Hi there! Your local social media expert, Amanda, here, with a look at one of our favorite tools for managing social workflows.
A lot of our clients come to us with challenges juggling all of their social accounts, and we definitely get it. Here at Informatics, we manage over 100 social accounts for our clients (fortunately, not all on my plate)!
If you've been around me for five minutes, you've probably heard me mention Sprout Social when discussing organic social media. We added the platform to our tool chest a few years ago, and it continues to be a powerful and efficient way to manage our social media efforts.
As somebody who is in the platform for hours and hours every week (not joking here), I wanted to walk you through four of my favorite features and explain why Informatics continues to choose Sprout Social for our social media management.
1. Content Scheduling
There are two major hurdles organizations face when it comes to organic social content. The first is creating content on a regular basis and the second is actually getting it posted.
While Sprout might not be able to help much with the former issue, their social publishing tool makes scheduling content quick and efficient. Thanks to advanced filters, you can sort by date, platform, profile, and see how your content will look on each platform (on both mobile and desktop) in either a daily, weekly, or monthly view.
The best part is that Sprout offers optimal times to post. They've done the research and have taken the guesswork out of when you should be posting to each platform. Now you can know that your posts are being shown to your audiences at the right times.
2. Social Monitoring
According to Smart insights, 63% of customers expect companies to offer customer service through their social media, and 90% of social media users have already connected with a brand or business through their chosen platform. But between Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, it can be hard keeping track of all the comments, direct messages, tweets, and mentions your brand is getting.
Enter Sprout's Smart Inbox.
Once your profiles are connected, the inbox compiles your messages in one place, helping to facilitate and streamline responses to questions, comments, or concerns. And with the ability to tag specific messages, you can separate the engagement your brand is receiving into themes or topics.
3. Social Listening
As one of the most robust areas of Sprout, social listening is a powerful tool that lets you uncover exactly what your audience is saying about your brand.
Using a mix of keywords and hashtags, social listening topics pull in conversations happening about your brand without needing direct mentions or tagging. With Sprout's help, we can track and analyze industry, brand, and competitive trends to understand exactly where your organization lands when it comes to user sentiment and brand health.
This honest and unfiltered feedback provides the opportunity to generate new products, services, and content. For example, while reviewing your topic you might notice that people are repeatedly asking the same type of question on Reddit. This provides the opportunity to create a quick explainer video, drawing traffic to your website and social pages as you provide the answer they're looking for.
4. Reporting
Remember that reporting on the performance of your social content is just as important as its creation. Sprout can provide the data underlying your data-driven strategy by pulling in all the crucial information you're looking for, and transforming it into an easy-to-understand dashboard.
Sprout offers both premade templates and the ability to build custom reports, so you can choose the data presentation that's most important to your team.
Keep in mind that these are only some of the features of Sprout Social. This impressive platform includes everything from asset libraries to chatbot creation to a superior support team.
If you're having trouble with your organic social content, are unhappy with your current platform, or have additional questions about any of the features discussed here, reach out—I'd love to give you a personal demo!
