprise brands who typically have larger teams managing incoming requests across multiple accounts.

  • Goal: Provide visibility into customer care team performance
  • Metrics: Response rate, action rate, average time to action and total actioned messages
  • Audience: Customer care/support teams, sales, marketing and product development
  • Channels: Cross-channel inboxes (Pro tip: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all incoming messages and mentions into one single stream)
  • Cadence: Monthly, quarterly and yearly

A customer care dashboard will help you illuminate how many messages your brand receives, your response rate and your average response time, like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report demonstrates.

A screenshot of Sprout's Inbox Activity Report which demonstrates total messages received, actioned messages, action rate and average time to action. The report also illustrates changes in Inbox volume over time.

Business intelligence dashboard

There are times when you need to take social data outside of your social media management platform. For example, consolidating touchpoints between social media and your CRM gives you a more in-depth understanding of your audience.

A business intelligence dashboard will help you access all your consumer data in one place to get a birds-eye view of how social media fits into the larger picture. This dashboard enables you to analyze data, create custom metrics and merge different data sources.

  • Goal: Track the customer journey across digital touchpoints (including social)
  • Metrics: Customized to meet your goals. Examples include engagements per network/per state, ad impressions and email CTR
  • Audience: Executives and stakeholders
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Quarterly and yearly

As Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector displays, you gain valuable insights by combining the power of social data with other business channels into one dashboard. This ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers—proving the value social brings to your business.

A screenshot of Sprout data integrating with Tableau. The dashboard shows engagements per social network and per state. It also demonstrates social custom engagement rates, banner ad impressions and email clickthrough rates.

Social media engagement dashboard

Social media engagement is a barometer of how much your audience interacts with your content. When examining engagement metrics across months or years, a birds’ eye view dashboard can help you identify performance trends that improve your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate the success of your most liked/commented on posts.

  • Goal: Determine if your content resonates with your audience
  • Metrics: Impressions, engagements, link clicks, ad spend and conversions
  • Audience: Social media team and other stakeholders who influence content direction
  • Channels: Cross-channel or channel-specific
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Here are a few examples of Sprout Social’s social media engagement dashboards that give you the tools to proactively grow your audience and repeatedly test your content direction.

  • Profile Performance Report provides a high-level aggregation of analytics so you can get a pulse on the performance of your social profiles. With this report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok metrics to better understand the impact of your social efforts.
A screenshot of Sprout's Profile Performance Report that demonstrates performance summary metrics (impressions, engagements and link clicks) and audience growth change over time.
  • The Post Performance Report helps you analyze your published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. It provides a unified view of your post performance across all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.
A screenshot of Sprout Post Performance Report that demonstrates impressions, potential reach, engagements and engagement rate per impression for individual posts on different networks.
  • Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab you can see a summary of your paid performance, impressions, engagements, web conversions, video views and a breakdown of key performance metrics by channel.

Brand awareness dashboard

Brand awareness requires continuous effort and frequent pulse checks. Use data to determine your reach, earned media value and share of voice.

  • Goal: Analyze rates of target audience recognition and awareness
  • Metrics: Impressions, reach, engagements, mentions, earned media value and sentiment
  • Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Sprout’s Listening tools help brands tap into global social conversation to extract actionable insights that improve brand health and fuel brand awareness. With Sprout’s Listening dashboards, you can track conversations concerning your brand to illuminate consumer attitudes, gain visibility into customer experience and sentiment, conduct competitive analysis and stay up to date with trends in your industry.

A screenshot of a Topic Summary in Sprout Social. The social dashboard demonstrates total volume, engagements and sentiment, as well as visualizes change in volume over time.

As many social media managers will tell you, achieving organic awareness and reach on social media is harder than ever. At Sprout, our team uses employee advocacy to breakthrough and track our success with brand awareness dashboards in our Employee Advocacy platform.

Here are two examples of employee advocacy dashboards we use on a monthly and quarterly basis:

  • Sprout’s Advocacy General Report provides an overview of our latest activity. The report analyzes the number of active stories, total shares and shares across each network, and how that translates into potential reach and earned media value. As you scroll, you can see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.
A screenshot of Advocacy by Sprout Social's General Report. The report visualizes total number of stories, shares, avg. share per user and earned media value during a given time period. The report also breaks each category down by network.
  • Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You can see how many shareable or internal stories were active each day along with a comparison to the previous month. The Content Breakdown chart provides stats on shareable and internal content including days, views, shares, engagement and potential reach for each Story.

A screenshot of Advocacy by Sprout Social's Content Report which demonstrates active story metrics, and breaks down metrics for each live story.

Executive dashboard

Most executives aren’t immersed in the world of social media on a frequent basis. Metrics that are meaningful to you and your team miss the mark when communicating with the C-suite. As a result, you might struggle to secure buy-in and investment to take your social efforts to the next level.

For best results, create customized reports for leadership that bridge knowledge gaps at the executive level and translate the raw data into a narrative that resonates with anyone in leadership. Create an executive summary of your most compelling social media reports to convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social has on your business.

  • Goal: Deliver clear evidence of social team’s impact
  • Metrics: Customized to each executive. Examples include share of voice, potential reach, earned media value, customer care productivity and competitor analysis data
  • Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Use Sprout Social’s Report Builder features to create custom reports specific to your business needs to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included in reports to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.

How to create a social media dashboard

To set up your own social media dashboard, follow these steps to quickly review/report on your strategy and highlight your team’s performance.

Vertical flowchart of the steps to creating a social media dashboard, starting with determine purpose and audience, then decide which kind of dashboard to create, then gather the metrics and ending with share with stakeholders.

1. Determine purpose and audience

The first step toward creating a social media dashboard is figuring out its purpose. What goal is this dashboard trying to achieve? Who will it reach? How familiar are they with the topic? Clearly define your purpose and audience before doing anything else.

2. Decide which kind of dashboard to create

Decide which kind of dashboard best fits your needs. Choose a dashboard with relevant metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate social’s value to stakeholders. Be mindful of your audience and their social media experience level when deciding how detailed your dashboard should be.

Revisit the five social media dashboard types mentioned in this article for inspiration.

3. Gather the metrics

Next, you’re ready to dig into the data. Scope out which networks need to be measured and the length of time required to demonstrate meaningful results. Collect raw data across those channels during that time period. You can start by using metrics from the native apps, like engagement rate, reach, followers and plays.

To up your sophistication level and boost efficiency with a simpler workflow, use a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social to streamline/automate the data collection process and easily generate dashboards that are ready to share.

4. Share with stakeholders

Transform the raw figures into riveting dashboards and data visualizations. Use key data points, complementary graphs and your expert analysis to give stakeholders a visual depiction of your team’s progress.

After creating your first dashboard, repeat the first three steps for each dashboard you need. Keep momentum going by updating your dashboards on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and resharing them with stakeholders.

Include everything you need in your social media dashboard by using Sprout Social

Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. By breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings with stakeholders, you will elevate the importance of social media across your entire company.

