Social was built originally for consumers, not businesses or teams, and we set out to build the software for any organization to be successful. Our early product helped social teams build content calendars, find and respond to relevant comments, publish posts across multiple channels with ease, and track proxy metrics of success (remember Klout scores?).

Over time, social activity ballooned, matured and fractured as new networks, content formats and communities emerged. Consumer usage became mainstream and multi-generational. Brands’ investment in social began to reflect this wider and more committed adoption. Today, more than 4.9 billion people worldwide use social media, and 53% of consumers have increased their social media usage over the past two years. Social ad spending in the US alone is expected to surpass $80 billion by 2025. None of these patterns show signs of reversing course.

Consumers now see social as a connection to the companies and causes they care about—a faster, richer experience than support@ email addresses and 1-800 numbers. No longer just a frontier marketing or niche conversational channel, social is fast becoming the nexus of customer relationships and the primary digital face of brands.

What does that mean for the next generation of social media management solutions? 
Brands will need more than just the next iteration of tools. Simply responding to more customers, publishing on more networks and sharing raw data across teams, will only go so far.

As consumers increasingly make social the digital hubs of their lives, brands have the chance to understand their audiences and markets deeply, and to spread that knowledge throughout their organization. Social media management solutions will evolve into the thread that connects and strengthens the bonds between brands and consumers—woven throughout every team, strategy and customer experience.

The next generation of business on social is not particularly about “social” at all. It’s about real digital customer relationships.

Customer intelligence is converging on social

We’ve seen how social customer care has changed the way marketing and customer support teams operate. Years ago they may not have had a reason to interact or share information regularly, but social media has made them close collaborators out of necessity. As social becomes the primary hub for high-resolution consumer insights, imagine how other departments could transform their work.

Consider the speed and richness of customer information you can glean from social compared to channels like email or phone. Social content is immediate, continuous and more fully represents the person. Email, phone and other channels are far more asynchronous—frustratingly for days with email—and are episodic, giving a limited view of the customer. An Instagram Story reply happens in real time whereas an email might go unread for days, or weeks. Who a customer follows on X (formerly Twitter) and interacts with says a lot more about who they are as a person compared to one service representative’s short conversation on a support call.

With people putting more and more of their lives online—including their lives as customers—social data is becoming the core representation of the customer. This impacts and benefits every team, even when they’re not on the front lines of social. We’re seeing departments like recruiting, legal and product asking to get involved in social, a reality I never anticipated seeing when we started Sprout over a decade ago.

At the same time, social is becoming more complex. Brands need to factor in how quickly social is fragmenting and morphing across emerging platforms and evolving consumer preferences. More social networks to choose from means consumers are exposed to a wider set of perspectives (be them other users, influencers or businesses), making it crucial for brands to demonstrate they understand what their audience wants in each space.

This growing bounty of intelligence means social media will continue to supplant traditional market and customer research, as well as legacy customer records. But businesses need tools that can aggregate, disseminate and analyze social data at scale and across the organization, before it decays—whether that’s because the opportunity passed, preferences already shifted or a competitor acted first.

This will take advanced, yet elegant, technology. Simply increasing budgets and manpower won’t help brands capitalize on the opportunities social media brings to the table. For brands to consistently deliver the exceptional experiences consumers expect, and to fully realize the emerging opportunity to know the customer, social media management solutions will need to become more accessible, intuitive and purpose-built for every team.

The future of social media management is…

With each emerging generation and as new platforms come online, social will only become further ingrained into both society and, in the business world, every workflow and team. Whether that’s directly interacting with a customer or applying audience insights to the business, social media is the front-line for customer relationships and market intelligence. It’s where your brand, reputation and opportunity exists.

For organizations to be truly customer-centric, the future of social media management solutions must be built with these four pillars in mind:

1. Ubiquitous. With social becoming the kernel of the customer record, social media management solutions will need to become accessible and consumable by every team. That doesn’t mean your sales team is suddenly going to be posting Reels. Rather, democratizing access to your social management platform means upleveling data and insights for specific departments, business processes and decision makers.

Today, only the most forward-thinking companies share social media insights pervasively within their organizations. Tomorrow, this will be table stakes. We’ll know we’ve entered the next era when all teams see social data as critical to competitively addressing customer, product and business opportunities.

2. Personalized. While brands aren’t rushing to remove traditional channels like phone and email from their communication strategies, social is raising the bar for how and when they engage with their audience. Consumers don’t just want brands to respond to them on social; 70% of them expect companies to solve their problem in a personalized manner. But “personalization” has to mean more than populating dynamic fields with standard name or location inputs.

Younger generations, in particular, bring any and all issues to brands on social, assuming they’ll be met with swift and authentic interactions. They expect the people behind the brand account to treat them the way they’d be treated walking into a local, independently owned shop: with empathy and acknowledgement of their individual preferences. With powerful social media management tools that intuitively surface the context they brands need to truly know each customer on this level, they can engage accordingly.

3. Intelligent. Expecting teams to manually collate massive amounts of social listening data and transform it into actionable recommendations takes time away from their core work. Departments need answers, not more chores. With AI innovation, expect to see social media management solutions to automate and elevate how social data is used across teams. AI and automation can, for example, present recommendations that empower brands to create highly personalized experiences in no time at all. Beyond saving time and resources, AI advancements in social media management solutions will enable teams to build relationships that influence revenue and loyalty at scale.

4. Interoperable. Customer relationships start, grow and expand on social. So it’s unsurprising that 96% of business leaders expect social data to be integrated into their organization’s CRM capabilities over the next three years. But integration is just the beginning.

It’s not enough to simply grant every department access to social data. Social media management solutions should process, package and seamlessly integrate data with the entirety of your organization’s tech stack. Social media management tools will become the go-to source that every team uses for immediate, in-depth market insights and customer intelligence.

The social media management solutions of tomorrow will be designed with every team in mind

Thirteen years ago at Sprout, we started by helping social teams simplify the tactical functions bogging down their workdays. We strove to empower social marketers, often working in teams of one, giving them the tools needed to keep up with the publishing and engagement responsibilities of their job.

But consumers expect more from brands now as social increasingly becomes the digital hub of their lives. The future of customer experience and understanding starts and ends with social. And social media management solutions must evolve to be more than an island, but a primary source purpose-built for every team to harness consumer insights and build deeper relationships.

For more perspective into how consumers’ social media behaviors and expectations are evolving, download The Sprout Social Index™ today.

The post What to expect from social media management in 2028 appeared first on Sprout Social.

That’s because both channels are absolutely critical when it comes to product discovery, research and helping people make purchase decisions. Rather than treating these marketing channels as a matter of either-or, it makes sense to find common threads between them. SEO can be an important pillar within your social media marketing strategy.

In this guide, we’ll highlight the basics of SEO and social media, including lower lift ways to boost your social media efforts via SEO (and vice versa).

Table of contents:

• What is social SEO?
• Is SEO needed for social media?
• What is the connection between SEO and social media?
• How to optimize your social profiles for SEO
• How to optimize your social posts for social search
• 4 quick social media tips to support your SEO efforts
• Create a strategy for SEO and social media

What is social SEO?

Social SEO involves optimizing your social channels and content to expand your reach in search results. It helps enhance the visibility of your content among the people searching for businesses similar to yours. For example, social SEO can help you rank higher in YouTube search results. Best practices vary across platforms, but it can involve adding captions, alt-text, subtitles and keyword research.

SEO and social media management strategies can complement each other because they are both channels for discovery. People are seeking the help of both search engines and social media platforms to uncover information. The lines between search engines and social media are blurring. For example, people use TikTok and Pinterest to discover new recipes, life hacks and more. And YouTube isn’t just a video platform anymore—it’s one of the most popular search engines in the world.

Is SEO needed for social media?

Discourse aside, SEO and social media have a complementary relationship. Companies can use SEO for social and it’s an important component of developing a mature marketing strategy.

What is the connection between SEO and social media?

The connection between SEO and social media—particularly if social links and shares have a significant impact on traditional search rankings—has been debated for over a decade now. Some argue that misinformation on social media has led people astray when it comes to SEO strategy.

Some SEO experts will tell you outright that Google doesn’t take social media performance into account when it comes to rankings. However, other SEO aficionados speak to the importance of using social media for business.

Search engines do not use social signals as a ranking factor, but some professionals agree they are an indirect SEO booster that can help with traffic and rankings.

Others say social media marketing is actually more effective than SEO, depending on the industry.

Even though the verdict is still out on the exact relationship between SEO and social media, there’s still a connection worth exploring when it comes to increasing your brand’s visibility.

Below is a brief breakdown of how social media impacts search traffic:

Social media profiles consistently rank among top search results

Particularly for branded keywords, social media profiles are often front-and-center, immediately following any given brand’s website result. On Google, social media channels are listed on the results pages and the knowledge panel, the box located on the right side of the platform that features specific information about the query.

The SERP also includes previews of the brand’s most recent posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), further highlighting a relationship between SEO and social media.

Meanwhile, Facebook represents a potential SEO goldmine for local businesses as it serves as an aggregator of positive reviews and potential bookings.

Google Analytics highlights social media as a significant traffic source

Because social is a significant source of traffic for organizations, it’s treated as a unique entity in Google Analytics.

Using Google Analytics for social media can help you learn about social media efforts, target audience and search optimization alike. This includes:

• Does social traffic engage better (or worse) than traffic from other channels?
• How does your volume of social traffic compare to other sources like organic, email, etc.?
• Which social networks drive the most traffic?

Social media links serve as a traffic funnel

Although concepts like social sites passing on link equity, also known as “link juice” have been debunked, consider the potential snowball effect of increased social shares resulting in more traffic.

Do social shares have a significant effect in the SERPs? Perhaps not. However, using social accounts to promote new individual pieces of content can be a significant driver of new visitors.

Brands that are active on social have the potential to build more backlinks either actively or passively. Consistently publishing content means more visibility and that visibility can result in links or brand advocates who enjoy sharing your content.

Social search optimization matters for social networks

Marketing organizations are using SEO best practices on social platforms like YouTube to increase views and promote their channel. YouTube videos and features like chapter titles show up in Google search results so marketers can optimize. For example, you can use target keywords in titles and descriptions. Adding captions will also send a positive signal to the YouTube algorithm.

How to optimize your social profiles for SEO

We’re going to focus on actionable optimizations that’ll increase your social channels’ visibility in the SERPs. The good news is that doing so doesn’t mean overhauling your presence or making any major changes. Here are the basics of social media SEO:

Fill out your social profiles with as many details as possible

Some platforms have much more real estate than others to fill in your details (think: Facebook’s generous “About” section(s) versus a minimalist Instagram’s bio). Either way, don’t let these spaces go to waste. Make a point to include industry and brand keywords, location and relevant links.

