I’m just gonna say it: If we didn’t crave the chaos, we wouldn’t have chosen marketing. We would’ve done Mom and Dad proud with a shiny degree in accounting or economics. But no — many will say the wild ride chose us, and here we are, turning madness into mastery.
Yep. Marketing is a cacophony of creative ideas and frenzied communications. Here at Brafton, we’re all about embracing the storm and making it work for us. But we couldn’t do it without some smart tools to tone it down here and there. One of these tools is Sprout Social, helping us transform calamity into calm. Here’s how it works:
What Is Sprout Social?
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that supports collaboration, helps you reach your customers across social media channels and accelerates your business impact. Facebook, Insta, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and more are compatible with Sprout Social integration, allowing you to compile data, analyze and publish posts in a single space. Let’s break it down:
- Publishing and scheduling: Sprout’s Compose tool allows you to plan and publish your social media marketing content in advance — and even share it on multiple networks simultaneously. You can store and edit images, schedule them on the platform’s social calendar and send them at optimal timings for your targeted audiences.
- Reporting and measurement: If you want to tap into audience growth, demographics, engagement and impressions to optimize your campaigns, Sprout Social’s got you covered. Measure competitor data, trends and paid vs. unpaid advertising impact to boost campaigns and take a structured approach to growth.
- Social listening: Sprout Social’s social listening tool gathers and evaluates conversations overheard in the marketplace. Tune into discussions related to your brand to discover what’s forming your public perception and accrue actionable insights.
- Social engagement: Receive all of your social messages into one smart inbox stream to filter and monitor messages, and visualize engagement compared with previous weeks and months.
Whether you want to measure your social media marketing KPIs accurately or automate workflows, Sprout Social will help you filter through the noise faster and proactively manage your social media empire in one intuitive platform.
Steps To Get Started With Sprout Social
Besides Sprout Social users seeing a 233% return on investment over three years, according to a Forrester report, putting the show on the road with Sprout Social is easy. So let’s run through how to use Sprout Social and make the most of its features:
How To Get Moving
In a nutshell, starting with Sprout Social is a pretty run-of-the-mill drill. You’ll need to get appropriate permissions from the account owner (if that’s not you) to set up features. Select your pricing — starting at $199/month for a standard account — and choose your billing settings. Nothing too painful.
Next up, the fun stuff. Connect your social accounts to the platform and add team members to collaborate with. You can also download the Chrome extension at this point to quickly share content to Sprout, and get the mobile app if you need to work on the go.
How To Publish and Schedule Posts
Sprout has a Compose feature that lets you plan and publish content to multiple social media accounts at once. Optimal send times hint at when it’s ideal to post. Message approval workflows keep your brand voice on point — and they streamline the authorization process.
Plan your social calendar by scheduling posts in advance, visualize your content plan and identify content gaps with the Publishing Calendar.
How To Use the Tagging Feature
In Compose, you can use Tags to categorize your content according to your strategic objectives or workflows. Apply Tags to your inbox messages, allowing you to filter them based on topic or urgency, boosting engagement rates and responsiveness.
Set up comment tagging to gauge activity in your posts, checking high-performing posts and tag efficiency. This also proves a helpful tool when responding quickly to customer inquiries and giveaways.
How To Use the Listening Tool
Through the Listening tool, track sentiments as they relate to your brand, uncover high-impact conversions and understand what drives brand perception through your audience’s lens.
Create searches for topics spread through the web and tap into AI-assist generated keyword suggestions with the Query Builder, where you can access insights without manual setup or ongoing support.
How To Engage Your Audience With the Inbox Tool
Smart inboxes organize all your messages into one stream for easier monitoring and faster response times. In fact, Sprout Social reduced response times from 48 hours to 10 minutes, according to the abovementioned Forrester study.
Set rules to automate message routing and categorize messages based on keywords, number of followers, VIP status, topic, language used and more. Manage your reviews across Google Play Store, Yelp and Tripadvisor to quickly identify and respond to emerging issues. Sprout also provides reports for message volume, response times and when you’re likely to see the highest engagement come in.
How To Access Analytics and Reporting
Want to see your competitors’ top posts and how their audience is responding to them? How about tracking your performance within the competitive landscape? Aggregated metrics help you evaluate your social strategy by comparing how posts perform across different social networks. Tag Performance Reports and Post Performance Reports let you track and achieve social media goals in Sprout.
The program also shows an overview of your reviews, breaking down the average ratings and reply statistics. Opt for the paid add-on Premium Analytics feature to see more granular data with custom metrics and filtering to help hone your social strategy even further.
Alternative Tools for Social Media Management
While we love Sprout Social, it doesn’t have to be the be-all-and-end-all of your social network success. There are plenty of other lifesavers out there that work for different audiences.
So if you’re keeping your options open, here are some other great marketing tools to pare Sprout up against:
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a great Sprout Social alternative if you’re interested in custom analytics and deeper insights. You can create and schedule posts across multiple platforms, only you’ll get more data-driven recommendations to hit peak engagement and optimize your performance.
The customizable dashboard provides social listening features across multiple accounts and you can add permissions and roles to establish social media content workflows — albeit basic ones. There are adaptation limitations across platforms and support isn’t as responsive as on Sprout Social. Zoho offers a free version and strata of five paid versions starting at $15/month.
Hootsuite
Like Sprout, Hootsuite provides a comprehensive view of your social media presence across multiple accounts. While the platform is said to be more “clumsy” than Sprout, you can plan and schedule posts according to optimal timing, access competitor reports and mention tracking, as well as analytics to boost post performance.
As a Sprout Social alternative, Hootsuite measures up pretty well, offering more features in its most affordable plan. Starting at $99/month after a free trial, this is a more economical option that could work well for mid-sized teams.
Planable
Planable also offers great collaboration and social media management features, such as commenting, real-time discussions and multi-level workflows. Clients can check in with — and approve or edit — posts, blog articles and newsletters.
Plans are free for under 50 posts and you can add workspaces at $33/month per workspace thereafter. Planable offers better content calendar features, such as color coding posts or filtering by author or topic, although monitoring and social listening aren’t included on the platform.
Plant the Seeds of Effective Social Media Management
If your social media is turning to social mania (go you!), it might be time to get started with helpful tools to keep on top. Social networks are vital ways to represent our brand and ramp engagement with our audiences.
Sprout Social is an intuitive marketing tool to soothe the inbox and content chaos social media generates so well — but there are other simpler and more affordable options on the market. Start by assessing where you need support, and take a look at which tools could act as a sidekick for your social media efforts so you can focus on the fun stuff.