Ohio State employs thousands of faculty members and staff, and boasts an alumni family that is more than 600,000 strong. Ohio State Buckeyes football, basketball and other athletics programs have a vast legion of followers. And that doesn’t even count the future students and community members across the globe who take an interest in Ohio State’s achievements, activities and research.

Engaging effectively with these diverse audiences across seven social media platforms is a tall task that requires exceptional strategic thinking, planning and creativity—plus the right technology. And according to Dani Dean, Associate Director of Social Media, since her team developed their audience-centric social media strategy and started using Sprout Social, they have excelled in their efforts to make Ohio State one of the highest-performing universities on social.

With Sprout, it’s easy to bring data-driven insights into our team and measure the impact of our efforts. Those insights help us shape and optimize our social strategies for Ohio State, contributing to our tremendous growth in engagement and brand awareness.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Measuring the impact of every piece of content with insights from Sprout

Dean said her team adopted Sprout’s social media management platform and other technology tools to help realize their goals to make Ohio State a leader among its peer set and one of the top 10 schools nationwide for social media performance. They needed intuitive systems that would allow them to analyze their audiences with precision and develop a data-driven strategy for social content and engagement.

In FY23, those investments helped Ohio State’s social media team see its most successful and productive year in the history of the university’s presence on social media. Dean and her team published more than 2,000 posts and led multiple paid and organic social campaigns that generated 140 million impressions and 11 million engagements—a 45% increase from the previous year.

During that same period, Ohio State saw a 155% net growth in followers across all platforms, and its social media audience grew to 2.2 million.

Dean said Sprout’s Reports and Listening features have been especially valuable in helping Ohio State’s content hit the mark with various audiences. “Sprout’s reporting tool is personally my favorite feature,” she said. “I’m an analytics nerd, but I also have a creative background. Sprout’s reporting lets me pair data insights with the creative side of my work. I can create a wide variety of customized reports, from Competitor and Tag reports to reports on the performance of video and other content.”

With social listening in Sprout, Ohio State can be more effective at rooting its content and messaging in what audiences are already saying. Dean said Sprout helps Ohio State be more proactive in communicating issues of interest to its audiences and be more responsive in engaging with people reacting to those topics.

Sprout’s features are super customizable. We love that Sprout lets us build so many reporting and tagging structures to support our specific goals, rather than making us fit our goals into a particular structure.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Ohio State’s leadership is often interested in reviewing listening reports following university announcements and other news, which are a snap for Dean’s team to generate. “Sprout has made the whole listening process so much more efficient,” she said. “Before we started using the platform, we had to build old-school queries to pull the data, and it was a painstaking process that took several hours.”

Dean said she also creates quarterly impact reports that she shares with various stakeholders, including Ohio State’s senior leadership and the board of directors. Sprout’s reports are also vital for helping her team track their three core key performance indicators (KPIs)—awareness, engagement and traffic.

“On the surface, these KPIs may seem broad, but we associate at least one of these goals with every piece of content we post,” she explained. Dean added that her team continues developing custom tags in Sprout to test, optimize and track their KPIs.

Hitting on just the right style and tone—with help from Sprout

Listening with Sprout allows Dean and her team to surface trends and themes likely to resonate with Ohio State’s different audiences. The insights they collect from listening help them customize “customer journeys,” according to Dean, with content most relevant to each audience at various points throughout the year.

Ohio State’s social media practitioners also use Sprout’s tagging and reporting features to test-drive new content formats, from writing style to video editing. Two major channels of focus for testing content are TikTok and Instagram, according to Dean, because that’s where her team can “push the boundaries with creativity and have fun.”

On TikTok, for example, communication is focused primarily toward future Ohio State students—a high school-age audience. “They want to feel a connection with our brand, so we have to make sure we don’t get too niche or ‘inside-jokey’ with our content, or it could fall flat,” Dean said.

Sprout has made such a difference in how we use data to drive our decision-making and measure our impact—it has changed our approach to content development. The social team collaborates with the multimedia and content teams and we use these insights to focus on ongoing improvement. When we create content, we think about channel and audience first.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Dean and her team—including a social media senior associate, a social media production associate, a social media manager of enterprise leadership, and a few student interns—create almost all the content Ohio State uses across its primary social media channels. It’s a collaborative environment with no shortage of work to do.