Sprout simplifies the dashboard creation process so managers have more time to focus on refining their team’s strategy and communicating social’s impact.

A screenshot of Reports Home in Sprout Social, which is home to all the social media dashboard templates Sprout offers.

To access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates, start your free trial today.

Start your free Sprout trial

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How social media collaboration can boost your strategy’s impact https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-collaboration/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-collaboration/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:46:05 +0000 http://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=15463 More than ever, companies need to bleed every ounce of impact out of their social media. Social isn’t just about awareness anymore. It’s a Read more...

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More than ever, companies need to bleed every ounce of impact out of their social media.

Social isn’t just about awareness anymore. It’s a tool for customer service and nurturing loyalty. So, you need to leverage other departments to support the end-to-end customer experience.

To stretch social media’s impact in your organization, set up a continuous feedback loop to collect and analyze data from your customers and stakeholders. Then, use this information to inform business decisions and improve your brand’s online presence.

Think about it: Every team in your company is full of experts. Imagine the benefits of using their collective IQ to integrate social strategy and data in all aspects of the business.

A LinkedIn post from Sprout Social that says "Reminder: social has a great impact on your ENTIRE organization. Product teams, sales teams, support teams - take note."

A successful social media strategy is rooted in collaboration. Working with customer service, product and other departments on your strategy helps you get the most from your marketing resources. It also helps stay ahead of competitors and create personalized experiences for customers. Let’s walk through how you can practice social media collaboration with teams across your organization to increase your social strategy’s impact.

The benefits of cross-team collaboration

New ideas don’t have to come at the expense of existing initiatives. When everyone is on the same page, it makes it easier for folks to share their unique insights and experiences. This creates room for innovative strategies that can help differentiate your brand experience and align your messaging at every point of the customer journey. It also fosters interest and buy-in for your initiatives across the organization.

On the flip side, your social media data can inform business decisions and improve the customer experience beyond simply boosting brand awareness. Let’s take a more in-depth look at how departments outside of marketing can support implementing a comprehensive social strategy.

Customer support can fix problems before they escalate

Our research from The Sprout Social Index™ 2022 shows that more than three-quarters of consumers expect a response within 24 hours on social media. Depending on your message volume, that demand can be too high for your social team to balance on top of their other duties. Your customer service team is already primed to support. With social media collaboration tools, your social team can use their expertise to address questions or issues about your product or service quickly and accurately.

Your social media data is also a tool for customer support teams to learn how customers think. Valuable insights they make look at include:

  • Customer sentiment
  • Common issues or complaints that customers experience
  • How quickly and effectively the support team responds to customer inquiries

A Sprout Social LinkedIn post that says "In today's market, social analytics aren't just used for retrospective reporting but instead drive proactive decision-making".

This feedback helps customer support teams make data-driven decisions that improve the customer experience.

Sales can tailor messaging to your target audience

Like customer support, sales teams need to understand customers’ pain points and improve the sales they generate.

Valuable social data for sales teams includes information about:

  • Customer preferences and interests
  • Common objections or concerns customers have
  • How customers interact with the company’s content, products or services

Social data helps sales teams customize sales strategies and messages to address what customers want.

For example, if a group of customers shows interest in a product or feature promoted on social, sales can highlight it in their communication efforts with those interested parties.

Additionally, sales can flag trends bubbling up in their customer conversations to inform niche interests or industry changes your social content should reflect. And equipping your sales team with guidance on their own social presence will boost their social selling efforts.

Product teams can use feedback to improve products

Product teams also need to understand customer needs and preferences.

They’ll be interested in data that shares:

  • Customer feedback
  • How customers are using the product in their daily lives
  • Common issues or problems customers experience with products

Social is a goldmine of unfiltered comments and posts with this type of information. All of which help product teams understand how to improve your brand’s products and services.

Across all departments, audience insights from data-driven social media marketing are crucial to predicting the success of campaigns and product launches. By acting on the insights, you’ll stay competitive in an increasingly crowded market. And you can build a loyal customer base that gives you repeat business.

Identify who’s who in cross-departmental collaboration

There are a lot of benefits to social media collaboration across teams, but where do you start? Which key business stakeholders need insights from your social strategy?

Our research shows customer service and corporate communications teams typically contribute the most to social strategy.

A graphic demonstrating which teams marketers say contribute to their organization's social strategy. The teams include customer service, corporate comms, product, HR and R&D.

Stakeholders will vary depending on your organizational structure but look at collaborating beyond your marketing team.

Here are a few key stakeholders who can contribute to and benefit from your social strategy and help you stay ahead of the game:

Customer service teams, especially the management team overseeing service level agreements (SLAs) and service agents’ workloads. They can delegate responses to customer questions and feedback on social. They’ll also need reporting to improve their responses to customer issues and complaints.

Sales teams, including sales enablement, will use your insights to understand customer preferences and objections. Then they can tailor their sales strategies and messages accordingly. 

Product teams, especially leadership and product leads, will need customer feedback and social data around common issues or requests to improve the product or service. Plus, they’ll inform you of upcoming releases that may require social promotion.

PR teams can monitor sentiment and address potential brand crises.

Executive teams will be interested in how social impacts the company’s performance to help them make data-driven decisions.

It’s clear social data helps each team find customer-centric approaches that further support your brand’s social presence and the company’s long-term goals.

Tips for successful social media collaboration with other teams

Once clear on social’s benefits for each team, you’re ready to build a workflow. Establishing clear processes and communication channels will make cross-departmental social media collaboration seamless. Here’s how:

A LinkedIn comment from Alexander Beeker, Senior Content Manager at Hopin. The comment says "Start early! The best time to start scoping is before a new quarter starts - then at the beginning of the quarter, involved internal stakeholders that social may impact to get their input/feedback."

Establish a point of contact for each team

Appoint someone from each team to lead and be the point of contact for everything social-related. Then, the team representatives can share updates about their departments’ progress with each other.

Set a meeting or collaboration cadence

Decide how often teams should meet and schedule dates in advance. During meetings, allot collaboration time to review progress and discuss challenges. And document each team’s review and share it with the other departments for alignment and visibility.

Give stakeholders access to social plans

Waiting for permission to access a doc is a real nail-biter when you’re in a time crunch. Save your teams’ cuticles by sharing docs ahead of time. And include everyone who needs access to social plans and strategies.

Share monthly reports and analytics

Along with access to the social plan, share monthly progress and data recaps with the other teams. Include analytics and insights that help clarify the plan and its effectiveness. Also highlight key takeaways for each team, focusing on the data that matters most to them.

Include social listening feedback

You need to understand your customers’ needs and speak their language when talking about your product or service. Through social listening, you can gather the opinions, experiences and other information they share with their networks about you and your competitors.

Establish a continuous feedback loop around your listeners. Share valuable insights, information and social listening data with teams on a set schedule. Then, they can design empathetic experiences and solutions that make your customers feel heard.

Build a better feedback loop with social media collaboration tools

Since carrier pigeons are outdated, consider using tools to communicate information about your social strategy and collaborate across your organization. They make it easy for everyone to stay up-to-date and work well whether you’re remote or back in the office.

