Social advocacy empowers employees to amplify your brand message in a way that’s consistent with your business’s voice and tone. With a strategy behind it, advocacy will help drive sales, attract talent and position your team members as leaders in their respective networks. It’s a win-win-win, and the companies that capitalize on the opportunity are reaping the benefits.

The time to build your social advocacy program is now. Kick off your process by taking inspiration from these four brands that have mastered the art of employee amplification.

How advocacy can strengthen your social media strategy

Social media algorithms are constantly evolving. While the path to a perfectly curated feed is paved with good intentions, there’s bound to be some trial and error along the way. As networks work those kinks out, marketers have to adapt.

Now that most networks are moving toward content recommendation algorithms, many social media managers are headed into 2023 asking a new question: “If our followers aren’t seeing our content, who will?”

That’s where employee advocacy comes in.

Whether we like it or not, seeing an original post from a familiar face in our social feeds has become a novelty. It piques interest. Factor that interest into the 842 social media connections each of your colleagues has on average, and you’ve opened your brand up to a whole new world of potential impressions.

According to our research, engaged social media users already think it’s essential for employees to post about their company and vice versa. This mutually beneficial relationship can help build brand awareness for your company while helping employees build up their personal brand.

4 social advocacy program examples to inspire your strategy

If you want to get a program started but you’re not sure where to begin, look no further. We’ve gathered these four proven social advocacy examples for tips and inspiration to coach your next crop of brand advocates.

1. Vizient

Vizient, the largest healthcare performance improvement organization in the US, saw a 200% increase in engagements within the first six months of launching their social advocacy program.

Results like these don’t just happen on their own. They happen when a dedicated team member—like Vizient’s Social Media Director, Elida Solis—gets equipped with the tools needed to power their strategy. For Vizient, that tool is Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social.

To get the rest of #TeamVizient up to speed and ready to post, Solis and her team put together an advocacy resource hub, complete with product demos, instructional videos and on-demand webinars. These provisions made it easy for individuals to understand how they can build their personal brand through their company’s advocacy program.

Since we started using Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, my network has become more engaged. I get asked about my company more than ever and people comment on how active I am on LinkedIn. It makes it easier for me to interact with my connections on social. I would highly recommend Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social to other companies considering it.

Carl Taggart
Vice President, Zone Leader NE & SE US—Spend Management Services and Delivery, Vizient

These efforts created a solid foundation for a program that sets a new standard for social advocacy. It even helped earn them the 2021 PR News Digital + Social Award for Best Use of LinkedIn (Community Engagement).

Takeaway: What you get from social advocacy is directly related to what you put into it. Dedicate staff time and resources to understanding what will make a program thrive at your organization. Then, keep iterating. If you set it and forget, you risk losing impact down the line.

2. Ivanti

Setting goals without benchmarks is like trying to shoot an arrow blindfolded. You might hit your target—but it won’t be easy. That’s why the team at Ivanti turned to Sprout for the tools and performance insights needed to revitalize their social advocacy program.

Jamie Laliberte Whalen, Ivanti’s Director of Social Strategy, knew exactly what she was looking for when she connected with Team Sprout. “I wanted Sprout to tell us where we are and where we need to be so we could set reachable goals to move us toward becoming best-in-class. I told the customer success team at Sprout, ‘Give me the key performance indicators and other metrics that we can hold ourselves accountable to, so I can bake that into our social strategy for the year.'”

With Sprout’s help, Whalen identified program adoption as an area of improvement. After retooling the program with a new incentive structure and revamped internal resources, Whalen kicked off an internal communications campaign to drum up excitement for the program.

These efforts resulted in a newly thriving ambassador program. “By the end of the first month of revitalizing the program, we had 17 million reach and an adoption rate of nearly 46%—which is well over the 30% benchmark for a best-in-class program,” said Whalen. “Also, after launching our incentive program, we went from 1,000 to 3,000 shares in the first month, and then up to 17,000 shares within the first quarter.”

Takeaway: You need measurable goals to gauge where you’re succeeding and where there are opportunities to improve. Use your performance data or industry benchmarks to create meaningful goals for your social advocacy program.

3. ZoomInfo

To Caroline Salis, Social Media and Community Manager at ZoomInfo, social advocacy groups are a type of community.

And why wouldn’t it be? ZoomInfo’s employee advocacy program boasts around 1,000 members who lean on each other for tips and inspiration on how to best position themselves and the ZoomInfo brand online.

“Praise is our best incentive,” says Salis. “People use our employee advocacy Slack group to get traction on their posts or gut check humor. The support and excitement you get from your teammates is natural and authentic. That’s an incentive in itself.”

This positive feedback loop has done wonders for ZoomInfo’s share of voice. “We have so many people who are proud to work at ZoomInfo, but they don’t know how to share. Advocacy and our Slack community empowers them to do something they’ve wanted to do all along.”

Takeaway: Experiment with incentives beyond gift cards or prizes to understand what really motivates your team. More than half of engaged employees say they would share company posts on personal accounts if they’re happy with their job (59%), and if they’re proud of the content they’re sharing (52%).

4. Salesloft

If you’re familiar with Salesloft but you’re not exactly sure why, it’s probably because you’ve seen Tom Boston come across your feed.

