Ricemedia are excited to announce that we have just become one of just 67 agencies worldwide to receive a Silver Agency Partnership status with Sprout Social (jazz hands!). Becoming a founding member of a partner programme will grant us even more support from the team at Sprout which we can later pass on to our clients.
Having this honoured status means that we were granted early access to all of the brilliant new features on the platform and ultimately, it enables us to flaunt our shiny new Sprout badge on our website.
Here at Ricemedia, we thrive on using Sprout Social purely for the fact it makes everyone’s working lives that tiny bit easier. Aside from it’s well-organised dashboard and easy navigation, the best part is that it enables the user to see all of the live feeds from each of their social media accounts, therefore putting you in a fantastic position to boost social reach and brand awareness when it comes to client bases.
How does Sprout Social work?
Well, I’m glad you asked. Founded in 2010, this versatile system helps brands communicate with customers and clients by integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Google + and Google Analytics, alongside many other significant platforms. Sprout Social is packed with handy features to allow its users to create content that can be seen, read and shared across all social networks.
Sprout Social Messages
Once logged into your desired account, Sprout’s ‘Smart Inbox’ Messages tab shows a comprehensive timeline of incoming messages and actions across the social networks you have implemented. Therefore, you never miss a mention or message ever again! You have the option to filter messages by social profile too, so if you are looking to read Facebook mentions only – you can do this by clicking the green ‘tick’ on the right-hand side. This function is primarily used to monitor messages, respond to queries and take action. You are able to ‘like and respond to posts’ in addition to creating custom brand keyword searches to capture all mentions of the brand you are monitoring. The best part is, users can tag, filter and assign messages as ‘tasks’ to their team members to respond and mark messages as complete once dealt with. It’s as simple as that.
Sprout Social Feeds
The third tab on the menu bar is Feeds, useful for identifying keywords for content that you could incorporate into future posts. It allows you to search through designated RSS feeds and any other tabs you which to include. Recently, Sprout Social partnered with Feedly to supply its RSS services within their social media management tool. To read the full, comprehensive overview of what you can expect to see out of this integration, be sure to read this article: ‘How to use your feedly RSS feeds in Sprout’.
Sprout Social Publishing
Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social enables teams and users to create a social media marketing strategy by scheduling and publishing content weeks in advance. If you are really keen to get a head start (and if you really wanted to) – you can schedule yours or your client’s posts up to six months in advance.
It’s a very simple process. You begin by clicking the green ‘schedule message’ button, add content, images and links you wish to accompany your text. If you include a link to a website, wait for the website page to load then completely remove the link. It looks much cleaner and sleek this way. The final step is choosing which social media platform you want to send the post out on, specify the date and time. If you make a mistake, you can go back at any time and edit text and images before they are sent out. There is one unique feature – Queue – that further schedules posts automatically based on pre-selected timeframes. Can you see why we love Sprout Social so much now?
Sprout Social Discovery
If you’re intrigued in finding conversations to join on social media, or to see what other people are talking about, this fantastic ‘Discovery’ keyword feature is an ideal feature to use. Simply engage by searching for certain words relating to your client or their business – (for example we used ‘Diamond rings’ for our client Diamond Heaven) and join in the conversation. You are able to ‘like, retweet, share and email message’ which means you can engage atany point you wish to.
Social reports and analytics
Sprout hits the nail on the head when they say ‘Social media measurement and reporting is ever evolving’. Because there are so many ways to measure engagement and results, you just need to understand how it works.
By clicking on the ‘reports’ tab on the taskbar, the social media analytics function provides audience intelligence and incredible benchmarking capabilities for your specified clients. Similar to how Google Analytics works by analysing your social data, Sprout’s reports include Group, Engagement, Team, Task Performance, Instagram Profiles, Twitter Profiles, Facebook Pages, Trends, Twitter Comparison, Twitter Listening and Tag Reports. It also incorporates Google Analytics and Bitly tracking for precision. From these results, you are able to produce reports to show clients their monthly achievements or downfalls. Ultimately, this is a perfect way of showing what is working well and what isn’t and what you can do to change this.
Overall, Sprout Social is a fantastic platform to use when it comes to social media analysing, brand monitoring and scheduling, with the only downfall being that it does not integrate fully with Instagram or Pinterest which has to be done manually. However recent updates proves this may change.
We hope our simple tips and tricks have helped you in your journey to progress with Sprout Social. If you would like to find out more, we definitely think you should check out this article:
‘5 Important Sprout Social Features You May Not Be Using’.
Would you like us to take a look at your social accounts? Get in touch and one of our certified experts will be more than happy to help.