“Everything we create needs to be tailored for each platform and each audience,” said Dean, whose role includes overseeing the creative direction for Ohio State’s social content. “But Sprout helps us make the best use of our time, resources and creativity because we can dig into the data and understand what’s working well and where with our different audiences.”

Customization is critical for making a lasting connection with audiences on social—and for Ohio State, that connection can literally last a lifetime. “If we want to continue growing and building upon Ohio State’s brand image and create full-circle moments with our audiences, we have to push ourselves. We need to foster connections, and social is a powerful tool to do that.”

In addition to the 45% increase in social media engagements for Ohio State in FY23, Dean said video views have grown by an impressive 300%. “These results show that our emphasis on the quality of audience-centric content versus the quantity of content we produce is a successful strategy for driving engagement and reach with Ohio State’s audiences,” she said, adding that her team intends to “continue pushing the boundaries of innovation in the social media space” using their refreshed strategy informed by insights from Sprout.

To learn how Sprout Social can help your organization engage more effectively with diverse audiences and increase the impact of your social content on every channel, request your free demo today.

The post Ohio State’s social media engagement and rankings soar with help from Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media engagement is an essential piece of the Dreamforce experience and integral to Salesforce’s customer relationships year-round. So, in 2022, Salesforce made the enterprise-wide transition to a new social media management platform. The move to Sprout Social has paid off, according to Mikaely Quaranta, Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy, for the customer relationship management (CRM) software company.

“Sprout is such an intuitive platform,” Quaranta said. “Our social media practitioners were excited to jump onto Sprout and start using the Reports and Listening features right away. We were also confident going into Dreamforce because we knew that Sprout’s automation and workflow features would allow us to move at the speed of social during our biggest event of the year.”

Tracking trends and securing real-time approvals on the go

Marissa Kraines, Vice President and Global Head of Social Media at Salesforce, said social media plays an integral role in helping the company build excitement for Dreamforce.

“We want to bring the magic and conversation of Dreamforce to all our audiences on social media,” she explained. “First, we’re looking for ways to amplify the in-person experience through content and interactions across our social media channels. Second, we’re determining how to translate the nuances of the on-site event to the virtual and on-demand experiences.”

With Sprout, Kraines and her team can easily track mentions from conference attendees and other interested parties, including the media, as well as keep tabs on announcements happening online and offline during the event.

Social listening is especially important during events like Dreamforce. Sprout allows us to understand when our audience is online, when they want us to engage with them and how we can assist them throughout their conference experience. Sprout also helps us stay on top of trends and be more strategic with our planning.

Mikaely Quaranta
Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy

Sprout’s mobile app also quickly emerged as a crucial time-saving tool for the social team, according to Kraines. She said it helps them to get approvals from stakeholders for content and messaging “in real time—easily and concisely,” whether they’re running around at events or on the Salesforce campus.

Forging and fortifying one-to-one relationships with Salesforce’s greatest champions

Sprout’s reporting helps Salesforce stay close to what drives their audience engagement. “It’s so important to measure engagement to ensure we continue creating content our audience loves,” said Max Benesi, Salesforce’s Associate Manager, Social Media and Community. “With Sprout, we can do that quickly—reporting out at any time so we always know where things stand.”

Through social listening, analytics and other features in the Sprout platform, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Saleforce’s social media team is learning even more about the Trailblazer community, and how to engage with them effectively via the company’s 150+ social channels.

“We’ve learned that the best way to build relationships with our Trailblazers is through one-on-one engagements on social—and Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps us to accomplish that,” said Benesi.

Salesforce’s Trailblazers and other highly engaged social audience members are open to having Benesi and his team test-drive new content with them. “They’re very honest—they will tell us what they like and don’t like,” Benesi said. “We use their feedback to inform our content creation.”

With other social media management platforms that we’ve used, the reporting was not intuitive. We often had to pull reports natively and work with spreadsheets. When our team started using Sprout, all that manual work went away.

