Redditors use the platform in multiple ways, from news aggregation to soliciting and sharing honest opinions without a marketing agenda. You won’t find paid influencers here. Instead, anonymous users of all backgrounds and interests share opinions about their hobbies, jobs, purchases and more in threads or forums on specific topics called subreddits.

These subreddits often appear in search query results when users search for specific topics, even more so in recent months thanks to Google’s partnership with Reddit.

Reddit’s ever-growing source of answers and advice houses insights into your customer base that you won’t find anywhere else—and marketers are beginning to recognize the value of Reddit as a powerful social listening source. All you need to do is access those insights through Reddit social listening and contribute authentically to the community a subreddit has fostered to grow your brand.

Read on to discover how to tap the power of Reddit to find, understand and even participate in game-changing conversations for your brand.

What is Reddit social listening?

Reddit social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing mentions of your brand, industry, competitors and important keywords on Reddit. The benefits go beyond your marketing strategy, as social listening can increase org-wide success.

On Reddit, which has around 52 million daily active users and around 138,000 subreddits, there’s a conversation for any interest, and threads for nearly any brand. This makes Reddit social listening a supercharged feedback tool. It’s qualitative data without the fluff. International marketing manager at Sprout Social, Jocelyn Rodriguez-Piedra says, “Reddit goes beyond the curated feeds and filtered metrics to reveal the unfiltered authenticity of customer conversations. It is a goldmine of raw, honest data waiting to be unearthed.”

Reddit has gotten an SEO boost. According to Rodriguez-Piedra, “The Google and Reddit partnership essentially elevates Reddit as a more valuable source for consumer intelligence. Social listening on Reddit is a way to harvest and mine data that goes beyond the ‘what’ of consumer conversations and helps you see the ‘why.’”

Why is Reddit social listening important?

Redditors share candid opinions in a way they wouldn’t in a branded survey or even on social media accounts that have their real names attached. That’s why being a fly on the Reddit wall has many positives for your brand.

Brand discoverability

With Google indexing Reddit data, there’s a good chance a customer searching for your brand will pull up subreddit conversations in response to their query. This means paid backlinks and media placements aren’t the only way to optimize your SEO.

“Conversations on Reddit may now have a greater impact on brand discoverability and visibility,” Rodriguez-Piedra explains. “Social listening enables you to understand what kind of content resonates on Reddit and optimize your brand’s presence to be surfaced in relevant searches.”

Those posts boosting your brand’s Google presence are also full of useful information about your customer base, data that Rodriguez-Piedra says may be even more credible than other sources.

Richer insights

Google’s AI capabilities paired with Reddit social listening data can help marketers uncover deeper, more meaningful insights. The key, Rodriguez-Piedra says, is diving deep, not wide. “Reddit is not a one-size-fits-all platform with its intricate network of subreddits,” she says.

She recommends focusing on the granular details that show you the “why” behind customer sentiment and the choices they make. “You can identify patterns in frustrations, desires and emerging trends within highly specific communities,” she notes.

Reddit posts can spotlight the true emotional pulse of the customer and using AI tools that analyze sentiment can help connect the dots and highlight pain points. Rodrieguez-Piedra explains, “Social listening enables us to move beyond guesswork and intuition, truly providing a rich tapestry of customer sentiment in real-time.”

Sprout Social’s Social Listening tools leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze sentiment expressed in text. Having AI support like NLP can add context and color to the content you gather through social listening on Reddit.

Identify customer pain points

While a customer may let you know of issues they have during the purchase process, you often won’t get detailed feedback unless there’s a complaint. And customers who do respond to feedback surveys aren’t always detailed about their broader thoughts on your industry or competitors.

On niche subreddits related to your brand, however, conversations are full of these tidbits.

Complaints about your brand and products as well as competitors are an opportunity for you to identify and improve areas you may have previously overlooked. A single Reddit thread can provide intel to inform product development and even address problems before they escalate.

And—when done correctly—your brand can even join conversations on the platform.

Join conversations

Joining a conversation on Reddit is a true example of meeting your audience where they are. Reddit is also known for launching and nurturing trends and memes, and a single Reddit thread can become a news story all on its own. But there are some nuances to consider when responding to posts.

The number one rule, according to Rodriguez-Piedra: Don’t just drop in a sales pitch. “Offer valuable insights, answer questions, connect with people in the way the platform has encouraged users to show up—authentically. Become a resource, not a bullhorn.”

Customers don’t like being sold to on any social platform, but Reddit users really won’t take kindly to a brand account trying to upsell products in a thread. Instead, consider how you can leverage the people on your team to create value. Whether an “ask me anything” (AMA) on a relevant subreddit or assigning a specific person to browse Reddit and find customer care questions they can answer, always put authenticity at the center.

How to use Reddit social listening for your brand

Using social listening on Reddit requires a thoughtful strategy and an understanding of what to do with all the insights you’ll find. Here are suggestions on how to get started.

Find subreddits and keywords for your social listening strategy

The uncurated nature of Reddit offers many paths to follow when looking for relevant content. To find the right subreddits and keywords to track, turn to your overall marketing plan and what you already know about your target audience. Ask questions like:

• What hobbies do our customer personas have that relate to our brand?
• What’s their age range and location? What subreddits are popular with that age group or geographic location?
• What major keywords are we using in our SEO strategy?

Begin searching on Reddit for subreddits and threads based on those hobbies, ages, locations and keywords. Also search for your brand name, your competitors’ names and industry topics. You may even find a subreddit dedicated solely to your brand. But, keep in mind that a thread doesn’t need to mention your brand to contain valuable insight.

Once you find a relevant thread, look through the users participating in the conversation. See the post history and analyze the upvotes and downvotes on individual posts to see what content the broader community supports. This will give you additional ideas for topics and subreddits to check out.

Monitor and analyze Reddit conversations

Thousands of posts go live every hour, and Reddit conversations flow and change quickly. A machine-learning (ML) based, centralized tool like Sprout, with its Advanced Listening capability will help you keep up.

You can create customized queries based on your previous Reddit research, automatically sift through the noise and get straight to the relevant insights. Advanced Listening also helps you uncover notable patterns and analyze sentiment on a granular level.

Rodriguez-Piedra believes this is where the true value of Reddit social listening lies. “By leaning into data, we foster a culture of data-driven decision-making and, in return, transform the fleeting buzz of Reddit into sustainable brand success.”

Define a regular schedule for reviewing the data your social listening tools provide, and build a timeline for sharing with key stakeholders at your organization. Create guidelines for responding to key conversations you come across, keeping in mind that the window of time to respond may be short.

Engage and nurture Reddit prospects/customers found through listening

Marketing on Reddit requires a thoughtful approach. If you want to add to your customer pipeline via Reddit, Rodrgiuez-Piedra suggests becoming a Reddit regular.

“Immerse yourself in relevant subreddits. Actively participate in discussions, not for promotional purposes, but to genuinely connect and understand the community’s dynamics. What pulls at their heart strings?”, she says.

Community dynamics may not always be positive, and you’ll likely come across critiques and rants. But don’t shy away from the negativity. Instead, consider addressing the concerns directly and honestly. Taking part in Reddit conversations as a brand requires a commitment to following the community guidelines set, and transparency is always to your benefit.

The people have spoken—are you listening?

There’s a world of opportunity waiting for your brand on Reddit. With the right social listening tools, you can sift through thousands of posts and find content deeply relevant to your organization and target audience, whether it mentions your brand directly or not.

Social listening can open doors your marketing strategy couldn’t otherwise. You don’t need to be a full-fledged data scientist to open those doors, either. Get started with our guide to creating better social listening queries.

The post Reddit social listening: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.

In today’s fast-paced digital environment, a brand’s social media response time is critical to building long-lasting customer relationships. Swift responses show your commitment to your customers, and this results in stronger brand satisfaction, loyalty and reputation.

But many brands struggle to improve response times due to team and resource constraints, often compromising quality. With the right technology, it’s possible to overcome these challenges and deliver faster, personalized care in a smooth, effective manner.

Read on to learn how quickly consumers expect brands to respond, and what you can do to speed up your social media interactions to exceed customer expectations.

What is social media response time?

Social media response time is the time a business takes to respond to messages and inquiries from customers on its social networks. This includes the time to understand the question, gather contextual information and reply.