Here are a few tools to add to your tech stack that will streamline your feedback loop:

  • Collaboration software: Slack, Microsoft Teams or Asana help teams share information, discuss ideas and collaborate on projects in real time.
  • Project management software: Airtable, ClickUp, Notion and Trello help teams manage and organize work, track progress and share updates.
  • Cloud-based storage: Google Drive and Dropbox enable people across the organization to access shared content, documents, style guides and the like.
  • Social media team collaboration software: Sprout Social offers a range of benefits—like comprehensive reporting and analytics and audience engagement tools—for companies looking to improve their social media strategy across networks.

Also, your client relationship management solution (CRM) can bridge the gap between teams. Since Sprout Social integrates with Salesforce, several teams have visibility into customer activity across channels to track the full customer journey. Plus, customer service can switch with ease between Salesforce and Sprout to handle customer service requests from social.

Use the power of collaboration for social strategy success

When everyone’s on board, success is inevitable. By harnessing collective expertise, teams make smarter decisions and efficiently measure results, boosting your social strategy and its impact on your business.

And using collaboration tools to enable cross-functional interactions will help teams create unified messages and experiences that drive results.

Ready to set up cross-departmental collaboration to achieve social success? Sprout Social has you covered. Deliver social insights org-wide with this template.

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Top 14 project management software and tools to level-up collaboration https://sproutsocial.com/insights/project-management-software/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/project-management-software/#comments Thu, 29 Dec 2022 16:00:56 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=104852/ When you hear the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” what comes to mind? Is it ways you could automate processes? Breaking down silos at Read more...

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When you hear the phrase “work smarter, not harder,” what comes to mind?

Is it ways you could automate processes? Breaking down silos at your company? Promoting seamless cross-functional collaboration?

If you answered yes, your current project management strategies and corporate communications tools might need an upgrade. It’s time to invest in  project management software to help you plan, coordinate and execute your team’s work at a higher level.

In this article, we share why you should use project management software, what to look for as you consider your options and the 14 best project management tools for different teams.

The benefits of project management software

A data visualization that defines project management software. The definition reads: "Software that helps you plan, coordinate and execute every aspect of your team's work."

Project management software helps keep teams organized and on track. It streamlines processes and ensures they’re followed, empowering employees to work smoothly and efficiently.

From daily, ongoing tasks to larger projects, a project management tool takes the guesswork and frustration out of collaboration so teams can focus on doing their best work. With project management tools, multiple teams and departments are enabled to join forces, allocate work, illuminate timelines and simplify approvals.

What to look for in a project management tool

Ultimately, your ideal project management software should fit your company’s specific needs. Consider your budget, team size, file storage requirements, security demands and existing integrations in your tech stack when assessing options. For example, a tool that works for a growing team of five might not be appropriate for a team of 1,000.

The most common features of a project management tool include:

  • Time tracking
  • Reporting
  • Scheduling and planning
  • Budget tracking
  • Document storing and sharing

Here’s our list of the leading project management software broken down by use case:

Best project management software for cross-functional collaboration

monday.com

monday.com is a standard tool that offers scalable workflows, processes and tasks. The software can accommodate a growing team, and their templates make setting up your projects time-efficient.

monday.com has the functionality to cater to projects and workflows in marketing, IT, software development, sales and CRM, HR and operations. Its specialized functionalities allow you to bring different departments together into one workspace and streamline the project management process.

Key features:

  • 40+ integrations including HubSpot, Google Drive, Slack and Zoom
  • Budget planning and management capabilities
  • Cost: $10/month per seat (Standard package)
  • Free project management tools available for individuals
A screenshot of a project overview in monday.com that demonstrates deadlines for this month/next month, project owners, status and timeline.

Trello

Trello is a user-friendly project management software with customizable playbooks for marketing, product development, management, startups and remote teams. If you need all members of your department or company to work within one tool, Trello’s software makes it possible.

Their customizable workflow templates and calendars are suitable for both everyday to-dos and long-term projects.

Key features:

  • 192+ integrations including Jira Cloud, Salesforce, Slack and Microsoft Teams
  • Budgeting and time-tracking capabilities
  • Cost: $10/month per seat (Standard package)
  • Free project management tools available
A screenshot of Trello's Marketing Content Catalog which demonstrates a board view of different content types, including blog posts, gated assets, webinars and case studies.

Smartsheet

With Smartsheet you can build sophisticated sheets, forms, dashboards and reports. The customizable solutions make the project management software a fit for cross-collaboration between departments like marketing, IT and operations.

Smartsheet can be scaled for enterprise companies with advanced needs due to its elevated capabilities and security features.

Key features:

  • 80+ integrations including Google Drive, Microsoft Suite, Adobe and Salesforce
  • Easy-to-create WorkApps based on your business need
  • Scalable options for enterprise companies
  • Secure request management
  • Cost: $25/month per seat (Business package)
A screenshot of a Smartsheet sheet that demonstrates risk, ticket, request, requestor, due date, status and priority.

Zoho

Zoho offers all the essential project management software features: task management, team collaboration, calendars, project templates and time tracking. Their tool also includes live chat and sophisticated automation tools.

With an affordable price tag and basic capabilities, Zoho would work well for growing teams experimenting with project management tools for the first time.

Key features:

  • 20+ integrations including Google Drive, Microsoft Suite, ZenDesk and Github
  • Budgeting and time-tracking capabilities
  • Live private and group chat
  • Sophisticated automations with third-party integrations
  • Cost: $3/month per seat (Standard package)
A screenshot of Zoho's Gantt chart view of a project that demonstrates how different tasks in a project overlap on a calendar.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a strong choice for teams who require close collaboration in a distributed work environment. With live chat, whiteboards and editing features, ClickUp is a project management tool that replicates the experience of working in-person—a draw for hybrid and remote teams.

ClickUp’s time management tools are helpful for leaders who need to appropriately allocate and distribute work. The tools illuminate the productivity of individuals and entire teams.

Key features:

  • 1,000+ integrations including Google Drive, Microsoft Suite, DropBox and Github
  • Live chat, whiteboards and document editing
  • Time management tools (tracking, estimates and reporting)
  • Cost: $12/month per seat (Business package)
  • Free project management tools available
A screenshot of ClickUp's Agile Project Management template that demonstrates projects grouped by status: QA testing, in progress and pending.

Sprout Social

At Sprout Social, our expertise is in social media management, an essential part of your digital marketing toolbox. Sprout is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows businesses of any size to manage all aspects of their social media strategy and work together efficiently.

Our platform offers project management tools that streamline approval workflows and customer care, simplifying cross-collaboration between marketing and customer support teams.

Key features:

  • Integrations with all major social media platforms, helpdesk, CRM and social commerce tools
  • Social analytics, engagement, publishing, monitoring and listening
  • Smart Inbox approval and response workflows
  • Live activity and collaboration
  • Cost: $399/month, $299 for each additional user (Professional plan)
A screenshot of Sprout's Approval Workflows in our Compose feature. By using Approval Workflows, social media posts are assigned to reviewers automatically.