Max Benesi
Associate Manager, Social Media and Community

Accelerating speed to insights—and eliminating thousands of hours of manual work

The business intelligence Salesforce gains from using Sprout helps them evolve their marketing strategies far beyond specific events. “We can’t just make decisions on a hunch. We need accurate data to understand where we’re finding success,” said Kraines. “The insights we get from Sprout allow us to have confidence in our decision-making.”

Quaranta underscored further just how game-changing Sprout’s reporting capabilities have been for the social media practitioners at Salesforce. “We saw immediate value following our implementation,” she said. “We’re reporting faster, and in real time, and sharing information continuously with our stakeholders.”

She added, “We’re also moving 10 times faster per day with community management by using Sprout’s automation and workflows. That gives our team more time to focus on strategy and bring our creative vision to life—the things that we do best.”

“When my team is able to automate simple tasks, it enables them to take that bandwidth and focus it toward innovation,” said Kraines. “We’ve saved over 12,000 hours this year by using Sprout, and our team is having a lot more fun with their work.”

Making plans to leverage a 360-degree view of Salesforce’s social media audience

Kraines underscored that while Sprout is a valuable tool for tracking social media around events like Dreamforce, her team uses Sprout’s capabilities to help them deliver on their year-round mission to increase brand awareness. That means helping customers truly understand what the global CRM software and applications provider does, and how it impacts their businesses—as well as their customers.

“Salesforce is focused on helping businesses become ‘customer companies,’” said Kraines. “We provide them with a 360-degree view of their customers so they can bring those ‘wow’ moments to life. I believe that social is the bread and butter of delivering that 360-degree view of the customer.”

Looking ahead, Kraines said her team is eager to see what impact Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce will have on how they craft social strategies and create new campaigns. “Sprout has already made it easier for the Salesforce social team to share insights with our leadership about what our customers are talking about, and what their needs and issues are,” she said. “This information helps to shape our company’s marketing, sales and operational strategies. And now, with Sprout’s integration across our platform, we can bring social insights and data everywhere across Salesforce.”

Kraines said her team is confident that Sprout is the right partner to help support Salesforce’s growing social media practice. “Sprout has great products,” she said. “But more importantly, they’re evolving and scaling along with our team. By partnering with us and listening to our input, Sprout allows us to be at the forefront of social media.”

I recommend Sprout to other social leaders because they have been such an amazing partner. When you’re onboarding a critical component of your Martech stack, it’s so important to have people alongside you who want to see you succeed.

Marissa Kraines
Vice President, Global Head of Social Media

To find out how your social media team can be more productive, free up time for innovation and never miss a moment to engage meaningfully with customers, request your free demo of Sprout Social today.

The post Salesforce’s social media team saves 12,000 hours in first year using Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Edgio provides powerful solutions across web apps, content delivery and video streaming—servicing approximately 4% of global internet traffic and clients in 38 countries worldwide. While the company isn’t new, its brand name is. Previously known as Limelight Networks, Inc., the business rebranded in June 2022 following its acquisitions of Layer0 and of Yahoo’s Edgecast. What followed was a year of significant change for the company as they pivoted from a CDN vendor to an edge company providing applications and solutions that take advantage of their global edge network.

When Lindsay Moran, Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy, joined Edgio in the summer of 2022, her challenge was to amplify the company’s new brand on social media with a strategy that could deliver results quickly and cost-effectively. Moran led the charge to implement Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform, a decision that not only drove employee engagement, but helped the company generate $126,000+ in earned media value (EMV) in just three months after launching its advocacy program company-wide.

The extra reach from our employees—not paid advertising—is helping us grow our audiences on social. Our earned media value was over $126,000 in the first three months of our program

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Reinvigorating employee advocacy during a time of significant transformation

Before its rebranding, Edgio had tried to launch an employee advocacy program, but it did not gain much traction internally. Moran said she recognized that the time was right to try again after helping Edgio develop a host of new assets, from blogs to web content, to help the business “rebuild” its position as an industry thought leader. Delivering consistent messaging about the company’s products, solutions and brand across social media channels was also a priority.

“Social media is a no-brainer for sharing this quality content,” said Moran. “We have small audiences on our key corporate social media channels, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. But we knew we could amplify our reach by inspiring employees to use their personal networks to help promote our brand.”

