Other Platforms Archives | Sprout Social

SMS marketing 101: What is SMS Marketing (+ examples)

Dorcas Adisa — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 19:09:12 +0000

Everyone reading this has something in common: you all own mobile phones. So do all your prospective and current customers. With over 6.71 billion people already using mobile phones, there’s no doubt this is one of the best ways to spread the word about your business. SMS marketing is here to stay, and with a few insights, you’ll discover how to use this to improve your digital marketing efforts.

In this article, we’ll discuss SMS marketing, including the types, benefits, best practices to follow and examples of marketing strategies that will take you ahead of your competitors.

What is SMS marketing?
Types of SMS text marketing campaigns
Benefits of SMS marketing
6 SMS marketing best practices to follow
SMS marketing strategies with examples
SMS marketing software to try
Take advantage of SMS marketing

What is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing (or text marketing) is a form of mobile marketing that allows businesses to send text messages to customers and prospects. This involves using a short message service (SMS) to send messages like promotional offers, discounts, appointment reminders and shipping notifications.

SMS marketing has many advantages over other marketing strategies, such as email marketing. One advantage to SMS marketing is a 98% average open rate, which is 5x that of email (20%), meaning there’s a higher chance your audience will see your text message than your email. SMS marketing also boasts a 9.18% click-through rate compared to email’s 2.5%.

SMS marketing is a great way to reach your target audience with a concise and clear message. You can use it to inform your customers about a weekend sale or promotion and advertise your business with a higher chance of receipt and action.

Types of SMS text marketing campaigns

There are many types of SMS marketing campaigns, from simple to complex. Here are three of the most effective forms:

1. Promotional SMS marketing campaigns

Promotional SMS marketing campaigns are designed to generate interest in a product or service. They can include discounts, coupons and other special offers. Everyone loves an incentive, and freebies have always been a great way to grab attention and drive more people to your store. This works even better with a compelling call to action (CTA).

Take a look at this SMS marketing example from Jenni Kayne, a fashion brand featuring a personalized coupon code and a direct link to their shop page.

2. Transactional SMS marketing campaigns

Transactional SMS marketing messages are sent in response to an event or action. These campaigns offer time-sensitive information to the customer, such as appointment reminders, shipping notifications, password resets, or product releases. Because these messages are timely and relevant, they have a high open rate and can effectively drive conversions.

An example of a transactional SMS campaign is an order confirmation from an e-commerce purchase. Here’s an example from Baking Steel that includes order confirmation, tracking information and an unsubscribe option.

3. Conversational SMS marketing campaigns

The major difference between conversational SMS marketing and other conventional SMS marketing methods is that it involves text responses as prompts. This two-way SMS marketing campaign mimics human conversations, with automated back-and-forth responses between your brand and the customer.

Conversational SMS blends natural language processing for lifelike digital chats, combining human agents and automated texts for effective customer engagement and retention.

Benefits of SMS marketing

With 7.3 billion people estimated to have smartphones by 2026, wouldn’t you rather use this to reach your target audience? Here are five benefits of SMS marketing:

1. Reach customers faster

If you have time-sensitive information to share, SMS is the right medium, as 95% of text messages are opened within three minutes of receipt. For example, if you’re running a limited-time offer, you can use SMS to inform your customers.

2. Increase response rates

Unlike other marketing channels, SMS allows you to reach customers directly on their mobile devices, and customers are 134% more likely to respond to an SMS than an email. Because text messages have a much higher response rate, they can keep your customers engaged with your SMS marketing and open opportunities for further offers.

3. Complement other marketing channels

While an SMS marketing strategy is strong on its own, it can also be used to enhance other marketing channels. For example, you could use SMS to promote a contest or sale on social media or increase your email newsletter subscribers. You could also use SMS to remind customers of an upcoming event or webinar to increase signups.

4. Build customer loyalty

SMS marketing can help you build customer loyalty by sending personalized messages and offers to individuals. This is a great way to make your customers feel valued and increase their chances of returning to your business.

5. Increase revenue

SMS marketing platforms can boost revenue by driving traffic to your store or website. You can use SMS messages to promote special sales and events and remind customers to complete their cart purchases. This mobile commerce approach takes advantage of the accessible nature of texts and seamlessly integrates into your brand’s marketing efforts.

6 SMS marketing best practices to follow

Now that we’ve gone over how to do SMS marketing for your business, let’s look at some best practices to get the most out of your campaigns.

1. Only send texts to those who opted in

Only send texts to those who have permitted you to do so. The best way to do this is to include an opt-in form on your website or other online channels.

Even if you have an opt-in, it’s a good idea to send an initial text thanking a new subscriber and asking them to confirm opt-in with a simple reply of “Yes” or “No.” A great example of this is the opt-in message from Flexispot, which states their business name, to alert who is texting before confirming subscriptions to marketing and promotional messages.

2. Make it easy for customers to opt-out

Make it easy for customers to stop receiving your texts by including an unsubscribe option. This could be as simple as replying “STOP” or “Unsubscribe” to the text. Opting out of your SMS marketing campaign.

3. Identify your brand early

Keep your messages concise. When you have your target audience’s phone number, introduce your brand immediately. This makes recipients more receptive to your message from an unknown number. Start with your brand name, followed by an irresistible offer within the second sentence. Instant brand recognition and brevity are key.

4. Keep messages short and to the point

For SMS marketing success, keep it within the 160-character limit. Eliminate unnecessary content to boost message open rates and clicks. An effective framework for SMS campaigns is usually in this format:

company name
customer name
enticing offer or brand promotion
conditions for opting in
a strong call-to-action, and
an opt-out option

Providing opt-out options makes consumers feel more relaxed since this is presented as a choice, not a requirement. If needed, include a shortened link for additional information.

5. Create a consistent SMS marketing strategy

As with any type of marketing effort, consistency matters. Find the right balance of messages you can send within a reasonable timeline. Don’t overwhelm subscribers with too many messages, but don’t go silent either. Striking this balance keeps your brand relevant without becoming a nuisance.

6. Adhere to privacy laws and regulations

Finally, ensure you comply with Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) privacy laws and regulations for SMS marketing. Obtain express written consent, always include your business name, provide clear terms and conditions, offer an opt-out option during business hours, and respect consumer privacy and rights. Adhering to these regulations saves you from legal issues and protects consumer privacy.

SMS marketing strategies (with examples)

Ready to ramp up your SMS marketing? Here are some creative SMS marketing strategies, along with examples, to get you started:

1. Send welcome messages to new subscribers

Once a customer subscribes to your SMS marketing campaign, send them a welcome message. This will ensure they know they’re subscribed and allow you to engage with them immediately. Plus, it sets the tone for future interactions.

Welcome messages don’t have to be long or complex. A simple “Thank you for subscribing!” will do. You could even include a coupon code or special offer to sweeten the deal.

2. Announce new product releases

Another smart use of SMS advertising is to announce new product releases. Share the excitement with your subscribers to create buzz and re-engage customers who haven’t shopped with you in a while.

You can also drive traffic to your store or website by including a link in your SMS campaign to entice people to check out your latest offering. For example, texting “Check out our new arrivals” with a direct link to your website can boost traffic and give people a reason to visit your site.

3. Follow up on abandoned shopping carts

The average cart abandonment rate for e-commerce businesses is 70.19%. That’s a lot of potential revenue that’s left on the table. SMS marketing can help you recover some of that lost revenue by sending abandoned cart messages to customers who have left items in their online shopping carts.

4. Inform customers when products are back in stock

As a consumer ourselves, it’s frustrating when desired items are out of stock. SMS marketing offers a solution to notify customers when products are back in stock, ensuring they don’t miss out on a restock opportunity. You can also alert customers about similar or related products that may go on sale.

5. Collect customer feedback

Customer feedback is essential for business improvement. SMS surveys collect customer feedback quickly and easily. You can create a short survey using tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey and send the link via SMS. Or, ask customers to reply with a rating (from one to five) and follow up with those who give a low rating to uncover areas for improvement.

6. Provide text-based customer service

You can use text messages to provide customer service. This is especially useful for businesses with a mobile workforce, like plumbers or delivery drivers.
If a customer needs to get in touch with someone, they can simply send a text rather than making a phone call. This can save the customer time, and it can also be less disruptive for the business.

Here’s an SMS marketing example from U-Haul, which offers customers the opportunity to check in and out via text:

7. Ask for production or service reviews

Many companies use SMS marketing services to gather reviews about their service or staff. You’ve probably seen this from companies like Uber, asking customers to rate drivers after their ride to get feedback on their experience and identify improvement areas.

According to the Sprout Social Index™, 83% of consumers recommend a brand they follow on social media to friends and family. Consider displaying these reviews on your website, social media pages, and SMS marketing messages.

8. Promote online and in-person events

Promoting your upcoming events through SMS marketing can get people excited and engaged. Your SMS event reminders can include:

Date, time and location of your event
A CTA to encourage people to buy tickets or sign up
A link to your website or event page
Details about what attendees can expect
Hashtags to promote on social media
Emojis to increase engagement

If you have a limited number of spots available, be sure to include an RSVP link in your text so subscribers can reserve their spots right away.

9. Start a VIP program

A VIP program encourages loyalty among your customers and subscribers. People love to feel like they’re part of an exclusive group, so make them feel special by offering VIP-only discounts, early access to sales and new products and other benefits.

To promote your VIP program, include a signup link in your SMS messages when customers purchase a product. You can also promote your VIP program on social media, your website or in-store. Use the right SMS marketing service to send relevant messages to different groups within your target audience and increase your conversion rate.

SMS marketing software to try

Rather than spend more time and effort on traditional SMS marketing methods, leverage SMS marketing software to streamline your strategy for greater success. Here are some standout options:

1. Attentive

With an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, Attentive ranks high as an effective SMS marketing software for sending personalized messages to your brand. You can integrate this with your email subscriber list and provide targeted messages for diverse groups.

2. SlickText

Integrate SlickText seamlessly with your brand’s existing software using its global API platform to get the best SMS marketing experience. Overall, this SMS marketing software features core features like text message scheduling, two-way text messaging, analytics and tracking reports for monitoring user engagement.

3. Klaviyo

Say hello to an omnichannel platform with automation and advanced segmentation capabilities. Klaviyo contains specific features that allow you to target specific consumers based on preferences and behavior. You can leverage this to increase conversions, especially with other marketing channels.

4. Birdeye

You don’t have to be technically inclined to use Birdeye. An amazing feature that makes Birdeye stand out is its easy integration with social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. This means you can easily incorporate a visual aspect into your SMS marketing campaign and spread your success across multiple platforms.