How quickly do people expect a response on social media?

According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™ , most consumers (69%) want brands to respond within 24 hours, and 16% want a response within minutes—a 3% increase from 2022. This isn’t surprising, given that 53% of consumers say their social media usage has been higher over the last two years than the previous two years, per the same report.

With social media saturated and brands vying for consumer attention to reach new audiences, a brand’s social media response time becomes the differentiating factor. Brands need to keep up with customer preferences at the speed of social or lose out to the competition.

Why social media response time matters so much

Here are some data-driven reasons brands need to prioritize social media as a support channel.

Customers rely on social for support

Data from Intercom shows nearly half of support teams cited a 51% increase in inbound volume in the wake of COVID-19. Plus, a recent PTMNTS Intelligence survey of 3,251 U.S. consumers showed 43% of Gen Z customers preferred to shop on a brand’s website—a rate 53% higher than the average consumer.

These factors have led consumers to reach out to brands on social with queries and feedback more than ever. In fact, Sprout’s Q1 Consumer Pulse Survey of over 2,000 consumers in the U.K. and U.S. revealed 80% of consumers use social media now, more than a year ago, to engage with brands about customer service needs.

Quicker than email and void of tiresome back-and-forth customer service phone conversations, social provides consumers with 24/7 access to brands at the touch of a finger.

Quick responses result in more loyal customers

A 2023 PWC survey showed 61% of executives believe enhancing customer service is a high priority to encourage brand loyalty. Another 61% say so is personalizing customer experience (61%). This comes as no surprise, as 32% of consumers shared they stopped using or buying from a business after a bad experience with customer service.

Repeat customers and brand advocates aren’t a “sure thing” if you aren’t consistent and attentive with your customer care. And with social media at the center of customer service in this age of digital marketing, social media response times have become even more critical.

Brands are recognizing this. Take this response from McDonald’s where their team responded to a customer complaint within 15 minutes.

Speedy customer service gives you a competitive advantage

Prompt social media response time is key to keeping customers from bouncing to competitors. According to a Salesforce report, 89% of consumers are more likely to remain with a brand and make another purchase due to positive customer service.

The good news is, as social media response expectations rise, so do your chances to meet customer expectations and delight them before they look for greener pastures. The next section tells you how you can achieve this with the right strategy and tools.

6 ways to speed up your social media response time

You know you need to speed up customer service response times, but how do you make it happen? Here are six ideas to help you put together a social media response plan that addresses customer concerns ASAP.

1. Merge your social comms into a single platform

If your brand has multiple social media accounts, you need to keep a tab on all customer messages across each of them and provide accurate and speedy responses. For instance, Sephora provides prompt social media responses on Instagram;

…X (formerly known as Twitter)…

…and Facebook.

But as you scale and your team size grows, manually handling multiple social media accounts can be daunting, time-consuming and prone to mistakes.

An all-in-one social media platform like Sprout helps you gather your messages across all social platforms into one unified Smart Inbox, so your teams work from a single source of truth. Thus, enhancing your team’s performance by simplifying tasks.

The tool also helps you build seamless and transparent workflows for social customer service teams to manage and respond to incoming messages quickly. Its collision detection capability further enhances collaboration, enabling greater work transparency so no two team members respond to the same query at the same time.

2. Use suggested replies and AI tools to address common concerns

Use AI-enabled tools to automate responses to common customer queries so your customer care agents resolve issues faster. For example, Sprout’s Suggested Replies uses machine learning to analyze incoming messages and detect if you’ve received similar comments and queries before.

Different from canned responses, Suggested Replies lets agents personalize replies to make them more authentic and add contextual details. This saves time and is especially helpful to team members with different experience levels, while also helping maintain a consistent brand voice when answering similar questions.

Here’s an example of an auto-generated, yet personalized response from McDonald’s.

Similarly, Sprout Social’s Enhance by AI Assist enables customer care teams to personalize responses based on the tone of the incoming messages so responses match the customer’s emotional state. Agents can make responses sound formal or friendly and deliver customized experiences at scale.

3. Use dedicated customer care tools to improve response times

Another way to ramp up social media response times quickly is to use tools specifically designed for customer service. Dedicated customer care tools like Social Customer Care by Sprout Social help increase team speed and productivity through capabilities like Case Management. The capability helps care teams get a holistic view of message volume and see the status of the most relevant cases, thus helping them manage customer interactions quickly and effectively.

Plus, integrations like Salesforce Service Cloud help agents quickly collect additional context to improve responses with additional information for smooth and consistent communication.

Dedicated customer care tools also help gather customer insights with automated NPS and CSAT surveys. You can customize settings to trigger surveys after an issue is resolved to know customer satisfaction levels and where to improve.

4. Let chatbots help route questions efficiently

Social media automation tools like chatbots help you improve your social response times. They enable you to engage and provide 24/7 support to customers, offering instant service even without an in-person rep present.

They’re ideal for addressing frequently-asked questions and routing customers to the appropriate support channels when questions get too complex (think: email, live chat), thus reducing initial wait times.

5. Prioritize your social mentions based on urgency

The right social customer care tools enable you to create customer service tiers to handle urgent messages for speedy social media response times. Sprout’s Case Management solution, for instance, helps you set criteria such as topic, profile type, message type, VIP status and message sentiment to create cases for faster workflows and quick issue resolution.

Having a tiered response strategy is also an important part of a brand’s social media crisis communication plan to deal with a potential brand crisis and notify agents when there’s a spike in brand mentions.

All social mentions are important, but the fact is, some mentions are more important than others—especially when they can impact your bottom line or reputation versus friendly shout-outs. Prioritizing messages based on urgency helps you address this need.

6. Set benchmarks to improve your average response time

Just as you analyze post performance to see what’s resonating with your audience, analyzing your social media response times will surface opportunities to improve your team’s productivity.

Sprout’s Social Customer Care solutions help you actively track response metrics through comprehensive average response time reports for detailed insights. Collect key metrics from the Case Team Activity Report and get actionable insights to help agents improve response rates.

Transform your customer care with faster social media response times

Modern customer care needs modern solutions, and time is of the essence in a competitive landscape. It’s possible to improve your social media response times quickly and enhance your overall customer experience with minimal disruption, provided you adopt the right strategy and technology. This proactive approach will help you win customer loyalty, build authentic connections and keep your customers happy.

Read more about social media’s role in modern customer service.

The post Why you need to speed up your social media response time (and how) appeared first on Sprout Social.

But what’s the best way for brands like yours to use the app?

Snapchat’s distinctive features and authentic vibe make it an excellent avenue for influencer marketing. This playbook will help you harness the power of Snapchat influencer marketing with guidance on forging partnerships, creating engaging content and tracking business results.

Partner with the right Snapchat influencers

To optimize your influencer marketing strategy on Snapchat, it’s crucial to collaborate with the right influencers. Conduct thorough research to identify influencers whose values align with your brand, who resonate with your target audience and who can help you achieve your campaign objectives.

Here are four factors to keep in mind when searching for Snapchat influencers:

1. Know your audience

   Different generations have unique platform preferences for social media. According to a Sprout Social Q2 Pulse Survey of more than 2,000 consumers across the US and UK, Gen Z and Millennials are the generations you can expect to see most on the platform, with Gen Z ranking Snapchat as one of their top three most-used social platforms. When you search for influencers, look for those who’ll resonate with younger generations.

2. Relevance matters

   Seek out individuals whose content aligns with your brand values and whose followers match your target demographic. Use tools like Social Blade and Tagger, Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform to pinpoint the best fits.

3. Prioritize engagement, not just follower count

   While a large follower count is appealing, high engagement rates are a truer measure of an influencer’s impact. Focus on influencers who receive substantial interaction on their posts, such as comments, shares‌ and views.

4. Build long-term relationships

   Develop long-term relationships with key influencers. Consistent partnerships lead to more authentic and impactful collaborations. Consider turning successful influencers into brand ambassadors. Ambassadors can provide a steady stream of content and maintain a continuous connection with their audience.

Harness Snapchat’s unique features

Like any social platform, unique features are what keep audiences coming back. Build your campaigns around Snapchat’s functionality to create content that resonates.

Stories

Snapchat Stories are ideal for sharing temporary, engaging content that creates urgency. Use Stories for behind-the-scenes glimpses, product launches‌ and exclusive previews. Collaborate with influencers for Snapchat takeovers, giving their followers direct access to your brand.