Start your free Sprout trial

Best project management software for agencies

Teamwork

Teamwork is project management software built for agencies, creative teams and professional service providers to maximize their resources.

With free client users and billing software/integrations, Teamwork makes it possible to manage multiple complex customer relationships.

Key features:

  • 80+ integrations including HubSpot, Slack, Outlook and Stripe
  • Time-tracking and billing software
  • Unlimited free client users
  • Cost: $17.99/month per seat (Grow package)
  • Free project management tools available for up to five users
A screenshot of tasks in Teamwork that are grouped by proposal, awaiting approval, approved and in progress.

ProofHub

ProofHub has workflows suitable for different agency departments, including marketing, HR and operations. The project management software addresses many business needs, from task management to streamlined client communication. ProofHub project templates and request forms make managing new projects easier.

Key features:

  • 8 integrations including Slack, Box, Google Drive and Quick Books
  • Time-tracking capabilities
  • Live private and group chat
  • Request forms
  • Cost: $45/month per seat (Essential package)
A screenshot of ProofHub's project management software that demonstrates today's and tomorrow's to-do list. The view illustrates the name of the tasks, start date, stage, assignee and progress.

Basecamp

Basecamp’s easy set-up and implementation make it an ideal fit for growing teams and boutique agencies. The project management tool is free for clients, contractors and outside guests, incentivizing communication and collaboration.

Key features:

  • 400+ integrations including Adobe, Dropbox, Google Drive and GitHub
  • Time tracking and reporting
  • Live chats with team members and clients
  • 500 GB storage capacity
  • Cost: $11/month per seat
A screenshot of Bascamp's homepage that includes recently visited projects, a personalized schedule and assignments.

Wrike

Wrike’s project management software provides companies with project visibility, resource management and client collaboration tools. Wrike offers cross-functional features like cross-tagging, internal/guest approvals, plus live editing and proofing tools.

The simplified intake process and time tracking/budgeting capabilities make Wrike especially conducive for agency work.

Key features:

  • 400+ integrations including Salesforce, HubSpot, WordPress and Google Drive
  • Time-tracking and budgeting tools
  • Security features like locked spaces, encryptions, two-factor authentication and single sign-on
  • Cross-functional, live tools
  • Cost: $24.80/month per seat (Premium package)
  • Free project management tools available
A screenshot of a website redesign project in Wrike that demonstrates active tasks, overdue tasks, completed tasks, days until project is due and tasks by assignee/status.

Best project management software for enterprise companies

Asana

Asana provides company-wide project management tools for a variety of use cases—including approvals/feedback, pipeline projects and planning large-scale goals. With Asana, users can upload and create an unlimited number of projects, tasks and documents.

Asana Enterprise grants users access to their full suite of features and advanced security functionalities.

Key features:

  • 200+ integrations including Adobe, Asana for Salesforce, Jira Cloud and DataGrail
  • Unlimited projects, tasks and storage
  • Scalable for enterprise companies
  • Cost: $10.99/month per seat (Premium package)
  • Free project management tools available for basic plan
A screenshot of an Asana project for Account Tracking that demonstrates task name, section name, assignee, due date, MRR and stage.

Jira

Jira is a project management tool specifically designed for software, marketing, HR, legal, operations, IT, finance and incident response teams. The tool helps teams build new products, craft campaigns from start to finish and respond to issues quickly.

Jira’s advanced capabilities work well for enterprise companies with complex projects, timelines and security needs.

Key features:

  • 3,000+ integrations including Figma, Adobe, Zendesk, GitHub and Trello
  • Time tracking and reporting
  • World-class security and compliance
  • Suitable for large, complex projects
  • Cost: $7.75/month per seat (Standard package)
  • Free project management tools available for up to 10 users
A screenshot of a Jira project with tasks categorized by to do, in progress, in review and done.

Confluence

Confluence is a collaborative team workspace for creating and organizing your work/processes. It’s ideal for mission-critical, high-stakes projects that require formalized communication and operations. Confluence must be hosted on the cloud, in a data center or on a server.

Like Jira, Confluence is an Atlassian product. The products work well together.

Key features:

  • Integrations including Google Drive, Draw.io, Lucidchart and Miro
  • Unlimited storage, spaces and pages
  • Complex project management functionality
  • Security features like data residency, IP ranges and spaces permissions
  • Test product sandbox and release tracks
  • Accommodates 35,000 users
  • Cost: $11/month per seat (Premium package)
  • Free project management tools available for up to 10 users
A screenshot of a Confluence workspace that demonstrates status, impact, driver, approver, contributors, informed, due date and income.

Scoro

Scoro project management software is appropriate for company-wide collaboration across industries. The tool delivers business intelligence data including detailed financial reports and real-time KPI updates. Scoro has role-based access control and enterprise-grade security.

Time management tools and activity logs within the platform help leaders capacity plan and illustrate the impact of their team’s work across the company.

Key features:

  • 1,000+ integrations including Slack, Asana, Jira, Basecamp and Trello
  • Time management tools and activity logs for capacity planning
  • Detailed, real-time financial reports and other KPI data
  • Purchase orders and expense processing
  • Role-based access and enterprise-grade security
  • Cost: $37/month per seat (Standard package)
A screenshot of a Scoro planner that demonstrates how an individual's work is broken up each day.

Create a culture of collaboration

Make silos, redundant tasks, messy email threads and frustrating collaboration a thing of the past. With this list in hand, you have all the information you need to find the right project management software for your team.

Project management tools are the key to unlocking efficient collaboration, streamlined processes and visibility.

Want to start encouraging collaboration between your sales and social teams today? Learn how you can work together to produce customer-centric content that impacts the bottom line.

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Data-driven marketing strategy: Why social insights are key https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data-driven-marketing/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data-driven-marketing/#respond Mon, 14 Nov 2022 15:00:44 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/adapt/?p=37/ In order to truly harness the power of data, you have to first recognize and understand its limitations.

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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.

A chart from the Sprout Social Index™ that reads, "My brand uses social data for..." with responses from marketers. For example, 65% of respondents said sales 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.

A data visualization that reads "How Team Sprout uses social listening to inform our strategy." Headings read, "We protect our brand. We optimize our content strategy. We 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.

A screenshot of the Sentiment Summary dashboard in the Sprout Social Listening tool. The dashboard illustrates the ratio of positive to negative sentiment, and a change in sentiment trends over time.

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.”

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.

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.

A screenshot of a Listening Performance Topic Summary in Sprout's platform. In the image, you can see total volume, engagements, impressions and sentiment analysis.

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.

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Overwhelmed at work? Here’s how to talk to your boss about burnout https://sproutsocial.com/insights/talking-to-your-boss-about-burnout/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/talking-to-your-boss-about-burnout/#respond Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:00:32 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=142832/ Today, brands’ front doors are their social media profiles—and you, the social media managers, are the gatekeepers. That is not an easy job. Building Read more...