Take advantage of SMS marketing

SMS marketing can help you reach your target audience and increase engagement. By marketing to your customers where they are most active, you have a better chance of keeping their attention.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of SMS strategies at the start. Some customers may prefer discounts or deals, while others may be looking for customer service support through order confirmation or shipping updates. By incorporating SMS marketing into your overall marketing efforts, you can further refine and define your social media marketing strategy.

The post SMS marketing 101: What is SMS Marketing (+ examples) appeared first on Sprout Social.

The Rise and Fall Of New Platforms: What Threads Has Taught Us About Emerging Social Media

Cat Anderson — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 15:54:39 +0000

Threads burst onto the scene this summer and quickly became the fastest-growing social media platform of all time with 100+ million users in one week. As the heat of its entrance has died down, what does this new platform mean for your brand and social strategy? What have we learnt about Threads, where does it fit in in the social media sphere, and well, is it too late to be an early adopter?

As social media teams across the world figure out strategies to not only incorporate Threads but also excel at it, this webinar will examine what we’ve learnt so far and explore thoughts on what we think is in store.

Hear insights from social media consultant and industry analyst, Matt Navarra, and Senior Social Media Manager from financial favourite and industry disrupter, Monzo.

You will learn:

The current state of Threads and how early adopter brands leverage its capabilities
How businesses can use Threads for community building, customer care and more
Key distinctions and differentiations between Threads strategy vs. other social channels
Predictions for 2024 and beyond

Your speakers:

The post The Rise and Fall Of New Platforms: What Threads Has Taught Us About Emerging Social Media appeared first on Sprout Social.

Why brands transition from Social Studio to Sprout Social

Ronnie Gomez — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 16:21:06 +0000

On the hunt for a Salesforce Social Studio replacement? You’ve come to the right place.

Sprout Social is Salesforce’s preferred social media management solution. Since announcing our global partnership, we’ve been developing new tools to help Salesforce customers manage their full social media presence while maintaining a 360-degree view of their customer.

With Sprout, you get an intuitive, straightforward platform designed to help you deliver exceptional experiences at every touchpoint. Pair that with a commitment to excellent customer service and pre-built integrations with the tools you love, and you’ll see it’s the clear choice.

In this article, we explore the key reasons businesses are opting for Sprout as their go-to Social Studio replacement. Plus, we’re sharing stories from brands that are driving smarter, faster business impact after making the switch to Sprout.

What is Salesforce Social Studio?

Salesforce Social Studio is a social media management and listening tool that provides basic functionalities for businesses to manage their social media presence. Users can schedule and track posts across various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest.

Source: Salesforce Ben

Social Studio was built through a series of acquisitions and has been offered as a Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution since its launch in 2014. Noteworthy features include:

Publish, where users can draft, publish and promote content to social profiles across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Pinterest. Like Sprout, Social Studio offers social media approval tools that support workflows for approving or rejecting posts before publishing.
Engage, where users can monitor conversations and respond to customer questions, comments and mentions in real time. The Engage interface is organized into columns that provide consolidated social media activity streams based on customizable filtering criteria. If you’re a Sprout customer, you might compare these to Custom Views in the Smart Inbox.
Analyze, which enables users to track their progress toward social media goals through reporting and analytics features. Social Studio’s listening tool (called Workbenches) is offered as a part of Analyze.

Social Studio replacement success stories

We get it. No one jumps out of bed and thinks, “I can’t wait to implement a brand new tool today!” Identifying and evaluating software options can be a lot of work, but it’s essential to your team’s ongoing success.

When you partner with Sprout, you get access to a team that has successfully migrated over 500 Salesforce Social Studio customers. We know how to dig into the unique complexities of your business, helping you create and implement workflows that support an enhanced 360-degree view of your customer. But don’t just take our word for it. Here are two brands that have accelerated social’s impact on their business by switching to Sprout Social.

Casey’s

Casey’s—a midwestern and southern US staple for gas, food and more—has a diehard fan base both online and off. To meet the needs of their thriving online community, their social team made the switch from using Social Studio to Sprout Social. The results are just as delicious as the snacks they sell in stores.

By using Sprout’s integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, Casey’s team has improved their response time to guests, reducing it by 90%. The integration has provided a centralized way to support customers across social networks, optimizing their experience through intelligent, automated case creation and routing.

For the first time in about five years, our Guest Relations Team reported that they didn’t have a backlog of messages to respond to. Sprout’s Service Cloud integration is a big reason for that.
Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager, Casey's

This increased visibility has fostered a new level of collaboration between Casey’s social and Guest Relations teams. Previously, it took around three days for either team to respond to guests online because it was too difficult to know exactly which messages were being handled and by whom.

With Sprout, Casey’s social and Guest Relations teams were able to increase their communication ten-fold. Now, both teams rely on the real-time capabilities of Sprout Social to ensure they never miss a beat in delivering on outstanding customer care.

Hudl

Jessie Koenig, Revenue Systems Administrator at Hudl, is no stranger to complicated tech stack integrations. Luckily, connecting Sprout to Hudl’s Salesforce instance was an easy win.

“[Sprout] was very powerful right out of the box. Many vendors say their products integrate with Salesforce, but it requires an extremely heavy lift from multiple engineers to create a custom integration. Sprout’s integration with Salesforce was quite literally plug-and-play, which is exactly what we were looking for.”

Hudl helps over 200,000 teams across more than 40 sports analyze and refine their game play through video analysis technology. When a question or issue prevents an athlete from being able to make a game-changing move, they reach out to @HudlSupport on Twitter.

“Our customer support team may need to field between 1,000 and 2,000 support requests per day—primarily by phone, email or Twitter,” says Koenig.

My tip for anyone transitioning from Social Studio to Sprout Social is to get ready for some great data coming into Salesforce. Your cases are going to flow through your system much better, too.
Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator, Hudl

After transitioning from Salesforce Social Studio to Sprout, the Hudl team was able to use out-of-the-box features and custom tools to streamline workflows and improve customer outcomes. Best of all, their Salesforce CRM system now contains a true 360-degree view of the customer enriched with social data from Sprout.

Why is Sprout the best alternative for Salesforce Social Studio?

Sprout Social is the clear choice for those in search of a Social Studio replacement. We help brands build a single view of the customer through pre-built integrations with the Salesforce solutions that are integral to your business. That includes Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Tableau and Slack.

Sprout’s intuitive social media management tools are built on a single code base with enterprise-level security. Our customers rave about its ease of use and time to value. If that’s not enough, here are four more reasons companies choose Sprout as their Social Studio replacement.

Sprout moves at the speed of social

The world of social media is fast-paced, unpredictable and enormous. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses need a social media management tool that prioritizes continuous innovation.

Sprout invests heavily into research and development every year, ensuring customers get constant innovation from our platform.

Today, we’re building even more power into our platform by combining Sprout’s proprietary machine learning and deep automation capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT model. In addition, our recent acquisition of Repustate adds 15 years of proven success in sentiment and textual analysis. Pair that with smart recommendations from AI Assist and other automation tools, and you get even faster time to value.

Sprout offers a complete social media management toolkit

Maximizing your team’s potential means investing in a platform that can match their speed, agility and skill. With Sprout, they get to work with tools thoughtfully designed to drive business results through social.

Sprout is a social team favorite for a reason. Our intuitive social media management tools have been recognized by G2’s Best Software Awards—which ranks software companies and products based on authentic, timely reviews—for seven consecutive years. In addition to our core tools, we also offer:

Scalable social listening: Sprout’s AI-powered social listening is intuitively designed and backed by robust functionality. On top of that, it doesn’t require manual setup or continuous support—you can hit the ground running with analysis-ready models that fit into your existing workflows.
An integrated employee advocacy solution: Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social empowers employees as brand advocates. With a connected platform designed for immediate adoption, you can amplify brand awareness and mitigate risks without spending more on advertising.
A free 30-day trial: You deserve a chance to try before you buy. Our free month-long trial gives your entire team an opportunity to see what work can be like with Sprout.

Sprout is committed to customer success

Every team has its own unique requirements and use cases for social media management software. When things aren’t working, they need support from reps who are just as social-obsessed as they are.

Sprout is all in on social, and all in on our customers’ success. Phone, email, video, self-serve—whatever your preferred medium is, we’re there. Plus, we get there faster. Our phone and chat support wait time is less than three minutes on average.

We also offer tailored onboarding, strategic education and guidance from Premier Success experts and Professional Services consultants. If self-paced learning is more your style, you can earn certifications, browse our learning portal, and join our community, the Arboretum, to sharpen your social expertise on your own time.

Sprout maintains enterprise-grade security practices

Social media governance is not a “one-and-done” activity. It requires constant risk assessment on behalf of not only your team, but your software vendors as well.

That’s why it’s so important to work with partners committed to conducting the ongoing security measures needed to prevent costly mishaps. At Sprout Social, enterprise-grade security practices are baked into our processes and product, with tools like:

Multi-factor authentication: Use apps like Google Authenticator and others to implement the Time-based One-time Password Algorithm (TOTP) or HMAC-based One-time Password Algorithm (HOTP) for generating passcodes.
Single sign-on (SSO): Leverage SSO authentication service to give employees one set of login credentials to access multiple applications.
Access permissions: Restrict access to profiles, features, actions and other data by applying granular controls to users on their account.
Global publishing pause: Temporarily disable any scheduled or queued messages in times of crisis from our web or mobile applications.

Find your Social Studio replacement

To succeed on the most dynamic channel in marketing, you need a social media management partner that is laser-focused on providing your team with the tools they need.

Sprout is the ideal Social Studio alternative. We’re on a journey to empower companies to create a 360-degree view of their customers through our global Salesforce partnership. Let Sprout be at the forefront of your social strategy, so you can be at the forefront of your industry.

Transform your business with Sprout and Salesforce

The post Why brands transition from Social Studio to Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

How the Sprout Social Salesforce integration strengthens your team

Tim Clarke — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 14:58:11 +0000

There’s a reason more and more companies are linking their CRMs with social media management tools like Sprout Social: Optimizing your customer experience should be at the forefront of your social media strategy.

Through a global partnership with Salesforce launched in 2022, Sprout and Salesforce are ushering in a new era of social customer care. The Sprout Social Salesforce integration empowers your brand to deliver world-class social customer care—all without interrupting your team’s workflow.

The Service Cloud integration ensures Salesforce customers can manage all of their social customer care requests directly from within Service Cloud while enriching customer CRM profiles with social data to provide a holistic view of customer interactions.

Want to speed up internal collaboration and uncover valuable customer insights at the same time? Our Salesforce integration empowers your social, sales, marketing and support teams alike.

In this guide, we’ll break down exactly how the Sprout Social Salesforce integration works. We’ll also highlight how the integration streamlines tasks across your entire business and makes it easier to prove the effectiveness of your strategies.