Geofilters

The future of influencer marketing will extend beyond the screen. According to Sprout Social’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, most consumers agree they’re more likely to buy from brands who partner with influencers on more than just social content—like IRL events.

To capture this intent, use influencers and geofilters to bring event activations to life. Design branded geofilters for specific events or locations, and have your influencers apply them. Anyone in the area can use these filters, boosting brand visibility and encouraging user interaction.

Lenses

Develop custom Snapchat lenses to allow users to interact with your brand in a playful and immersive way, from simple overlays to sophisticated augmented reality experiences. Partner with influencers to showcase these lenses on their accounts and encourage audience to do the same.

Incorporate Snapchat Ads

Complement influencer content with Snap Ads to extend your reach. These ads reinforce your campaign message and drive additional engagement. You can also sponsor content to amplify reach further—enhancing the impact of your influencer campaigns.

Craft authentic and engaging content

Sprout’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report also found that the best brand and influencer collaborations are honest and unbiased, entertaining or educational.

Keep those factors in mind while building your content strategy, and use the tips below to craft engaging content.

Stay authentic

Allow influencers the freedom to present your brand in their unique style. Authenticity resonates strongly with their audience, making the content more impactful. Collaborate closely with influencers to co-create content that’s both creative and aligned with your brand messaging, but let them guide the approach to foster innovation and engagement.

Take audiences behind-the-scenes

Humanize your brand with behind-the-scenes content. This approach makes your brand more relatable and accessible. Encourage influencers to tell a story through their snaps and give audiences a sneak peek at what it’s like to work with your brand. Storytelling makes the content more engaging and memorable for the audience.

Share user-generated content

Encourage influencers to share user-generated content. This strategy helps boost engagement while building credibility and trust in your brand. It fosters a sense of community, making followers feel valued and part of a larger group.

Run contests and giveaways

Contests and giveaways are powerful tools for driving engagement. Partner with influencers to run these campaigns, offering followers chances to win exclusive products or experiences. Provide special deals or discounts to the influencer’s followers. This creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency, driving immediate action.

Stay updated with trends

Keep up with new Snapchat features and trends. Early adoption of new tools can give your brand a competitive edge and keep your content fresh. Be aware of cultural and social trends that resonate with your target audience, and incorporate these trends into your content to make it more relevant and engaging.

Take CeraVe, for example. The brand leaned into Snapchat’s AR trends and partnered with Snapchat creators for a campaign to raise product awareness.

Creators used AR to “apply” CeraVe products on screen while explaining the product’s benefits to viewers in real time.

Use analytics to understand performance

Dig into your native Snapchat analytics to see how your influencer campaign impacts real business results. Then, based on what you learn, iterate and improve your campaign strategy. Here’s what to do:

Track performance

Use Snapchat’s analytics tools to monitor the performance of your influencer campaigns. Key metrics include:

• Engagement metrics: Track interactions like views, shares‌ and screenshots to gauge user interest.
• Reach and impressions: Measure the number of unique users who have seen your content and the total views.
• Story views and completion rates: Understand how many users view your stories and complete them.
• Swipe-ups: Monitor the number of times users swipe up for more information or links.
• Demographic data: Gain insights into the age, gender and location of your audience.
• Time spent: Measure how long users spend viewing your content.
• Conversion tracking: Track actions taken by users after viewing your content, such as website visits or purchases.

Refine your strategy

By analyzing audience behavior and preferences, you can tailor your campaigns to better meet the needs of your target audience. The data you collect can tell you the strength of specific influencer partnerships, the campaign content that resonates the most and what other opportunities exist to differentiate your brand. Turn your data into impact by finding insights and creating new ideas to refine your strategies.

Maximize Snapchat influencer marketing ROI

Using Snapchat in your influencer marketing strategy involves a blend of creativity, strategic planning‌ and a deep understanding of the platform’s unique experience. By selecting the right influencers, crafting authentic content‌ and effectively using Snapchat’s tools, brands can create impactful campaigns that resonate with their audience. Use this playbook to build an influencer strategy that works, and learn how Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform can help you execute Snapchat influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish.

The post The ultimate playbook to build a Snapchat influencer marketing strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Creating a social media interaction strategy is essential for long-term customer satisfaction. Most consumers expect brands and companies with a social media presence to interact with customers, promote products‌ and answer questions. As social continues to evolve, the ways audiences engage with brands will grow alongside it.

In this article, we’ll cover what these interactions look like, and how they impact your overall business strategy. But first, let’s cover some basics.

What is social media interaction?

Social media interaction is an umbrella term that encompasses all the two-way conversations and touchpoints that occur between companies and consumers.

Whether you’re liking a tagged post or addressing a lukewarm review, the way you interact with your followers has a huge impact on customer satisfaction and retention. Every positive interaction has the potential to build customer relationships and turn a casual shopper into a lifetime fan.

3 key social media interaction statistics to focus your strategy

Not all social media strategies are made the same. The path your brand takes depends on your current social media planning, engagement gaps with followers and the best way to build deeper connections with them.

To fully understand today’s shifting social media landscape, we surveyed over 1,800 consumers and 900 marketers for the Sprout Social Index™ 2023 report. What we found were changing consumer expectations, higher social media use and room for improvement around brand engagement.

68% of consumers follow brands on social to stay informed on new products or services

More than two-thirds of consumers now use social media to stay informed about new products and services. Our research found 45% of people also follow brands to see the enjoyable and entertaining content they post.

Social media is the new mall, and brands are no longer shying away from using social media as a selling platform. Once someone hits follow, it’s a clear signal they want to stay up to date on new products, services, exclusive deals and promotions. Embrace this by creating content that resonates with audiences, encourages interaction with your products or services and leads them to the checkout.

53% of consumers say their social media usage has been higher over the last two years than the previous two years

Social media is filling a seemingly endless need for content. We’re more online than ever, allowing brands to create a stronger marketing funnel that supports the full customer journey and builds trust.

With 78% of consumers—up to 88% for Gen Z’ers—agreeing a brand’s social media presence has a larger impact on whether or not they trust the brand, positive social media interactions are key to building your audience.

“As the most accessible touchpoint for consumers, social media has become the call center, suggestion box and customer service desk for brands. Give your team the resources to effectively care for your customer via social media.”

Azad Yakatally, Head of Social Media, Klaviyo

However, only 30% of marketers say their brand actively engages with customers on social media

The evidence is clear that social media customer engagement is a winning strategy for brands, but only a third are actively engaging and listening to customers. And 71% of business leaders agree most companies don’t have a strong social media strategy for customer service and care.

These stats are a strong indication of how most brands manage social media interactions. While customers increasingly rely on social media to find new products and follow brands, many brands still have work to do to increase customer engagement.

8 ways customers interact with brands on social in 2024

Social media gives consumers the opportunity to interact with brands anytime, anywhere. Here are the most popular ways customers engage with brands on social, and how they can inform your social media customer engagement strategy:

1. They Like posts

According to the Index, 79% of social media strategists regularly track metrics around engagement—the likes, shares and comments on a post. These engagements are a no-cost way for consumers to demonstrate interest in a product or service, but the data they provide is invaluable.

Tracking which posts generate the most ikes helps you understand what your fans are most interested in. For example, if posts about your corporate social responsibility program typically receive a higher Like count than posts about your product or service, you could use that information to create stronger, more socially accountable product messaging.

Use a social media management tool like Sprout to measure post performance across platforms to get a more comprehensive understanding of customer preferences. The beauty of these insights is that their applications extend well beyond social, informing email strategy, paid ad campaigns and more.

2. They follow brand accounts

Pressing the follow button is the first step to becoming active brand community members. Each of your followers exists in some phase of your marketing funnel, whether they’re considering a first-time purchase or are a loyal customer.

Many consumers follow brands specifically to learn about new products or services, while the Index found another 46% want to get access to exclusive deals or promotions. To get more followers on social media, brands must think about the types of content they publish.

Customers have a wide range of content they like to see:

• 42% want short-form videos (<15 seconds)
• 30% want static images
• 26% are looking for influencer content
• 20% want GIFs/memes, while only 10% are looking for text-only content

However, customers said there’s also content they don’t see enough of:

Incorporating these consumer demands into your social media efforts can improve engagement and grow your followers to get more eyes on your content. Creating content your audience loves gives your brand more opportunities to build trust and create a loyal following.