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Today, brands’ front doors are their social media profiles—and you, the social media managers, are the gatekeepers. That is not an easy job.

Building an impactful, holistic social presence takes time, research, creativity and constant innovation. On top of that, you’re inundated with unexpected crises, emotionally charged consumer messages and constant change in social media trends. And you can’t just sign off or take a social media detox when the work becomes overwhelming. This constant balancing act can lead to social media managers reaching their breaking point.

According to Sprout Social data, 40% of social pros say they experienced burnout recently.

Sprout Social data visualization showing how recently social media practitioners experienced burnout.

What I am here to tell you is that battling social media burnout does not mean you are incapable of doing your job. It does mean you need to ask for help and learn how to tell your boss you’re overwhelmed. In this article, we’ll explore ways to have effective conversations about burnout with your boss, and we’ll provide specific prompts to help you get started.

Gif showing a text conversation between two people, one of which expresses being busy at work and not knowing how to tell their boss

How to discuss burnout with your boss: Don’t suffer in silence

Your boss likely has lots of things competing for their attention, so they may not be aware that you’re struggling unless you speak up. And while it may be intimidating to start the conversation, a lot of good can come from leveling with your supervisor and being honest about the challenges you face in your role.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at work, talking to your boss about burnout will help you challenge assumptions about your role and responsibilities and bring any invisible expectations to light.

For instance, are you overscheduling yourself? Why do you feel the need to work to the point of burnout? Does your boss know that you’re working late every night? Do they actually expect you to be able to respond to messages immediately or is that an expectation you put on yourself? Uncover those answers so you can recalibrate if needed.

Most, if not all, managers have been through a period of burnout themselves. In that case, they’ll have empathy for your situation as well as advice to get you back on track.

Only 29% of social media marketers say they are most comfortable talking about burnout with a direct manager.

Sprout Social data visualization showing that only 29% of social media marketers feel comfortable talking with their direct manager about burnout.

Having a vulnerable conversation is an opportunity to set new norms with your manager, like being transparent about your state of mind, feeling comfortable expressing blockers or even saying no when you don’t have the bandwidth.

Get the ball rolling

When you address burnout with your manager, you’ll need to get specific and provide context to help them understand what spurred on what you’re feeling. Here are a couple questions that can help you get to the root of the problem:

  • What are your top priorities right now?
  • What is holding you back from focusing on big picture projects?
  • What is the most mentally draining aspect of your job?
  • What tools or resources do you need to do your job more effectively?
  • How do existing processes or management styles contribute to burnout?
  • Is personal stress carrying over to work?
Sprout Social graphic featuring six questions to help identify the root of burnout.

With an understanding of what challenge(s) you’re trying to solve, you can start the conversation with your boss more effectively. And prioritization will help you more easily juggle your tasks in the long run. 

Text conversation gif showing an employee asking to talk to their boss about burnout

When you’re ready to talk, it’s best to do it in person or via video call whenever possible, but getting it on your boss’s radar can start in writing with an email or Slack. Here are a few ways you can kick it off:

  • I’ve been overwhelmed by the volume of messages I’ve been managing lately. Do you have time to chat about it this week?
  • A lot of our recent projects have been really urgent. In our next one-on-one meeting, could we talk through top priorities?
  • I’ve been putting out a lot of fires on social lately and it’s becoming unsustainable. Do you have time this week to chat about how we can get ahead of crises?
Sprout Social's graphic with three prompts to start the conversation with management about burnout.

How to tell your boss you’re overwhelmed: Propose solutions and demonstrate your value

Approach your conversation with some solutions in mind. Think about what “better” will look like for you. Maybe that’s more time to focus on big picture projects, minimizing working after hours, new resources to manage your workload or more open communication between you and your manager.

You’re not going to fix burnout in a single conversation, so start with a realistic and specific goal for your meeting. It will vary for each individual but here are a few suggestions:

  • Align on priorities and expectations
  • Implement a new or different process
  • Determine where you need more support and identify teammates or external resources, like a temp or contractor
  • Develop or reorganize timelines
  • Communicate roadblocks
Sprout Social graphic with example goals for meeting with management about burnout

Remember, the focus of your conversation should be on the impact your burnout has on not only you, but your team and business. You want to have a productive conversation, not a vent session. This is more likely to happen when you can show how burnout directly impacts your productivity, focus at work, the rest of your team and overall marketing goals.

For example, you might say, “I’ve been unable to contribute to the business from a strategy perspective because I’ve been focused on execution and responding to inbound messages. If I had more time to hone in on our social data, I could bring really beneficial insights to the rest of the organization.” Showcasing how much more impact you could have on top line goals will inevitably pique your boss’s interest and make them invested in your recovery from burnout.

While you should have an idea of what might fix the problems at hand, the onus is not solely on you. Your supervisor can and should help solidify the proposed solutions. At the end of your conversation, reiterate your plan of action to your manager and clarify any remaining confusion or concerns.

Gif showing a text conversation of an employee setting priorities with their boss.

Follow through and follow up

Once you learn how to discuss burnout with your boss and enact your agreed-upon plan, be patient with yourself. Immediate relief is not guaranteed. When you feel like you’ve had enough time to make an assessment of how things are going, set aside time to reflect. What’s changed since you spoke with your boss? What is working? What is not?

If you’re still struggling after some time has passed and the solutions you came up with aren’t providing relief, don’t get down on yourself, clam up or accept defeat. You’ve already taken that first step—make it a point to follow up with your manager, continue the conversation and build off what was discussed initially. Together, you can decide how to tweak your original plan of action if it hasn’t been effective.

Lastly, follow up even if things are working! Your boss will want to know that you’re feeling more productive, supported and revitalized.

Gif showing a text conversation of an employee following up after meeting with their boss about burnout.

Get the support you deserve

Burnout is very real and pervasive in the social media marketing community. Restoring balance in your work life might feel like a big to-do when you’re burnt out, but you don’t need to go it alone. Communicating your struggles to your boss is brave, bold and the best way to get back on track.

@henrisomad

#ad Don’t suffer in silence. Check out @betterhelp today. #betterhelppartner

♬ original sound – Henri Somadjagbi

If you’re having these conversations and things aren’t getting better, your boss isn’t as receptive as you’d hoped, you don’t feel psychologically safe at work or you’re in need of more mental health support, here are a few resources that may help:

If managing multiple social media accounts is contributing to your burnout, we think Sprout can help. Sprout can help alleviate some stress by streamlining your processes and improving efficiency so you can empower your social teams.

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How we use advocacy to overcome social media challenges at Sprout https://sproutsocial.com/insights/how-we-use-advocacy-to-overcome-social-media-challenges-at-sprout/ Thu, 20 Oct 2022 16:00:26 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=165947/ Algorithm shifts. Economic uncertainty. Crowded feeds. Like all social marketers, this is the social landscape our team faces. At Sprout, we turn to employee Read more...

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Algorithm shifts. Economic uncertainty. Crowded feeds. Like all social marketers, this is the social landscape our team faces. At Sprout, we turn to employee advocacy to help us overcome our most pressing challenges and amplify our content.