Integrate keywords into your profile(s) and posts

Speaking of keywords, consider that social media at large is becoming more and more search-oriented. Performing keyword research is a good idea just for the sake of finding potential topics to post about and likewise optimizing your content for visibility. You don’t have to (nor should you) optimize every single caption or description that you write.

However, there are plenty of opportunities to integrate keywords into your posts naturally if you’re aware of them. This is especially true on platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn or Pinterest where you have plenty of characters to work with.

Point links back to your site

Chances are you’re probably doing this already. Although your own links shouldn’t be the sole source of your social content, they should definitely factor in if you’re hungry for more traffic.

From blog posts and promotions to downloadables and beyond, make sure you’re taking advantage of link tracking to assess what’s getting the most clicks and how visitors behave once they’re on your site. Doing so also clues you in at a glance at what your most popular links are via social. Here’s what the process looks like through Sprout Social’s URL shortener:

Share on-site content and encourage others to do the same

Perhaps one of the most effective ways to get shares beyond your brand account is through employee advocacy. Now a staple of B2B social media, encouraging colleagues and coworkers to share content through an established employee advocacy program is a much more measurable and scalable way to increase visibility.

Publish content that’s worthy of backlinks

Posting linkable assets on social media is a no-brainer, but which sorts of posts are prime for links?

When in doubt, infographics and original reports are safe bets. These posts are typically among the highest-performing on social since they’re unique and share statistics in a way that’s easy to digest. Likewise, original research often represents a primary source that hasn’t been linked elsewhere.

How to optimize your social posts for social search

Here’s a quick overview of some best practices to optimize content for social search:

• Use relevant keywords and hashtags in captions, titles and descriptions
• Use alt-text to make visual content more accessible
• Use subtitles in video content on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok
• Tag your location so your content can appear in social search results
• Say your main keyword out loud on YouTube and TikTok
• Incorporate SEO into your file management process by using keywords and key phrases in the video file name
• Aim to use high quality photo and video assets to benefit from visual search
• Be conscious of overstuffing keywords

4 quick social media tips to support your SEO efforts

To wrap things up, let’s look at some other tactics that combine SEO and social to get more out of your investment in both channels.

Make your website content easy to share

Social sharing buttons are staples on blogs and websites. Quick copy links and single-click sharing should be integrated into your site in some way, such as including buttons on blog posts to make sharing easy.

Bonus points if you don’t have to make your readers dig for your sharing buttons. Below is a good example from Grammarly, showcasing social share buttons that follow visitors as they scroll through a post.

Translate your social data into content ideas

If you’re strapped for fresh content ideas, look no further than your social feed. From potential blog topics to the latest trends and keywords, there’s arguably no better place than social media to find them. Social conversations are timely and you can assess trends instantly rather than wait for traffic to roll in to figure them out.

This is where a tool like Sprout Social really comes in handy. With our platform’s Social Listening features, you can quickly hone in on topics and trends without having to do a bunch of guesswork. Social listening is also a useful tool for making sure your marketing messaging lands and you speak your audience’s language.

Fine-tune your publishing frequency

Establishing a consistent content calendar produces better traffic results than posting at random.

Familiarize yourself with the best times to post on social media and make sure links to your site are part of your social content strategy. As a side note, don’t be afraid to publish and recycle links to blog posts. Given the legwork required to put together any given post, they deserve to be shared multiple times. If you don’t want to repeat yourself, consider repurposing your content for social distribution.

Foster relationships with your audience and influencers

We’re all about building customer relationships at Sprout. Building an engaged community means you’re more likely to score clicks and attract meaningful traffic to your site. Those same folks can also give your content a much-needed boost when prompted. You can use social media as an avenue for developing and nurturing relationships with your target audience, including influencers. Influencers can help support content visibility. If an influencer reshares your content, you amplify your brand’s reach.

Create a strategy for SEO and social media

Whether search or social is your primary focus, consider how both channels complement each other because doing so means getting more out of your marketing efforts. Likewise, you can uncover a ton of customer insights and content ideas in the process.

Our social marketing guide breaks down even more ways to create top-tier content and grow an audience.

The post SEO and social media: How to use search to boost your social marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

But with a market that’s flooded with options, you may have a hard time choosing the best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business. This post helps you narrow down your options and provides you with a list of the top choices. Let’s take a look.

Why do you need a LinkedIn analytics tool?

LinkedIn analytics refer to a set of metrics used for measuring how your Page and posts are performing on the platform. LinkedIn analytics tools help you keep track of those metrics and understand the effectiveness of your strategy.

According to the latest LinkedIn stats, the platform is the most effective channel for generating B2B leads. However, those leads don’t appear out of nowhere. You need to actively work on producing content that would attract your target audience and turn them into valuable leads.

With the help of a LinkedIn analytics tool, you can get key insights into your audience and better understand how to engage them. You’ll be able to see what types of content resonate with the audience, what information they’re seeking out and so on. This helps you strengthen your strategy to make more effective use of LinkedIn for your business.

Which LinkedIn analytics tool is the best and why?

The native LinkedIn analytics tool offers a range of essential insights into your Page performance. But if you need to dig a little deeper than that, you should consider using a third-party tool. Ideally, these tools should offer data-backed suggestions on how to improve your performance. This includes suggestions such as the top content types and the best times to post on LinkedIn.

The best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business depends on your unique needs and operation size. For example, agency users would want a tool that lets them generate multiple client reports.

At the bare minimum, the tool should let you track key performance metrics for your LinkedIn Business Page. This includes follower and visitor metrics, update metrics, profile metrics and lead metrics. Additionally, you should be able to measure your standing in the competitive landscape. Some tools even let you track metrics related to LinkedIn employee advocacy.

Beyond these basics, you can look for an analytics tool that supports other aspects of your LinkedIn strategy. For example, if you’re running LinkedIn ads, you need a tool that keeps track of your paid campaigns.

Keeping this in mind, here are 12 of the best LinkedIn analytics tools in the market to help you make the right choice.

1.     Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s powerful LinkedIn analytics features put it at the top of our list. The platform gives you a comprehensive look into your LinkedIn performance through key metrics.

What makes Sprout stand out is the ability to help you visualize your LinkedIn data, making it easier to analyze your performance.

An overview of your LinkedIn Page performance helps you understand your Page growth over time. The Performance Summary shows you changes in impressions, engagements and post link clicks. And the Audience Growth chart helps you visualize the number of followers gained or lost over time in a color-coded graph.

For more in-depth insights, Sprout breaks down your performance at the post-level. So you can understand what resonates with your audience based on engagement rates and content types. This informs your LinkedIn strategy by helping you develop more effective content.

Meanwhile, the Paid Performance Report shows you how your LinkedIn ads are performing. This reveals paid metrics such as ad spend, impressions, engagements, clicks and web conversions. You can really drill down on specific campaigns and ads to identify your top-performing ones.

Beyond this, Sprout offers the following key LinkedIn analytics features:

• Tag Performance Report to analyze volume and performance patterns of tagged messages
• Competitor Report for advanced social media competitive analysis
• Inbox Team Report and Case Performance Report to measure the productivity of teams and individual members

Pricing: Starts at $249 per month

Free trial: 30 days

2.     Keyhole

Keyhole offers a powerful Profile Analytics tool to measure your LinkedIn performance. The dashboard gives you a summary of your activity and performance during a given time period. You can keep track of the number of posts, engagement rate and average likes per post during this period.

The tool helps you visualize your post performance with a chart depicting the timeline of posts and engagements received. You can access comprehensive analytics to compare your performance against the competition. The dashboard lets you benchmark your account size, engagements, share of voice and sentiment against theirs.

One of the main highlights of Keyhole is the data-backed suggestions on how to optimize your performance. It gives you recommendations on the best time to post and optimal post length to grow your social media engagements.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: Limited to 3 account trackers and a sample of historical data

3.     SocialPilot

SocialPilot provides you with detailed insights to see which LinkedIn posts are the most visible and engaging. This helps you fine-tune your content strategy and get more out of LinkedIn marketing.

You can access comprehensive audience insights to research trends in reach and growth patterns. SocialPilot even shows your most active fans so you can amplify their voice for better brand advocacy.

Pricing: Starts at $30 per month

Free trial: 14 days

4.     SocialInsider

SocialInsider offers a powerful analytics tool for LinkedIn. It lets you track your engagement evolution along with vital metrics such as reach and impressions. This gives you an idea of your most impactful strategies so you can optimize your content mix for greater results.

The tool comes with competitor analysis features to see how you stack up. You can keep track of your competitors’ follower growth, engagement rate and campaign performance from this tool.

SocialInsider provides detailed post analytics insights to inform your social media content strategy. These insights help you understand optimal caption lengths, hashtags and content formats. You can then optimize your posts for performance based on this information.

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month

Free trial: 14 days

5.     Brand24

Brand24 is an analytics tool with a focus on social listening insights. It lets you measure brand awareness and presence through brand mentions. These insights help you assess the impact of your latest LinkedIn efforts on improving reach and brand awareness.

You can use the tool to analyze sentiment and understand how people feel about your brand. This gives you an idea of what they like or dislike so you can fine-tune LinkedIn strategy accordingly.

Brand24 helps you measure the effectiveness of your campaign with hashtag analytics. Beyond hashtag volume, it keeps track of metrics such as reach and engagement. This paints a clearer picture of how your campaign hashtags are performing.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 14 days

6.     Social Status

Social Status is a full funnel LinkedIn analytics tool. It lets you track top-of-funnel metrics such as reach and impressions. You can measure middle-of-funnel metrics like video views and engagements. Plus, it shows you the effectiveness of your LinkedIn efforts through bottom-of-funnel link clicks.

The Content Feed gives you a comprehensive look at your post performance metrics. This helps you visualize the type of content that makes an impact with your target audience.

Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Free trial: 14 days

7.     RivalIQ

RivalIQ gives you comprehensive insights into your LinkedIn post performance. You can easily identify your top-performing posts and replicate them for your content strategy. It helps you visualize how your posts are performing by post times. This allows you to optimize your publishing strategy to target optimal post times.

This LinkedIn analytics tool lets you measure hashtag performance by activity and engagement. You can then use these insights to inform your hashtag strategy and maximize your LinkedIn reach.

Pricing: Starts at $239 per month

Free trial: 14 days

8.     DrumUp

DrumUp is a social media management tool that offers comprehensive LinkedIn analytics. It lets you track key performance metrics such as shares, comments and clicks. This paints a clear picture of the types of content that works for your brand so you can fine-tune your strategy.

You can use smart filters to perform a deep-dive analysis and quickly identify your top-performing content. Plus, you can easily spot trends by tracking changes in engagement metrics.

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month

Free trial: 14 days

9.     Iconosquare

Iconosquare is one of the most comprehensive LinkedIn analytics tools in the market. It gives you engagement insights so you can track how they correlate to your content efforts. You can then refine your strategy to boost engagement and improve your brand presence.

