How Sprout Social Helped Me Become a Better Social Media Manager

Toby Lambert,
25601340How Sprout Social Helped Me Become a Better Social Media Manager

As you probably know, something exciting happened at the end of last year.

Thanks for the warm welcome, @sproutsocial! Excited to be a part of the family.

A post shared by Simply Measured (@simplymeasured) on Dec 6, 2017 at 11:58am PST

We were acquired by Sprout Social!

Since we were acquired, I’ve had access to Sprout’s amazing publishing tool. Here are three ways using Sprout has affected my role as a social media manager, from a workflow and data perspective.

1. Everything in One Place

Every month at Simply Measured, we hold a Lunch & Learn event. The purpose of these events is to learn more about how we can better serve our current and prospective customers. Basically, an expert in social marketing comes to our Seattle HQ and Lucy asks questions about their day-to-day. Then other people from our office get to ask questions. Here’s a blog post with takeaways from one of our favorite Lunch & Learns.

One question we almost always ask is, “What does a day in the life look like for you?” Almost every time, the guest mentions the number of tabs they need to have open–one for analytics, one for each social network, and one for publishing–for me, that’s six tabs.

I’m happy to say that with Sprout Social, I can narrow it down to two tabs. Instead of opening up all six tabs, I can head straight to Simply Measured to take a look at how we did the day or week before so I can quickly adjust our strategy for the week to come, then pop into Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox to start engaging with our followers.

2. Optimized Processes

Social marketers have a ton on their plate. We’ll take any opportunity to optimize our processes, AKA get more time back. One example of a process I’ve been able to streamline since using Sprout is how I plan out tweets. In the past, I’ve done this in a spreadsheet for two reasons–to plan out for the week, and to be able to see our social content at a glance when I audited what happened after the week.

With Sprout Social, I can completely eliminate this spreadsheet because I can plan things out on the calendar view, then reference it when I look at the data.

As an added bonus, when I reference the calendar at the beginning of the following week, I can see the tweets that I wasn’t able to plan out–like the tweets that are sent out when we participate in Twitter Chats.

3. No Guesswork

A common obstacle that social marketers face is finding the best times to post on each social network. (Hence our four-part blog series on best times to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.) The reason this is difficult is because the optimized time is always changing as algorithms and audiences change.

Thankfully, Sprout Social has Sprout Queue and Viral Post. Sprout Queue lets you line up content in one place, then sends it out at preset times. Viral Post analyzes when your audience is online and interacts with your content to determine optimal times for your posts to be published. You can learn more about them here.

When we tested out how posts manually published compared to posts published through Sprout Queue, posts pushed out from the queue averaged 67% more engagement than normal tweets.

Bonus: Preview Feature

One thing I needed to adjust when I started using Sprout Social was the way I formulated a tweet. I normally formulate a tweet like this: one or two sentences that pique your interest in the post. This is how you get there: LINK.

Tweets were written like this because we uploaded a picture to every post rather than using Twitter cards. When you add a photo to a post, the link stays in the copy of the post.

 

But when you use Twitter cards, the link appears as a clickable card. As a result, I need to write it like this: A complete sentence/thought that piques your interest in the post. LINK

Notice how the bit.ly link isn’t visible?

The nice thing is that Sprout has a preview feature, so I can see what each tweet will look like before it gets published.

 

Want to get your hands on Sprout Social? Schedule a demo here.

 

The post How Sprout Social Helped Me Become a Better Social Media Manager appeared first on Simply Measured.

Social Media