“Advocacy is our secret superpower for creating awareness,” says Olivia Jepson, Sprout Social’s Senior Social Media Strategist. “Amplification is the key to breaking through the noise, increasing our reach and standing out on social.”

In this article, we are showcasing how employee advocacy turns our greatest challenges into our strongest opportunities. Keep reading for a deep dive into our strategy and actionable steps you can follow to fuel your advocacy program.

Why advocacy matters

Our employees are our greatest asset on social. That’s why we rely on advocacy to solve our hardest problems and bolster our overall strategy. Here are four ways our advocacy program delivers solutions to common social media challenges.

Extends reach and awareness

Social media challenge #1: Achieving organic reach on social is harder than ever.

If you’re struggling to breakthrough on social, turn to your employees to widen your audience and grow your brand community. On average, content shared by employees receive more total engagements than content shared by brands.

According to Rachael Goulet, our Senior Manager of Social Media, “Advocacy is the easiest way to extend our reach. Through Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform, we drove almost 8 million impressions in the last two years, and expect to receive 10 million impressions by the end of 2022. That’s more organic impressions than any of our social networks could drive.”

When employees celebrate our company’s culture and share their authentic experiences, interest in Sprout ripples across their social networks.

A teal graphic that reads, "At Sprout Social, advocacy drives more impressions than our social networks. 10 million impressions expected to be driven by advocacy in 2022." The graphic also includes a thought bubble with an eye inside of it.

Attracts the best candidates

Social media challenge #2: More than 50% of marketers say finding experienced talent is difficult this year.

Allow your current employees to expand your search and generate interest in working for our company.

At Sprout, advocacy gives us more opportunities to attract top talent. Our team members are eager to post about their experience with our brand. Their messages are the most compelling examples of company culture we can offer prospective candidates and they help us stand out in a crowded playing field.

A screenshot of a LinkedIn post by a Sprout employee who is celebrating his one year anniversary at Sprout. The employee is recommending Sprout to potential candidates and sharing a link to apply to open roles.

Many Sprout teams work together to curate posts about open roles, product awards and cultural recognitions. Our advocacy program makes it as easy as possible for our team members to share these announcements with their networks by putting them all in one place.

Engages and empowers employees

Social media challenge #3: Struggling to engage employees and mitigate potential risks from employee-generated content.

By allowing your employees to take a shared role in your company’s identity, you show them your trust. Be sure to provide helpful resources and a continuous pipeline of content to make your program successful.

When curating a story for our team to share in our advocacy platform, we provide pre-approved social copy so they feel confident they’re staying on-brand—while we’re reassured they’re representing our brand positively. Employees can personalize the message idea before sharing it, guaranteeing that not every post is the same.

A screenshot of a story being shared in the Advocacy platform. The image shows two social copy options for LinkedIn.

Regardless of a team member’s comfort with social media or experience developing their thought leadership, employee brand amplification makes representing Sprout online accessible.

According to Micaela McGinley, Sprout’s Internal Communications Strategist, “In a digital, remote-first work environment, the days of popping over to the next cubicle are behind us. We have to make sure our content resonates and is easily shareable. Sprout’s Advocacy solution empowers people to stay active on their social networks and spread exciting news.”

Olivia adds, “Advocacy allows us to target our entire team to amplify a campaign. Every single member of our company can participate, no matter their department or social media experience—it goes beyond marketing.”

Fortifies faith in social

Social media challenge #4: Securing social buy-in.

Advocacy pays off and improves your social strategy ROI.

Proving the value of social to stakeholders can be challenging, especially on networks like LinkedIn where it’s increasingly difficult to gain traction and expensive to place ads. By showing the impact of your advocacy program, you can help secure investment and resources.

As Rachael says, “When you consider the size and scope of the audience you’re able to reach with advocacy, you can compare how much you would’ve spent on a media budget to make the same impact. In the last year alone, we achieved an earned media value of $320,000, and we’ve been able to reach the right people—something that isn’t always guaranteed with paid media.”

A dark green graphic that reads, "Advocacy pays off at Sprout Social. $320,000 achieved in earned media value through Sprout's Advocacy platform in 2022." The graphic includes an image of a white calculator.

How we use Sprout’s Advocacy platform

To answer the important question: At Sprout, all the responsibility doesn’t fall on our social team’s shoulders alone. There’s a lot of cross-functional partnership. Here’s a breakdown of how we use our Advocacy platform and other Sprout tools to support our brand amplification function.

How we curate

Our social, PR and content teams collaborate to decide which content we promote in our Advocacy platform. We include our content (launch materials, blog posts, social content, etc.) and third party articles.

We prioritize sharing:

  • Employer brand content
  • Owned and earned thought leadership
  • Industry insights and news
  • Recruitment content

Individuals from those teams curate new stories in the platform on a regular basis. In total, we typically share four to five stories per week.

A screenshot in Sprout's Advocacy platform. The screenshot shows the internal note and social message options for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

To curate a story, we add a link to the content, an internal note and three to eight versions of social copy customized for each network.

Our internal distribution strategy

From there, our team can share the story to their social profiles right from the Current Stories feed.

To encourage sharing among our team, we also send out weekly digests with our latest high priority content stories. As Olivia says, “We schedule a weekly newsletter every Thursday morning, so we always have fresh content for our team to share.”

Links from the newsletter will take team members to our Advocacy platform, where they can share our content.

A screenshot of Sprout's Current Stories feed in our Advocacy platform. The feed include short descriptions of each article and the number of shares each content piece received.

The Sprout features that help integrate advocacy into our larger strategy

According to Rachael, her other favorite advocacy-forward Sprout features are:

  • Advocacy reporting tools
    In the platform, you’re able to pull data like potential reach, earned media value, shares, engagements and other metrics that can help you determine which stories perform best with your team and their audiences.
  • Tagging
    Across all Sprout properties, you can tag your messages based on your workflows, business objectives and marketing strategies—which makes it easy to track how well Advocacy content performs. The platform also offers UTM tagging, a sophisticated tool that can help you demonstrate how curated content impacts your website’s traffic.
  • Send to Advocacy function
    Whether it’s posts you’ve already published or third party content you’re sourcing, you can use the Send to Advocacy feature in Sprout’s Compose tool to seamlessly add new sources to our advocacy platform.
A screenshot of Sprout's Publishing tool that includes a button to share to the Advocacy platform.

Sprout’s Advocacy platform: The key to amplifying your brand

The challenges social marketers face aren’t going away. Yet, a strong performance on social media is becoming more and more important for brands.

A screenshot of a Sprout Social LinkedIn post that reads, "Social is the first place today's consumers turn to discover information, build connections and make purchasing decisions in real-time. Pass it on."

The key to up-leveling your brand’s social performance is tapping into your employees and their networks on social. Employee advocacy helps you extend your brand’s reach, attract the best candidates, empower your employees and prove the value of social to stakeholders.