Why you need to integrate your CRM with social media ASAP

The importance of social media integrations with your business’ tech stack can’t be overstated. And your CRM platform should be a top priority.

This is especially true as customers rely on social media as a research tool, support channel and place to sound off about brands.

Looking at the top challenges of B2B marketers, the growing need for social media CRM integrations is clear. These challenges include:

Engaging buyers at the right time in the right channel (57%)
Giving the sales team relevant content to engage target buyers (23%)
Dealing with internal data silos and inefficiencies (17%)

The Sprout Social Salesforce integration addresses all of the above.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s dive into some of the key upsides of linking your CRM with your social presence.

Create a 360-degree view of your customer

Empower your agents with a complete customer 360 view before responding. Sprout Social enriches your Salesforce customer CRM data with social data to provide a comprehensive view. With this integration, agents can engage in real time with the right context.

Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector takes it a step further by combining social data in an omnichannel view, customized with the exact visuals and metric combinations companies need. This delivers rich data options and visualizations that give users a complete view of their customers, without requiring time-consuming work.

With a more complete picture of your customer, you can create meaningful customer journeys and segment audiences based on their social interactions with your brand. Leverage the robust social data shared with Salesforce to ensure you’re delivering personalized messages that convert contacts to lifelong customers.

Monitor make-or-break moments in the buyer’s journey

CRMs help businesses assist leads and customers on the path to purchase.

And social media is where so many crucial moments happen during that journey.

This rings true for B2B and B2C alike. Let’s assume that the typical B2B buyer’s journey is around eight months. Social interactions are a given for folks doing their homework on a product.

Meanwhile, recent research from TikTok describes consumer behavior as an “infinite loop” in B2C. The modern path to purchase is far from linear when people are bouncing between so many channels.

As customers bounce between platforms and content, social media serves as a place to make valuable touchpoints along the way. This includes answering questions and publishing educational content to nurture leads.

The same rules apply to existing customers. Data from The Sprout Social Index™ 2021 notes the majority of people that follow a brand on social intend to buy from them (or buy again).

Earn (and track) more social sales

The growth of social selling speaks for itself.

Do activities such as customer care and content marketing contribute big-time to closing and retaining leads? Of course.

Still, they’re difficult to track without a CRM.

With integrations like those between Sprout Social and Salesforce, it’s so much easier to attribute sales from social. The ability to quickly answer questions and handoff cases between social, sales and support likewise makes it easier to respond to people quickly.

Gather meaningful customer insights you might otherwise miss

The more info you have about your customers, the better.

Consolidating touchpoints between social media and your CRM gives you a more in-depth understanding of your audience. And by tapping into Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector, your team can access all consumer data in one place to get a birds-eye view of how social media fits into the larger picture.

Fact: 90% of marketers say data from social enables them to differentiate their brands in the market and stand out from their peers. Also, consider how many people use social media as a place to sound off about brands.

These conversations and activities provide insights for sales and support, including:

Sales objections
Pain points and challenges
Wants and needs
Competitor advantages (and disadvantages)

With all of the above on hand, your team can approach leads and customers with a much-needed sense of confidence.

Reimagine the role of social in your business

A powerful, all-in-one social media management platform

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How does Salesforce integrate with Sprout Social?

Here’s a quick snapshot of the Sprout Social Salesforce integration and what you can do with it:

Create Salesforce contacts, leads and cases directly in Sprout. This means you can route social customers to support and sales without leaving Sprout or Salesforce.
Paint a complete picture of your CRM contacts with information and conversations via social media.
Tie your social presence to actual business results with analytics and reporting.
Personalize audience segments and journeys in Marketing Cloud based on your social data.

Respond directly within Service Cloud where agents work, reducing the need for multiple tools wrapped in a layer of governance and security.

As an added bonus, our Salesforce integration is available on all Sprout plans. Features and requirements below:

Requirements: Salesforce account
Data types: messages, contacts, tickets
Key functionality: create leads, edit contact information, create cases, edit cases, auto-sync

What entities are available with the Sprout Social Salesforce integration?

The Salesforce social media integration with Sprout Social allows the creation and editing of these entities directly within Sprout’s dashboard:

Leads: Kick off the sales process by identifying potential customers through questions, comments and other social media interactions.
Cases: Route customer issues or concerns posted on social to your support team without leaving the platform.
Contacts: Beyond customers, you can keep track of social interactions with contacts such as company partners.

To learn more, check out this detailed breakdown.

Sprout + Tableau + Salesforce

We understand there are times when you need to take social data outside of Sprout to combine with other data streams (including customer care and other marketing data), and to further customize it based on your company’s own internal preferences.

With Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector, you can combine the power of social data with other business channels. The tool enables you to analyze data, create custom metrics and merge different data sources.

This seamless and customized view gives you a consolidated source of truth for wider business insights and performance.

The integration:

Consolidates wider business updates
Builds your perfect dashboard
Accesses data without the dev network

For Salesforce users, this ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers.

4 key benefits of using the Sprout Social Salesforce integration

To wrap things up, let’s look at some of the specific benefits of using a Salesforce social media integration like Sprout.

1. Provide better customer care

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, there are two specific actions brands can take to earn consumer trust over a competitor:

Respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner.
Demonstrate an understanding of customer needs.

Our Salesforce integration can help you in both departments.

Again, logging social activity means a more comprehensive understanding of your customers’ wants and needs. Not having to bounce between your CRM and social tools is a huge time-saver. In turn, you speed up your response time.

Not only that, our intelligent case routing feature improves agent productivity and optimizes the customer experience through automated case creation and routing. Ensuring that inbound messages reach the right agent speedily—right inside of Salesforce.

The end result: Responding to customers faster and coming up with better solutions to meet their needs. Doing so is a recipe for long-term loyalty and retention.

2. Align your marketing, sales and support teams

Consider that 36% of marketers say they struggle with cross-team collaboration.

When marketing, sales and support are aligned, each team is empowered to do their best work. There’s so much room for error if you only log your customers’ social interactions sometimes.

Think about it. If marketing or sales leave out key customer details in your CRM, your support team is left in the dark. On the flip side, marketing should be aware of sales objections and concerns to better speak to customers’ desires.

Here are some specific ways that Sprout’s Salesforce integration can help:

Save time by eliminating needless back-and-forth between vendors, managers and social managers.
Swiftly route cases to avoid bouncing between tools.
Provide each team the context they need to serve your customers.

3. Boost the value behind your marketing content

Learning what makes customers bounce or stick around is invaluable for marketers.

Tracking these touchpoints can lead to the answers you need to create more impactful content, meaningful marketing messaging and personalized customer journeys. This includes:

Blog posts
Social posts (think: how-tos, tutorials and content you share to nurture customers)
Reports, white papers and other lead magnets
Webinars

For example, marketers might learn that high price points are the most common sales objection among lost leads. This information encourages the marketing side to reframe their messaging and how they speak to their audience.

4. More meaningful attribution via analytics

Perhaps most importantly, social integration with your CRM highlights the ROI of your team’s efforts.

This is an ongoing struggle for marketers, in particular. Although social media is a must-have for businesses, determining its business impact can be tricky.

That’s where Sprout comes in. Through our marketing and analytics features, brands can see how social engagements correspond with dollars and cents. Proving how these interactions contribute to revenue reinforces the value of social to stakeholders.

And with our reporting functionality in Salesforce, you can keep track of your full omnichannel experience, including seeing which channels (e.g. phone, email, social) and social channels (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter) cases are being created from.

Food for thought: Sales strategy is the number one use case for social data, especially as social has more impact on the bottom line. However, 43% of social teams still feel siloed.

This speaks to the importance of integrating social with your tech stack to advance the sophistication of your customer care.

When you need to aggregate all of your marketing, customer care and social data in one place, Sprout’s Tableau integration will help you best tell the story of your brand’s success on social and beyond.

Checkout this article to understand why is Sprout the best alternative for Salesforce Social Studio.

Ready to try the Sprout Social Salesforce Integration?

From customer insights to better service, the upsides of linking your social presence with your CRM are crystal clear.

Thankfully, getting up and running with the Sprout Social Salesforce integration can be done sooner rather than later. Our platform makes it a breeze to beef up your tech stack while bringing your team closer together.

If you haven’t already, we invite you to request a demo of our Service Cloud integration or get set up via the AppExchange.

Don’t forget to take a peek at our other business integrations to see how else Sprout can help you level up your company.

The post How the Sprout Social Salesforce integration strengthens your team appeared first on Sprout Social.

16 unexpected ways to use WhatsApp for business

Jessica Coleman — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 14:55:34 +0000

Conversational marketing is on the rise, driven largely by consumers’ increasing expectations for convenience and tailored digital experiences. In fact, 90% of global consumers say they’ll spend more with companies that personalize the service they offer.

Coupled with recent government- and self-imposed restrictions on in-person shopping, more brands than ever before are turning to WhatsApp and similar messaging platforms to interact with customers in meaningful ways.

Today, millions of brands are using WhatsApp Business to build personal connections with consumers at scale. In this article, we’ll establish the growing importance of WhatsApp across business functions (not just marketing), showcase the ways some brands are using the app and highlight a few innovative tips for making the most of the network.

The benefits of using WhatsApp for business
Inventive ways to use WhatsApp for business
7 WhatsApp Business account features to use
WhatsApp Business account vs. WhatsApp Business API
16 brands that demonstrate how to expertly use WhatsApp for business

The benefits of using WhatsApp for business

For brands that use WhatsApp to engage with customers, there are a number of clear benefits.

Expand your global reach. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging app worldwide, has upward of two billion active users across more than 180 countries. With a potential audience that large, it’s easy to engage with new prospects that may not yet be aware of all your business has to offer.
Improve the customer experience. Research from Zendesk found that leading companies offer customer support across twice as many channels as their peers. If you are looking to expand your opportunities to support customers, WhatsApp provides a seamless platform for doing so.
Enhance employee satisfaction. WhatsApp’s messaging capability can also be a win for your internal team as customer support personnel report that they are 50% more likely to want to engage with customers via messaging platforms versus more traditional methods because it affords them the freedom to multitask.
Increase profitability. When customer service is streamlined, operating expenses often shrink. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 40% of customer service will go from a major organizational expense to a significant profit driver as direct messaging streamlines sales pipelines.

Inventive ways to use WhatsApp for business

WhatsApp is more than just a place to answer one-off customer questions. Consider these ideas for integrating WhatsApp into your social media, sales or customer service strategies.