Tom Boston, Salesloft’s Brand Awareness Manager, has over 24,000 followers on LinkedIn. His most recent video received more than 3,000 likes, 500 comments and 200 shares. He’s a content creation powerhouse and a major asset to the Salesloft brand.

Boston started his content creation journey with general sales advice content. During a webinar on building a personal brand on LinkedIn, he revealed that he workshopped his humor-driven persona through experimentation.

His efforts show what’s possible when you take a chance and hit post—not just for Salesloft, but for other B2B sales leaders, too.

Takeaway: Tap a group of internal influencers to help your program take flight. Lean on these individuals to promote the program internally by showing what’s possible with advocacy.

Learning from social advocacy examples  

Hopefully, these advocacy program examples will inspire you to design your strategy that plays to your business’s strengths. As you pull this off, remember that content is only half the battle. You’ll need the right tools—like Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social—to empower your colleagues to be the best brand ambassadors they can be. 

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The post 4 social advocacy examples that prove authenticity pays off appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employee Advocacy by Sprout—an employee-driven advocacy hub built into your social media management platform—makes it possible to boost reach while cutting ad costs by turning your employees into brand advocates. Because some of the best advocates for your brand aren’t paid creators or influencers; they’re the people you see, in person or virtually, every day.

Amid strain put on marketers from declining organic reach and the ad spend that comes with it, employee advocacy is a key component of your broader social strategy. In fact, Gartner predicts 90% of B2B social media marketing strategies will have scaled employee advocacy programs by 2023.

Let’s get into why adding an employee advocacy program to your strategy is the secret sauce behind cooking up better business results.

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What is employee advocacy, and why is it important?

Employee advocacy is when a person who works for a company promotes the brand or company on social media (think: posting news about the business or a selfie with company swag).

An internal program, plus a platform like Employee Advocacy by Sprout, makes it easy to encourage employees to post more and to track business results.

Social media is a crucial channel for businesses to connect with consumers. But social teams are spread thin. Leveraging employees’ voices provides extra advertising that can extend your reach and grow your digital audiences. As Sprout’s Senior Manager of Social Media Rachael Samuels explains, “Advocacy is important right now because there are a lot of challenges social professionals are dealing with, including algorithm shifts, lean teams and budget cuts.”

Encouraging employees to post about their authentic, positive experiences at your company has deep cross-departmental business benefits, like:

• Extending sales team networks and leads
• Creating buzz and increasing impressions for your marketing team
• Boosting employee engagement for your HR team
• Increasing earned media for your PR team
• Building trust with talent prospects for your recruiting team

From brand amplification to building trust, let’s dive into three major benefits of employee advocacy.

Increase brand awareness—even on a decreased budget

Between the decline of organic reach and recession fears pressuring marketers to perform, it’s never been more important to reach more, with less.

Employee advocacy is your secret superpower—employee posts connect you to new audiences without increasing your ad spend. In fact, increasing brand awareness is the most important business outcome of these programs, according to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™.

“Advocacy has driven a higher number of impressions than any single one of our social channels, driving more than 8M impressions just this year,” Rachael tells us. “Advocacy really is our social superpower. We’re able to reach beyond our core audience and tap into our team’s extensive networks.”

Employee posts boost buzz around your business from trusted voices. There’s a reason 68% of marketers report their organizations have an employee advocacy program—amplifying employee voices by making posting easier comes with massive benefits.

Build brand trust with future fans and talent

In the consumer-brand relationship, trust is everything—58% of consumers say trust is the reason they pick one brand over a competitor. This is where the voice of your workforce shines. So much so, that employee voice is about three times more credible than that of a CEO’s.

Employee advocacy posts create a steady flow of digital word-of-mouth marketing from trusted voices. People want to learn about new things from people they know and trust—after all, a friend’s recommendation is the most impactful reason consumers purchase on social.

This can also help win trust with prospective employees—especially important since The 2022 Sprout Social Index™ found that finding qualified talent is the number one challenge marketers face this year.

When it comes to what it’s actually like to work at your company, there’s no voice more trustworthy than that of your employees—use this and empower them to share.

Maintain consistent brand messaging and fuel thought leadership

Even if you already encourage employee advocacy, there are a few common blockers that may stop them from posting, including bandwidth and anxiety.

Similarly, you may be hesitant to encourage employees posting for fears of rogue brand messaging.

A formal employee advocacy program solves both of these problems. On the employee side, ready-to-share content makes it easier for them to post about authentic work experiences, industry news, brand videos and more on social media without second-guessing their content.

On the business side, you’ll feel confident that content employees share is on-brand by providing pre-approved social messages and content to choose from.

By removing barriers and empowering your employees to post, you’re helping them become thought leaders—and thought leadership can have real business impact. About 47% of buyers say thought leadership led them to discover and purchase from a company. And with 68% of US adults online saying they don’t think companies share interesting content, a steady stream of fresh perspectives from employees diversifies the content your social team can share, too.

Stand-out features: Employee Advocacy by Sprout

Now that you know how employee advocacy can supercharge your strategy, you’re ready for the next step: get an employee advocacy platform.

Employee Advocacy by Sprout is a hub for your employee-driven brand amplification tools. On the employee side, it’s an internal “news outlet” for staff to find and share content to their personal social networks. And on the admin side, you can seamlessly curate shareable content, create internal newsletters and track ROI with analytics and reports. And with Advocacy’s deeper integration with Sprout, you can now compose and publish posts for Advocacy and your brand’s social media channels, all in one place.