3. They make direct purchases

According to Statista, social commerce across all social platforms is on the rise. Whether people are looking at products on Facebook Shops or browsing on Instagram and TikTok, more customers are buying directly from a brand’s social channel.

A brand uploading shoppable posts to social media can tag products and create direct links to streamline the checkout process. This interaction on a brand’s channel can engage audiences, particularly younger generations who like purchasing products directly through social media.

4. They leave product or service reviews

Your review strategy can make or break your online reputation. The Index found some 32% of consumers leave product or service reviews as a way to interact with brands on social. Those reviews carry serious weight—85% of consumers report that customer reviews are influential when making purchase decisions.

A review response plan is an integral part of your brand management practices. Whether someone gives positive feedback or explains how you can improve, you need to engage. Acknowledgment goes a long way toward strengthening brand loyalty. A thoughtful response can turn a one-time buyer into a repeat customer.

Simplify your review management strategy by opting for a social solution that takes multiple platforms into account. Sprout Social’s review management tool unifies reviews from Facebook, Glassdoor, TripAdvisor and Google My Business into one view to simplify your response process.

5. They ask questions

Social media is a bridge between your brand and your customers. These platforms are the public face of your brand, so it’s no surprise customers increasingly use these channels to report issues and complaints. It’s how a brand responds to these reports that makes all the difference.

The Index found 63% of consumers agree their loyalty to a brand is significantly influenced by the quality of customer support they provide on social media, and leaders across customer service, marketing and communications are taking note. Response speed also impacts customer loyalty, as 76% of customers put equal value on brands that prioritize customer support and respond quickly to needs.

It’s not enough to resolve an issue quickly—brands must give quality customer care by interacting with every message on a personal level. Moving from platform to platform to monitor and address direct messages natively wastes valuable time that can impact customer satisfaction. Streamline your response management process by using a tool that consolidates your social inboxes in a centralized location.

MeUndies has set goals for faster response times on social media to ensure all messages are replied to within a 60-minute window. The company uses Sprout’s Smart Inbox to track and respond to Instagram direct messages, mentions and comments in one stream.

6. They tag brands

Interacting with tagged posts can help turn customers into brand advocates. First, it creates an opportunity to celebrate the customer and their experience with your business. Second, it builds valuable social proof that can convert potential customers who are on the fence about making a purchase.

Whenever a person takes time out of their day to praise your brand on their personal profiles, bank that for marketing use down the line. User-generated content can be repurposed for social posts, web copy, ad campaigns and more. With tools like Sprout, you can monitor mentions and tags to identify posts worth sharing now and later on.

Customers are also increasingly using social media to ask brands questions and gather information. Responding quickly with detailed answers can help create a community and win customers over.

7. They mention brands in posts (without tagging)

Scoring social mentions is a double-edged sword. Ideally, every mention online will be a positive one, but sometimes brands are tagged in a crisis or to simply grab attention. Participating in conversations in a personalized way builds trust with audiences and shows you’re actively engaging with everyone who tags your brand.

And, not every customer will tag a brand directly in conversation. They may simply mention a brand name or product on social media–making it tough to keep track of every conversation without the right tools.

Brands can use social listening tools to join these conversations–even when they’re not tagged. Nearly 43% of brands surveyed in the Index report plan to use social listening and monitoring to support more customer-centric service strategies. Social listening tools like sentiment analysis tap into social media posts and measure whether or not brand mentions from customers are positive, negative or neutral.

This data allows brands to capitalize on positive mentions and respond to any negative chatter before it impacts credibility.

8. They use brand hashtags

Hashtags mobilize and create communities around specific themes or ideas. Adopting trending hashtags is one way to go, but brands can also create buzz with their own hashtags and encourage followers to do the same in support of their campaigns and products.

Sprout’s hashtag tracking tools can find hashtags frequently mentioned alongside your brand in posts. It also tracks which hashtags get the most engagement so they can be incorporated into future social campaigns to increase post reach.

See how customer engagement is evolving on social

Customer expectations aren’t static. As long as social networks evolve their functionality, consumer habits will change alongside them. Download the Sprout Social Index Report™ 2023 to learn more about how social media interaction will impact your brand in 2024 and beyond.

The post 8 ways customers interact and engage with your brand on social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Addressing the needs and interests of multiple audiences calls for a commitment to data, collaboration and tailored messaging. Thankfully, each of these commitments supports the others. At least, that’s what Gettysburg College’s social team found after testing and learning.

Kailey White, assistant director of Social Media & Digital Strategy, and Staci Grimes, director of digital marketing are the driving force behind Gettysburg College’s social media strategy. Together, they’ve transformed digital spaces into online communities where key audience segments can deepen their engagement and advocacy with the college.

We spoke with Grimes and White to get the inside scoop on what it takes to develop a high-impact social media strategy for higher education institutions. Keep reading for their top tips, plus a behind-the-scenes look at their student intern program.

5 higher education social media tips from Gettysburg college

Marketing teams in universities and colleges manage various elements of their strategy, including department and program goals, audience needs and an overarching marketing plan. The following tips will help you balance these factors to create a cohesive, value-driven higher education social media strategy.

1. Create network-specific social media strategies

Gettysburg College’s largest audience is their current student population. It’s a key audience, but if they only created social content with traditional college students in mind, they’d miss the opportunity to engage other important groups, like parents and alumni.

“Understanding audiences and their preferences allows us to deliver more personalized experiences across channels,” says White. “For example, TikTok attracts a younger demographic, which requires a different content strategy than Facebook, where parents and families are our key audience.”

Sprout’s network-specific social media reporting options help White maintain an updated understanding of each profile’s unique audience. “Our strategy really acknowledges the different needs of our varying stakeholders, and we attribute that audience insight to Sprout.”

2. Connect marketing goals to university vision

If you want to create an effective higher education social media strategy, it’s not enough to seek engagement for engagement’s sake. Plans should align to your college’s goals for the future.

The Gettysburg College social team supports the institution’s strategic vision by enhancing its reputation and expanding its reach, while fostering an environment that strengthens recruitment and philanthropy.

“Our office uses an integrated marketing plan every year, and we map that directly to the College’s strategic direction,” explains Grimes. “We’ve identified the key metrics that allow us to understand whether or not our work is being impactful. That’s how we ensure that the work that we’re doing is advancing the vision for the institution.”

3. Share social media performance data proactively

Grimes and White show up to every planning meeting with relevant social insights, no matter who it’s with. This practice supports more collaborative work with several different organizations on campus, increasing the overall effectiveness of their strategy.

“We gather specific data so we can be as strategic as possible when consulting with different departments and programs,” says Grimes. “Our focus on performance and audience insights influence the cadence and delivery of messaging across the institution.”

White shares monthly reports with the Gettysburg content team so they can incorporate social insights into upcoming work. Grimes provides an analysis of social KPIs for reports that their Chief Communications & Marketing Officer, Jamie Yates, delivers to the school’s board of trustees several times a year to showcase the impact of their strategy. These reports may have different goals and audiences, but one source of truth informs them: Sprout Social.

“One of the things that I really appreciate about Sprout is the fact that all of our prominent brand accounts are attached to our Sprout dashboard,” shares Grimes. “It aggregates insights, allowing us to look at everything through the same lens.”

4. Work with campus partners

As the college’s social media presence grows and evolves, more programs are interested in getting involved. “We’ve definitely seen an influx of our campus partners joining social media spaces,” says White. “Our library, our dining services department, different academic programs—they’re all very involved, and they look to us to find out what they could be doing better.”

Grimes and White collaborate to support these requests by educating campus partners on how to navigate social media. They’ve created and shared presentations on representing the Gettysburg brand on social, launching a strategic social media presence and increasing student engagement.

These efforts create new opportunities to showcase the value of social media with strategic partners. As a result, the college continues to strengthen its online presence and foster a more connected campus community.

5. Use social listening to stay ahead of the conversation

According to Grimes, social listening is crucial for keeping the Gettysburg social media strategy audience-centric. “We use listening tools to evaluate the timing of different campaigns, assess the positive mentions of the college in digital spaces and measure our work against industry benchmarks.”