Optimize your profile: Use your WhatsApp business profile to share important information about your brand and provide answers to common customer questions.
Use digital catalogs: Create a digital catalog to help your customers discover your products or services.
Support customers: You can significantly reduce your reliance on call centers by outsourcing simple customer requests and queries to a WhatsApp-powered chatbot or digital assistant.
Share content via the Status feature: Use the Status feature to share content the same way you already do in your Facebook or Instagram Stories.
Develop creative marketing campaigns: Engage customers with an out-of-the-box marketing campaign.
Replicate core business processes: Identify key areas of your business that might be possible to replicate on WhatsApp.
Level up with ads: Use Facebook and Instagram ads that click to WhatsApp to initiate customer conversations that lead to sales.

7 WhatsApp Business account features to use

Once you create your WhatsApp Business profile, you’ll find a suite of tools you can use to scale your 1:1 messaging strategy on the platform. Here are seven that can help you make the most out of your presence on WhatsApp:

1. Quick replies

Quick replies are a great way to take some of the work out of addressing those frequently asked questions, like “when are you open?” or “is this in stock?”.

To set one up, all you have to do is click Quick Replies under the Business Tools section of WhatsApp. From there, you can create up to 50 unique replies that you can access via keyboard shortcuts.

A word to the wise: Start with 5-10 Quick Replies and add more as needed. That will make your new shortcuts easier to remember and use when talking to customers.

2. Automatic away messages

Adding 1:1 messaging to your strategy doesn’t mean you need to be available 24/7. You can use away messages to set appropriate expectations with your customers and to give yourself a break as needed.

Away messages can be triggered by a few different scenarios, including:

When a customer messages you outside of business hours
During specific periods, like holidays or extended closures
When receiving high volumes of inbound messages

When you set up an away message, be sure to clearly state when a customer can expect to hear back from you. Remove as much ambiguity from the situation as possible for an improved customer experience.

3. Contact and message Labels

You can use labels to organize inbound messages and contacts on WhatsApp, similarly to how you might use labels to organize your email inbox.

When it comes to creating a label strategy, it’s a choose your own adventure game. However, if you want to keep your social media response times low, we recommend that you create a label specifically for unresolved issues. This will help keep them top of mind as you work to find the answer to a customer’s question.

4. Catalogs and collections

Use your WhatsApp Business account to drive social commerce sales by creating an inventory catalog within the app. Aside from the product title, all additional fields—price, description, website link, product code—are optional, so you can make your listing unique to your sales process.

You can also use collections to sort your catalog for easier browsing. For example, you can create a holiday-specific collection or one that features products currently on sale.

5. Catalog links

Once you create a catalog, you can share items in your catalog in conversations with customers. All you have to do is find the item you’d like to share and click Send link via WhatsApp Business.

Use this tool if a customer is asking about a specific item or to provide alternatives for items that have sold out. You can also use it to send loyal customers updates on items that have gone on sale.

6. Cart

While you can drive customers directly to your site using WhatsApp Business’s catalog feature, you can also create a more seamless checkout experience by encouraging them to complete their purchase in-app using the cart tool.

All you have to do is enable the Add to Cart feature within your catalog and your customers can handle the rest from there.

7. Broadcast lists

If a customer adds your business to their address book on WhatsApp, you can add them to a broadcast list. These lists help you send the same message to multiple customers at once, saving you a lot of time and effort.

Use this tool sparingly and with SMS marketing best practices in mind. If you use it too often, you risk alienating customers who appreciate your business enough to consider it a personal contact.

WhatsApp Business account vs. WhatsApp Business API

If you’ve been looking into setting up a WhatsApp Business account, you’ve probably also come across information on the WhatsApp Business API (also known as WhatsApp Business Platform).

Think of this as the next evolution of a WhatsApp Business account, designed for medium and large businesses to manage conversational marketing at a wider scale. The WhatsApp Business API provides access to the tools listed above, along with advanced marketing and customer care features, including:

Multi-agent access
Profile verification
Multimedia message templates
Message variables for personalization
Interactive messages

Of course, advanced tools come at an advanced price point. WhatsApp Business API also has a conversation-based pricing model whereas WhatsApp Business Accounts are free. Businesses using the WhatsApp Business API receive 1,000 free conversations per month, with monthly rates increasing depending on the number of user- and business-initiated messages sent within the billing period.

16 brands that demonstrate how to expertly use WhatsApp for business

Brands are using WhatsApp in a variety of ways that expand their customer-facing and internal capabilities. The following examples highlight use cases in customer service, financial services, marketing, human resources and pipeline growth.

Customer service

1. Vodafone, a German telecommunications company, has embraced WhatsApp for customer messaging, reaching more than 200,000 customers via this channel each month. Their artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, TOBi, recognizes more than 250 customer needs and will only pass requests over to employees if it encounters an issue it is not equipped to solve. More than half of these interactions result in a solution for the customer, removing the need for live customer service support in many cases.

2. Estée Lauder was the first major beauty brand to use WhatsApp to offer personalized skincare consultations for customers. Liv, an AI chatbot, was developed in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to replace over-the-counter consultations customers previously had in department stores. These digital conversations help customers understand how to use the company’s products and gather tips for maintaining an effective skincare regimen.

3. Nissan Saudi Arabia, looking to engage younger customers and reduce its reliance on call centers, began using WhatsApp to handle inquiries and nurture sales. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, people under 30 years old make up nearly three-fourths of the population. To reach that market, Nissan developed an automated chatbot powered by WhatsApp that could answer simple customer questions without the need to transfer them to the call center. After the launch of the chatbot, leads increased 390% and inbound calls were reduced by 33%.

Financial services

4. One of Spain’s leading insurance providers, Mutua Madrileña, offers personalized messaging for customers via WhatsApp on more than 1,000 topics. In the first six months of using this new channel for customer support, the company had received nearly half a million messages, making up 23% of digital customer inquiries. In late 2020, the brand became the first insurer in the country to allow customers to submit automobile accident claims via their WhatsApp virtual assistant, resulting in a process that is now 30% faster.

5. WhatsApp banking is also a thing. Many banks, primarily in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are using the app to make banking simpler and more convenient for customers. India’s ICICI Bank and Pakistan’s HBL Bank both use the app to answer customer questions and to conduct basic transactions.

6. Mukuru, one of the largest money transfer providers in Africa, realized more than $1 million in reduced SMS costs after implementing customer service via WhatsApp. It also improved the reliability and security of wire transfers for the financially excluded communities it serves across the continent. With WhatsApp available, consumers can reduce their dependence on mobile banking apps that traditionally use more unpredictable unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) protocols that don’t require an internet connection. Since the introduction of WhatsApp, the brand’s customer satisfaction has jumped from 65% to 80%.

7. Tikkie, a Dutch peer-to-peer payment app (similar to Venmo or Zelle), created their own set of 11 stickers for their WhatsApp users. The stickers allowed customers a fun way of communicating with each other to thank someone for paying or to remind them to do so.

Marketing campaigns

8. Absolut Vodka, a Swedish spirits brand, used WhatsApp to publicize an in-person product launch event in Argentina. Customers were encouraged to message a chatbot doorman named Sven to try to convince “him” they deserved one of two available tickets. This campaign resulted in more than 1,000 messages from 600 individuals over three days.

9. Carrefour Group, a French-based big box store chain, uses WhatsApp to provide digital coupon catalogs to its client base. These offers were previously printed, but the company wanted to offset those costs and have better targeting capabilities based on customers’ locations and preferences. By inputting their zip code into a chatbot, customers can be directed to their nearest store and also receive tailored deals straight to their phone. According to Meta, 45% of users now engage with the digital catalog versus 10% who open the catalog via email.

10. The Brazilian arm of Hellmann’s, a mayonnaise brand, launched a campaign via WhatsApp to provide its users with on-demand cooking advice delivered by culinary professionals. The campaign, called WhatsCook, allowed customers to converse in real time with chefs to get detailed instruction, answers to their questions, or specific assistance for preparing their meals.

11. Adidas’ 100% Unfair Predator campaign, launched via WhatsApp, helped the brand engage with a core set of customers: footballers. Users were allowed to chat with Adidas to request a professional athlete join their local teams for a single game. For the lucky teams chosen, Adidas-sponsored players showed up in the company’s new Predator20 Mutator shoes.

Human resources

12. BASF Group, a German chemical production company, uses WhatsApp to engage potential recruits. Anilina, a digital career assistant in the form of a chatbot, helps to answer candidates’ questions quickly and on the spot. For more involved conversations, candidates can reach out to representatives Monday through Friday via WhatsApp chat.

13. Logistics company Deutsche Post DHL Group allows candidates to apply to open positions directly from WhatsApp, eliminating the need to fill out lengthy and cumbersome online forms. The company deployed the chatbot to reach their target candidates where they are via a more user-centric application process.

Pipeline growth

14. French newspaper Le Monde used WhatsApp’s status feature to target customers in French-speaking African countries. The company posts content to its status, which is viewable for 24 hours (similar to an Instagram Story), three to four times a day. About 20% of the brand’s follower base typically consumes this content, and over time, Le Monde Afrique has grown its WhatsApp followers by 10,000.

15. Triya, a Brazilian beachwear brand, uses WhatsApp to converse with its customers and also to send order information like receipts and tracking information. After doubling down on their presence on the app, the company 5Xed their annual sales.

16. Centaline Property, one of Hong Kong’s largest real estate brokerages, uses WhatsApp to qualify leads more quickly and increase their sales pipeline. The company integrated the network with its property recommendation engine to allow leads to be funneled to the appropriate agent, along with each customer’s information and communication history. The use of key WhatsApp features like List Messages and Reply Buttons help Centaline Property personalize their outreach, resulting in a 27% increase in sales conversions.

How will you use WhatsApp for business?

Conversational marketing is here to stay. The majority of customers expect it, and companies that strategically engage their audiences via channels like WhatsApp are better positioned to take advantage of the growth it makes possible.

If you’re looking for even more opportunities to use social messaging to build stronger customer relationships, this interview with Martha O’Byrne-O’Reilly, head of messaging developer partnerships at Meta, should give you some ideas.

The post 16 unexpected ways to use WhatsApp for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

Tumblr is back. What does that mean for marketers?

Katie Woods — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 16:00:22 +0000

If social media platforms were teens from an 80s comedy, Tumblr would be the weird–but cool–kid. You know the one. Seemingly unapproachable but actually super nice. They’re fixated on niche interests and the jokes they create. Plus, they have impeccable taste in music and clothes (just not the kind of music and clothes you think you could get away with). From 2007 to the late 2010s, Tumblr had a lock on the alternative social media market. They lost their way for a little, but it’s clear Tumblr is back with an understanding of what its audience wants and the willingness to execute on it.

welcome back 🙂https://t.co/ixbAwSlMkB pic.twitter.com/9sNyCMlsX4

— tumblr dot com the website and app (@tumblr) November 14, 2022

Tumblr returns

Tumblr still feels like a relic of a different time. The platform’s interface essentially hasn’t changed since the 2010s. But that’s exactly what people like about it. The reverse chronological feed is the anti-algorithm–you see exactly what you’ve followed and basically nothing else. Tumblr feels free.