The tool helps you visualize your community growth on LinkedIn. It gives you a detailed breakdown of your audience demographics. So you can optimize your efforts according to where they are and what languages they speak.

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month

Free trial: 14 days

10.  Talkwater

Talkwater comes with powerful analytics for audience insights and social benchmarking. Additionally, it offers tools for media monitoring, customer feedback analytics and social listening. It lets you measure your competitors’ social media performance and analyze where you stand. This helps you identify areas for improvement and opportunities to capitalize on.

This analytics tool provides comprehensive audience insights to inform your targeting efforts. You can use it to discover new audiences and uncover prospects that are ripe for purchase.

Pricing: On request

Free trial: No info available

11.  Inlytics

Inlytics is an analytics and scheduling tool specifically designed for LinkedIn. It provides you with real-time and historic visualizations of your content performance. You can use it to track metrics such as impressions, reactions, comments and engagement rates.

One of the most useful features is the Profile Improvement Recommendations. You can get actionable suggestions on how to optimize your profile and improve visibility. Plus, your audience engagement insights will help you understand your audience better. This will then inform how to optimize your content to better resonate with them.

Pricing: Starts at $12.50 per month

Free trial: Free plan with limited analytics

12.  Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers advanced analytics to measure the return on your LinkedIn marketing strategy. This lets you visualize your organic and paid metrics in a single dashboard. So you can better understand how your organic content efforts and your ad campaigns are paying off. It shows you your top-performing posts and best times to post to help you optimize your strategy.

The tool provides you with reports that compare your LinkedIn performance against that of your competitors. These insights can inform how to duplicate their success and leverage missed opportunities.

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 30 days

Which LinkedIn analytics tool will you choose?

When choosing the best LinkedIn analytics tool for your business, it’s important to clearly assess your needs and budget. This will help you narrow down the features that are important to you and the ones you can sacrifice.

If you’re marketing on other social media platforms, make sure to look for a tool that provides analytics for those other channels as well. This will streamline your social media analytics efforts so you don’t have to switch between multiple tools. Learn more about the top social media analytics tools that offer analytics for LinkedIn.

The post Best LinkedIn analytics tools to maximize your marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

Data analysis and social media reporting are becoming increasingly important skills for social media marketers. Today, there’s an increased pressure, and need, to use this data in more sophisticated ways—on the social team, and beyond. According to The Sprout Social Index™ 60% of marketers plan on connecting social to business goals by quantifying the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue impact.

As brands and business leaders realize this potential, they place a growing emphasis on the need for marketers to understand and share their data in the context of specific goals and strategies. In order to do so, modern teams must be able to easily create custom reports.

In this article, learn the importance of custom reporting, and how Sprout customers are using their custom reports to empower swifter, better-informed decision-making.

What custom reporting in Sprout looks like

The value of social media and the insights that come from it has never been more widely understood. According to this year’s Index, 76% of marketers agree that their social insights inform other departments.

The more influential social insights become, the more robust, agile and focused your reports must be. Adding a custom reporting ability to your social media analytics tools enables them to serve the needs of various teams.

Sprout Social’s Report Builder and Custom Reports enable your team to feature the data that matters most to the stakeholders receiving it—at scale. With the ability to customize widgets that use data already available in Sprout, marketers can arrange their reports to tell the story that matters most.

The Report Builder enables your team to share impactful cross-org reports and recommendations that have real business impact, fast. Your team can build a report from scratch, or customize Sprout’s existing templates by selecting and adding dozens of widgets to hone in on key data. And with text widgets, write in context and recommendations based on insights or add a full analysis.

Custom reporting is available with Sprout’s Premium Analytics, which can be added to any Sprout plan. If you haven’t tried Sprout’s social media reporting options yet, request a personalized demo to get hands-on experience.

Request a personalized demo

To give you some ideas, let’s look at some stand-out ways that Sprout customers are using custom reports.

3 Sprout custom reporting examples that tell a richer story about social’s impact

Some of the most important questions about social’s impact are often the most difficult to answer. What’s the ROI of our efforts? What did this influencer campaign do for us? How do people feel about our content?

Social marketers are finding creative ways to connect their social efforts to business impact through data storytelling. Here are three stand-out ways we’ve seen customers enhance their social media reporting to answer tough questions with Sprout’s Report Builder.

In-depth campaign performance reporting

Creator and content campaigns are as crucial as they are notoriously hard to report on. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 47% of respondents said their main challenge when implementing influencer marketing was measuring campaign effectiveness.

Custom reports bring clarity to this common challenge, and make it easier to confidently understand on your campaigns and influencer partnerships. They bring all of the KPIs into one streamlined report to tell a wider ROI story about your campaign.

One stand-out Sprout customer in the travel and meeting planning industry uses a custom campaign report to understand campaign performance and share it with external stakeholders. Their key to success is including widgets that provide a holistic view of their influencer campaigns. The Tag Performance Widget enables them to show data from the campaign-specific posts.

They also include social listening widgets featuring a topic summary, listening engagement and potential impressions. This enables them to show stakeholders how their influencer campaign impacted related conversations and engagements in the wider social space. Here’s what a general version of those two widgets looks like:

Beyond helping their social team make strategic partnership decisions, this report also helps them connect influencer campaigns to other business functions, sharing their custom campaign report with other teams to tell an easy-to-understand ROI.

There are endless ways to mix and match widgets to highlight social data in action. And various combinations have enabled customers to report on campaigns in different ways, to different stakeholders. One Sprout customer creates custom reports to highlight their end-of-year campaign success. Another uses theirs to share biweekly brand partnership reports across dozens of corporate partners. Combine different widgets, like listening, tag and post performance widgets to capture the full scope of your campaigns.

Tailored benchmarking and quarterly reports

Quarterly audits and benchmarking reports are two halves of one holistic story about your social strategy and overall brand health. When combined, they empower smarter decision-making by giving your strategy context against your competitors.

But the level of detail these reports carry may be overwhelming for a busy C-suite. And given that 57% of marketers share social media metrics with executives weekly or monthly, according to our Index, creating focused reports is crucial.

A Sprout customer in the SAAS industry used custom reporting to answer their C-suite’s biggest questions about Instagram, while still serving their team’s needs.

While Sprout offers a pre-built Instagram competitive report, this customer wanted to create two competitive intelligence reports: a weekly one for their team to track trends and competitor engagement surges. And a monthly C-suite report laser-focused on top-level competitive intelligence.

Their monthly report told their C-suite about how their Instagram compared to their competitors—without getting bogged down by in-the-weeds data. While the weekly report helps them stay on-trend and on-pace with platform-specific widgets that track trends. Here’s an example of what similar cross-network widgets look like:

With Sprout’s custom report builder, streamline or combine your larger audits and benchmarking reports—include cross-channel performance, competitive listening, customer care data and more for a 360-degree view of your strategy.

Pro tip: Create custom reports to hone in on the insights that matter most—for your team, or for other stakeholders—to get higher-impact insights from a lower lift. Tap into text widgets to give your data context with a SWOT analysis, and to prove ROI. Or, take this a step further by creating a custom report that serves as a social media dashboard your team and others can use to regularly enrich strategic business decisions.

A holistic view of organic vs. paid performance

According to a Q1 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, marketers rank organic and paid social as their two most valuable social tactics—with organic out-ranking paid. Organic and paid social strategies go hand-in-hand, and reporting on them side-by-side can provide a holistic view to inform strategic decisions across your strategy.

The Paid vs. Organic Network Summary widget in the Premium Analytics Report Builder enables you to compare organic and paid content in custom reports across your Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles—no extra work needed from your team.

If you want a more channel-by-channel view of your paid performance, there are widgets by network available, too. Sprout’s paid reporting options enable you to easily evaluate the success of paid social campaigns executed through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter). As well as widgets that show the performance of your owned organic content.

Use custom reporting to uncover and share the focused social insights that matter

You and your team are no strangers to reporting on social data. But social media has grown up—and reporting must evolve with it.

To uncover and share deeper insights, you need to create more sophisticated reports for your team, leadership and beyond.

Drill down on the insights that matter most to your social and business strategy faster, so you can focus on making improvements—not digging through data. Request a personalized demo of Sprout with Premium Analytics to see how custom reports simplify answering the tough and important questions for your business.

The post 3 ways to get more from your data with Sprout custom reporting appeared first on Sprout Social.

In social media, the most important questions are often the most difficult to answer or quantify. But these are questions you have to answer; not just for your team and strategy, but for your leadership and teams beyond marketing.

Luckily, there is a light at the end of the ask-hard-questions tunnel: Tags in Sprout reports. Sprout’s Tagging feature has changed the reporting game for many brands.

In this article, we’ll show you how 3 brands have created a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns, cross-org reporting and better insights. Let’s dive in.

How 3 standout brands use a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns, and beyond

To get you up to speed, Tags are a Sprout feature that act as labels you can attach to any piece of content you plan to publish. They can be the name of a campaign, the name of a creator partnership, a content bucket, a goal—whatever helps you organize content.

Using Tags allows you to filter social media reports to see specific content pieces, themes and posts, enhancing your social media insights. Think: honing in on campaign performance, uncovering how specific content themes perform on different platforms, seeing how your audience responds to different topics—the possibilities are endless.

We’re constantly impressed at the creative use cases people create for Tags—and the insights Tags help them uncover. Here are 3 brands who have developed a creative Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns and beyond, and how it empowers them to streamline otherwise complicated reporting processes.

Report on UGC and influencer content with Tags—River Island

There’s no denying the importance of creator and influencer partnerships. However, quantifying their success is difficult. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout pulse survey of 307 US-based social marketers, 47% of respondents said their main challenge with influencer marketing is measuring the effectiveness of campaigns.

London-based retailer River Island uses Tags to make this reporting process easier. In fact, they cite Sprout’s Tag Report as one of the most useful reports in Sprout for their team.

One of their stand-out use cases is how they use their Tagging strategy for marketing campaign reporting. For their team, this includes highlighting the performance of owned content vs. influencer content—a stellar way to showcase the effectiveness of influencer marketing.

As River Island’s team explains, “With the Tag Report, we can test and report on user-generated content (UGC) versus campaign imagery and determine which are more engaging. This helps us confidently allocate budgets to different creative assets.”

Apply it: Label influencer content you reshare or share with campaign-specific Tags to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your influencer, creator and UGC campaigns.

Analyze the social conversation to create community-first content, faster—CareSource

Social media teams are no strangers to content audits. To truly create impactful content, you must be able to analyze and make data-driven content decisions more frequently—not just on a quarterly or yearly basis when larger content and strategy audits occur.

Healthcare non-profit CareSource has fine-tuned its content analysis to be more agile and to get more granular with content reporting. To do this, they tap into Tagging.

As CareSource’s Senior Director of Digital Strategy Sarah Chapman explains, “If we notice a trend in our monthly Tagging reports, like a sudden influx of questions about ID cards in August, then we realize this is likely related to parents needing back-to-school sports physicals and immunizations. So we plan ID card-related social content in August.”