Helping employees feel connected to our brand and aware of our news was also a top factor in the decision to reinvigorate employee advocacy at Edgio. “When merging companies and pivoting to new value-added capabilities for our customers, there’s a lot to share,” she said. “Employee advocacy is helping us stay abreast of all the good news and stay focused on the future by inspiring our employees to play a front-line role in telling our brand story.”

Employee advocacy needs to feel natural and authentic. What’s great about Sprout is that we can equip our employees with the content we want them to share, but they still have the opportunity to put their individual spin on it and make it their own.

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Impressive post-launch results that inspired a “happy dance”

To get the new employee advocacy program off to a successful start, Moran said she leaned on the team from Sprout to provide training to a select group of handpicked brand enthusiasts at Edgio who took part in a 30-day pilot program in February 2023. “It was a great experience,” Moran said. “Sprout let us record the pilot training session, and we’ve since turned it into an internal training tool for our new hires.”

She added, “The pilot program helped us to ensure we had plenty of content prepared going into our company-wide rollout of Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform. And through a post-pilot survey, we gathered more valuable insights on how to make our program successful from the outset.”

Edgio officially introduced the new employee advocacy program to its workforce through a monthly sales awareness call and a companywide “EdgeTalks” presentation (Edgio’s version of a TED Talk). Moran said these forums were a vital way to communicate the “why” for the program clearly, and to offer a solid overview of program basics plus “tips and tricks” for users to make the most of employee advocacy.

Moran also emphasized that the “tremendous support” of Edgio’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nancy Maluso, who played no small part in helping to build momentum around the employee advocacy effort. “She continues to promote and encourage the program among our leadership teams,” Moran said.

With Sprout’s Reports, Moran tracks the impact of Edgio’s employee advocacy program and shares the results with employees to help them stay motivated “cheerleaders” for the brand.

There’s been new business activity percolating at Edgio, too, which can be attributed to the company’s use of Employee Advocacy by Sprout. “During a recent team meeting, our sales leader in EMEA told us she’d received a lead from content shared through Advocacy,” said Moran. “I did a happy dance! It’s so exciting that we’re already starting to see fruit from our labor. It validates what we’re trying to do as a company, and why we’re working so hard to promote this program.”

Sprout makes it easy to jumpstart and grow employee advocacy

Moran said the employee advocacy program at Edgio is blooming, and the sales, marketing and customer success teams are particularly active in sharing content. But several product specialists and other subject matter experts have also become frequent users, and Moran said their outreach is particularly valuable for helping Edgio grow its reputation as an innovator.

“The ease of adopting a tool like Sprout helped our team embrace the new employee advocacy program quickly. After just the first month, the adoption rate was 34%,” Moran said. “Today, 20% of employees are active users, sharing content with their audiences more than three times per month, on average. Over time, I’d love to see our adoption rate hit 50%. That’s my aim.”

To learn more about how Employee Advocacy by Sprout can help amplify your brand’s social presence and engage your team—without spending more on paid promotion—request a demo today.

The post Edgio sees $126,000+ in earned media value with Employee Advocacy in just 3 months appeared first on Sprout Social.

Boingo provides next-gen wireless solutions that enable smart connected environments and needed a seamless social media management tool to support its award-winning customer care team. Boingo, which uses Salesforce Service Cloud, was looking to automate the social media service ticketing process to properly tag items of priority and filter out unnecessary noise.

“When I came across the integration between Sprout Social and Salesforce, it was just what we were looking for—a solution we could easily transition to because it was compatible with Salesforce,” said Susan Nordquist, Senior Manager, Business Systems, at Boingo Wireless.

The integration between Sprout Social and Salesforce Service Cloud is one of the most flexible integration packages I’ve seen. They get a gold star for the smart design—and for using as much native functionality as possible.

Susan Nordquist
Senior Manager, Business Systems

An opportunity to “spring clean” keywords

Nordquist, who describes her role at Boingo as part data architect and part systems architect, was keen to find a solution that would complement the company’s current workflow without taxing internal resources. The transition to Sprout Social presented an opportunity for Nordquist to make adjustments that would help ease the administrative burden.