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Top 18 social media management tools for businesses in 2023 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-management-tools/ https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-management-tools/#respond Tue, 13 Sep 2022 16:55:45 +0000 https://sproutsocial.com/insights/?p=117409/ Social media marketing has a lot of moving parts: creating, publishing, monitoring, engaging and much more. That’s why it’s important to have a social Read more...

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Social media marketing has a lot of moving parts: creating, publishing, monitoring, engaging and much more. That’s why it’s important to have a social media management tool that will help you streamline all of your tasks in a single interface.

Thankfully, there’s an endless list of tools to take advantage of for any part of your social media strategy.

Throughout this article, we’ll cover some of the top social media management tools in the industry and their main features, to give you the information you need to decide which software will work best for your team.

But first…

What is a social media management tool?

In simplest terms, a social media management tool is a software designed to allow a user or users to manage one or more social media profiles across one or several networks in one dashboard or program.

It makes all aspects of social media management – creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, engaging and collaborating – simplified.

Best social media management tools to use

Social media management tools assist with a variety of tasks—content scheduling and publishing, social listening, commenting and engagement, customer care, analytics and reporting, and so much more.

There are a variety of tools available to fit within any budget: from free tools for businesses on a budget to tools for agencies or smaller companies. Each includes different features and options to best suit your team’s needs.

Let’s go through each of our recommended social media management tools to help you find the best ones.

  1. Sprout Social
  2. Social Pilot
  3. Sendible
  4. KeyHole
  5. Zoho Social
  6. eClincher
  7. NapoleonCat
  8. Buffer
  9. Later
  10. Hootsuite
  11. CoSchedule
  12. MeetEdgar
  13. Preview
  14. Tailwind
  15. Tweetdeck
  16. Oktopost
  17. Pallyy
  18. PromoRepublic

1. Sprout Social

Screenshot of the Sprout Social social media management tool publishing calendar dashboard.

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot, right? Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows businesses of any size to manage all aspects of their social media strategy.

Integrating with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and other platforms, you can work across your entire presence in a single dashboard. Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business and Facebook, and create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.

Looking to make your employee brand advocates, as well? Our Employee Advocacy tool provides a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their social networks and amplify your business’s reach.

Features:

  • Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting and more in one easy-to-use dashboard
  • Access to our ViralPost feature to ensure you publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage, boosting visibility and reach automatically
  • Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms, giving you a complete view of all your social interactions
  • The ability to identify the most relevant hashtags for your content
  • Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions

2. Social Pilot

Screenshot of the Social Pilot dashboard.

SocialPilot is a simple and straightforward social media management solution for those just starting out with a management tool. In addition to publishing and scheduling, the tool features a curated content list based on categories and keywords and will share automatically to your feed.

SocialPilot offers in-depth analytics reports to guide better strategies. From content performance and audience insights, users will be able to understand what audiences are engaging with and analyze growth patterns to continue creating content.

Features:

  • Integration with several major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
  • Ability to customize and optimize posts for multiple social networks in a single Post composer
  • A content curation platform provides a list of content pieces to inspire you with new ideas

3. Sendible

A screenshot of the Sendible website

Sendible has done a great job of niching down, working to cater their social media management software specifically to agencies and other large businesses that manage a number of social media profiles. They also offer a number of helpful integrations to make social media management as easy as possible for their users.

Features:

  • An all-in-one dashboard that makes it easy to see your overall social media performance at a glance
  • Collaboration tools that allow your team to create content and then send it to the client or team leader for approval
  • Presentation-ready reports to showcase ROI of your social media efforts to clients
  • A mobile app that lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts on-the-go

4. KeyHole

Screenshot of the KeyHole social media management tool website.

KeyHole is unique from most of the tools on this list in that it boasts itself as an influencer tracking and marketing tool as well. Its Influencer Analytics feature provides marketers with the data they need to understand how each influencer is impacting their campaign goals. In fact, social media reports are their bread and butter.

Features:

  • Automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds
  • Several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting and influencer reporting

5. Zoho Social

Screenshot of the Zoho Social dashboard.

Zoho Social is a tool that boasts features “built for every social media feed.” The app allows you to start discussions, share reports, create team roles and encourage feedback. This makes it easy to get everyone on board with your updates, strategies and performance insights.

In addition to scheduling, the platform has its own optimized timing features similar to Sprout. Zoho Social also has built-in Instagram scheduling, allowing you to publish posts and repost user-generated content straight from your desktop.

Features:

  • An instant integration with the Zoho CRM and the ability to monitor customer interactions
  • Social listening dashboards to track brand reviews, @mentions and branded keywords
  • Ability to collaborate with teammates within the platform via chat, audio and video calls

6. eClincher

Screenshot of the eClincher social media management tool website.

eClincher markets itself as a social media management platform that highlights their commitment to 24/7 customer support. They focus on the agility of their team to constantly improve their tool for the needs of their customers, with the intent to simplify and save time for users.

But what features does their tool offer? Like most tools on this list, eClincher features a cross-network social publishing tool and visual calendar, with a dedicated messaging inbox and publishing queue. Plus, it features brand monitoring across social, news, blogs and more, as well as sentiment analysis.

Features:

  • Provides 24/7 customer support for its users so they can “strategize, optimize and measure ROI”
  • Team collaboration with drafts, comments, notifications, tagging and assigning messages

7. NapoleonCat

Screenshot of the NapoleonCat website.

NapoleonCat is a social media management tool that helps users and teams untangle complicated workflows and simplify collaboration. In addition to approving, publishing and scheduling, users can color-code and visualize calendars.
Probably the most unique aspect of NapoleonCat is that it’s marketing to help with ecommerce goals: posting product updates across profiles, handling customer queries and reviews, and tracking your results.

It’s worth noting that NapoleonCat only has integration with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube – not TikTok.

Features:

  • Dedicated inbox for all social media comments, messages and reviews
  • Professionally designed, in-depth social media reports that will help you identify successes and areas of opportunity
  • Boasts automated Facebook and Instagram comments that may help with converting comments into sales

8. Buffer

A screenshot of the Buffer website.

Buffer is another social media management tool that is ideal for small businesses or businesses that are just getting started. They offer a completely free plan for your first three social media channels, making this the perfect option for setting up your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Features:

  • Social media publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule out all of the social media content you’ve created for each channel
  • A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
  • Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s-eye-view of how your social media efforts are performing
  • The ability to create landing pages for lead generation, sales and more

9. Later

A screenshot of the Later website.

Later started as an Instagram-only social media management tool and has slowly added in other platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and more. They offer a number of features, including a link-in-bio tool, that make Instagram management an absolute breeze.

Features:

  • Social media scheduling tools that let you plan out and schedule your content ahead of time in batches
  • A visual content calendar that makes it easy to visualize and plan out feeds on Instagram and other platforms
  • Tools to help you find and curate user-generated content that your audience will love

10. Hootsuite

Screenshot of the Hootsuite website.

Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool that, like Sprout Social, is well known for original research it  publishes regarding social media and digital marketing across the globe.