This strategy uses customer care questions to inform content, and vice versa. Not only does CareSource tag their content depending on what content bucket—that is, what content theme and topic—they fall into; but they also tag incoming comments with the same tag as the original post. Using a specific Inbox Rule automates this process.

“When I produce a piece of content and tag it as a member benefit post when someone comments on that content, I have an Inbox rule that ensures the comment shares the same tag as the post,” Sarah explains.

Beyond helping them understand how content buckets perform on various platforms, this also enables them to get a pulse on their community’s conversation for enhanced reports.

As Sarah explains, “My team creates a monthly PowerPoint that shares insights, ‘ah-has’ and provides a high-level view and volume numbers of what the community was talking about last month. We get our insights directly from Sprout’s Tag Performance report to see what topics spiked—we can see if they spike on a day or around an event, and give insights that feel grounded in the community and don’t require someone to understand social speak.”

Rapid reporting leads to a smarter strategy and share-friendly stats. And their Tagging strategy has been a major time-saver, too. “It’s hard to quantify, but I would easily guess our team saves 10 hours a month just on having ready answers available for our team and others,” Sarah explains.

Apply it: Create a robust Tagging system for all of your content—including tags for each of your content buckets, campaigns and the platform each is posted on, for starters. Then, set up Inbox Rules that automatically tag any comments on specific posts to track what topics, content and themes may be driving the conversation, what that conversation might be and what the overall sentiment is in the comments section. This enables you to get more granular insights faster.

Get department-specific insights and report across your org—Grammarly

Social media has come a long way. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree their social insights inform other teams. And yet, 43% of marketers say they still feel siloed.

The value of social media extends far beyond the marketing team and has the power to inform and bolster every team at your org, but it’s important to tailor insights to other teams.

The Grammarly social team has incorporated cross-departmental report sharing into their process, breaking down social team silos. This has been especially impactful for their user experience, product and leadership teams.

Their robust Tagging strategy enables them to group incoming messages, like comments, based on the content—much like CareSource does—helping them tailor insights for specific teams, and to employ full enterprise reporting.

As Grammarly’s Community Manager Emma Hanevelt tells us, “Once a month, we combine Tagging insights from Sprout with Zendesk reports to create a deck that gets shared across the organization. It’s how we keep others up to date on trends and opportunities we’re seeing in customer support.”

But this Tagging strategy also enables the Grammarly team to filter department- and request-specific feedback to empower different teams. As Emma explains, “Tagging is one of the most important features for us. We can quickly pull specific feedback when needed. If any of our product managers come to us asking for messages on a certain product, we have it.”

Apply it: According to the Index, 57% of marketers share social metrics with executive leadership weekly or monthly. Use Tags to filter insights for in-depth and tailored reports for your leadership, and to create reports tailored for teams based on the insights that are most useful and relevant to their work.

How to implement Tagging in your marketing campaign reports today

Honing in on insights granular and broad. Providing cross-org knowledge. Speeding up decision-making. Proving the ROI of influencer partnerships; we’ve already highlighted the key benefits of Tagging on social media. Now let’s get into how to use it.

Jumpstarting your Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns in Sprout is easy—in fact, the process is baked into your publishing process, streamlined as part of the content creation process.

Start your free Sprout trial

Once in Sprout, all you need to do is:

1. Navigate to the “Compose” icon—the paper and pencil image in the upper right-hand corner. Or click “Compose” on any day on the Sprout publishing calendar.
2. Once you’ve added the copy and visuals for your post, click on the tag icon to select from a dropdown of your existing Tags, or to add new ones. If you’re in the full-screen compose window, navigate lower in the display to the “Sprout Tags” field and add Tags under “Labels.”
3. To automatically tag incoming messages with the same Tags as the posts they’re attached to, set up auto-tagging: Navigate to your name in Sprout > Settings > Click Automated Rules under Global Features > Click Create new rule > Enter a rule title and description of what it does > select Inbox message for the Rule Type.
4. Once you start tagging your content, dig into the data. You can filter general reports—like the Post Performance Report—by Tags to hone in on how topics or campaign posts perform. And the Cross-Network Tag Performance Report empowers you to filter and analyze Tag performance across platforms over your chosen time period.

Pro tip: This report is also shareable. This means next time leadership or teams outside of marketing ask you about how specific topics or campaigns perform, or what people are saying about a specific topic, you can quickly pull and send those insights directly from Sprout.

More impactful insights in less time: Try Sprout to simplify and streamline your reporting

New platforms, changing content formats, shifting algorithms, tight bandwidth—social teams are strapped for time as it is. But social media is an invaluable wealth of insights, for your marketing team and beyond.

Enabling your team to quickly answer tough questions from leadership, be more agile and share social insights with other teams is more than just a nice-to-have; it’s essential as social media becomes more influential.

To empower your team to work faster and smarter, try Sprout free for 30 days to see how a Tagging strategy for marketing campaigns changes your team, and entire business.

The post How 3 brands use a Tagging strategy for marketing to get better insights, faster appeared first on Sprout Social.

Cybersecurity threats are constantly evolving, so companies need to evaluate and adjust. In this post, we’ll cover enterprise social media security best practices to help you develop a security-first approach for your organization’s accounts.

What is social media security?

Social media security refers to the policies, procedures and protocols used by businesses and employees to protect the organization and customers from cyberattacks across networks. These cyberattacks include but are not limited to:

• Phishing
• Social engineering
• Hacking
• Malware
• Identity theft
• Account impersonation
• Catfishing
• Password theft

With the right privacy and security guidelines, enterprise organizations can lower the risk of these attacks and maintain a positive reputation.

The foundation of strong social media security for any organization

Regardless of your industry, there are four pillars that will help you maintain strong social media security:

Protect customer data on social media

If a customer reaches out on social media to ask a customer service question about their account, there should be a response protocol to route them to a more direct channel, along with guidelines for handling this sensitive information.

Vet your vendors

Every company should do their due diligence. Properly vet vendors by asking specific questions before buying a product. Along with internal software vendors, proceed with caution when using third-party applications. Research the app and review its privacy and security policy before integrating it into your social media networks. Some applications may require access to sensitive information, so you want to make sure any info you share stays protected.

Have a dedicated security team

Infrastructure and network security teams help protect companies at all times. They can incorporate system administration best practices and vet any vendors for you. For example, Sprout Social employs a dedicated security team that’s on call 24/7/365.

Maintain regulatory compliance

Depending on your industry and location, you may have additional requirements for security and privacy compliance. Seek legal counsel to ensure your organization is compliant locally, statewide and at the national level.

Enterprise social media security best practices

Here are some enterprise social media security best practices you can follow to safeguard your business and brand:

Stay vigilant and monitor unusual activity

Personal account attacks can ripple out to a brand, especially when team member accounts have access to company profiles. This makes it essential to remain vigilant, watching for phishing and other social engineering attacks in the form of emails, messages, friend requests and more. Be aware of accounts impersonating an individual or brand, especially those that are well known.

Avoid public Wi-Fi

Cybercriminals can use public Wi-Fi to intercept data because they are usually less secure. Employees should default to using a trusted network with a strong password or use a corporate VPN if public Wi-Fi is the only available option. IP whitelisting is another great practice because it can limit access to users logging in from approved IP addresses, blocking unauthorized credentials.

Use a password manager

Enterprise companies often have several social media accounts across various platforms, so using a password manager makes it easier to store and manage access to passwords. This will keep all your important data in one, secure place.

Many companies also use social media management platforms with single sign-on (SSO), like Sprout, to help manage their various accounts and increase security. These platforms make granting and removing team member access simple and have multiple authentication measures to restrict account access to only those who need it.

Create an informed social media policy

A strong social media policy defends against security risks and legal issues, empowers your staff and protects your brand. It clarifies who can speak for your company on social media, outlines a plan for dealing with conflict and includes personal account guidelines.

For more on how to create one, check out our guide.

Crisis management plan

What does your organization do if a hacker gains access to social media accounts and posts content against your brand values? Or even worse, what if they leak consumer data?

Outline a social media crisis management plan within your social media policy so teams are prepared.

How to manage social media cybersecurity across your org

Social media governance is an ongoing process that requires risk assessment of your organization, teams and your software vendors. There are a number of ongoing security measures you can follow to protect your organization:

Combat cyberattacks in onboarding and trainings

Unfortunately, many cyber attackers target the people connected to accounts rather than the accounts themselves. Since cybercriminals target people, the more team members connected to accounts, the higher the risk of infiltration. Enterprise companies should remain proactive by providing training, especially for larger social and customer care teams.

In IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, phishing and stolen or compromised credentials were the two most common initial attack vectors. The global average cost of a data breach in 2023 was $4.45 million USD, a 15% increase over the past three years.

That’s why 51% of organizations are planning to increase security investments as a result of a breach, including employee training, incident response (IR) planning and testing, and threat detection and response tools.

To keep team members up-to-date, introduce your social media policy during onboarding and conduct regular training to revisit cybersecurity developments. Many organizations, including Sprout, hold recurring phishing and social engineering training to help team members exercise their scam-recognition skills.

Access permissions

Enterprise products should have the ability to restrict access to profiles, actions, features and data. Applying access permissions to users can ensure compliance and limit risk. Limiting access to social media accounts will help keep them secure, externally and internally. Along with limiting access, it’s important to verify and audit these permissions regularly to ensure only authorized employees have access. Access permissions are also relevant if an employee leaves the organization or transitions to another role or department.

Follow your organization’s password standards

Strong passwords are the first line of defense against security breaches. Every organization should have a policy outlining what constitutes a strong password. For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), requires federal agencies to use passwords that are at least 8 characters long. NIST also offers a variety of resources like the Cybersecurity Framework, which provides guidelines for all sectors and sizes. This framework is a starting place and organizations can customize depending on their needs.

Your social media policy should also include relevant information about password standards and procedures. For example, we recommend OnePassword or LastPass to store and manage access to passwords. This will keep all important data in one, secure place.

As a good rule of thumb, highly secure passcodes have at least 12-18 characters and include a mix of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers and special characters. These passwords should be updated regularly (e.g. quarterly).

Enable 2FA and/or MFA across channels

Two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) requires more than just a password to grant access to an account.

The second factor is typically an approved device such as a mobile phone, or something more personal, like a fingerprint. If someone tries to sign in from an unrecognized device, they might be required to enter a one-time code from an approved mobile device and authenticator application.

X (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Google My Business all offer 2FA/MFA options. Leverage them to reduce social media security risks. We recommend using a third-party authenticator application such as Google Authenticator, Authy and other similar products to implement the Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) or HMAC-based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) for passcode generation.

Take advantage of single sign-on applications

Single sign-on (SSO) allows you to connect various applications through your organization’s identity management platform, so users can access their tools with the same login credentials.