All of this removes barriers—for you and your employees—to make advocacy a seamless part of your strategy. As Sprout’s Product Marketing Manager Rae Repanshek explains, “Running an advocacy program shouldn’t feel like a second job. It should be a natural extension of the amazing work social media managers and marketers are already doing. And that’s what Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social does.”

Let’s walk through the four stand-out features of our platform that will lighten your load while supercharging your strategy.

Integration with Sprout Social

Employee advocacy should be part of your social strategy—not another bowling pin for marketers to juggle.

With Employee Advocacy by Sprout, your social media management and advocacy efforts are combined in one hub, cutting out extra workload. You can create content for employees to share within Sprout in the same place as you would compose a social media post for your brand channels.

“Employee advocacy has become a much bigger part of our customer conversations, and our leading brands are revamping their social media and internal communications strategies to include employee advocacy programs,” Rae explains. “That’s why we’re continuing to integrate our Employee Advocacy platform even more deeply with our core Sprout platform and investing in product development to deliver valuable features our customers have been asking for.”

Improved LinkedIn post sharing for a better user experience

As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn is a crucial platform for sharing thought leadership and company news. Ensuring your employees can engage with your company’s content through Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform—and that reshared posts looked natural—was a top priority.

We’ve been enhancing features to make sharing LinkedIn content through our Employee Advocacy solution more seamless. With the integrated compose experience, any LinkedIn posts you create for your brand accounts can easily be made available to your employees.

This means your employees can reshare LinkedIn posts you curate for them from the Advocacy platform, instead of having to go find the post on the network—cutting out a search step that might be a barrier for staff to repost content.

Diversified LinkedIn video content

Video has become more popular than ever—66% of consumers say short-form video is the most engaging content type, up from 50% in 2020, according to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™.

That’s why sharing video content seamlessly on LinkedIn was one of our top priorities. Previously the only video content you could share on LinkedIn was video content hosted elsewhere (think: YouTube videos).

We’ve updated Employee Advocacy to enable video uploads as content employees can share with their networks. This creates a more native LinkedIn experience for those posting, empowers you to share on-brand video and cuts out a step for you as the curator.

And more to come…

Like we mentioned, the tool you use to power your social strategy with employee advocacy should ease the posting process—not hinder it. From compliance-focused tools for highly regulated industries, to even more enhancements to scheduling posts, there are more features on the horizon.

As Rae says, “There’s a lot more in store for Employee Advocacy in the future, and I’m so excited to help our customers drive greater business results by empowering their employees to share their voices and experiences.”

It’s never been more important to increase your organic reach, without spending more to do so. A tool feeds two birds with one pellet: making your social media and employee advocacy strategy more efficient, while maximizing the free reach achieved by employee advocacy posts. The only thing left to do now, is to get started.

Grow brand awareness and supercharge your reach with Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy programs have hard-hitting benefits. Internally, employee advocacy programs make curating and sharing stories you want your employees to promote easier and more efficient. Externally, all that additional promotion and buzz helps cut ad costs by giving your organic reach a major boost.

This is your sign to kickstart your own employee advocacy program. You have the why. You have the how. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now, you’re ready to explore how employee advocacy can grow your strategy, reach and business results.

Use our ROI calculator to find out how employee advocacy and a platform like Sprout can amplify your company message and grow your business.

The post Brand amplification matters: Reintroducing Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employees have an average of 10x more connections on social media than an organization, which means countless opportunities for additional sales and awareness. In fact, a 12% increase in brand advocacy can result in a 200% increase in revenue.

In this groundbreaking Sprout webinar, we’ll explain why employee advocacy is a win-win for B2B businesses and employees, share 5 easy ways to increase your company sales while boosting employee retention and provide steps on how to implement your own employee advocacy program.

Walk away from this webinar understanding:

• How to leverage your biggest brand advocates
• Why increasing B2B sales doesn’t need additional ad budget
• Implementation logistics for starting your employee advocacy program

The post 5 Easy Ways to Increase B2B Sales with Employee Advocacy [Webinar] appeared first on Sprout Social.

In all six categories, G2 recognized Sprout Social as a leader among all customer segments, from small business to mid-market and enterprise. Sprout Social was also named a Momentum Leader in each award category, a recognition that signifies the high-growth trajectory of Sprout Social and its platform based on user satisfaction scores, employee growth and digital presence.

“With the emergence of new platforms and shifting consumer behavior, social media is constantly transforming and impacting businesses in new ways,” said Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social. “Being recognized by G2 as a Momentum Leader across so many areas is representative of Sprout Social’s dedication to continuously evolving and seeking new ways to provide value to our customers as their use cases and the power of social grows.”

With millions of verified customer reviews, G2 analyzed a combination of Satisfaction and Market Presence scores to create its 2022 Summer Reports. Sprout Social earned its place on these lists because of customer feedback, including:

“We have been Sprout users for more than ten years and over that time the platform has evolved with the fast-moving sector in which we work to become one of our business’s most valuable social marketing tools.”

“Outstanding customer service and resources, fantastic metrics and reporting. Worth every penny.”