It also plays a key role in crisis management. When an issue—whether it be local, national or global—is unfolding, the Gettysburg team uses Listening to determine whether they should pause scheduled posts or develop messaging around the issue. The tool provides an overview of the conversation at large, along with valuable sentiment analysis data to provide a clearer understanding of audience opinions.

“Sometimes, an issue will feel very prominent to us because we’re in the comments and reading conversations. Then, we’ll look at Listening data and see that the conversation’s impact is pretty limited. It helps us understand from a really realistic perspective what truly is happening and whether or not we need to either take action or resume normal business.”

– Staci Grimes, Director of Digital Marketing, Gettysburg College 

How Gettysburg College manages their student intern program with Sprout Social

The tips outlined above will help refine your strategy, but there’s nothing to refine without content. At Gettysburg, students aren’t only featured in social media posts—they’re also involved in planning and producing them.

The Gettysburg College marketing office hires a dozen or so interns every academic year. These roles mimic the responsibilities of the college’s professional staff, including copywriting, video production, photography and graphic design.

This isn’t your average internship. Students receive exclusive training and networking opportunities with previous intern cohorts. They also get the opportunity to collaborate on a professional-grade content production effort.

“The students use their talents to support one high profile event at the college every year.” explains White. “For the past two years, Gettysburg College and community partners hosted Ken Burns for the Gettysburg Film Festival, and our office interns have been highly involved in executing the coverage strategies for those events.”

White creates each student’s individual social media report using Sprout Social’s Tagging feature, which allows users to label pieces of content for more tailored reporting options.

“We create a specific Tag for every student intern,” says White. “That way, we can filter our reports with their name Tag to create their unique report. We can even drill down into their specific speciality. For example, if their focus is photography, we can filter the report by their name along with a content type Tag.”

These reports do more than just highlight their achievements—they help them stand out in a competitive job market.  “The lead intern during the festival’s first year talked about the experience in a job interview, and the interviewer called our program director to share how impressed they were.” shares White. “She ended up landing the role, which was awesome to hear.”

The Gettysburg marketing internship program provides mutual benefits for both the social media team and the participating students. The students gain real-world work experience, while their contributions generate relevant, authentic content that drives higher engagement with key audiences.

Create a smarter higher education social media strategy with Sprout Social

When colleges and universities invest in their social media strategy, they do more than set up another communication channel. They foster a sense of community and build connections with students, alumni, fans and more.

Curious to see how other schools are using social media analytics tools to elevate their strategies? Find out how Texas A&M University earned 8.3 million content impressions in 6 months using Sprout.

The post Higher education social media strategy: How Gettysburg College makes the grade appeared first on Sprout Social.

Through that time, our north star has always been to help our customers not just manage but maximize the power of social. It’s the reason why we are constantly, thoughtfully investing in our platform—because our industry doesn’t move forward unless we’re equipping our users with the tools they need to do exceptional work.

Which is why I’m thrilled to share that Sprout has launched Breaking Ground: a new quarterly program to keep our customers up to date on everything you need to know about our latest product advancements, so that you can drive more business impact from social.

Here’s a glimpse at what we’re releasing this quarter.

Advancing AI to make space for human creativity and connections

Social media teams are at max capacity. Our recent Social Media Productivity Report found that almost half of social marketers feel they sometimes or rarely have enough time to get their work done, and even more (63%) agree that manual tasks prevent them from doing high impact work.

At Sprout, we embrace a human-centric philosophy to developing AI capabilities that empower the people behind your brand to work faster and smarter. Over the years, we have consistently invested in AI and machine learning at Sprout, but 2023 marked a significant leap forward with the introduction of numerous AI Assist capabilities.

Our latest AI and automation capabilities build on this momentum, helping you focus on what matters most: the creativity and strategic thinking no machine can emulate. Listening customers will be able to tap into Analyze by AI Assist and Summarize by AI Assist, new widgets that will help you distill content and surface important conversation trends faster. For customer care teams, updates including AI conversation summaries, Response Recommended and Message Intent will make it easier for agents to get an at-a-glance view of incoming messages, ensuring the most urgent ones get routed and responded to promptly.

AI has been vital in helping Thailand-based Minor Hotels expand its online presence to match its growing physical footprint. Before using Sprout, their social team had minimal insight into how their efforts were performing—whether their campaigns were resonating or bringing in new customers. In a fiercely competitive travel and tourism industry, they needed a way to grab analytics more frequently and uncover market trends.

Enter Sprout. With AI Assist and Listening, Minor Hotels increased the frequency of their reporting twofold and saved over 192 hours annually on pulling reports. Today, our AI capabilities allow the Minor Hotels team to proactively monitor performance, adapt their social content and inform business strategy.

On the content front, we’ve also introduced Generate by AI Assist. This innovation automatically produces alt-text for social post images, making it easier to build a more accessible social presence.

“Working to make my social content accessible to all has been a top priority of mine for years, so Sprout’s new AI-generated alt text feature has been a major win. The detail picked up in the description is impressive and much more accurate than I’ve experienced with other AI tools. This saves me time and mental focus on each post, which I can put back into the content,” said Jessie Brown, Social Media Specialist at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Telling a richer story about how social impacts the business

Connecting your social strategy to business-wide sales and revenue goals remains one of marketers’ most elusive challenges—especially for those lacking the right tools. Almost twice as many social media marketers who use a dedicated social media management platform say their brand’s social efforts contribute significantly to revenue compared to those without, according to the Social Media Productivity Report.

Which is why we’re excited to roll out new capabilities like My Reports, a new Premium Analytics reporting interface that lets users dig even deeper into their data. Users can customize their reports using a breadth of data points—including post-level performance, customer care and even Employee Advocacy metrics—to tell a more detailed story about social’s impact on the business.

For iHeartRadio Canada, which manages a portfolio of over 300 social accounts, Sprout has been essential in not just scaling but proving the power of their content strategy. As Clayton Taylor, National Content Manager – Digital Radio, explained, “In terms of ROI, Sprout helps us gain recognition with our direct audience while also demonstrating value to our branded partners and sponsors. We can also show our music label partners why it makes sense for them and their artists to work with iHeartRadio Canada.”

Drawing a clear line from influencers to revenue

How do you typically measure the impact of your influencer marketing efforts—Post views? Impressions? Comments?

These are each reliable ways to quantify the power of influencers, but the truth is this: Influencer marketing has a greater impact on conversion and sales than we give it credit for. Almost half of all consumers (49%) make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts, according to The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report.

With Tagger, Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform, we’re making it easier to track how influencer partnerships add to your bottom line. Instagram Tap Tag mentions will allow influencers you partner with to organically integrate product tags directly into their posts. On the reporting side, users can track engagement, reach, and conversions—helping you develop long-term relationships with the influencers driving both awareness and sales for your business.

Consider the role influencers played in Lovesac’s 25th anniversary campaign, “Rewriting the Rules of Comfort.” With help from their agency KWT Global, they used Sprout Social Influencer Marketing to recruit long-time brand fans and new influencers (including celebrities like Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, Brandy and Travis Barker) to show how they rewrite their own rules of comfort at home with Lovesac styles.

As Erin Ally, Vice President of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at KWT Global explained, “We wanted to be able to find influencers proactively, report effectively and easily on influencer successes to stakeholders, and manage it all through one platform that is intuitive and anyone on our team could learn to use…After evaluating various solutions, choosing Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform was a no-brainer for us.”

With our platform, Ally’s team can tell a stronger story about the success of campaigns like Lovesac’s—which was particularly impressive. The months-long effort generated $8.48M in earned media value, 57 million impressions and a 14.3% increase in Lovesac Q3 sales year over year.

Helping brands meet their audience in more places

Today’s social media ecosystem is made up of a growing list of networks, each with unique algorithms, content formats and audiences. Consumers are using a mix of them all to consume content and connect with their communities. In fact, 38% of consumers plan to use more networks this year compared to 2023, according to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

One of the latest networks captivating consumers and brands alike? Threads.

Marketers across industries have experimented with the community-centric platform since it launched in July 2023—but now they can elevate their approach with Threads scheduling, engagement and reporting capabilities in Sprout. In less than a year, Boston-based public media producer GBH has started posting to Threads across 15 production units—growing an audience of nearly 180,000 followers.