Giving employees one set of login credentials to access multiple applications means less password management, easier sign-ins and fewer chances of falling for phishing attacks.

Without 2FA/MFA, however, it means an attacker can gain access to multiple accounts in one fell swoop. Keep this in mind when crafting your security approach. Speak with your IT or security team to take advantage of this functionality where possible.

APIs and Integrations

Application Programming Interface (APIs) helps social media practitioners use integrations. Many social media management platforms like Sprout use APIs and have security protocols in place, but when connecting any platforms to your social accounts, organizations should use secure third-party APIs to protect the accounts from cyber threats. This is especially relevant if your social accounts integrate with a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, because you need to understand how customer data is stored and secured.

Guarding the gateways to social accounts and data

Safeguard your brand by staying aware of the changing cybersecurity landscape and continually educating yourself and your team to stay ahead. Remain vigilant, and you can keep your accounts safe today and into the future.

Managing all of your accounts and permissions in one place is a strong step toward greater social media security. Start a free, 30-day trial today and see how Sprout Social empowers more than 34,000 brands to deliver smarter, faster business impact with comprehensive social media management solutions, including publishing and engagement, customer care, influencer marketing, advocacy and AI-powered business intelligence.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post Social media security best practices to keep your company and customer data safe appeared first on Sprout Social.

Data visualization helps transform large data sets (think big data) into something that’s easily processed at a glance. This makes it a crucial part of your social media reporting efforts. In this post, we take a deep dive into what data visualization is all about and what role it plays in your business. Let’s get started.

What is data visualization?

Data visualization is the process of presenting data and information in a visual format. It involves the use of charts, graphs, maps and other visual elements for translating data. These visualizations make it easy to process and understand trends and patterns in a given data set.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of data visualization?

Visualizing data improves understanding and communication across the board. Considering this, it’s hard to imagine that there would be downsides to it. Information visualization can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, so it’s important to consider both the advantages and disadvantages before you delve into it.

Advantages

Enhanced data understanding

Visualized data is easier to understand for people of all skill sets and experience levels. You don’t need to be an analyst to interpret what the data is saying.

Quick identification of patterns and trends

With data visualizations, outliers in data sets are prominently highlighted. This allows you to quickly spot patterns, relationships and trends without having to pore through mountains of data.

Effective communication

As visualized data is easier to understand, there’s a lower risk of confusion and misinterpretation. So you can effectively share information with relevant parties, resulting in improved communication.

Improved decision-making

Visualization quickly translates huge data sets into actionable insights. This makes it easier to decide what to do with your social media data.

Enhanced data-driven storytelling

Data visualization enables effective storytelling with big data. Colors, patterns and other visual elements help people to visualize the story that your data is trying to tell.

Disadvantages

Misinterpretation of visuals

If you’re not careful with how you present the data, the visualization may not effectively convey your message. This leaves more room for people to misinterpret the data and come up with incorrect conclusions.

Overlooking context and details

Sometimes, visualization results in an oversimplification of data. So people draw inexact conclusions because they overlook essential context and details.

Selection bias and distortion

On its own, data visualization leaves interpretation up to the audience. That means each individual applies their own selection bias to understand the data. This muddies the waters, resulting in distorted insights.

Data visualization and big data

Big data refers to huge volumes of data that are too complex to manage using traditional processing tools. This type of data is extremely diverse and arrives at a high velocity, which makes it all the more challenging to analyze.

At the same time, organizations can’t afford to ignore big data. Due to its high volume, high velocity and high variety, it has the potential to generate a wealth of insights using the right analytics tools.

That’s where data visualization comes in, helping you make sense of the trillions of data available at your disposal. Advanced data analytics filter out the noise from big data to extract the most important information. Visualization then helps you tell stories by highlighting those key details. So the two concepts work closely together to drive data-driven decision-making.

What are the 3 C’s of data visualization?

If you’re going to make the most of data visualization, an essential step is to avoid the drawbacks highlighted above. Follow the three C’s of data visualization to clearly and accurately present your data.

Clarity

Be clear about the message you’re conveying with your visualization. What does the data mean? How does it provide value to the audience? Eye-catching graphs may be good to look at, but they’re of no use to stakeholders unless they present important information.

Consistency

It’s easy to misread and misinterpret information when there’s no consistency in your visualization. The same rules and visual styles should apply across the board.

If you’re using one color to represent something in one bar chart, the meaning should be similar across other graphs and charts. For example, if green represents an increase in sales in one chart, it should represent a decline in negative sentiment in another chart.

Context

On its own, data can only tell you so much. It doesn’t tell you if a number is good or bad. For example, if your click-through rate is 4.5%, is that a good number? Adding context to your visualization is crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of the data.

Stakeholders should have something to compare the data against to make better sense of it. In the example above, industry benchmarks and previous quarter numbers can add context.

What are the 5 steps in data visualization?

Keeping the above in mind, here are five steps to build better data visualizations.

Step 1: Be clear on the question

What question does your visualization aim to answer? Have a clear idea of your purpose so you can identify the audience you want to reach and the types of data and analysis you need. You can then understand the types of visualizations that will be most effective for conveying your message. This step serves as the foundation for your visualization efforts.

Step 2: Know your data and start with basic visualizations

Once you’ve laid out your purpose, decide on the data you need to answer your question. Based on this, you’ll understand whether you can collect existing data, or you’ll need to create your own.

Regardless of the type of data, start with basic visualizations to put it all together. This helps you keep things as simple as possible so it’s easier to derive actionable information.

Step 3: Identify messages of the visualization, and generate the most informative indicator

The next step involves cleaning up your data and analyzing it to extract vital insights. What do those numbers mean? Are there any recognizable patterns or trends? What messages can you convey with the data?

This is one of the most important steps as it determines the accuracy and relevance of your data visualizations.

Step 4: Choose the right chart type

The clarity and effectiveness of your visualization heavily depend on the type of chart you use. Decide on the best chart type by understanding the message you want to deliver.

Some charts show patterns in data while others make comparisons between different variables. But more on that in the next section.

Step 5: Direct attention to the key messages

Now it’s time to create your chart. Make sure to include relevant context so it’s easier to interpret the message.

And don’t just lay out numbers. Turn them into actionable insights. If there are any key messages or takeaways, be sure to highlight them so people know what to focus on.

Best types of data visualization

Wondering what types of charts you should use for your visualization? Here are some of the best types of data visualization and their use cases.

• Tables – Data presented in rows and columns. Best for supporting other, more complex types of visualization.

• Charts – Tabular and graphical presentation of data, usually along two axes. Some examples include bar charts, pie charts and Gantt charts. Best for presenting categorical data.

• Graphs – Diagram presenting data with lines, curves, areas, points or segments. Some examples include bullet graphs, line graphs, scatterplots and network graphs. Best for spotting correlations or deviations.

• Maps – Data presented in map form. Some examples include heat maps, treemaps and geographical maps. Best for demonstrating hierarchical relationships and location-specific data.

• Infographics – A combination of words and visuals that represent data. Best for adding context and additional details.

Best examples of data visualization

Not sure what a great data visualization should look like? Check out some of these best examples to inspire you.

London Selfie Demographics

Selfiecity put together the following interesting data visualization of selfie demographics in London. Part of a larger project studying selfies of the world, the visualization below shows a chart comparing London selfies. It compares the number of selfies taken by men vs. women across different age ranges. There are highlights of key findings on the left-hand panel for ease of understanding.

Image Source: Selfiecity

Corruption Perception Index

Transparency.org developed an interactive map showcasing the global Corruption Perception Index. If you hover over each country on the map, you get an overview of its CPI score and how it has changed since the last year. Clicking on the country gives you a detailed report outlining how the score has changed over time.

Image Source: Transparency.org

The World’s Population at 8 Billion

In 2022, the world’s population reached 8 billion. Visual Capitalist presented the data using the following visualization. Lines separate countries and colors separate continents. It’s a simple yet comprehensive way to visualize the info for everyone to understand.

Image Source: Visual Capitalist

Data visualization tools and software

The best way to clearly and accurately visualize your data is by using the right visualization tools and software. This may include platforms with built-in analytics that provide visualized data reports. It may also include software designed specifically for data visualization. Here are some options you should consider.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool with robust visualization capabilities. The built-in analytics automatically measure your performance across leading social media platforms. The platform then presents the data in a visual format to simplify your data analytics. It uses a combination of graphs, charts, tables and maps to create captivating visualizations of your performance.

Sprout lets you build a wide variety of shareable data visualizations to support your social media reporting. This includes visualizations for your overall account performance and profile activity. You can create team-specific reports with visualizations presenting metrics relevant to each team. It even lets you break down reports to track specific types of performance such as engagement and productivity.

Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics platform for creating actionable and easy-to-understand data visualizations. It lets you unlock comprehensive insights by connecting to integrated data from any source.

The platform processes this data to deliver predictions and recommendations using Einstein AI. This minimizes the need to write your own algorithms, which streamlines your data analytics process. You can then build visualizations in just a few clicks using the drag-and-drop editor.

Image Source: Tableau

Google Charts

Google Charts is a set of tools for building interactive charts to display live data on your site. Choose from different chart options that best fit the data you want to present. Then customize existing designs to visually match your website. Google Charts lets you connect to your data in real time so you can present dynamic data to site visitors.

Image Source: Google Charts

Additional resources

Interested in learning more about data visualization? Check out the following resources to brush up on your visualization skills.

• Sprout’s blog post on data visualization for marketers
• Coursera’s Data Visualization with Tableau Specialization
• Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts

Making data talk with visualization

Visualization is a powerful way to translate your data into a message everyone can understand. At the same time, it’s important to present the data clearly and consistently to minimize the risk of misinterpretation. This helps you get your message across more effectively to turn data into action.

Make the most of Sprout’s Social Media Analytics tools to turn complex social performance data into visuals. Get a comprehensive look at how your social profiles and content are performing. Then put these visualizations together into actionable reports to share with your team.

The post Unlocking insight: the power of data visualization appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s a fascinating time for social media teams. In many ways, social media has “grown up.” Many leaders and execs see the value in social and no longer need to be convinced to invest in a strategy.

However, we’ve entered a new phase where social teams are trying to find the best ways to share social’s value—from customer connections to data—with other teams. After all, social impacts every part of your company and can help teams across your organization meet their goals.

In this article, you’ll learn which metrics can help you communicate how social bolsters other teams, plus, find tips on how to break down silos and share social insights across your organization.

Table of contents:

1. 1. Return on investment (ROI)
   2. Website traffic
   3. Brand awareness
   4. Purchases/revenue from social
   5. Engagement
   6. Customer satisfaction
   7. Lead generation
   8. Customer retention
   9. How to communicate the value of social media beyond the marketing department

Return on investment (ROI)

You know the time you put into social is worth it—and more leaders recognize this now, too. But quantifying social’s impact still matters.