“Sprout Social allows our business to better identify top performing and low performing social content, key influencers within our industry, share of voice among competitors, and an automated customer support system. By far one of the best social media management tools I’ve ever used.”

“Wildly powerful, complete, and all-inclusive.”

Learn about G2’s methodology or read more reviews directly from Sprout users here.

The post Sprout Social named leader in G2’s 2022 Summer Reports across six award categories appeared first on Sprout Social.

Then 2020’s lockdowns, travel bans and retail closures forced consumers to alter their shopping behaviors completely, accelerating social as a serious channel for commerce. Now, social is no longer just your showroom, it’s your point of sale.

To be clear, social commerce—the buying and selling of goods or services directly within a social media platform—isn’t just a pandemic-era trend. According to research conducted by the Harris Poll, on behalf of Sprout Social, 43% of Generation Z and 49% of Millennials have purchased directly from a social media platform. On the brand side, 86% of executives say social commerce is a growing part of their marketing-driven revenue plans. And that number is expected to rise as the consumers most likely to purchase on social media—Millenials and Gen Z—have increasingly more spending power.

Social commerce is not a trend, nor is it optional for brands looking to scale and grow their business. That’s why we’re excited to announce two new integrations with social commerce leaders, Shopify and Facebook Shops. These new integrations enable you to manage your social commerce strategy and harness the power of Shopify and Facebook Shops all within Sprout’s unified platform.

Extend your storefront into social networks

Social commerce introduces a new way for customers to research, engage and purchase your products in one place. Rather than using social media mostly as an awareness channel, brands have an opportunity to transform social into a direct revenue driver. We’re leading this evolution by making it easy and scalable for you to connect with consumers at every step in their buying journey. Our first-of-its-kind, dedicated integrations with Shopify and Facebook Shops help you easily launch and accelerate your entry to social commerce.

Buyer expectations have dramatically increased and today’s consumer expects a seamless purchase experience in one place, so businesses must adapt. Our fully integrated social commerce platform will enable Sprout customers to unite their commerce and social workflows. This results in a streamlined shopping experience for customers, and an easy-to-use experience for their team members behind the scenes.

Ryan Barretto
President, Sprout Social

With Shopify and Facebook Shops in Sprout, you can deliver a rich customer care experience and provide personalized interactions throughout the entire purchasing cycle–from discovery to sale and beyond.

Share products with integrated catalogs

You’re missing out on a highly engaged audience if you’re not selling on social media. Consumers already show their interest in your products by following your page or engaging with your content. Removing extra steps between their discovery and checkout creates efficiencies for them, leading to more sales for you.

By connecting your product catalogs from Shopify and Facebook Shops to Sprout, you can quickly send links to your products and meet customers’ needs.

Pro tip: Product catalogs are available in both Compose and the Smart Inbox. You can schedule product links into your content for upcoming campaigns, or respond to someone’s message by sending them a direct product link.

Personalize your conversations with engaged customers

With more purchases happening on social media, customers also expect you to support them on those same networks. Your team needs to have the right context, and quick access to the right information, in order to help customers in their moment of need (on their channels of choice).

We eliminate the need to go digging for answers across multiple tools by giving you the right information to respond to commerce questions within Sprout. As you reply to someone, you’ll automatically see their commerce information like order history, shipping status and more. Combined with your other CRM and helpdesk integrations in Sprout, you’ll get a complete view of who you’re talking to and help them even faster.

Pro tip: When you’re replying to a message, look through that person’s conversation history and ticket history with integrations like Zendesk. You’ll get a better understanding of how they’ve been helped and how they responded in previous interactions.

Paving the way for a social commerce future

These new integrations are just the start to what you can do with social commerce. Through continued partnerships and innovation, our goal is to set you up with the tools you need to capitalize on emerging social commerce trends. Have an idea for how you’d like social commerce to evolve? Send us a note—we read every piece of feedback. We can’t wait to see how social commerce in Sprout can transform your business. See commerce in Sprout right away by connecting your commerce store, or if you’re new to Sprout, get started for free with a 30-day trial.

The post Announcing first-of-its-kind social commerce solution in Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this article, we’ll walk through some of the campaign management challenges social media teams frequently face and how a tool like Sprout can help alleviate them. 

The most common social media campaign management challenges

For all the value they can bring, social media campaigns come with innate challenges. Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to juggle:

• Concepting, creating and scheduling dozens of social media posts across multiple networks
• Managing your community and monitoring social for all campaign mentions and engagement opportunities
• Tracking how your content is performing mid-campaign 
• Soliciting and curating user-generated content
• Reporting on your campaign’s performance to your boss, client or other marketers
• Ensuring messaging and content consistency when you have multiple team members or stakeholders involved in the publishing process
• Optimizing your campaign to make sure your numbers keep growing

In most cases, these challenges stem not from people but from a lack of tools and infrastructure. Having the right social media campaign software can be the difference teams need to minimize manual effort, expedite planning and make the most of their campaign budgets. 

7 ways to simplify social media campaign management 

Whether you’re a brand marketer running multiple campaigns or an agency marketer managing multiple clients, an easy-to-use, turnkey solution that facilitates collaboration, execution and reporting all in one place can work wonders. We’ve created this guide to show you seven ways to simplify your social media campaign management—all using Sprout Social.