“Now that Threads publishing and scheduling has been added to Sprout, GBH’s social media managers—who are responsible for growing and engaging audiences for their specific productions or units—can more easily and efficiently leverage the platform to build and deepen connections with our communities,” said Zack Waldman, GBH Social Media Strategist.

Ready to break barriers?

Our vision at Sprout is to be the social platform powering the world’s most innovative brands. But we only get there by building software that exceeds our customers’ needs both now and in the future. We can’t wait to see the ground-breaking work marketers and customer care professionals accomplish with some of these latest releases.

But again, these are just a few highlights of the product updates we have and will be unveiling this quarter. Learn more about these releases and our Breaking Ground Q2 2024 launch event.

The post Breaking Ground: The latest Sprout updates you need to know about appeared first on Sprout Social.

As these creators migrated to social media, influencer marketing became ubiquitous and prolific (and sometimes notorious). The influencer economy grew, creating more opportunities for creators and brands alike. But some wonder if influencer marketing’s potential has already reached its peak, and if trends like “deinfluencing” could topple it.

Taylor Lorenz, author and tech journalist at The Washington Post, strongly disagrees. As Lorenz said at Sprout’s Under the Brand-fluence digital event, “This just isn’t true. None of the data supports that. That’s a media narrative we hear every few years like clockwork. But over the past two decades it’s just continued to grow. Even deinfluencers influence—they are influencing someone to live a certain lifestyle.”

Data from Sprout’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report supports this. Almost half of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts, and 86% make purchases at least once a year.

While influencers will continue to be a cultural mainstay, how they build communities and forge brand partnerships will evolve. What can the past and present reveal about the future of influencer marketing? These takeaways from Lorenz’s event session explore what led to the influencer boom, why influencers received so much backlash in the early days and future trends that will inform the landscape.

What the past reveals about the future of influencer marketing

The emergence of blogging software provided a platform for people and ideas left behind by traditional media. As Lorenz explains, “Blogs allowed people to self-publish their own content. For example, women were writing super candidly about their daily lives. These were moms struggling with breastfeeding or postpartum depression who went on to have thousands and millions of subscribers or followers. They were talking about topics excluded from women’s media at the time, and redefining motherhood. Really, women, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people built this industry.”

Despite their obvious influence and community-building expertise, these early influencers were harassed constantly, discredited for not having “real” jobs and dismissed as narcissists who took too many selfies (“Selfie even became the word of the year in 2013,” Lorenz points out).

“So many early people on these platforms were outcasts. They didn’t have a lot of social capital. They didn’t have a voice in traditional media. They built these revenue models that so many people have come to profit off of. Now influencer marketing has been mainstreamed, but those people have been pushed out. They faced too much online hate,” says Lorenz.

The state of influencer marketing today

Many of the negative stereotypes about influencers persisted and intensified through the 2010s. The pandemic era was a major turning point for influencer acceptance (though, creator harassment will never disappear). Everyone went online, causing many people to realize for the first time that influencers alchemize culture.

“In the early days of the pandemic, a lot of people who dismissed online marketing realized social media is the primary space where culture is born today. The digital world became everyone’s default reality, which accelerated trends we’ve been seeing for many years,” Lorenz points out.

As the lines between social and traditional marketing continue to blur, old stereotypes are falling away and influencers are gaining credibility. More than half of Gen Z report they would become influencers if given the opportunity. Another half of all consumers trust influencers just as much as they did six months ago, while close to 30% trust them more, according to the Influencer Marketing Report.

Now, influencers are being taken seriously and clinching more brand deals than ever—increasing the volume of influencer-driven content on social. But this is having unexpected consequences. Influencer content saturation led to last year’s deinfluencing trend, and the algorithms are making widespread discoverability harder to come by.

What it means to be an influencer is changing, but, in many ways, Lorenz argues, influencers are still doing what they do best: building intensely loyal fandoms.

3 cultural shifts driving the future of influencer marketing

In the wake of platform shakeups, economic confusion and emerging technology, some question the long-term impact and resonance of influencers. If they still exist, will consumers even care? How can they continue to build revenue streams on distribution channels? Will AI influencers replace them?

“Even with social network instability, there’s no end in sight for the influencer industry,” predicts Lorenz. She looks at people’s behavior instead of buzzy headlines: “We are only getting more and more online.”

As we look to the future, she sees early signs that these questions are being answered.

Influencers will be everywhere (but lose some mainstream influence)

As more people become influencers, the market will become flooded with creators brands can partner with. In some ways, that means influencers won’t be as likely to go “viral” (in the traditional sense) or have widespread influence, but they will have even more clout in specific pockets of the internet.

People want more autonomy over their online experience, and desire to go beyond the bounds of algorithms. “Secondary networks like Substack are fostering more niche communities,” Lorenz gives as an example. Channels like Substack, Discord, Patreon and Twitch will continue to offer more opportunities for direct connection, and empower creators with revenue generation models that don’t rely on brands (Substack’s tagline is “a new economic engine for culture”).

This suggests people’s loyalty to specific influencers will intensify. That’s why it’s critical to find the right influencers—ones who actually love your products and who want to develop authentic, long-term relationships with your brand. These partnerships will fuel a feedback loop that leads to deeper understanding of your audience and internet culture, and facilitates product development and refinement.

Influencers will seek pay transparency

With influencer trust on the rise and consumer attitudes shifting, brands feel even more confident betting on influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social media strategy, with 79% describing influencer content as necessary for their customers’ experiences.

But as brands recognize the role influencers play in modern marketing, influencers are (rightfully) demanding fair and equitable compensation. The online conversation about pay transparency was fueled by the COVID era, when influencer labor was largely legitimized. The hope is that brands will fill gaps in compensation for women, BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ influencers that have existed for the past two decades.

Lorenz explains it like this, “There will probably never be standardized rates for the industry. That’s like asking for all ads to cost the same. But pay transparency should be the norm. Remember that any piece of communication you share (contracts, proposals, etc.) can end up going viral on social media. Expect your interactions to be screenshotted out of context and shared online.”

If you wouldn’t be proud if those communications were seen, you should rethink your payment structures.

AI will refine influencer content creation

While data from Sprout’s Influencer Marketing Report points to 37% of all consumers being more interested in brands that work with AI influencers, Lorenz speculates this is a passing fad. She explains, “We already have faceless influencers. They’ve been around for a long time. What people want online is reliability—AI influencers don’t engender trust. Humans do.”

Yet, AI does offer something that will be invaluable to influencers: It makes extremely high quality content easier to produce. Tools like Jasper and Writer make it easier to write and edit posts and captions, while Wondershare Filmora and Descript speed up video editing. “What AI does very effectively is lower the barrier to content creation so influencers can create better content with less effort. The tools are getting more accessible every year. More and more high quality content is going to continue to shift the landscape because of that,” says Lorenz.

Influencers will continue to define the cultural zeitgeist

The trajectory of online influencer marketing underscores its enduring relevance and endless evolution. From its blogging beginnings to the present proliferation of influencers across social platforms, the industry has not only persisted but thrived.

Even while facing challenges like backlash and saturation, influencers continue to wield significant power, particularly in niche communities. Looking forward, increased influencer diversity, pay transparency and AI-assisted content creation promise to shape the future landscape—ensuring that influencer marketing remains a powerful force in the digital realm and opens up limitless opportunity for brands.

Want to hear more from Lorenz about influencers’ role in internet culture? Watch her Under the Brand-fluence session on-demand.

And read Lorenz’s book, Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. You can also follow her on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Substack.

The post The past, present and future of influencer marketing, according to Taylor Lorenz appeared first on Sprout Social.

You know raw social analytics 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.

How did you do this? Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time.

To help you get to this ideal scenario, 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.

The Importance of a strategic social media analytics dashboard

The right social media dashboard makes all the difference for brands that rely on their online presence. Dashboards provide a summary of social interactions, which help teams respond and engage with trends and customer needs proactively. Here are four benefits you’ll enjoy from a strategic social media analytics dashboard.

1. Easier decision-making with real-time data

A social media dashboard integrates real-time data across social platforms, which helps you to make informed decisions quickly. This immediacy helps you adapt your strategies in response to live customer feedback and market shifts.

2. Streamlined reporting and insights

Dashboards condense complex datasets into actionable insights and simplify reporting. They also make it easier to strategize around data and communicate findings to ensure stakeholders understand the impact of social media efforts.