That’s where return on investment (ROI) comes in. It’s one of the best ways to track social media value because it puts dollar amounts to the time and money spent on your efforts. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, in 2024 45% of marketers plan to calculate the ROI of social ad spend to connect the value of social to business goals.

ROI can be measured at the campaign level on each social platform or at an overall social media marketing level. The formula for social media ROI is:

((Earnings – Costs) / Costs) x 100

Let’s say you ran an influencer campaign that led to $50,000 in new purchases. The total campaign cost your company $10,000—including paying for the influencer partnership, ad placements and tools to run the campaign. You would find this campaign’s ROI by calculating:

[(50,000-10,000)/10,000] x 100

This would give you a final ROI of 400% for your campaign. The inputs for assessing ROI vary between companies. Learn more in our guide to social media ROI.

How to use Sprout to track ROI

Sprout has several social commerce integrations available to use, such as Shopify and Facebook Shops. These can help you follow the trail of social media-influenced purchases.

Sprout also offers reports that assess campaign success. The Tag Performance report, for example, enables you to tag and track campaign-specific posts to report on the success of a specific campaign.

Website traffic

Social media drives significant referral traffic to e-commerce websites. When someone clicks through your social post to your website, that click is recorded as referral traffic.

If you don’t already track website traffic driven by social, this is your sign to start. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 60% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly track social media traffic to the website. And for good reason—website visits from social clearly illustrate the impact of social media on business.

To track website traffic, connect your Google Analytics account or look at your website’s native data. Go a step further by using UTM trackers to identify which sources the clicks are coming from. This way, if your website receives a sudden influx of visitors, you’ll know which one of your Facebook posts it’s from.

Website traffic data influences are dependent on how your company operates. For example, if you make a significant amount of sales in the fourth quarter, your website traffic data will reflect this. Or, if you create a blog post that news outlets pick up, that also factors into the data.

Learn how to set up your Google Analytics account in our Google analytics and social media article.

How to find website traffic in Sprout

When you connect Sprout to Google Analytics, you’ll be able to go beyond tracking where your website clicks come from. You can also conveniently build your UTM tracking as you compose your social posts. With this tracking activated, you have a more comprehensive view of your website traffic.

Brand awareness

Brands benefit from being present on social media. In fact, 80% of consumers say brand awareness makes them more likely to buy on social. Building brand awareness comes in various forms; a reshare of a post, a targeted video ad or reviews all count as brand awareness. Online reviews and recommendations from trusted sources are known to influence purchases, boost social proof and can double as resharable content.

This makes audience reach an important metric to track to identify your social media value.

And social teams know it. According to the Index, 58% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly track reach and impressions—core brand awareness metrics.

Follow these tips to boost your company’s brand awareness on social media.

How to use Sprout to analyze brand awareness

There are several ways to use Sprout to analyze brand awareness on social media. Sprout’s cross-channel reports enable you to assess how each of your channels and posts drive brand awareness in one report.

And with robust listening tools, you can build and track topics that are most relevant to you. You can then view data in Listening Topics to see how well your brand is performing against competitors and your share of voice in your industry.

Using hashtags in your posts allows you to track their performance, too. With specific hashtag types, you can see how each one performs within your Listening Topics—especially the Twitter Trends report (which will soon rebrand to the X Trends report), which enables you to uncover popular topics and hashtags related to your brand. Knowing these will help you craft content to build brand awareness.

Purchases/revenue from social

Connecting sales directly to your social media efforts is a clear way to prove social media value. So much so that the Index found 57% of marketers plan on connecting the value of social to business goals in 2024 by tracking conversions and sales driven by social efforts.

There are a number of ways to measure purchases driven by or made directly on social. Here are three key ways to do this:

1. Track sales with Google Analytics (and in Sprout): We already talked about how UTMs and Google Analytics enable you to track traffic from social—and how you can use them in Sprout. Take this a step further and use these tools to measure sales made from social, too. Using Google Analytics, you can track how much your social media efforts are driving sales and conversions, and which channels are most effective drivers of sales. Conversion reports and top conversion path reports give you a good idea of what channels and activities are driving sales.
2. Tracking sales made through social media shopping: Social platforms have been making their shopping capabilities more user-friendly, with TikTok as the latest social platform to officially launch shopping capabilities to users. And social shopping works: 69% of retailers report selling on Facebook, and 59% report selling on Instagram. Built-in platform analytics make tracking this easy. Meta, for example, offers robust insights in their Commerce Manager to track shopping events on their social platforms and on your website (if you’ve added your Meta Pixel).
3. Tracking conversions made from ads: Social media platforms—especially Facebook and Instagram—offer many creative advertising options and formats. Whether you’re using shopping ads that pull in product information directly from your site or ads promoting your brand as a whole, tracking sales made from your paid social media campaigns is essential. In Sprout, the Cross-Network Paid Performance Report simplifies tracking web conversions, cost per conversion and more driven by ads across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly known as Twitter.)

Engagement

Social media engagement includes clicks, likes, reposts, follows, views and incoming messages. It’s one of the most important social media metrics to track.

Healthy engagement involves brands publishing content their audience is interested in. In fact, according to the Index 45% of consumers say their main reason for following a brand is because they post enjoyable, entertaining content. Tracking engagement ensures you’re monitoring the value of your social media content.

But engagement also involves the brand engaging with customers who interact with their posts. And a little goes a long way.

Need ideas on creating great organic content? Check out these four types of content for driving engagement. Or, use these proven social media optimization strategies to boost social engagement.

How to track engagement in Sprout

Engagement is available as a metric in multiple reports at the profile level, network level and post level. The number is further broken down into the types of engagement, like clicks and comments.

Customer satisfaction

Traditionally, this is a customer service team metric. But social customer care often falls under the marketing umbrella. And given that 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support, measuring their satisfaction is a core piece of social media value.

There are a number of ways you can measure this, including with the most on-the-nose metric—your customer satisfaction score (CSAT). However, this metric requires sending a survey, often via email or customer service chatbots. And while it tells you the overall CSAT rating, it’s not always clear why the customer chose that rating.

So here are a few additional customer service metrics to watch:

• Average first reply time
• Average reply wait time
• Reply or response rate
• Sentiment
• Most received topics

How to measure customer satisfaction in Sprout

Sprout has several ways to measure customer satisfaction. The Inbox Team and Activity reports, which we’ll get into later, shed light on how responsive you are to your customers. But Sprout also offers customer feedback surveys that measure your social CSAT or Net Promoter Score (NPS). This survey can be implemented in your Instagram, Facebook and X private messages to get the pulse of how happy customers are with your help.

Sprout’s Social Listening solution also empowers you to go straight to the source and to understand how customers feel about you, your competitors and your products or services. This is a great tool to use to uncover what improvements must be made to boost customer satisfaction.

Lead generation

Wanting to reach customers in the consideration stage of their purchase journey is a common social media goal. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 44% of marketing VPs and executives regularly track conversion rates and leads generated on social media.

To set up analytics for your lead gen efforts, create unique tracking links (the UTMs we talked about) that track when customers take an action on a link. This makes it easy to track what platforms, posts, ads and promos drive the most consideration-stage interest.

Tracking links also make it possible to identify return visitor activity and people who continue to interact with your website after visiting social. This will show you how well your social activity—and specific channels—are warming up leads. If your social management tool has integrations, you can even take this one step further by tracking specific leads in a CRM platform, like Salesforce.

If you’re stuck on how to grow your brand on social, here are some ideas for lead-gen campaigns.

How to improve lead gen with Sprout

For lead generation efforts, Sprout connects with Shopify and Facebook Shops to tag your product offerings. When a customer inquires about a product, you can easily add a direct link to the reply.

You can also seamlessly communicate with your sales team when you find a lead on social. Tag your sales team on incoming messages from potential leads to help move them down the funnel.

Finally, tracking leads is even easier and more granular when you use Sprout’s Salesforce integration. This empowers you to seamlessly connect your CRM with social data, so you can surface insights alongside your other marketing metrics and spark lifelong customer relationships.

Customer retention

It’s great to attract new customers, but don’t forget about your current ones. It’s also cheaper to retain current customers than it is to score new ones. It can cost up to seven times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one. Existing customers are also 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new ones.

Measuring customer acquisition costs is a metric marketers have their eye on. The Index found 29% of marketers plan to connect the value of social to business goals in 2024 by calculating this metric.

Create useful content and offer after-purchase customer service support to increase retention rates. Employ customer retention strategies like rewards programs and feedback emails.

And simply be responsive on social. It can encourage customers to feel connected to your brand. According to the Index, 51% of consumers say when brands simply respond to customers, it makes them memorable.

How to improve customer retention in Sprout

Sprout’s Smart Inbox is designed to support customer retention. With filters and custom views, never miss a social media message again. The reporting features include useful metrics like response time, unique messages and action rate. Don’t assume your team is replying; gather the data that proves it.

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How to communicate the value of social media beyond the marketing department

The insights you glean from social have the potential to inform and help every team at your org meet their business goals. Today, 76% of social marketers say their team’s insights inform other departments, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™. And yet, 43% of social teams still feel siloed.

You and your team already know that other teams can benefit from social insights. But those other teams may not understand the value of social media for their goals. Here are a few examples of how you can communicate the value of social with other teams beyond marketing.

Before you start: talk to team leaders to understand their needs

Not every metric or finding will be important to every team. Take time to talk to leaders from each team. What are their goals? What are their pain points? What do they need to be successful, and what does their team care about?

Asking questions early on will help you understand which social insights matter most to each team. Then, you can create tailored reports that highlight exactly what they need to know.

This is also where you can understand how often to share reports with other teams and stakeholders. The majority of social media marketers share social performance reports with executive leadership weekly or daily, according to the Index. And tapping into automation will help you set and forget your reports or scorecards you create.

Sprout, for example, enables you to build custom reports tailored to different teams, and enables you to set a regular sharing cadence.

Uncover customer care performance and opportunities

The Sprout Social Index™ found most marketing teams either split social customer care with the customer service team, or they own it. But regardless of how you divide up responding to customers on social, if your customer service team isn’t tapped into social, they may be missing key opportunities.

For instance, incoming social FAQs can help customer service understand where customers most often need help. This can inspire them to create new FAQ resources, customer self-service tools, chatbot answers and more.

Social media insights are also key for your customer service team to understand their performance, what they do well and what needs improvement. After all, 69% of consumers say they expect a response from a brand within a day. And metrics like your average first reply time or reply rate can uncover how quickly your team responds to messages, and how long customers are left waiting.

Using a tool like Sprout’s Inbox Team and Activity reports quantify how quickly customer care agents respond to customers and their response rate. This clearly illustrates whether their responsiveness meets customer expectations—or even exceeds them.

Predict market shifts for your product team

In our fast-paced world, being proactive vs. reactive is essential. And social media is the best source to identify trends…if you know how to tap into the conversation.