1. Build your campaign in Sprout to set a strong foundation for reporting later
2. Save your team time with a comprehensive publishing suite
3. Bring team members, leaders and stakeholders into campaign planning with ease
4. Optimize campaigns with real-time data and feedback
5. Engage with your audience to create loyal fans
6. Use social data to inspire confidence in your campaigns
7. Hone in on the metrics that matter most

1. Build your campaign in Sprout to set a strong foundation for reporting later 

Marketers continue to struggle to measure the ever-elusive ROI of social campaigns, but with the right infrastructure in place, tracking the performance and ROI of your campaign is simple. Given all the challenges of campaign management, having a tool like Sprout that centralizes your existing social publishing, customer care and reporting workflows is essential. With campaign management in Sprout, your posts are automatically incorporated into a tagging structure that organizes and tracks the success of your overall campaign and individual content.

The first step is to create a new campaign. Sprout Campaigns provide the structure and simplicity to manage even the most complex campaigns–whether they span multiple networks, variable time periods, multiple KPIs or creative assets. Set the time frame of your campaign, which specific accounts are applicable and ensure consistency with a campaign brief to level-set content expectations and goals for the team. Sprout’s Advanced Plan users can even add media and text assets to campaigns – making it easy for your team to ensure the creative they use is on-brand and on-message.

As you run your campaign, you can use the Campaign Planner to evaluate how your current content is performing, fill potential gaps and use additional tags to test your content and continue optimizing your campaign. At our Sprout Sessions Digital event, speakers shared a number of ideas for how to use tags.

In addition to message tagging, Sprout users can add URL tracking to links to easily identify social referral traffic and conversions from social campaign posts in Google Analytics. Being intentional about your tagging and URL tracking will help later to report your results.

2. Save your team time with a comprehensive publishing suite

Once you’ve got your strategy squared away, goals set, creative assets prepped and campaign created, it’s time to start publishing.

Manually logging in and out of native platforms to schedule content is tedious. Sprout’s intuitive publishing tools help you map out your long-term campaign strategy and schedule content across different profiles and platforms simultaneously. The collaborative calendar is shared with all users in your plan, so marketers, clients and leaders can all view or contribute to your planning efforts. You can quickly filter the calendar to look at all of your scheduled social content, or isolate a specific campaign to fill in any content gaps. Campaign badges and campaign notes on the calendar make it even easier to identify your campaign specific content and information. This can also be helpful if you’re sharing your calendar with leadership or agency clients who want to focus specifically on upcoming campaign posts and strategy.

According to the Sprout Social Index™, consumers find short-form video 2.5x more engaging than long-form. Visually engaging content is an effective way to capture your audience’s attention while delivering information about your brand, product or service. When you’ve invested a lot of time creating beautiful assets to support your campaigns, it’s important to access them with ease as you start scheduling content. This accessibility is even more important as more people shift to working remotely.

Sprout’s Asset Library simplifies asset management, letting you create, organize, edit and publish assets from one place. Sprout integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive and Canva so you can add images or videos to your posts directly from the Compose window. If you feel more secure uploading directly from your computer, you can also easily drag and drop files into the Asset Library. These assets can be added directly to campaigns, ensuring only approved elements make it into your campaign.

Social platforms have adjusted their algorithms over the years to serve up more relevant content to users and prioritize paid content. As a result, 45% of consumers now rely on suggestions in their feed and/or use discovery tools to find new accounts to like and follow, compared only 25% using hashtags for the same purpose. While campaign hashtags are still an effective way to encourage engagement among your audience and create a thread of connected content on social, brands also need to embrace other tactics to get eyes on their content.

Including strategic CTAs that drive action and publishing your content at the right time are both crucial to driving authentic engagement and optimizing campaign outcomes. Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology analyzes your audience data to find the times most likely to reach your largest audience and receive real-time engagement updates. Use Optimal Send Times in Compose to schedule with precision and choose the best times to post that are specifically calculated for that profile on that day. Or, configure your Sprout Queue with ViralPost®, an automated approach that schedules your content for you while still optimizing your post times.

3. Bring team members, leaders and stakeholders into campaign planning with ease

Because social campaigns ladder up to larger marketing initiatives, brands often implement an approval process that safeguards brand standards. Sprout’s approval workflows let stakeholders review, comment and give final sign off on scheduled posts. This level of governance ensures that marketing leaders feel informed and confident about how social supports campaign goals. In the Campaign Planner, you can see which of your campaign related posts are still out for approval—a good way to track content that still needs stakeholder review.

In addition to message approvals, you can share campaign calendar views and campaign specific reports with relevant stakeholders to keep them informed of content plans and overall performance. 

4. Optimize campaigns with real-time data and feedback

Social campaigns aren’t something you can just set and forget. Consistent management maximizes impact.

While SMMs won’t need to do a full-blown report on campaigns every day, they should be keeping an eye on performance. If you notice a post performing well, you can apply those insights to your future content and potentially enhance your campaign in real-time. Additionally, if a Facebook post is resonating with your audience particularly well, or one of your more essential posts is garnering low impressions, you have the option to boost those posts directly in Sprout. A little paid jolt can make a big difference for your campaign. The Campaign Planner lets you quickly identify top performing content during the actual campaign (or, on the flip side, content that is not performing as high as you expected) to help inform whether you should do a content pivot. 