3. Competitive edge through in-depth analytics

With features like competitive analysis and sentiment tracking, dashboards provide a deeper insight into your performance and that of your competitors. This helps you maintain a competitive edge and fine-tune social media marketing strategies.

4. Optimized ROI

Dashboards highlight the most successful campaigns and tactics, helping businesses allocate resources to optimize marketing spend and improve your ROI.

What insights should your social media dashboard software include?

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 each dashboard’s ingredients might differ, 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 six 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)
• How do we compare to competitors? (Example: competitive analysis and hashtag monitoring)

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 deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.

Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization

Here are six types of social media dashboard templates designed to breakdown sophisticated reporting and help refine your data-driven strategy.

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 dashboard with a birds’ eye view helps you identify performance trends in your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate your successes and iterate on your least popular content.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab, you’ll 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 stories 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 you tap into global social conversations 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.

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’ll see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.

• Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You’ll 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

Social competitive analysis dashboard

Tracking your competition on social media gives you essential insights to make strategic decisions. Keeping an eye on competitors helps you understand how well you do in comparison and helps you to set benchmarks. A social competitive analysis dashboard combines market share, competitor activity and audience engagement to help you gain a competitive edge.

• Goal: Gauge competitive position and strategy effectiveness
• Metrics: Market share, competitor post frequency, engagement rates and sentiment analysis
• Audience: Strategic planners and marketing executives
• Channels: Multiple platforms for comparative analysis
• Cadence: Monthly and quarterly updates

With Sprout’s competitive analysis and social listening tool, you’ll see how well your competitors do on social media. You can compare how often they post, how many people interact with their posts and how many followers they gain.

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 an influx of 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 a 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

Business intelligence dashboard

A Business Intelligence Dashboard helps to improve your social media marketing strategy by viewing consumer interactions across multiple channels. This dashboard aggregates data and offers in-depth analytics to help you understand how your social media campaigns are performing in relation to business-wide objectives and social media KPIs.

The dashboard combines different data sources, like social media stats and CRM info, to thoroughly examine customer behaviors and preferences. This helps you tweak your strategies to reach the right people with the right messages at the right times. It also helps you optimize your marketing spend by showing which campaigns and channels drive the highest ROI.

The business intelligence dashboard’s key features include tracking user engagement, conversion rates and customer journey patterns from initial contact through conversion. This level of detail provides you with the data to craft more personalized and effective marketing strategies.

• 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.

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 the 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: Leadership and teams across marketing, including social media
• Channels: Cross-channel
• Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Use Sprout’s My Reports feature to create custom reports to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.

How to create a social media dashboard

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

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. Revisit the six social media dashboard types mentioned above for inspiration. 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.

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 simplify your workflow, use a social media analytics tool like Sprout to automate the data collection process and easily generate dashboards that are ready to share.

4. Share with stakeholders

Transform 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 sharing them with stakeholders often.

Streamline your analytics with Sprout’s social media dashboard

Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. You’re able to articulate your social ROI to stakeholders across the org by breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings.

Start your free trial to access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates.

The post 6 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands appeared first on Sprout Social.

Especially as the app booms as a brand discovery and shopping channel. From organic and paid promotions to influencers and Shop, tracking TikTok analytics is a must-do for marketers.

The problem? Content moves fast on TikTok and the algorithm demands a high volume of videos.

But that’s all the more reason to keep a better pulse on your performance!

By knowing what’s working and what’s not, you can optimize your videos and strategy with confidence. Below we break down which TikTok metrics to prioritize and how to track them.

What are TikTok metrics?

TikTok metrics are data points that measure your videos’ performance and audience engagement. Through tracking metrics, you can uncover new opportunities to earn more views, fine-tune your TikTok marketing strategy and reach your target audience more effectively.

Like most social media metrics, you can track account-level and video-level analytics.

Here’s a snapshot of a few key TikTok metrics you can see natively in the app:

Growing and going viral on TikTok doesn’t happen totally by accident. Tracking performance goes hand in hand with higher engagement and understanding what viewers want from you.

What are the most valuable TikTok metrics for TikTok marketing?

Good question!

The performance insights provided by TikTok’s native analytics are a valuable source of information. Having a list of priority TikTok metrics can keep you from getting too into the weeds with your analytics.

Defining the best metrics to track will vary based on your goals. That said, below are a handful of the most important TikTok metrics to track regardless of your audience or industry. We’ll also highlight what these metrics look like when tracked using Sprout Social.

• Engagement rate. This video metric measures the ratio of views to interactions (likes, comments, replies, shares and saves). Increasing TikTok engagement goes hand-in-hand with greater reach and visibility within the app’s algorithm.

• Views. This metric measures the amount of times a video was watched. Keep in mind that TikTok views are counted as soon as a video starts or is automatically looped. Understanding which videos are earning the most views can highlight trending topics and future opportunities to create high-ranking content. Increasing your engagement rate and getting more views on TikTok can create a snowball effect of greater reach.
• Followers growth. This account-level metric measures the rate at which your audience is growing based on the number of followers you’ve gained. While followers aren’t the most important TikTok metric on their own, increasing TikTok followers organically is a good sign. On the flip side, stagnant growth can be a signal to adjust your content strategy.

• Click-through rate. This TikTok ad metric reflects how many people are tapping through and engaging with your ads versus total viewer impressions. Low click-through rates can be a sign of poor campaign targeting or ad creatives. On the flip side, strong click-through rates mean your ads are resonating with your target audience.
• Shares. This metric tracks how often people repost your content or share videos independently with other users. Shares are a valuable TikTok metric for B2C brands by highlighting products featured in videos that are being bookmarked and discussed among viewers.
• Audience demographics. This is a collection of TikTok metrics that covers the demographics (including the age, location and gender) of your viewership. Your social media demographics should reflect your target audience.
• Trending hashtags. This metric measures how often hashtags are used on TikTok. For example, you can see which hashtags result in the most reach and engagement for your individual videos. You can also find trending hashtags in TikTok’s Creative Center to understand which topics are trending across the app.

How to find TikTok metrics in the TikTok app

You can use TikTok analytics to highlight a wide variety of account-level and video-level metrics.

Next, we’ll cover in-depth what you can measure and where in the app to find these numbers.

TikTok Key metrics

Key metrics provide a big-picture overview of your account and recent content’s performance.

Here’s how to access them within your TikTok profile:

• From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
• Then, tap “View all” to see your account-level analytics in more detail (“Overview”).
• In the “Overview” tab, you’ll see your TikTok Key metrics broken down by date range. You can view these metrics in 7-day, 28-day or 60-day increments (or set a custom timeframe).

TikTok metrics covered in this section of your analytics include:

• Post views. This is how many times your posts were viewed.
• Likes. This is the number of likes on your profile.
• Comments. This is the number of comments your posts received.
• Total views. This is the number of people who viewed your posts.
• Shares. The number of times your posts were shared.

TikTok Content metrics

TikTok content metrics provide a video-level overview of your content’s reach and performance.
Here’s how to access them within your TikTok profile:

• From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
• Then, tap “View all.”
• Select the “Content” tab (to the right of “Overview”).
• You’ll see a list of videos titled “Trending posts.” According to TikTok: “These are the top 9 posts with the fastest growth within the last 7 days.”
• Select an individual video.

Under the “Video analysis” summary, you’ll see icons reflecting the following TikTok metrics for an individual video: likes, saves, comments, shares and saves.

You can drill down even further for individual videos by selecting the “Overview” tab.

Here’s a snapshot of the TikTok content metrics you can find in this dashboard:

• Total play time. The cumulative amount of time viewers spent watching your video.
• Average watch time. The average time people spent watching your video.
• Watched full video %: The percentage of people who finished your entire video.
• New followers. This is the number of viewers who started following you after interacting with your video.
• Video views. This is the number of views your video earned. This is measured hourly for the first 48 hours up until 7 days after a video is posted.
• Retention rate. This is the percentage of your viewers who are still watching your video at a particular time (measured in a range of seconds).
• Traffic sources: This is where people find your video, including sources such as TikTok search or the “For You” page.

By selecting the “Viewers” tab, you can dive into viewer-level analytics for a video.