Social listening is an often untapped tool that product teams can greatly benefit from. By tapping into the wider conversation on social, beyond just your channels, social listening empowers you to identify trends and market shifts proactively.

Clothing brand River Island is a shining example of a marketing team that changes the game for its product team with social insights. They used social listening to discover that fringe jackets were coming back as a big trend. This is social data in action—while these insights are invaluable to the product team to stay ahead of trends, they also inform the social team what they should push on social.

Social listening also puts a microphone up to what your ideal customers are saying about your products and competitors’ products. Sprout’s Competitive Analysis Listening Tool empowers you to uncover these conversations, helping you unearth customer pain points that need fixed, and opportunities to differentiate your brand and products from the competition.

Create a reference for your creative team on visuals that resonate

It’s no surprise that 79% of social strategists, managers and directors regularly check engagement metrics. But these metrics are helpful for teams beyond social, like your creative teams.

When I managed social media for a non-profit, the visual team asked me if they could see how their photos and videos performed once posted. Not only would engagement metrics give them insight into what was performing well—it was also a good indicator of what types of visuals our audience reacted to.

If you work with a team that provides you with graphics, photos, or videos, share engagement with them to help them understand what resonates with your social audience.

Pulse check audience sentiment for your PR team

Hopefully, you and your PR teams never experience a social media crisis—big or small. But if you do, it’s always better to catch it early where you can still get ahead of the narrative.

Social media is where that chatter starts and takes off. But it’s not always on your channels first. To understand how your brand is being talked about and perceived, you need to zoom out.

Using social listening is one of the best ways to catch a potential issue bubbling up early. It empowers you to identify keywords people are using while talking about your brand, sentiment dips and more—which is invaluable information for your PR team.

Collaborating with your PR team can also help you create a social media crisis plan that involves social listening to keep tabs on the conversation.

Show your entire organization the value of social media marketing, and how it can help them

Social media offers a wide range of value for brands and businesses alike. But while the value of social media to business goals as a whole is clear, it’s up to you to show other teams what social can do for them.

By honing the right metrics, creating tailored reports for each team and understanding what social insights matter to each team, you can help grow your whole org—one department at a time.

Making social data more accessible and useful cross-org will only become more important. If you’re looking for data to help make the case that every team needs social insights, download and read our latest Sprout Social Index™ report.

The post How to measure and communicate the value of social media beyond marketing appeared first on Sprout Social.

But what was once a clear-cut process has become a complex collage of touchpoints thanks to the rise of digital marketing and social media. As Scott Feldman, Customer Intelligence Practice Lead for Canada at SAS describes, “Buying is not linear, and successful brands know it. Skilled marketers understand that digital and non-digital touchpoints all work together to drive conversions…You must add unique value across channels.”

Ultimately, he explains, it’s about showing up on the channels your customers use, and giving them the experience they’re looking for. To do that, it’s essential to tap into marketing business intelligence. In this article, I’m sharing more from my interview with Feldman where he explains what marketing business intelligence is, and how the insights you gain from it lead to more effective strategies for reaching your customers.

What is marketing business intelligence?

Feldman describes marketing business intelligence (BI) as: “The accumulation of data from all of your external channels.” For example, marketing BI originates from a variety of places including social content performance data, social listening insights, website analytics, email marketing metrics and more. The data can be applied to functions within and outside of marketing, including customer care, product development and corporate strategy.

He goes on to add, “Marketing BI needs to reside in one place to effectively model and market. It enables a single view of your target audience and customers, and empowers you to track the channels your customers are using. Working off of that model allows us to be better connected marketers.”

How can marketing business intelligence benefit an organization?

Marketing BI is essential to empathizing with consumers at every stage of the customer life cycle. With those insights, you can grease the wheels of your marketing strategy, enabling stronger targeting, increased ROI and an improved customer experience (CX).

Define your ideal customer profile

Knowing who you should be marketing and selling to is key to growing your business. Yet, narrowing down an ideal customer profile is a challenge for many companies.

As Feldman explains, “When I work with brands that aren’t [tapping into BI data], I ask: ‘Do you know who your customer is? Do you know who you’re selling to?’ They often answer: ‘We’re everything to everyone.’ No brand should be a catch-all. Even phone companies don’t sell to everyone. Be true to yourself and your business by knowing who your customer is.”

With accurate marketing BI data, you can segment your audience into different buyer personas. The right BI tools enable you to create data visualizations and reports that demonstrate the defining characteristics of these personas—including their needs, pain points, demographics and even personality traits. The marketing BI insights should also illustrate the arc of a persona’s relationship with your brand—from first encounter to final sale.

For example, with social media intelligence insights, you can surface critical voice of the customer (VoC) data from various sources such as social listening, reviews, surveys and contact center interactions to track brand health, improve products and enhance customer engagement and retention.

Sprout Social’s social listening solution uses AI technology to calculate the overall sentiment of your brand, product or CX, and reveal audience insights from social conversations. This intel might reveal that a segment of your customers is using your product in a way that you didn’t realize, helping you better position your product going forward.

Refine marketing attribution

When it comes to asking for resources, marketing BI can help demonstrate the value of marketing initiatives to your CFO.

“The CFO doesn’t give an infinite budget. Your marketing campaign needs to be important to the business. Prove how your campaign leveled-up to revenue with data,” Feldman advises.

Marketing BI metrics like conversion rate, cost per conversion, return on ad spend, customer acquisition rate and marketing-sourced revenue demonstrate the throughline from your campaign efforts to your company’s bottom line. Continuously analyze marketing BI data to assess the status of key performance indicators (KPIs), measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and make data-driven improvements.

Not only will this data illustrate ROI, it will also guide your future investments in specific channels, and set you up for stronger marketing campaigns. As Feldman says, “Not every channel provides the same ROI. It’s important to attribute revenue and conversions to a certain source.”

For example, when defining actionable social media ROI for your business, using a tool like Sprout Social aggregates your paid campaign results from across channels. These analytics reports directly tie social activity on each channel to business results in shareable, digestible reports all stakeholders can understand.

Deliver a smoother customer experience

What was abundantly clear in my interview with Feldman was his passion for helping brands deliver a smoother CX. It was the crux of his argument for why BI data matters, and how it can help organizations.

“CX should be easy, memorable and positive. That’s what brands need to deliver. That’s what consumers are looking for. Every point of friction is measured against you. What you must create as a brand is an experience that people want,” Feldman emphasizes.

As a real-world example of what a smooth CX looks like, Feldman cites KFC. “Whether you like their food or not, KFC is one of the best brands on social. They’re smart, funny and witty. What you see on Facebook is not what you see on TikTok. They provide different value on each network.”

He goes on to describe how their customer care is second to none. “They’re responsive. It’s not just about being on these different channels. Their customer interactions are next level.”

Achieve this enviable world-class CX by using Sprout’s Smart Inbox to enable stronger collaboration between your social and customer care teams.

The inbox unifies your social channels into a single stream, and when you reply to a user, you see key BI like conversation history and customer relationship management (CRM) data. With this data, customer care reps can provide higher quality support across channels, and improve satisfaction across the customer journey.

Select the right business intelligence tools for your marketing team

Maximizing your use of marketing BI requires following data management best practices. As Feldman puts it, “If you’re working with stale data, then you’re not actually working off of marketing BI.”

To keep your data up-to-date, you need processes and tools that support seamless data collection and maintenance. Here are a few tips when selecting business intelligence tools for marketing teams.

Have an end goal in mind

According to Feldman, the most important step to take before setting out to update your processes or find a new tool is to think critically about what you want your marketing BI data to achieve. Ask yourself: What do we need to learn about our customer to improve our go-to-market approach? Feldman adds, “It’s not the channel or the tool you use, it’s what you get out of it.”

When you audit your processes and evaluate new tools, keep your brand’s strategy top of mind. Be sure you can access the customer intel that’s most important to your brand and industry. A good rule of thumb is to remember that your tools should meet your needs, you shouldn’t retrofit your strategy to fit a tool.

Choose user-friendly tools

In the same vein as serving your company’s unique strategy, your marketing BI tools should be accessible. They shouldn’t be so complex that only a data analyst can use them. The democratization of marketing BI data is what amplifies its impact beyond the marketing department, and makes a material difference in your CX. Usability is also critical for keeping data accurate and up-to-date.

Look for tools that are intuitive to use and make it easy for your team to make decisions that improve business strategy.

Integrate BI tools with your existing tech stack

When marketing BI tools integrate with the rest of your tech stack, the result is deeper customer satisfaction and internal synergy. Yet, many companies don’t have tools that work together. According to a Q3 Sprout pulse survey, only 37% of enterprise companies use integrated technology to address customer care needs, and 42% of all organizations cite gaps in available customer information as a barrier to providing customer support and a better CX.

On top of limited data, many organizations don’t know where their data is coming from, according to Feldman. By introducing complementary tools into your tech stack, you can improve your marketing BI reporting capabilities and improve your approach to customer care.

For example, with Sprout’s Salesforce integration, social data enriches your CRM data to provide a comprehensive view of your customer. With this integration, agents can engage in real-time with all the context they need. With a more complete picture of your audience, you can track customer journeys and segment audiences based on their social interactions with your brand.

Contextualize BI insights

Even as a social media management company, we acknowledge that social isn’t the only source of marketing BI. Feldman agrees. “You can’t attribute marketing BI from social alone.”

Having tools that help you contextualize and streamline all your marketing BI in one place, and illustrate how your different campaigns and channels interact together is essential.

Take Sprout’s Tableau integration. This Tableau BI Connector combines the power of social data with all your key data streams, including display ads, email campaigns, website data and more. You can customize the dashboard with the exact visuals and metric combinations you need, without requiring time-consuming development work.

To aid your search for the best tools for your company, here’s a complete list of marketing BI tools that can level up your business’ decision-making and improve your brand’s CX.

Use marketing business intelligence to better understand your customers

Accurate and up-to-date marketing BI makes it possible to optimize your campaigns, share meaningful data with stakeholders and, most importantly, elevate your CX. With comprehensive BI data at your fingertips, you can decrease customer acquisition and retention costs and prevent churn. As Feldman says, “People buy on emotion. Loyalty comes from having positive interactions with your brand, and forging an emotional tie.”

When used to its full potential, marketing BI is the bridge that connects your brand to your customers. If you want to dive deeper into understanding your customers’ journey, use this CX audit template to ensure your social channels are meeting the needs of your target audience.

The post How marketing business intelligence empowers you to reach your customers appeared first on Sprout Social.

Table of Contents

• What is enterprise reporting?
• Why is social media important for enterprise reporting?
• What are the benefits of enterprise reporting?
• How to create an effective enterprise report in 7 easy steps
• How to leverage social media data in your enterprise reporting
• Enterprise reporting FAQs

What is enterprise reporting?