Inbound messages can also help you revamp content in real-time. The Smart Inbox centralizes messages from your audience, providing opportunities to engage with new customers and gauge the reaction to your campaign. To organize your inbox, apply message tags as they come in to categorize and separate campaign feedback, leads and customer support.

Sprout’s Inbox Rules allow Advanced Plan users to create automated systems that categorize and apply tags of your choice to specific inbound messages that meet certain criteria. You can also add incoming messages to your campaign – this can help customer care teams to prioritize campaign-related content and track the inbound conversations the campaign generates. From there, you can surface specific Inbox Views that show only messages relevant to that topic. For example, you can create inboxes specific to your campaign, customer service issues or product feedback. Based on the rules you establish, you can then set up Automated Alerts to receive notifications about the messages you deem most important.

5. Engage with your audience to create loyal fans

Marketers and consumers agree that engagement with audiences is a hallmark of best-in-class brands on social.

While a lot of inbound messages may relate to customer service issues, there are many other reasons consumers reach out on social. In the Sprout Social Index™, Edition XVII: Accelerate, we found that 78% of consumers agree that social media is the fastest and most direct way to connect with a brand.

If someone’s loving your campaign, don’t ignore it. It’s just as important to respond and show your appreciation to those consumers as it is to resolve customer complaints. It can go a long way in building customer loyalty, especially if those consumers are continually engaging with you and your content.

In Sprout, users can view conversation history between your team and contacts. With that context, you can personalize responses and nurture a lasting customer relationship. In the same window, you can add contacts to VIP Lists, which is useful when identifying brand evangelists and potential ambassadors or influencers for your next campaign.

6. Use social data to inspire confidence in your campaigns

Campaigns are all about the payoff, but only 29% of social marketers use social data to assess campaign performance. There’s a lot to be learned from social data and without it, you can miss out on valuable insights that support top-line goals.

Sprout’s robust analytics and reporting capabilities help you track campaign success and generate reports that inspire confidence, not confusion. Add outgoing posts to your campaign in Compose to easily track performance inthe Tag Performance Report and narrow in on metrics like engagements, impressions and clicks.

While explaining your overall campaign performance is essential for reporting, digging into your top and lowest performing is also critical. Filter the Post Performance Report by your campaign to sort your content by whichever KPIs matter most. This will help you uncover themes around which posts performed well and which didn’t so you can optimize for future campaigns. And if you forgot to add posts to your campaign when initially scheduling, don’t worry—you can retroactively do that in the Post Performance Report. Rather than adding posts individually to your campaign, users with Premium Analytics can tag them in bulk. For instance, if several posts with the campaign hashtag were sent out not added to your campaign, use the search feature to bring those posts to the forefront and tag them all at once.

7. Hone in on the metrics that matter most

If your brand has built a paid strategy for your campaign, your bosses will be especially curious to know how that money was spent. Sprout’s Paid Performance Reports help track performance and inform budget decisions on the fly for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn campaigns. The reports are digestible and focus on the metrics that clients and executives alike will care about most, like cost per conversion, cost per click, total spend and more.

If you’re on the organic side and working with a media buyer or paid social expert, these reports can also help you share insights and collaborate to improve both the paid and organic efforts of your campaign.

And to bring it all home, don’t just tell your clients and executives how your campaign performed, show them. With Sprout’s Premium Analytics you can tailor a report specific to your campaign with custom reporting options. In addition to the out-of-the-box reports offered, you can build a report from scratch by adding and arranging data and text widgets in a way that tells a story and clearly demonstrates campaign success. Once you’ve drilled into the data that underscores the value of social, share it with your social team and beyond.

Social media campaign management can be seamless

Putting it simply, Sprout takes the pain out of campaigns. Dad jokes aside, Sprout can truly help nurture your campaigns, community and company goals.

Sprout removes the busywork from your process, streamlines content creation and simplifies reporting so you can focus more time on optimizing your campaign, tending to your customers and looking forward to your next project.

Try Sprout Social for free with a 30-day trial. Already a customer and need help getting started with custom reports? Find more in-depth how-tos on creating custom reports here.

The post Plan, launch, report: How to master social media campaign management appeared first on Sprout Social.

In 2020 alone, Sprout added an impressive list of new partners that span the entirety of our platform. From increased access to social data and functionality to expanding beyond core social; from creating tighter alignment across critical CRM and helpdesk solutions to tie-ins with critical workflow tools that make collaboration and access more seamless. As Sprout expands our offering of business and technical integrations, we’re working closely with each company, ensuring our strategic relationships and holistic approach to partnerships truly set us apart. 

Here, we’re highlighting recent enhancements that provide Sprout customers of all shapes and sizes the best tools of the trade. If you’re not using some of them already, take a closer look. The results will be not only more successful utilization of the Sprout platform, but more compelling community conversations and engagements across your social channels.

Extend social further into your business with CRM & Helpdesk integrations

Earlier this year, Sprout announced a new integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 which complements our existing suite of CRM and help desk integrations including Salesforce, HubSpot and Zendesk. Social media professionals on the front lines know all-too-well how challenging and nuanced it is to deliver a unified customer experience across every interaction, especially when their colleagues internally may have critical context. 