This tool has been around nearly as long as social media marketing has been a strategy and has evolved over the years to offer more useful features to businesses—but one thing that’s stuck around has been its  dashboard that gives you a glimpse at all of your social media progress at once.

Features:

  • Publish and schedule social media posts to a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and more
  • Manage incoming messages and mentions and respond to them in a single inbox
  • Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to gather audience sentiment and stay on top of trending topics

11. CoSchedule

A screenshot of the CoSchedule website.

CoSchedule began as a content marketing company and has since brought in social media management and calendar into their fold. Their overall goal is to help brands keep their marketing organized by allowing teams to schedule out all marketing content—blog content included—using their content calendar.

Features:

  • A content calendar that lets you see when every single piece of marketing content will publish
  • Project management tools that let you monitor the progress of marketing content and when it’s ready to publish
  • The ability to manage all content creation in one single dashboard
  • A headline studio that helps you to write better headlines for more traffic and attention

12. MeetEdgar

A screenshot of the MeetEdgar website.

MeetEdgar is a lesser-known social media management tool that helps teams automatically curate their social media feeds. This is perfect for solopreneurs or businesses with small teams. Startups where team members wear a lot of hats may benefit from the features available with MeetEdgar.

Features:

  • Repurpose old content and give it new life by automatically republishing it at a later date
  • Scheduling tools that let you set the optimal times for MeetEdgar to schedule your content
  • A/B testing so you can discover which types of content your audience loves best

13. Preview

A screenshot of the Preview app website.

Preview is a mobile app that lets you visually plan out your Instagram feed. If you’re looking to create a feed that’s based on a pattern, rainbow colors or some other Instagram feed aesthetic, you can upload as many photos and videos into the app so you can preview your feed before you publish.

Features:

  • Upload photos, videos and Carousels to the Preview app to get an idea of what it would look like live on Instagram
  • Schedule your content right within the Preview app so it’ll publish when you’re ready
  • Plan out Reels and Stories as well as your regular Instagram feed so you know how everything will fit together

14. Tailwind

A screenshot of the Tailwind website.

Tailwind is another tool that started with one social media platform in mind and then branched out to others. Because there was a hole in the market for Pinterest scheduling, Tailwind began to help schedule and automate Pinterest marketing for brands before expanding into Facebook and Instagram.

Features:

  • Post ideas to help you always have Pinterest content in the pipeline
  • A design tool to create your own Pinterest graphics and immediately save them Boards
  • Automated scheduling and SmartSchedule feature that keeps your Pinterest feed full

15. Tweetdeck

A screenshot of the Tweetdeck interface.

Tweetdeck is a Twitter-owned management tool that makes it easy to monitor and engage with followers and potential customers from your target audience. It’s also a great way to participate in Twitter chats and keep up with the conversation. Simply head to tweetdeck.twitter.com and sign in with your Twitter profile to get started.

Features:

  • The ability to view several feeds at once, like your home feed, notifications, a hashtag or trending topic, someone else’s profile, etc.
  • Windows that let you tweet or view and respond to your own messages right from Tweetdeck
  • Real-time updates and notifications that let you manage your Twitter profile easily

16. Oktopost

A screenshot of the Oktopost website.

Oktopost is another social media management tool that has niched down to a specific audience. They serve B2B companies and have added feature that help them best serve this audience. They’re also one of the few social media management tools that offer employee advocacy features.

Features:

  • Tools that let you plan, schedule and even approve social media content before it is published
  • Analytics and reporting tools that help B2B teams monitor performance and adjust strategy accordingly
  • A People Database that lets users turn their social audience into qualified leads in their CRM

17. Pallyy

Screenshot of the Pallyy social media scheduling platform tool website..

Pallyy is a unique social media management tool specifically targeted for agencies. This tool helps agencies plan and schedule clients’ social media posts all in one place. The Pallyy dashboard is very visually appealing: a kanban-style workflow, media and folders library, and actual visual planner where you can plan your grids.

Features:

  • Integration with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest and TikTok
  • Visual planners make it easy to prepare content across platforms and grids, especially when aesthetics is high in mind
  • Media storage can be organized into folders for better organization
  • Collaboration with clients made easy with shareable content calendars where clients can also leave comments, make notes and approve posts.

18. PromoRepublic

Screenshot of the PromoRepublic homepage.

PromoRepublic is a unique tool on this list as it highlights itself as a local marketing platform. Having a localized social media management tool is unique, especially for small businesses, franchises and multi-location enterprise organizations, who want to target their local audiences. Through its local SEO tool, businesses will be able to grow foot traffic and web traffic, and managing customer reviews and feedback will be easier in the dashboard as well.

Features:

  • Best for small businesses, franchises and businesses who want to grow awareness in local audiences
  • Create brand consistency with a media and asset library
  • Target the right audiences through hyper-localized ads, and uncover opportunities and business insights through social listening.

Why do you need a social media management tool?

Whenever marketers tap into a new tool, they want to find one that adds value to their marketing tech stack rather than more bloat. Here are some factors to consider to narrow down your choices as you’re deciding between tools.

1. Pricing and budget

Whether or not you can get by with totally free social media management tools really depends on your business’ size and scope. For solo businesses and up-and-coming agencies, free or freemium tools might serve as a stepping stone toward paid ones.

But oftentimes, “you get what you pay for” rings true. That’s why it’s important to assess which features matter most to your business and what your non-negotiables are.

And when in doubt, testing out tools (like with Sprout’s 30-day free trial) and seeing what they can do firsthand is always a safe bet. Sprout is also the only tool on this list that provides a 30-day free trial; most of the others only offer a 14-day trial.

2. Automation and time-saving features

“How is this tool going to save me time?”

Any tool you add to your tech stack should be able to answer this question for you and your business.

Features ranging from publishing and scheduling to a social media calendar, automated responses, and content ideation can seriously free up your schedule.

Another key consideration is whether or not your tool of choice integrates with the rest of your marketing stack. This can serve as a massive time-saver in and of itself.

3. Collaboration features

From scheduling content to responding to customers in real-time, the best social media management tools make it easy to collaborate.

How many users can work within the tool at once? Can you easily set up permissions to onboard new members to your social team?

How many seats a social media management tool has is crucial, especially if you’re outsourcing part of your social or plan on scaling your team.

4. Reporting and analytics

We can’t stress enough how much analytics matter.

The easier it is to highlight your performance and KPIs, the better. Whether you’re reporting on behalf of clients or presenting data to stakeholders yourself, in-depth and easy-to-read reports are an absolute must-have.

Additionally, reporting can help highlight what’s working and what’s not in terms of your social presence. Before investing in any tool, make sure that it monitors the social metrics that matter most to your business.

Find the best social media management tools for your brand

Social media has become an integral piece of any given business today: customer service, competitive analysis, promotion and sales.

And that only scratches the surface.

Start searching for the best social media management tools for your team’s needs. After reading through all the tools in our list, take some time to mull over the best options before biting the bullet.

And remember, you can test drive a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social to get a first-hand look at our automation, collaboration and reporting features yourself.

The post Top 18 social media management tools for businesses in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

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