In a world where platforms are more and more defined by the type of content you consume and create–Twitter is for text, TikTok and YouTube are for video, Instagram is for all things visual–Tumblr’s environment invites post diversity. You might see a GIF next to a text post next to an image. And users–especially younger users–are responding to that freedom. Of the 135 million monthly users visiting the microblog site, 48% are Gen Z. That number might be even larger now, since Tumblr had a 96% adoption surge between October 27, 2022 and November 17, 2022.

Tumblr is one of the last bastions of wilderness on the internet, and I spend literal hours on here making stuff and talking to people and looking at stuff other people made.
@Kedreeva
Tumblr User

The enthusiasm for Tumblr is spilling over into other platforms. According to Sprout Social’s Listening Tool, between October 4, 2022 and November 17, 2022, there were over a million Tweets about Tumblr.

With all of the renewed interested in Tumblr, marketers might be considering the platform for their social strategy. But before brands can decide if Tumblr is right for them, they need to understand the nuances of the platform.

Tumblr’s take on culture

If other platforms are defined by their content type, Tumblr is defined by its culture. Social media platforms are inherently cultural experiences but Tumblr feels different. Twitter is known for the spicy quote Tweet response while Instagram is known for aesthetically pleasing grids. But Tumblr, with little rules about content type or subject matter, is known for being weird.

Features like reblogging create viral inside jokes that make no sense out of context–and sometimes very little sense with context. The result is a strange, but pleasant, fever-dream-esque experience. Tumblr as a brand has fully leaned into where its audience has taken the platform.

Offering information for the uninitiated

Tumblr likes poking fun at itself. Site users have lovingly nicknamed Tumblr the “hellsite” due to its chaotic nature. Instead of making changes to the platform to curb the chaos, Tumblr recognized that its users want more of it and is more than willing to deliver. The platform is so devoted to its culture that it created a blog called “Hellsite High” for new users to learn how to assimilate and contribute to the culture. The tip blog covers everything from best practices to keyboard shortcuts to avoiding burnout. It’s just the type of tongue-in-cheek content that’s made Tumblr a cult favorite.

tumblr: your favorite liminal space https://t.co/WzAvUweEF3

— tumblr dot com the website and app (@tumblr) November 13, 2022

Absurdity on sale now

It’s hard to imagine retail products for most social media platforms. But Tumblr isn’t most platforms. Tumblr users don’t just love the content the site facilitates, they love the site itself. Tumblr is monetizing its users’ devotion with an online store.

Some products lean into inside jokes, like a pair of shoelaces with a Supernatural reference–a staple fandom on the platform. Others, like physical verification pins, poke fun at common social features that don’t exist on Tumblr. There are also products that comment on the state of Tumblr, like a sold-out bandanna that says “I grew up on Tumblr” or a branded notebook with “Welcome back to weird” emblazoned on the back. These products are absurd, but so is the platform. It works somehow.

Cannot even begin to tell you how much I need this pin @tumblr https://t.co/gaXzsJVHQr pic.twitter.com/CAH9RNAcUF

— Stardust&Melancholy (@MelancholyPhoto) November 14, 2022

A guide to Tumblr marketing

If you’re a marketer, you’re probably wondering how you can leverage Tumblr’s return. The answer is a little complicated. Tumblr can be an excellent avenue for the right brands but it has to make sense for yours. Here are some tips for marketing on Tumblr.

Evaluate if Tumblr marketing is right for your business

Tumblr has never been known for its moderation. Their method relies on user tags for posts that might offend, like nudity or sensitive subject matter. With that being said, brands need to seriously evaluate their risk tolerance with Tumblr. Even if your posts are squeaky clean, the reverse chronological algorithm means they could show up next to something more explicit in your audience’s feed. Tumblr is best for edgier brands with a more relaxed take on brand safety that wouldn’t be negatively impacted by such juxtaposition.

Brands should also evaluate whether their audience is even on Tumblr. Tumblr’s audience skews younger and more alternative. Fandom content, cult favorite products, clothing lines and niche interests will do best on Tumblr. If you’re selling luxury jewelry or baby products, your social strategy is probably better served elsewhere.

Organic posts reign for Tumblr marketing

Tumblr has never been good at ads. They’re clunky and because not all brands fit the Tumblr aesthetic, they’ve never been a huge revenue driver for the company. The platform even rolled out a premium ad-free subscription in early 2022, meaning power users won’t even see your ads. Which means your organic posts have to be perfect.

Tumblr’s unique approach to the algorithm means that your followers will see more of your posts than they would on other platforms, making this the perfect space for organic posts. When you add in the freedom of post type Tumblr is known for, it’s a winning marketing combination.

But be cautious. Tumblr users are some of the savviest social media users out there–and according to The Sprout Social Index™, consumers already feel they don’t see enough authentic, non-promotional content from brands. They spend a lot of time online and see a lot of advertisements. If the content isn’t authentic and interesting, they’ll see right through it. Spend time on your Tumblr social strategy to make sure it resonates.

Have fun with your Tumblr marketing

Tumblr is endearingly strange. And that makes it fun. Tumblr isn’t the place for buttoned-up ads or HD product visuals. Tumblr is a place to have fun with your social marketing. Get weird. Reblog slightly unrelated posts that your audience might enjoy. This is an opportunity to put your brand personality first and your product line second. Who knows, you might just become the next viral inside joke.

Emerging (and reemerging) platforms

Social media is unpredictable. Most people would have said Tumblr had about as much chance for a comeback as Napster, but things change constantly. As marketers, we have to be aware of those changes and be ready to shift strategy on a dime–when it makes sense. Evaluating whether or not an emerging platform is right for you is tricky, but it’s an important aspect of your social media strategy.

Want to learn more about new platforms? Check out this article about BeReal.

The post Tumblr is back. What does that mean for marketers? appeared first on Sprout Social.

Top 10 social media apps and sites in 2022

Chloe West — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 12:41:49 +0000

When creating a social media marketing strategy, it’s important to find all of the best social media apps for your business to have a presence. But with so many options, it can be easy to overlook a platform that might actually be a great converter for your brand.

This is why we’ve put together a list of the top 10 social media apps and sites in 2022. Learn more about how many users each site has, its key benefits and why it might be a great fit for your brand.

Why should you use social media apps for your business?

Social media apps provide the perfect avenue for reaching your audience where they already are. About 58.4% of the world’s population are active social media users, spending an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes accessing social media each day.

There are three major benefits to social media marketing that your brand doesn’t want to miss out on:

Identifying and understanding your audience

Social media apps give you amazing insight into your target audience. Being able to see the types of posts your audience likes and shares helps you deliver consistently better content. It also gives you insight into the types of products or services your target audience might benefit from.

Having an active presence on social media apps helps you pinpoint exactly which demographics are most interested in your business by analyzing your followers and those who engage with you online. Through that analysis, you can get a much better understanding of who your audience is.

Gauging sentiment analysis of your brand on social media

Social media sentiment analysis is the process of retrieving information about your customer’s perception of your product, service or brand. And it’s yet another reason why monitoring your audience on your selected social media sites can be so valuable.

Through social listening, you can easily pay attention to what people online are saying about your brand, your products/services and your industry. This helps gauge whether you need to revisit your brand’s reputation or adjust your marketing messaging to better serve your target audience.

Using social media apps as a customer service line

Social media is also a great channel for providing customer service. In fact, some brands create social media accounts specifically for customer service, as we can see with this example from Spotify:

Add customer service into your overall social media strategy so that even if you don’t create a separate support account, you still have a process in place for handling support requests.

10 most popular social media apps

There are so many social media apps out there, and it feels like there are more popping up every year, so it’s easy to overlook a platform that might actually be a huge success for your brand. Whether you want to make sure you’re on all the best social media apps or you’re looking to branch out onto new platforms, we’ve got a list of the top 10 social media apps in 2022.

1. Facebook

2.93 billion monthly active users

The largest social media platform of them all
A Facebook Business Page that acts as a second website and online store
Comprehensive advertising to help you further reach your audience

Facebook is one of the longest standing social media apps, having been created back in 2004 before soaring to global popularity around 2007. Naturally, it has evolved over the years, offering many different features and making it easier for businesses to reach their audiences. With nearly 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook is a great platform for nearly every business to have a presence on.

2. Instagram

2 billion monthly active users

Visual content platform for sharing stylized photos, videos and more
Instagram Reels, short-form videos that are wildly popular with viewers
Filters, stickers, audio clips and more assets for creating visual content

Instagram, owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, is a visual social media platform that revolves around photo and video content. It also includes both stories and reels, giving users a number of ways to reach their audience. As a visual platform, Instagram is perfect for brands with a visual product to photograph and showcase.

3. Twitter

229 million monetizable daily active users

Platform where a lot of people get their news and discover trending topics
Great for conversations and text-based content
Twitter threads allow brands to engage users with more than 280 characters

Twitter was founded in 2006 and has stayed very similar to its initial concept—a place for short statuses. Although it increased its available character count from 140 to 280 per Tweet and has added in features like Retweets, quote Tweets, threads and more, its chronological feed is one that its users love. Twitter is ideal for news publications, B2B companies, tech companies and the like.

4. TikTok

1 billion monthly active users

Short-form, scrollable and easily digestible video content
Easy-to-navigate search feature that Gen Z uses frequently
Audio clips, captions and stickers to help create engaging videos

TikTok was the initial inspiration for the popular Instagram Reels feature, leading the charge in short-form video content. All sorts of brands can take advantage of this app; you just need to get creative with your content.

5. Pinterest

433 million monthly active users

Visual search engine ideal for online shopping and finding new products
Shoppable Pins that make online shopping even easier
Pinterest SEO helps your pins to show up in searches

Pinterest is another visual social media platform that is perfect for ecommerce platforms. However, brands can also create infographics and blog graphics to promote content from their website and increase web traffic. Just put together a branded graphic or two that you can reuse for each blog post you share on Pinterest.

6. LinkedIn

830 million members

Professional B2B platform for networking, job searching and recruiting
Platform for long-form articles you can share with your audience
Post polls to start conversations with your connections

LinkedIn is great for personal branding and business-to-business marketing. Professionals create profiles alongside companies, making this a great way for both C-Suite team members and the brand itself to reach potential customers.