• Total viewers. This is the total number of unique viewers for a video. This TikTok metric was formerly known as “Reached audience.”
• Viewer types (new vs returning viewers, non-followers vs. followers). This breaks down your audience into segments based on past engagement.
• Gender. This is the defined gender breakdown of a video’s viewers.
• Age. This is the defined age breakdown of a video’s viewers.
• Location. This is the defined geographic location breakdown of a video’s viewers.

Finally, you can find even more data under the “Engagement” tab:

• Top words used in comments. This measures most frequently words and phrases that appear in your TikTok comments.
• Likes. This measures the percentage of people who liked your videos at a particular point (measured in seconds) within a video.

TikTok Follower metrics

TikTok Follower metrics provide an overview of your account and audience growth over time.

Here’s how to access them within your TikTok account:

• From your profile, tap the ☰ menu. Select “Creator tools.”
• Then, tap “View all.”
• Select the “Followers” tab (to the right of “Content”).

Here’s a snapshot of what you can see within your TikTok follower metrics. Keep in mind that you need at least 100 followers to have full access to this data:

• Total followers. This is the total number of people following your account for a specified period.
• Net followers. This shows the net number of followers gained in a selected date range and comparison with the previous period.
• Follower insights. This is a demographic breakdown of your followers.
• Most active times. This is the average time your followers are active on TikTok broken down by hours and days.

How to use TikTok metrics to achieve your goals on TikTok

All of the data above can be eye-opening, especially when it comes to your audience and top-performing content.

But how do you turn your TikTok metrics into action?

To wrap things up, here are three ways to translate your data into actual business impact.

1. Uncover top-performing video formats

As noted earlier, content moves fast on TikTok.

Marketers have to experiment to figure out what works and what doesn’t. This means publishing videos of varying lengths and formats with different creative edits. For example, do your viewers engage with unpolished and off-the-cuff content? Do they prefer shorter-form or longer videos?

Answering these questions and beyond starts by looking at your TikTok metrics. Rather than frantically scrambling for video ideas, you can use your numbers to guide you toward video formats that resonate with your audience.

You can make your metrics part of a TikTok audit to assess your overall content strategy. Chances are you’ll find outliers and common trends between videos that earn the highest engagement and watch times. TikTok’s trending content tab makes it especially easy to find these videos in a matter of seconds. You can use these insights to repeat successful formats again and again.

2. Find a posting frequency that maximizes reach and engagement

Compared to other platforms, TikTok’s content demands can feel aggressive and daunting.

However, businesses and brands don’t necessarily need to overwhelm themselves to find an “optimal” publishing frequency on TikTok.

In fact, your native TikTok metrics are the best indicators for the best times to post on TikTok and how many videos per week earn the most engagement based on your individual audience.

Given how stretched marketing teams are right now, you have to allocate your time and resources carefully. Rather than meet some arbitrary daily posting requirement, consider that you can earn as much (if not more) engagement by cutting your posting frequency in half. You’ll never know until you look at your numbers.

3. Clarify and align your brand’s TikTok goals

Some brands are active on TikTok “just because.”

Of course, adopting a social platform for the sake of it is a recipe for off-course content and poor performance.

Consider how you can align your social media goals with your TikTok metrics and presence. For example, are you purely building brand awareness? Driving conversions and traffic?

Your goals will ultimately determine which metrics you benchmark and measure over time. Not to mention how you approach your content and engagement strategy. This again highlights why it’s important to have your priority TikTok metrics available at a glance to make decisions holistically.

Have you dug into your TikTok metrics yet?

Tracking TikTok metrics is still unexplored territory for many businesses and brands.

But there’s so much you can learn from your data if you take the time to dig into it. From driving leads to building awareness, a pulse on your numbers can help you move the needle ASAP.

If you haven’t already, check out how Sprout Social’s TikTok integration helps brands manage their TikTok analytics and content from end to end.

The post What TikTok metrics you need to track for TikTok marketing in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

That is the only certainty in life. It’s interesting how many said social media was a disruptive force to big, traditional broadcast media. That it would replace it— only to one day become just like it.

Wait, what?

As Avi Gandhi recently hypothesized on LinkedIn:

“In the early days of the Creator Economy, we used social platforms to connect socially. The dichotomy between our friends’ posts and content creators’ posts was blurry, and we felt like Creators were our friends too.

The improvement of production quality and rise of all manner of monetization tool have caused that blurry line to sharpen. Creator content keeps getting better, and is more obviously economically-driven, such that Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are now more media networks than social networks.

Today, we as users are less concerned about keeping up with friends and family on social media, and are instead more interested in being entertained or educated—the same way we were when we were reliant on television to pass the time.”

Knowing where we might be headed, what should senior marketing execs do as a result of all of these changes? Should you:

A.  Put all your emphasis into treating social as a content channel like old media?
B.  Continue posting content and copy similar to how social has always been, leading with brand content?
C.  Pause and learn about the Conjoint Effect in order to map a new strategy altogether?

But what is the Conjoint Effect and why am I hearing about this for the first time? And why should all marketers understand it and its impact on social media strategies right now?

Because it will help you move beyond being an imitator. And become an innovator.

What is the Conjoint Effect?

The Conjoint Effect is a theory that people, brands, celebrities and content creators are all acting like each other and stealing each other’s tricks (and in many cases, sadly, their content).

But why is this important for marketers to understand?

Mental availability drives fame for a brand. And yet, too many are just copying what everyone else is doing. This worked for a long time—until now. Let’s rewind.

For much of the golden era of social media (2007-2015), social media was about connection, interaction and engagement along a social graph. We got updates from people mainly in the form of text status updates and some photos. We knew these people. As a result, we trusted them. This was the early part of the influencer and creator economy. One where connections were highly valuable.

But then the “For You” feed took over and has led us where we have begun to trust complete strangers on the web, as long as those strangers have credibility and clout. The Conjoint Effect is an overthrow of past ways social has worked. One where it’s more aligned to an interest graph, focused on interests and ideas. This puts pressure on brands to start making content that rises above the signal to noise ratio. A memorable “meal” over junk food so to speak. As a result of this, brands need to make the following pivot:

• Past: Brands are people, and should behave like them on social media. Sounding human, being authentic, being relatable.
• Future: Brands aren’t people, and should behave where they provide value on social media. Even if this value comes in the form of entertainment or humor.

As more of the social web moves in this direction, what should you do moving forward as we cross the chasm?

3 ways to upgrade your social media strategy around the Conjoint Effect

If the “For You” feed becomes the norm on every platform and we see less content from people we’re connected to and more from new creators, influencers and brands we’re not following, what is the best way to adjust to this new world? Let’s start with…

1. A listening strategy to help identify content trends for lookalike audiences and similar brands to yours

The best way to figure out what you want to be at the intersection of the Conjoint Effect is to look and see what other creators are making for audiences similar to yours. This is NOT to copy what they are doing, but rather to figure out what you should be doing that grabs attention. Remember, audiences have many choices now. Why will they pick you? Gather the information. From here…

2. Identifying trends to leapfrog into unique content creation

Most companies start and stop with number one. They find the trends based on what others are doing, mimic it, remix it a bit and serve it up. Here’s where you need to move beyond them. Remember, you need to drive mental availability. You can’t do that when you sound, look and dress like everyone else. One thing to do when pulling social listening report is to find the “hidden nuggets” of things that aren’t trends with your audience but could be. This will give you an advantage in terms of original ideas. Good examples of brands going beyond what others are doing include Marc Jacobs, Duolingo, Airbnb and Mailchimp to name a few. Ultimately from here you get into…

3. Creating a flywheel effect that helps you get into a habit of creation

You find your groove. You go back to step one, but to gather data to help you differentiate. Yes, you may start making things with competitor lookalike audiences in mind, but you ultimately move beyond that. You become the brand everyone wants to imitate. You become a brand everyone references in “best practices” presentations. A few ways to do this beyond groundbreaking social content? Following a consistent tone, style, visual identity, voice and branding in your posts that provides value over solely promotion of your products and services.

And once you do this, you reach a nirvana state. Like the band, everyone talks about you. You sprout a whole new way that people look at how content is made for social media. You become the innovator, and everyone else becomes your imitator. You end up on many FYPs without ever amassing many friends or followers.

You become “Must See Social.”

Looking for examples of brands cutting through the noise on social? Check out our Post Performance Report series. 

The post The Conjoint Effect: From friends to “for you,” how creator-led content is changing social media appeared first on Sprout Social.