Fast, reliable and efficient customer service on social media is quickly becoming standard procedure. Sprout’s CRM and help desk integrations enable organizations to safely and securely share customer context across teams and systems—providing a more complete picture of the people behind the messages and improving how you communicate with them.

Monitor for five star service with a host of review platforms

Sprout’s recent announcement of a first-of-its-kind integration with Glassdoor, the preeminent source for employee- and candidate-driven reviews and insights for companies, expands upon our existing reputation and review management solutions for Facebook Reviews, Google My Business and TripAdvisor.

We all know that a brand’s online reputation has never been more important, and certainly brand perception goes beyond just your customers to include your employees as well. Adding Glassdoor reviews to Sprout’s Reviews integration partners continues to provide value beyond core social channels and supports a growing trend of seeing social professionals’ influence and purview expand beyond traditional social to connect them to customers wherever they are. 

Work smarter, not harder, with complementary work apps

Even prior to COVID-19 completely changing the way the world operates, the need for effective workflow tools within your social stack was paramount. And certainly with the new paradigm of companies being mostly, if not fully, distributed for the foreseeable future, it’s critical that social media managers have access to the files and tools necessary to stay productive and focused.

Earlier this year, Sprout introduced integrations with key digital asset management systems Google Drive and Dropbox, as well as an open beta program for an integration with the preeminent work communication and collaboration platform, Slack. 

By connecting your Sprout account with systems to access multimedia files and configure task and approval notifications within complementary work apps, like Slack, you can work smarter, not harder, to complete daily workflows across social publishing and engagement. 

Rely on up-to-date experiences with social networks and community platforms

Of course, even as we broaden our scope of integrations, it is always a priority to strengthen and deepen our existing partnerships as well. In 2020, we’re excited to have bolstered several key integrations with expanded access to data and functionality, including:

• Expanded Instagram functionality—including many messaging features—as a byproduct of Sprout working with Facebook to integrate the new Messenger API
• Up-to-date Twitter features, including a Twitter Pro Media Video integration that enables customers to post longer videos through the platform.
• Enhanced Reddit data access within Sprout’s Listening suite, opening the door for more robust and powerful conversation data from Reddit communities.
• Additional YouTube data access powering the recently released YouTube Videos report for detailed breakdown of video and channel performance

Setting a gold standard for partnerships

We are extremely proud of the deep, meaningful relationships we’ve built with our technology and integration partners. Guided by our Sprout values and managed with care, compassion and consistency—there are many benefits that these partnerships provide to the more than 25,000 brands and agencies that trust Sprout to be their social marketing system of record. As we look to 2021 and beyond, we’ll continue to innovate with our technology, bring new relationships to bear and deliver on the promise of providing our customers with the best possible experiences.

The post Beyond integrations, Sprout’s focus on partnership adds value for our customers appeared first on Sprout Social.

How does that relate to social media? It connects to a shared goal: employer branding. A close look at your audience shows the worlds of social, recruiting and inbound marketing are intertwined. A prospect sees posts about you on social media, browses through your social media timelines and uses company sites to learn more about you. Your goal throughout that lifecycle is to make a positive impression, all factoring into your employer brand.

We’re here to help you strengthen your reputation, ultimately helping you acquire the right customers and land top tier talent. That’s why we’ve partnered with Glassdoor to help manage your employee reviews directly in Sprout. A first-of-its-kind integration, you can reply to Glassdoor reviews quickly from Sprout, enhance your employer branding workflows and collect insights to improve your brand reputation.

Faster responses influence your story

An expert social media manager advocates for their brand beyond “traditional” social media —Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. If you’re only paying attention to what’s being said on social channels, you’re ignoring important critics: your own employees. Even more critical is responding to what they’re saying.

Reacting quickly to reviews, both positive and negative, also influences your company narrative. 62% of job seekers say their perception of a company improves after seeing an employer respond to a review. Social media managers are in a prime position to respond to reviews since they’re naturally monitoring real-time message activity. By responding promptly you demonstrate a commitment to transparency, help your employees feel heard and can respectfully provide another perspective to negative reviews.

Using Sprout, you’ll see reviews when they come in along with your traditional social media messages. From there you can respond immediately or collaborate with your team to create an on-brand approved response. Adding Glassdoor alongside your other networks creates a natural checkpoint for review responses in your already established social strategy.

We’re excited to partner with Sprout by integrating Glassdoor reviews directly into a social media platform employers use daily as part of their brand strategy. This enables users of both products to listen to and act on employee feedback effectively and efficiently.

Lindsey Kanefsky
Senior Product Manager

Unlock your way into more insights

Replying to Glassdoor reviews shows you care in the short-term; paying careful attention and reacting accordingly helps your long-term reputation. Not only do you want your employees to feel heard, but they want you to back it up by taking action on what they’re saying. Aggregating and organizing their feedback helps you understand the best way to improve and keep morale high.

The combination of Glassdoor and Sprout makes it easier to uncover and organize your most relevant employee insights. You can narrow down the exact reviews you want to see by star rating, or search for the reviews with a specific keyword or phrase. You’ll also notice trends within reviews that you’d like to share with other internal teams.

For example, you might see a growing number of complaints about your 401k matching policy. Using Sprout, you can search all reviews that contain “401k,” organize them with a 401k tag, and share them out by emailing/exporting those reviews. Sprout helps you find and share the informed recommendations you need to improve your brand reputation.

