Sprout Social: How to Grow Your Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest… and the list goes on. In our current day and age, social media has become a vital tool for large and small businesses alike. It acts as a platform to connect with consumers and grow a customer base. While building a social media presence may seem daunting, Sprout Social poses as a very helpful tool to manage all your online profiles in one place.

What is Sprout Social?

The benefits your company can gain through an effective social media profile is undeniable. With the right approach, your business can target your desired interest group and foster a loyal and growing customer base. But how does your company use all these platforms and truly benefit from social media?

Sprout Social is a social media management and optimization platform. It compiles data from all your online profiles and offers publishing, analytics, engagement, and listening tools. In one location, you can easily plan and publish content across all your social media platforms. The provided data can be used to track social performance. Your business maintains a unified social inbox to engage with consumers and build lasting customer relationships.

Expanding Your Social Media Presence Through Sprout Social

Sprout Social has four major focuses to expand your social media. These features include social publishing, social analytics, social engagement, and social listening.

SOCIAL PUBLISHING

Through social publishing, your company can:

• Post to multiple social networks at once. With scheduling and content features, Sprout’s compose tool allows you to plan, schedule, and post messages whenever you’d like. Multi-media content can be edited and stored, and custom tags can be applied to messages to boost the organization of your site.
• Create and manage social content. Sprout Social allows you to create visually engaging content through its various features. Sprout’s asset library provides a place to store and edit images with editing tools to add filters and text overlay. You also are given access to a publishing calendar that is helpful in scheduling posts through many profiles.
• Use social media publishing tools. You are provided with automated posting and sending. You also receive optimal send times and post targeting to increase activity and target customers.

SOCIAL ANALYTICS

Sprout Social creates a unified platform for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It provides analytic tools across these sites for your ease.

• Facebook. To assist the growth of your business’ Facebook page, it allows you to tap into Facebook insights. This provides you with reports to show page impressions and customer growth. You are also given competitor data to compare pages and grow your company.
• Twitter. Sprout provides tools to identify your best content through clicks, reach, engagement, and top performing tweets (likes and retweets). It also tests strategies by planning campaigns with keywords, hashtags, and trends.
• Instagram. In addition to measuring follower growth, tools can test engagement and trends for better hashtag use. Shared content can be used for content strategy.
• LinkedIn. Sprout provides analytics for audience growth, demographics, impressions, and engagement data. It also gives data on advertising impact by comparing paid versus organic.

Through this data, you can easily create reports for your business. These reports can be shared and downloaded as PDFs with the company logos included.

SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

The “Smart Inbox” compiles all of your business’ messages from its different profiles into one single stream. With its tools, you can easily filter and monitor messages and keywords and visualize progress through analytic comparison methods from other weeks.

SOCIAL LISTENING

Social listening betters the company and forms a relationship with the customer by allowing them to be heard. These tools allow for honest feedback and opinions under one platform. You can build listening queries and refine query searches for more focused results. The data can be easily filtered by gender, age, and location. Through social listening, your business can create content that truly applies to the customer by filtering demographic data. This allows trends to be seen and customers to be attended to.

How Your Small Business Can Benefit from Sprout Social

Sprout Social allows your business to connect to its customers and gain trust with new customers. Studies find that 86% of consumers state that being trustworthy is vital when deciding on which brands they choose to support. Nearly 94% of customers are likely to be loyal to brands they deem as transparent, and80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand that offers a personalized experience. Through the relationships gained via Sprout, your business will attain a more loyal and supportive audience.

Sprout Social alone will not guarantee a perfect social media influence. However, pairing the data from Sprout with various social media management techniques will help your business grow. Sprout’s analytics and tools can be applied to hashtag usage and engagement data. As an example, on Instagram, Sprout provides hashtag trends. Using popular trends and applying it on your page is basically an SEO technique for social media. The more popular the hashtag, the more likely your post will be clicked. The more you post is clicked, the more likely you will gain a customer. How often are you left thinking did this hashtag even work? Should I change out certain hashtags?

Overview

Building your social media presence may not be the easiest thing to do, but not only will it help your small business it is essential in today’s age. With so many access points to your customer base, a social media focus is essential to gain a target audience.

Using Sprout Social, your small business can have a much more positive social media experience. Combining various profiles allows for more efficient social media usage while cutting down on the time required to switch between various platforms. Sprout Social does make your social media A LOT easier, but there is still work that needs to be put in. Creating posts that catch the eye of the audience and marketing tactics still must be used. Sprout helps bring you closer to your customer, but you still must highlight your profile. We can help with that. In addition to the social media services we offer, electrIQ is an agency partner of Sprout Social. We combine industry best practice social media tactics, developing content and managing relationships, with Sprout’s analytic platform for our clients.