7. Snapchat

332 daily active users

Built-in insights for checking in on your overall reach
Disappearing stories that allow you to show behind-the-scenes photos and videos with your customers
Stickers, filters and drawing tools for creating engaging visual content

Snapchat was the original disappearing story app that Instagram and Facebook stories emulated on their own platforms. It has evolved to include stories from prominent brands and publications as well as Spotlights, its own version of short-form videos similar to TikTok and Instagram Reels.

8. YouTube

2 billion monthly active users

Video sharing platform for long-form video content
Second most popular search engine with its own form of YouTube SEO
Video library perfect for sharing educational and product-led content

YouTube, owned by Google, is the most popular video-hosting platform available. It’s perfect for any brand looking to share long-form educational content with their audience. Create playlists for each series to organize them on your YouTube channel.

9. Reddit

1.5 billion monthly visitors

Forum with endless rooms called “subreddits” focusing on various topics
Have industry-specific discussions in subreddits dedicated to your niche
Use your blog content and educational videos to add more to your forum responses

Reddit is a popular online forum with subreddits in nearly any topic you could think of: finance, marketing, tech, etc. Browse through related subreddits to your industry to see if you find any questions your company has knowledge on. Create a brand account for your responses. Brands can also sponsor topics to get even more awareness on the platform.

10. Clubhouse

10 million weekly active users

Host an audio chat about a topic related to your industry
Join like-minded audio chats to offer input

Clubhouse popped up in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as a way for professionals to still network while quarantining. Users could start an audio room for others to join and listen in to learn about something as well as ask permission to join as a speaker and provide their own insight.Clubhouse is a unique social media app and a first of its kind, but that also presents its own challenges. If an audio discussion app seems like something your brand and your industry are interested in, it may be worth looking into.

Find the best social media apps for your brand

Build your brand’s presence on the best social media apps for you. Find your target audience, create content suited for each platform and start building a following. Learn even more about how to build your social media presence.

The post Top 10 social media apps and sites in 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

How to use Google’s Business Messages to engage with your customers

Mary Keutelian — Mon, 16 May 2022 15:58:33 +0000

Online customers don’t have the luxury of walking up to a salesperson and asking an important question—but they still expect a fast response when they’re seeking information. Google Business Messages can help businesses meet that expectation.

Google’s Business Messages is the real-time chat feature in Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business).

And as research shows, 75% of consumers now prefer to engage with a brand over private messaging channels versus traditional channels.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

How Google’s Business Messaging works
5 benefits of Google’s Business Messages
How to set up Google’s Business Messages on desktop
How to set up Google’s Business Messages on mobile
How to manage Google’s Business Messages
7 Google’s Business Messaging best practices
4 Google’s Business Message examples

What is Google’s Business Messages?

Google’s Business Messages is a free real-time chat service that helps people get in touch with your business straight from your Google Business Profile listing on Google Maps and Google Search.

Think of it as Google’s equivalent to Facebook Messenger:

It makes it easy for customers to contact your brand to ask questions or raise concerns.
It helps build their trust in your brand and enhances their customer experience.

As a result, people can contact your business directly instead of clicking through to your website and looking for an email address or phone number.

How Google’s Business Messaging works

When users search for a business by name in Google Search or Google Maps, they’ll see a Google Business Card. That card contains buttons users can click to call the business, visit the website or get directions. If a business has set up Google’s Business Messaging, users will also see a “Message” button.

Source

Having a direct line from a Google search listing opens a new avenue for business owners to connect with potential customers.

Before you can use the messaging feature, you’ll need to create your free Google Business Profile.

5 benefits of Google’s Business Messages

Here are five reasons Google’s Business Messages improves the customer experience:

You’re available when customers need you

Google’s Business Messages lets customers communicate with you from your Google Business Card. Instead of going to your website first or searching for your social profiles, they can chat with you directly via the message button.

Integrate and automate customer touchpoints

You can integrate Google’s Business Messages with the social media management software or messaging service you’re already using via the API. For example, if you use Sprout Social, you can automate your communication in Google’s Business Messages with chatbots to enhance the customer journey. To note, you can create up to five welcome messages in GBM to help start the dialogue with customers.

Provide personalized on-demand support

With Google’s Business Messaging, you can share rich media like photos and carousels, providing a more personalized experience for customers when responding to queries. Adding visuals to your conversation is an effective way to eliminate miscommunication about a product and address their questions.

Reduce response and resolution times

According to the Sprout Social Index™, 30% of consumers who reach out to brands on social media expect a response within the same day. Maintain multiple conversations at once in Google’s Business Messages and help reduce customer wait times for responses and increase resolutions.

Increase foot traffic and revenue

If you have a brick-and-mortar location, the ability to respond to inquiries in real-time can help you provide directions or parking information for customers, which in turn could mean more customers coming through your door. Don’t pass up an opportunity to engage with a potential customer.

How to set up Google’s Business Messages on desktop

If you’re getting started on Google My Business, here’s how to set up Google’s Business Messages on desktop.

Step 1. Sign in to your profile

Log into your Google Business Profile by clicking the button in the top right corner. Follow the prompts to access your Business Profile.

Step 2. Select Messages in the menu options

In the left menu screen, select Messages.

Step 3. Turn on messaging

You should see a blue button in the top-right corner of the screen that reads Turn on messaging. Click that and you’re done! Customers can now message your business directly from your Google Business listing on Google Maps or Search. It’s that simple!

Step 4. Customize

Remember to customize and personalize messages to your customers. Whether it’s a warm welcome message or setting up an automated chatbot system for after-hours queries.

Turn on notifications so you don’t miss any messages. Google will deactivate the chat or messaging feature from your listing if you consistently don’t respond in a timely manner.

How to set up Google’s Business Messages on mobile

Let’s look at how to set up Google’s Business Messages on Android and Apple mobile devices.

Step 1. Download the Google My Business app from Google Play or the App Store:

Note: The Google My Business app will be deprecated this year, so Google will have to develop a workaround.

Step 2. Enable messaging

Sign in, go to Customers, then Messages, then click Turn On. Now the Message button appears in your Google Business listing.

You’ll get an email from Google confirming the message button is activated.

Step 3. Customize your welcome message

Choose Edit welcome message and enter the greeting you want people to see when they start chatting with you:

How to manage Google’s Business Messages in Sprout

Here’s how to add Google’s Business Messages in Sprout so that you can respond to your customers quickly.

Connect your GBM profile to Sprout

Follow these steps to connect your Google’s Business Messages profile to your Sprout account:

Step 1. Log into Sprout, select your name and choose Connect a Profile to launch the Profile window:

Step 2. At the prompt, Create Google Business Messages Profiles, click the Next button on the lower right.

Step 3. Complete your Google’s Business Messages profile, including:

Your company name
Your logo
The agent’s name
Welcome message
Live chat timeframes

Then click Next.

Step 4. Review your information for accuracy and agree to the terms of use. Click Submit. Within five business days, the Sprout team will review your brand information for approval.

View and schedule Google’s Business Messages in Sprout

After connecting your Business Messages profile, you’ll begin to see new messages arrive in your Smart Inbox.

With all your messages across all your social profiles, as well as Google’s Business Messages, you can manage them in a single inbox. Whether it’s just you or a team of social media specialists, you can filter and manage your messages with ease.

If you have multiple locations or storefronts, you can now add additional locations to your existing Google Business Messaging profiles in Sprout. With many digital interactions between business and customers happening through Google’s Business Messages, it’s important that you can communicate with them regarding their preferred location — all in a single tool.

7 Google’s Business Messaging best practices

Follow these seven best practices below for the best experience with Google’s Business Messaging.

1. Create a welcome message

When people click on the Message button in your Google Business Profile, they’ll see your welcome message.

Craft a welcome message that thanks customers for contacting you and asks them how you can help.

2. Use a shared inbox

It’s good practice to use a shared inbox that multiple people can monitor for messages and notifications. Make sure you control permissions so that only the most qualified team members can field the inquiries.

3. Reply within 24 hours

Seventy-nine percent of consumers who mention or message a brand on social media expect a response within 24 hours. Google supports that sentiment and may deactivate chat for businesses that don’t respond to inquiries within 24 hours.

It’s possible to use saved responses for quick replies to common inquiries, but you’ll also need service agents to resolve complex or unusual customer service issues. Keep in mind that inquiries may be coming from multiple channels, so you’ll need a tool like the Smart Inbox to ensure you’re seeing (and responding to) every message.

4. Enable notifications

It’s important to turn on notifications to know when you have a new message. Then you can ensure you’ll keep the message button active on your profile by meeting Google’s requirement for a 24-hour response time.

5. Be concise

When you respond to a query from a customer, be clear, concise and conversational in your response. If needed, you can ask for or provide additional information during a brief Google’s Business Messaging exchange.

6. Use visuals

Besides text messages, you can also use visuals, like photos, in Google’s Business Messages. Sometimes, visuals are a more effective and efficient way to answer a question.

In the example image above, Google illustrates how businesses can use images to provide additional context—in this case, the agent shares an image carousel featuring the hotel rooms with the best views.

7. Never ask for personal information

You should never ask for personal information over Google’s Business Messages, such as:

Credit card numbers
Social Security, passport or other government identification numbers
Login credentials, like passwords

Exchanging sensitive details via messaging could compromise the privacy of customer data. And it’s also considered a violation of Google’s messaging guidelines.

Make customers aware that it’s your policy not to ask for such personal information so that they can spot any suspicious requests.

Google’s Business Message examples

Now that we know how to use the feature, let’s look at four examples of brands using different Google’s Business Messages.

1. Woolworths, the largest supermarket in Australia, uses Google’s Business Messaging to help customers search for products and check availability at their local store:

2. Walmart lets customers quickly find information about store hours, and pick-up and delivery options, using quick-reply chips for many frequently asked questions:

3. Mattress Firm helps customers shop for a new mattress by sharing videos and product information on Business Messages:

4. DISH (Satellite TV) has reduced average handling time for customer support requests by more than 22%, using Business Messages:

How do I publish posts on my Google’s Business Profile?

Because Sprout is integrated with Google My Business and Google’s Business Messages, you can publish posts to your Google My Business Profile from a single platform, as well as maintain other social profiles associated with your business.

To publish posts to your Google Business Profile in Sprout, open Compose, then choose one of your Google My Business locations. Add the text or image that you want to include.

Click the dropdown arrow next to the send button and select your Post Type: What’s New? or Event. The What’s New? post type will require you to input text, but uploading an image is optional.

For an Event, create an Event Title and select the Start and End dates. You can also choose a call to action from a dropdown list, by clicking on Button Type:

After you’ve built your post, you can save it as a draft, publish it immediately, schedule a publication time or add it to the Sprout Queue.

Manage Google’s Business Messages with Sprout Social

You’re now ready to start engaging with people via Google’s Business Messages.