A collective approach simplifies your strategy

It may not seem like an obvious pairing, but employer branding and social media are a powerful combination to strengthen your brand. Responding quickly to employee reviews and making recommendations based on their feedback makes a substantial impact on your brand reputation. Consolidating those tasks within Sprout gives you the tools to make your employer branding workflows even easier. Take your prospect lifecycles from start to finish with Sprout Social and Glassdoor. See your reviews right away by connecting your Glassdoor profile, or if you’re new to Sprout, get started for free with a 30-day trial.

The post Take a stand with your employer brand: Introducing Glassdoor Reviews in Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

In fact, according to data in the Sprout Social Index™, Edition XVI: Above & Beyond social marketers said their greatest challenge was identifying and reaching their target audience. While sales, customer success and support teams work to understand who is interacting with customers and how to best reach them, the social team has an opportunity to become stewards of internal collaboration and deliver insights that can improve the overall customer experience.

Sprout’s new integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 rounds out a suite of existing CRM and help desk integrations with HubSpot and Zendesk to help you deliver a unified experience across every interaction. These tools, in tandem with Sprout, provide a complete picture of the people and community behind the messages and improve how you communicate with them.

Smooth collaboration for better customer service

Stronger internal collaboration using these integrations helps you provide fast, reliable and efficient customer service. Social and support teams can work with sales and success teams to create, track, manage and resolve issues efficiently without having to leave their respective tools. The ability to quickly share contacts and leads coupled with contextual information empowers sales and customer success teams to act fast with qualified contact information.

Specifically, the CRM and help desk integrations enable you to:

• Pass information from incoming social messages in Sprout Social, such as username, notes, internal comments and company name, to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
• Assign messages as Cases, Contacts or Leads to instantly share relevant information to support or sales teams.
• Forward incoming social messages to customer support teams through Zendesk or Hubspot Service Hub to generate automatic service tickets.
• Communicate bidirectionally between Hubspot or Zendesk and Sprout Social with internal comments on both platforms.

Historically, social could operate in a silo and the rich engagement brands have with their customers is underutilized or not always visible across departments. Partnering with leading CRM and help desk providers connects the proverbial social dots to more people within the business. Our vision was to build these integrations in a seamless and accessible way so that every customer could connect quickly and immediately realize value.

Andrew Caravella
Vice President, Global Partnerships, Sprout Social

Create a path to customer-centric outcomes

Pairing Sprout Social with Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot and Zendesk keeps your internal communication effective and in turn helps your customer with a better experience. Deliver an integrated experience with all of your incoming social messages. Connect your CRM and help desk integrations today by visiting Sprout’s Inbox Integrations page, or if you’re new to Sprout, get started for free with a 30-day trial.

The post Identify and quickly assist your audience with Sprout Social’s CRM and help desk integrations appeared first on Sprout Social.

But behind the scenes, the journey of creating that content and sharing it on social media isn’t always Point A to Point B. Feel free to nod along if you’ve felt the struggles of a lengthy approval process, team members working remotely, files being in the wrong location or all the above. As your team grows and becomes more distributed (both physically and within your business), so do your files–across different platforms, apps and communication channels. Hunting down the files you need can interrupt your day and leave you feeling frustrated.

That’s why Sprout Social partnered with Dropbox to make social media planning even easier. You can now add Dropbox images and videos to your posts directly from Compose on Sprout’s web and mobile apps—making content creation to delivery a direct path.

Uniting content with social

Your day isn’t meant to be spent digging through different emails, Slack messages and spreadsheets looking for files. Stay connected to your team by storing your social-ready images and videos in Dropbox, and get instant access to them in Sprout when you’re ready to plan or publish them on social.

Using Sprout, you can easily schedule and publish new social posts through the Compose window. To try out how Sprout works with Dropbox, click the camera icon from Sprout’s Compose and select Dropbox to attach your media. Once your message is added and you select which network(s) you want to post to, you publish your content now or schedule it to automatically post later.

We’re thrilled to partner with Sprout to bring social content creation and sharing capabilities to Dropbox. We want to help our users accomplish their workflows efficiently and get the most out of their work. By integrating their key tools within Dropbox, users can seamlessly take actions on their content all in one place.

Andy Wilson
Media Principal, Dropbox

Making your content count

Attaching Dropbox files in Sprout not only makes planning easier, but it also unlocks tools that improve your overall social strategy. As you schedule out your images and videos you’ll see a list of recommended times to post. Optimal Send Times regularly analyzes your audience’s engagement patterns and shows the best times to share your content for highest engagement.

Once your posts are live, you can continue to maximize their lifecycles with Sprout’s Engagement and Reporting tools. Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps you see all of your incoming messages and comments across your networks so you can respond to them. See which content is making a splash in the Post Performance Report, and if your posts are working well you can leverage that content by rescheduling it.

A clear runway ahead

There’s already enough inefficiencies in our days. We want to do everything we can to turn the workflows that feel like layovers into simple, nonstop flights. Sprout Social and Dropbox are making that happen by merging the worlds of content creation and social media management. Let us know what you think! Send your thoughts to @SproutSocial and @Dropbox.

The post Connecting creatively with your community: Introducing Sprout Social’s Dropbox integration appeared first on Sprout Social.