Enterprise reporting refers to analyzing and communicating company-wide data across an organization. These reports track KPIs across your entire organization, including department-specific data.  Through enterprise reporting, you get a holistic view of how your business works (together). These are reports that cover business KPIs, operations, productivity metrics and beyond. The goal of enterprise reporting? Communicate results and takeaways to key stakeholders organization-wide. Reports are most valuable to teams by ticking three boxes:

• The data reported is accurate and up-to-date
• Reports get to the right stakeholders consistently and securely
• Data is clear, actionable and interpreted accurately

The points above may seem straightforward enough. The reality? Achieving all of the above with hundreds or thousands of employees is no small feat.

Why is social media important for enterprise reporting?

Simply put, social media is a goldmine when it comes to business intelligence. That’s because your social presence impacts so many sects of your business. This includes your sales and marketing funnels. The wealth of data to gather via social is nothing to scoff at. Below is a quick snapshot of why social media matters so much for enterprise reporting:

• Brand and product research on social media is at an all-time high. As brand discovery on social media grows, so do opportunities to gather data beyond lead gen. This includes customer insights and shopping preferences based on engagement.
• Uncover marketing wins (and future opportunities to assist other departments). From customer service to sales and beyond, social interactions are almost guaranteed across the buyer’s journey. Reporting on those key touchpoints can highlight value for your department and beyond.
• Social media is integral to audience research. Beyond engagement metrics, the qualitative data you can gather from social media is critical. From market research to competitive analysis, there’s no better place to track real-time trends.

What are the benefits of enterprise reporting?

You probably already feel like you’re dealing with more than enough data as-is. You’re already tracking your share of numbers so why add more to your plate? That’s why more businesses are investing in enterprise reporting tools, though. Time spent tracking KPIs shouldn’t go to waste. Through more accurate and streamlined company reporting, you can take those numbers beyond your dashboard and translate them into real results. Here’s a sample of the benefits of better enterprise reporting for any given business:

Point to ROI for stakeholders without second-guessing

Proving social media ROI is consistently one of the top challenges of marketers year after year. That’s because some stakeholders are still skeptical of its value. That’s all the more reason to present hard numbers in the context of results and KPIs. In-depth social media analytics go hand in hand with enterprise reporting as you present more than surface-level business impact.

Make company-wide decisions (and predictions) with more confidence

Brands are spoiled for choice when it comes to potential social media campaigns. Content marketing. Social ads. ABM. The list goes on. Understanding which platforms, processes and tactics produce real results means digging into the data. Doing so can help you prioritize and make predictions with better accuracy.

Break down silos and build toward unified company goals

Enterprise reporting encourages you to keep a pulse on the numbers that matter not to you but to other teams. Likewise, you can focus on the tactics that align directly with timely objectives. Data silos are a universal challenge for enterprise companies. The bigger your company, the bigger your silos. These silos result in misinterpreted reports, lost productivity and wasted time.  On the flip side, breaking down silos via company-wide reporting encourages cross-team collaboration. This can also reduce the burden of decision-making on your marketing team.

How to create an effective enterprise report in 7 easy steps

Now that we know how enterprise reporting helps businesses in theory, let’s look at it in practice. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of what goes into a report that resonates with stakeholders.

1. Roll out reporting templates for faster collaboration

Enterprise social teams are constantly juggling reporting requests. For example, one department might want click attribution data. Maybe another department was context on an ad campaign’s engagement rate or reach. The ongoing and growing need for cross-departmental reports puts marketers in a tricky situation. At a glance, your options are:

• A. Create multiple, tailored reports for each team on demand
• B. Send a generic, one-size-fits-all report across departments

Of course, both options aren’t exactly ideal. Option A can quickly become a time-sink. Not to mention it takes away from your marketing efforts and strategy elsewhere.  Option B might be more time-efficient but leaves room for error. Data can get misread by stakeholders or (even worse) ignored altogether. That’s where templates can save the day. Creating a social media report template for each department should be your first priority. Doing so upfront saves countless hours in the long run. You’ll also encourage cross-team collaboration and find opportunities to delegate work. You can create and save templates DIY with tools like Google Docs, Sheets (or Excel) and Slides. Which one you use depends on your preference and presentation style. Better yet, consider a social media management solution like Sprout Social. Custom reports in Sprout meet the demands and depth of enterprise reporting. The Report Builder tool instantly aligns your social data and is a nice added bonus. Also, Sprout’s platform makes it a cinch to share reports across teams ASAP. This encourages a streamlined reporting process that delights your entire company.

2. Include an executive summary

Once your report leaves your outbox, there’s no telling where your data will end up. Going unread happens. Things get worse when reports get shared beyond who they were intended for. Your recipients may have meant well when sharing. However, this often creates follow-up questions and confusion. You might be asked to explain data you already explained in your original report. This is yet another waste of time and energy. That’s why sharing reports with context is so important. Data on its own doesn’t mean much.  For example, an uptick in brand mentions could mean people are loving your service. But it also could mean people are making complaints. To make sure your data is always framed with the big picture in mind, include an executive summary. Executive summaries provide a brief overview of report findings. This allows you to control your data narrative.

Features in Sprout like text elements available in our custom reports are huge here. You can use them to add in context that showcases the full ROI of social. This includes benchmarks, data from Google Analytics and more. These details make reports more valuable by being accessible and actionable. Anyone seeing it can understand it without having to interpret the metrics themselves.

3. Create a data glossary

Let’s assume your team is fully aligned on your KPIs and business impact. You know what your progress means and how it all ladders up into business goals. However, anyone beyond the marketing department doesn’t live and breathe social metrics. They may understand how an engagement differs from a click. However, they don’t know how that connects back to department and company goals. With a data glossary, you can attach a quick recap of the “why” behind your goals with every report that you send. A formal data glossary is a collection of all the terms that define your data across systems. These are often large undertakings led by an IT department but they don’t have to be. A simpler, marketing-specific version can be created quickly and with minimal effort. Making it happen starts by compiling information. This starts when you first set your quarterly or yearly objectives and KPIs. Sort that in a table format with a quick recap of each KPI and how it supports a business or marketing objective. This provides external stakeholders with all everything they need to contextualize your reports. Here’s an example of what an entry could look like:

Impressions: A reach metric that tracks how many times a post or profile has been seen. Our quarterly and annual impressions goals ladder up to the marketing department’s brand awareness goal.

You can also use your data glossary as a document hub that links out to:

• Benchmark data
• More in-depth social media KPI explainers
• Strategy documents to encourage interested parties to learn more about team initiatives.

4. Align your reporting with your business goals and needs

This might seem like a no-brainer but it’s easier said than done. Especially since social media given how many areas of your business it touches.  To assess what should go into your reports, start by considering big-picture business goals. For example, increasing MRR or increasing lead quality. Then, look at more granular data points that tie into them. You can likewise break your reporting down by different types of KPIs such as:

• Strategic KPIs related to ROI, profits and revenue
• Operational KPIs related to time (or time spent) on certain tasks and initiatives
• Functional KPIs related to your department and its performance

Not every metric you track is going to tie directly to a business goal. That’s okay! However, your reports should ideally prioritize metrics that matter most to your stakeholders. Extra information can lead to lost interest and likewise distract from your wins.

5. Create data visualizations that provide actionable insights

Anything you can do to make your reports understandable ASAP is a plus. That’s where data visualization comes in. For example, you can translate numbers in reports into formats including:

• Area charts
• Line charts
• Bar charts
• Pie charts
• Scatter plots
• Histograms
• Heat maps

Food for thought: nearly two-thirds of people consider themselves to be visual learners. On that note, nobody wants to sift through a laundry list of numbers even with context. With data visualization, your reports instantly become:

• Easy to understand at a glance
• More shareable
• Actionable

Sprout Social automatically generates visual reports for your social media performance. You can generate visuals for internal reports including case performance and team reports. You also can easily track follower growth rate, measure post performance and compare yourself against the competition through these visual reports.

6. Leverage an enterprise reporting tool

Given the wealth of social data to go through, tracking number by number DIY isn’t realistic. In the case of enterprise brands, measuring customer interactions and engagement metrics alone across multiple channels is a massive time-sink. This highlights the value of an enterprise social media tool like Sprout Social.  Sprout leverages the rise of AI with social listening tools to gain business-critical learnings from millions of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback. This empowers you to upgrade your strategy and guide future action. Automated engagement tools both gather and analyze the data so you can focus on action and gather your data accordingly.

7. Share reports proactively

Social media has transformed how businesses operate and deliver value to their customers. Firsthand insights into consumer needs, trends and competitive intelligence are massive. This is especially for the enterprise. The problem? Only 8% of marketers say social data is treated like an organization-wide business intelligence resource. As the old saying goes: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Many businesses aren’t leveraging social data to the fullest because they don’t know what it can do. Leading with social data starts with you. Create teaching moments illustrating the value of social media and its business impact. Proactively sharing social data lay the groundwork for future strategic initiatives. Especially when shown to people that didn’t ask for it. All the ‘while maintaining control over where your data goes and how it is shared. On top of that, it’s as easy as a quick CC or a scheduled PDF send.

How to leverage social media data in your enterprise reporting

Again, you’re probably already sitting on a mountain of social media. That’s not a bad problem to have! Especially for the sake of building out comprehensive enterprise reports. To wrap things up, we’ll provide some examples of opportunities to translate your numbers into action.

Gain a competitive advantage through social insights

• Messaging: Understand which values (think: affordability vs. ease-of-use vs. ethics) matter most to your audience, how your messaging compares to your competitors, which types of messages and pieces of content result in the highest (or most valuable) interactions

• Sentiment: What thoughts or feelings are associated with your brand based on conversations about your brand (this includes specific phrases, reviews and comparisons between your brand and competitors)

• Content types: Which social assets actually move the needle, what do they have in common in terms of format (think: photos versus photos) or goal (think: customer education vs. offers vs. community-building)

Get a better understanding of your target audience

• Pain points: Detect common challenges and pain points based on conversations, comments and feedback on social media (both publicly and within DMs)

• Favorite products: Uncover which products your audience is talking about or inquiring about the most, understand which specific features or details they gravitate toward

• Sources of engagement: Which pieces of content drive the most interactions and meaningful social media leads across your platforms (think: IG vs. TikTok)

Gather quick insights for better data-driven decision making

• What to publish: Content formats based on engagement rate, reach and interactions

• Where to publish: Which platforms earn the most interactions or generate the most leads from social media

• When to publish: Understand your brand’s ideal publishing frequency on each platform to maximize your time and productivity

Is your brand equipped with enterprise reporting?

The role of social media in business intelligence can’t be overstated.  Now’s the time to break down enterprise silos and start maximizing your data. If you’re already tracking it at scale, translating your data into action should be your next step. That’s where Sprout Social’s enterprise features can save the day. If you haven’t already, check out Sprout’s suite of tools to help you share reports quickly and effectively.

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