Give your customers a chance to connect with a live agent and improve your customer trust and loyalty by responding to Google’s Business Messages via Sprout. Remember to turn on notifications and be concise, clear and friendly in your communication. And try to respond as quickly as possible.

Ready to start managing your GBM in Sprout? Try a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social today.

The post How to use Google’s Business Messages to engage with your customers appeared first on Sprout Social.

11 Social messaging apps every marketer should know in 2022

Aubree Smith — Tue, 10 May 2022 14:22:41 +0000

Social media messaging is an integral part of daily life for most of us.

Today, 70% of people agree they expect to have conversational experiences with brands on social media, too. But finding ways to talk directly to your consumers can seem intimidating. So, how can you integrate conversational marketing into your strategy? Enter: social media messaging apps.

Social messaging apps give marketers the opportunity to connect with people one-on-one by creating impactful, personalized touchpoints. These channels are approachable for consumers, social media managers and customer care specialists alike.

When choosing the right apps to talk to your audience, consider why and how people want to connect with your brand.

Do they want a quick response to a frequently asked question?
Are they looking for a video consultation with an expert before buying?
Do they need help using your product or service?

In this guide, we’ll break down the 11 most popular social messaging apps and their use cases. From the well-known to the often overlooked, we’ll help you find the right app(s) to reach your community.

Why should your brand use social messaging apps?

The customer journey is changing. Social media is now an essential part of reaching people, from generating awareness to creating advocacy. Consumers expect to direct message, voice chat or video call your brand when they’re in a moment of need. Social media messaging apps allow you to meet consumers’ new communication expectations while supporting your business objectives. Watch our video below for an overview of the most popular social messaging apps, along with tips to help you select the best social messaging app for your brand:

Engage in conversational commerce

About 90% of consumers buy from a brand if they follow them on social. That impressive number reveals how important it is to invest in your social messaging strategy. When brands adopt conversational commerce tools like chatbots, live chat and video consultations, they deliver easier buying experiences and win more sales.

Provide customer service and care

People will no longer settle for one-way communication or outdated 1-800 numbers when dealing with a customer service issue. They expect brands to use the most convenient channels for them, including social messaging apps.

If you’re not available to support your customers with social messaging, you will leave gaps in the customer experience. Some 67% of consumers identify responsive customer service as the most important factor in creating a positive experience with a brand on social.

Build a pool of brand evangelists

Be attentive and engage thoughtfully when people send you a positive direct message. By providing an extra level of care, you will make them feel like a top priority, and more likely to become a loyal customer.

Take it a step further by surprising some of your diehard admirers with V.I.P. discount codes, premium offers, access to exclusive live events and sneak previews. These extra steps will turn your customers into brand advocates.

Navigate a social media crisis

On the flip side, show just as much care and attention when things go wrong. Although you can’t always control a social media crisis, you can minimize its negative impact by addressing customer concerns via social messaging apps. Keep a keen eye on your notifications and @mentions to prevent negative feedback from snowballing.

Thankfully, this doesn’t mean monitoring your social feeds 24/7. Social media engagement tools like Sprout Social can notify you of engagement spikes and spot a potential crisis before it snowballs.

11 most popular social messaging apps

Now, let’s dive into the most frequently used social media chat apps.

WhatsApp
Instagram direct messages
Messenger
TikTok direct messages
WeChat
SnapChat
Telegram
Discord
Viber
Twitter direct messages
Zendesk

1. WhatsApp

Monthly active users: 2 billion

Key benefits:

Chatbots
Video and voice chat
No ads
Businesses can send 6 different message types

The growing buzz around WhatsApp has many marketers asking, “What’s up with WhatsApp?” As the most popular messaging app in the world, WhatsApp is proving to be an essential part of modern marketing and customer care strategies—especially for brands with a global audience. WhatsApp makes it possible to streamline all messaging with consumers in one convenient place. Whether they have an issue with their order or are looking to buy something new, WhatsApp is the channel people turn to.

On WhatsApp, you can call, video call or live chat with customers. If you face a high quantity of messages, you can also employ chatbots on the app. Although the app doesn’t allow advertising, brands have other opportunities to effectively reach consumers. For example, some leading brands use digital catalogs to help their customers discover their products and services.

2. Instagram direct messages

Instagram monthly active users: 2 billion

Key benefits:

Integrated with Instagram
Built-in GIF and sticker gallery
You can add filters, effects and drawing to images
Video and voice chat

Instagram is the most downloaded app in the world. Instagram direct messages (DMs) play an important role in its success by allowing users to connect one-on-one and in group messages. In the Instagram app, you can send DMs to all users, including brands.

Instagram DMs are a great way to dip your toe into social messaging apps. Chances are if you have a presence on Instagram, you’re already familiar with DMs, as they don’t require a separate app or account. Even when a consumer tags your brand in their Stories, you’ll automatically see it in your DMs.

Instagram DMs have built-in GIF and sticker galleries so you can infuse whimsy into your messages. If you send a photo or video, you can also add filters, effects and drawings. As Instagram continues to evolve into a video-first app, you can now make video calls and voice chat in DMs, too.

3. Messenger

Monthly active users: 1.3 billion

Key benefits:

Integrated with Facebook
Automated replies and chatbots
Built-in GIF and sticker library
Video chat

Messenger is Meta’s most-used feature. Originally launched in 2011, the app is separate from the Facebook platform, but still integrated in the user interface. Well-known around the world, Messenger is the right app for brands trying to reach a wide variety of people.

When using Messenger for business, you can create automatic replies and set up chatbots to answer frequently asked questions. This is useful for brands who receive a high volume of incoming messages.

Like Instagram, the app offers a built-in GIF and sticker gallery so you can infuse personality and playfulness into your live-chat, too. If your customer care cases go beyond chat, Messenger also provides video call capabilities.

4. TikTok direct messages

TikTok monthly active users: 1 billion

Key benefits:

Integrated with TikTok
Custom auto-replies

Like Instagram, TikTok messaging is integrated in the app. With 1 billion monthly active users and growing, the potential for reaching people increases everyday. But TikTok messaging is unique. To send a message, the recipient must accept your message request—even if they’re a brand.

For some consumers, this feature adds a roadblock on their customer journey. But this extra step also prevents your inbox from overflowing—which makes it easier to prioritize ongoing conversations with brand advocates, influential creators and high priority customers.

TikTok also offers an automated response option for business accounts. This helpful workaround allows you to acknowledge people sending you messages before accepting. It also enables you to answer frequently asked questions based on common keywords.

5. WeChat

Monthly active users: 1 billion

Key benefits:

Reaches Chinese-speaking communities worldwide
Video and voice chat
Broadcast messaging
Social commerce capabilities

If you’re trying to reach Chinese-speaking communities, WeChat is a must-use app. Facing steep competition, WeChat emerged as the leading Chinese messaging app because of its high message capacity and social commerce capabilities. In fact, users can send up to 45 billion messages a day. They can also send voice chats and make video calls. Like other social media platforms, they can broadcast messages publicly on WeChat, too.

WeChat’s social commerce integrations are among the best in the mobile payment app industry. WeChat Pay boasts 900 million users who send money and make purchases within the app.

For global brands, WeChat should play a pivotal role in their strategy—especially for timely events like Lunar New Year celebrations.

6. Snapchat

Monthly active users: 500 million

Key benefits:

Disappearing images and videos
Custom filters, effects and drawings

With certain social messaging apps, success depends on cross-promotion with other platforms. Take Snapchat for example. For people to see your content, they must subscribe to your Profile. To spark intrigue, share snippets of the highly engaging videos you’re posting on Snapchat to other social apps. This might include behind-the-scenes tours, interactive custom filters or influencer takeovers. You can also include links to your website or app in your content.

Once you amass a following and your Profile is verified, you can start having meaningful conversations around the Stories you post. For example, your subscribers can send you questions or share their love for your new product. You can also Quote your followers’ replies and share them on your Story—this level of engagement is key to creating loyal superfans.

7. Telegram

Monthly active users: 500 million

Key benefits:

Edit and delete messages after you send them
Location sharing
Expiring messages
Unique themes and stickers
Supports group messaging up to 200,000 people

Similar to WhatsApp, Telegram is a popular alternative to traditional SMS texting—particularly for people messaging between countries. Telegram enables large group messages, location sharing and unique themes and stickers. But it also has additional features popular for businesses, including B2B brands.

In Telegram, you can edit and delete messages after they’ve been sent, or set an expiration date on a message. This could be valuable when you need to send a customer an expiring code or if you’re a B2B business sending confidential paperwork.

8. Discord

Monthly active users: 350 million

Key benefits:

Video and voice chat
Screen sharing
Bottom of the funnel opportunities
Live events

Discord, the social messaging app used most frequently by gamers, is a new frontier for many companies—even retail brands are beginning to tap into the platform’s potential.

By creating a Discord server, you are able to add channels catering to the niche interests of your community. Your channels can be private, public or view-only.

In your server, you can host live events. Whether it’s an “ask me anything” video or a gaming tournament, live events encourage advocacy and conversation within your community. Leading brands on Discord also give their consumers access to premium channels to encourage repeat purchases.

9. Viber

Monthly active users: 250 million

Key benefits:

Built-in GIF and sticker gallery
Video chat
Built-in QR code scanner
Supports unlimited group messaging

Viber, or Rakuten Viber, is another social messaging app often preferred over traditional SMS texting, especially in eastern European and Middle Eastern countries. Known for its security and end-to-end encryption, it’s marketed as one of the safest messaging apps. Viber offers group messaging with no size limitations, video chat and a built-in GIF and sticker gallery. Users with a subscription plan can also make calls to all telephone numbers.

Viber for Business allows companies to chat with customers through its platform, but this feature isn’t available in many countries. However, all brands can create ads for the app and take advantage of the built-in QR scanner.

10. Twitter direct messages

Twitter monthly active users: 217 million

Key benefits:

Integrated with Twitter
Chatbots
Built-in GIF and sticker gallery

If your brand is on Twitter, you probably already use your Twitter DMs to communicate with customers. Twitter DMs are integrated into Twitter, and anyone can send other users messages. In your DMs, you can employ chatbots to provide exceptional customer care, too.

We recommend using the built-in GIFs, sticker gallery and emojis to infuse your brand’s identity into your conversations.

11. Zendesk

Key benefits:

Omnichannel customer care
Voice chat
Chatbots

Although not technically a social messaging app, Zendesk is the glue that holds an effective social messaging strategy together. Zendesk is a customer service software dedicated to helping brands create meaningful, personal and productive relationships with their customers.

The software integrates with your social messaging apps to provide customer support and sales outreach at scale. You can also connect Zendesk with a social media management platform like Sprout Social to resolve issues faster across your social and customer service teams.

Manage your social messaging apps in one place with Sprout Social

If these social messaging apps are already a part of your strategy, you know the struggle of trying to balance so many channels at once. Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox unifies your social channels into a single stream to monitor all incoming messages. It simplifies customer care and outreach by making it easy to see messages, mentions and brand keyword usages at a glance.

The Smart Inbox offers tools like People View to help you provide personalized experiences for your contacts. In People View, you can foster connections with influencers, manage your VIP Lists and view conversation history with a specific user profile.

It all boils down to this: When using social messaging apps, you must make your customers feel like they’re your top priority.

Looking for more guidance to help you refine your social messaging strategy? Learn why social messaging is the future of the customer experience.

The post 11 Social messaging apps every marketer should know in 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

11 corporate communications tools to boost team performance

Brent Barnhart — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 19:08:00 +0000

Communications tools are make-or-break for modern companies

Because every missed deadline, bottleneck and minor misunderstanding trickles down to impact your team’s productivity.

But the bigger your company, the faster these issues tend to snowball out of control.

That’s why dedicated business communications tools have become a staple of in-person, remote and hybrid teams alike.

The problem? There’s no shortage of software out there. Couple that with the fact that onboarding your team to new tools is no small feat. This is especially true for enterprises.

If you don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered in our comprehensive guide to corporate communications.

What are corporate communications, anyway?

Corporate communications refer to how stakeholders in business interact with colleagues (internal) and customers (external). From updates and expectations to messaging and results, businesses prioritize communications for the sake of organization, productivity and accountability.

And so corporate communications tools represent the software and apps that stakeholders use to manage the interactions above.

These tools can be put into two buckets based on their respective audiences — internal and external.

Internal vs. external corporate communications tools

Internal communications cover interactions that happen among stakeholders within an organization. This includes employees, folks at the C-level and other internal collaborators (think: freelancers or contractors).

To manage these relationships and keep stakeholders up-to-date, companies might use:

Project management tools
Team chat tools
Video conferencing tools
Company Intranet or wiki tools

On the flip side, external communications tools are used to deliver key messages to customers, subscribers or partners. These tools might include:

Marketing tools (think: social, CRM, email)
Customer communication tools (think: live chat or help desk software)
PR and media tools

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to adopting comms tools. That said, a combination of internal and external tools is key to keeping everyone involved with your business in the loop.

Why business communications tools matter so much

Investing in dedicated digital communications should be a matter of “when” and not “if” for companies of all shapes and sizes.

Enterprise. SMBs. Solo. You name it.

Consider the well-documented benefits of streamlined communication below:

Encourage meaningful collaboration among your team. When teams’ tasks and goals are aligned, they create better business outcomes. There’s a reason why effective communication and higher rates of employee engagement go hand in hand.
Empower people to be more productive. Recent research from Teamwork notes that people are up to 25% more productive when they have quick access to deliverables, requirements and other critical project information. With the right business communications tools, you can consolidate all of the above in one place.
Create a more connected company culture. Food for thought: only 7% of workers feel that communication is “accurate, open and timely” at work. This signals the need for businesses to really put their corporate communications under the microscope for the sake of not only productivity but their workers’ well-being.

Also, keep in mind that the efficiency of internal communications has a direct impact on how you communicate with customers.

For example, consider how marketing messaging and creatives for campaigns require multiple steps, stakeholders and approvals.

When a department is on the same page and able to communicate effectively, its messages to external stakeholders are more likely to resonate.

11 corporate communications tools to try

Below is our breakdown of the best comms tools, all proven to bring businesses together and help workers communicate better.

Of course, no company necessarily needs everything on this list. That said, the internal and external tools here can highlight areas where your business’ comms might need a tune-up.

Internal communications tools

Building an internal communications strategy is a must-do, especially for remote and distributed teams. Let’s start by looking at tools to help your team internally.

1. Asana

Especially given the rise of remote teams, project management tools are a must-have for companies big and small.

Tools like Asana provide businesses with a unified place to plan and track the progress of any given project. From tasks and to-do lists to full-blown project timelines and department calendars, Asana makes it all easy to track with:

Multiple project views (including Kanban boards, lists and calendars) that provide a constant pulse on the progress of a task
The ability to assign roles and permissions for collaborators (including entry-level employees, contractors and C-level) to keep workflows structured
Automated updates and notifications to keep a constant pulse on task progress

2. Slack

It’s hard to find a team that isn’t using Slack (or a similar team chat tool) to stay connected.

With Slack, you can organize your team’s communications into company-wide, department-specific or role-specific channels. This allows for immediate, timely communication that doesn’t totally interrupt workers or cause needless meetings. Arguably the biggest selling point of Slack is its ease of use and endless integrations (including many of the tools on this list).

3. Teamwork

A project management solution that’s almost a hybrid of the two tools above, Teamwork sets itself apart with its ability to track granular project data in addition to updates and messaging. For example, you can track individual contributions to any given task as well as team-wide time spent on tasks.

Teamwork answers “what’s been done, what needs to be done and what’s next” in one place. The platform’s project tracking features represent a massive time-saver and create fewer back-and-forths among collaborators.

4. Confluence

From internal docs and policies to reference pages and wikis, Confluence represents a sort of “home base” for teams to refer to.

The platform serves as a project management tool in its own right but also provides teams with a digital whiteboard to brainstorm and make notes as needed. Confluence’s features are yet another example of how you can consolidate corporate communications rather than jump between multiple apps, inboxes or internal drives.

5. Employee Advocacy by Sprout

Employee advocacy is all the rage right now. Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform empowers your teammates internally to earn maximum on external marketing messages.

For example, Employee Advocacy makes it easy to boost your brand’s biggest announcements and latest blog posts. Rather than craft individual updates or captions, the platform provides templates, inspiration and creative options to boost your social posts messages in the most engaging way possible.

6. Dialpad

Dialpad represents an all-in-one video conferencing, chat and phone solution that’s ideal for distributed teams.

Perhaps the most “corporate” of our corporate communications due to its enterprise clientele, Dialpad boasts a number of features to improve team comms. This includes AI tools such as call sentiment analysis, automated notes to address sales objections and automatic call transcriptions.

External communications tools

For the second half of our breakdown, we’ll look at external tools you might consider as part of your marketing tech stack.

7. Sprout Social

No surprises here! Sprout Social is a powerful, all-in-one tool for streamlining internal and external comms related to social media.

How so? For starters, we allow teams to consolidate all of their social messages and notifications in one place. Not only does this mean less jumping between platforms, but also empowers teams to respond to more messages faster via collaborative features. The ability to combine your inboxes is a massive time-saver and likewise gives you a more comprehensive view of your customer comms.

Beyond that, Sprout also serves as the home base for all of your external social content.

Updates and announcements. Videos and images. Stories, Reels and everything in-between.

With Sprout, you can schedule and optimize your content across multiple social networks at once. Having all of your social media assets and updates in a single platform allows you to maximize your reach and get your message across to the appropriate audiences faster.

And we don’t stop there!

Below are a few more ways you might use Sprout as a corporate communications tool:

Developing and rolling out your social media crisis plan
Listening to crucial social conversations and shout-outs to uncover opportunities to intervene or answer questions for customers
Encouraging cross-team collaboration and unified comms among your entire marketing department (including social, design and content marketing)

8. SendinBlue

While trends in marketing come and go, email remains a staple of external comms.

Newsletters. Welcome messages. Winback campaigns. The list goes on.

Platforms like SendinBlue are scalable and make it a cinch to set up automated workflows for any campaign you can think of. The ability to assess engagement metrics and fine-tune your campaigns over time means that you can maximize the eyes on your marketing messages.

9. HubSpot

HubSpot’s suite of corporate communications tools includes a robust CRM, email marketing platform and CMS rolled into one.

Having all of the above in one platform gives marketers the opportunity to have a more complete understanding of their customers and their needs.

For example, which content do our leads engage with the most? What’s our most common sales objection? Which of our campaigns results in the most direct revenue?

With HubSpot, you have a holistic view of your marketing channels and likewise what makes your customers tick.

10. Muck Rack

PR and relationships with bloggers, journalists and media outlets are key for businesses looking to earn some much-needed exposure.

Tools like Muck Rack make the process of finding relevant outreach targets and pitching them faster. Providing instant access to thousands of journalists, the platform allows you to track the progress of your pitching campaigns and automate the process of conducting follow-ups as needed.

11. Shorthand

Shorthand is a self-proclaimed “scrollytelling” tool that allows users to create digital experiences (such as websites and landing pages) to share with customers. The tool boasts a variety of team collaboration features that makes it easy for writers, designers and other marketers to come together to create the most compelling stories possible.

Below is a snapshot of how the platform works:

How to pick your corporate communications tools

We get it: choosing between tools can be tough.

This is especially true if you’re on the hunt for an enterprise solution.

To wrap things up, let’s review a few key details that’ll help you make a decision faster.

Be mindful of your budget

No-brainer, right? Most SaaS tools require negotiated pricing for larger teams. Regardless, try to pick solutions that are reasonable to scale and don’t involve usage-based pricing.

Onboarding should be a breeze

Ideally, you should be able to adopt and roll out corporate communications tools across your team ASAP. Many tools go to great lengths to educate and empower teams when it comes to onboarding. Some will basically hold your hand through the process to make it less daunting.

For example, Asana has a ton of resources, guides and videos to help teams get started.

Don’t second-guess security

Security matters for any piece of software and your business communications tools are no different. Potential breaches or data loss isn’t an option when you’re dealing with sensitive company materials.

For example, many businesses defaulted to Zoom during the pandemic. However, ongoing privacy concerns highlight how choosing a tool prior to shopping around can result in headaches down the road.

Double-check integrations with your current software

As noted earlier, anything you can do to consolidate tools and communications is a plus. Most major comms tools connect with each other to help boost productivity and likewise reduce notification spam.

Below is a snapshot of two of Sprout’s most popular integrations for both internal and external comms.

Make sure your comms tools have a track record

When in doubt, read reviews! Although there’s nothing wrong with test-driving brand new tools, we recommend sticking to a more “proven” platform for comms.

Review sites like G2 can highlight which apps have long-term users and the most satisfied customers. Insights from buyers can likewise break down specific features or concerns that might be relevant to your team.

Which corporate communications tools do you use?

If you want your teams to communicate more effectively, start with your tech stack.

Any combination of the tools above is a solid starting point toward building a more connected and aligned business. Doing so not only makes your workers’ lives easier but also empowers your team to send the right message to your customers.

If you haven’t already, make sure to check out or guide to leveling up your corporate communication skills to do exactly that.

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