Nordquist said she made “spring cleaning” of keywords a high priority. The solution to cutting down the noise, Nordquist said, was to rethink how the team was using keywords and target handles instead. Through this refresh, its customer care service agents can focus on responding to messages from customers looking for assistance.

And because agents don’t have to spend time weeding through a never-ending stream of messages, they have more time to focus on high-quality customer care initiatives. We have reduced the number of cases that are created from social media channels by 89%.

Sprout Social is a fully mature social media management platform with way more functionality than I ever knew anybody needed.

Susan Nordquist
Senior Manager, Business Systems

Making the transition to Sprout

Boingo’s transition to Sprout Social was “extremely easy,” according to Nordquist. And while Nordquist said she was initially concerned about how challenging it might be to move the customer care agents to a new solution, the training process went smoothly. Nordquist said the Sprout team has been responsive to requests for guidance—like walking her through the process of keyword cleanup—and for customizations to suit Boingo’s specific needs. “Sprout has been quick to incorporate our feedback,” she said. “Our current version of the package is really solid. It’s one of the best integration experiences I’ve ever had.”

I was very happy with the level of detail that Sprout delivered. It’s clear that they care about setting up their customers for success.

Susan Nordquist
Senior Manager, Business Systems

If you’d like to see for yourself how quick and easy it is to switch to Sprout Social, request a personalized demo.

The post Good connection: How Boingo Wireless seamlessly switched to Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

“We automate online advertising for our clients,” said Spencer Traver, Director of Content at Simpli.fi. “But unlike traditional demand-side platforms (DSPs), Simpli.fi doesn’t lead with buying advertising on a segment basis. We’re built on our data management platform (DMP), so we can provide granular data—giving our clients plenty of targeting options and insights. For example, they can target audiences based on demographics, what content they’re reading online or what physical locations they visit.”

While Simpli.fi helps advertisers take a data-driven approach to their campaigns to drive optimal performance, the advertising technology company is working to elevate its own online presence. In April 2023, it launched a major rebranding initiative—and a critical facet of that effort is an employee advocacy program supported by Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform. According to Traver, since Simpli.fi piloted the program in February, it has seen almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value (EMV).

Our employee advocacy has returned nearly $90,000 in Earned Media Value in just three months. That means we’re already 7x our ROI. So, communicating the value of our investment in the advocacy program internally has been straightforward.

Spencer Traver
Director of Content

Tapping employees to reintroduce a changed company with a unified brand message

Until recently, Simpli.fi hadn’t prioritized its corporate social media strategy like it hoped to. But after making several acquisitions in the adtech space, the business decided it was time to elevate its online presence and internal processes to reintroduce Simpli.fi as a transformed and unified brand.

“We aligned the launch of a new social media strategy with the brand transformation—and we moved quickly to get employee advocacy live a few months in advance,” said Traver. “Employee advocacy is an easy, interactive way to get people involved in sharing our story. We wanted to use it to help create a sense of belonging, internally, not just around the brand transformation, but as an evergreen effort moving forward.”

When Traver was evaluating technology to support Simpli.fi’s employee advocacy program, he realized that Sprout would provide an obvious, cost-effective solution. Simpli.fi has used the Sprout platform since 2015, primarily for social media management tasks such as scheduling and publishing. “It was easy for us to expand our use of Sprout to include Employee Advocacy,” said Traver. “But we also appreciated that it wouldn’t mean adding another external tool or training our staff to use a new system when it didn’t make sense.”

There’s a real sense of belonging that comes from having a platform for employees to access high-quality content that they can use to help tell our brand story. And Sprout makes the whole process so seamless. It makes you wonder, ‘Why doesn’t everybody do this?’

Spencer Traver
Director of Content

Forging a quick path to user adoption and ROI with Sprout

The results Simpli.fi has seen since piloting Employee Advocacy speak to the ease of getting people on board with using Sprout’s platform. In addition to the 55% adoption rate achieved in the first quarter of the program, Simpli.fi realized nearly $90,000 in estimated EMV.

Advocacy is also helping to build camaraderie and cohesiveness across the newly expanded workforce. The sales team is currently the most active on the platform, representing 53% of sharing activity, according to Traver. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” he said, noting that the customer success and development teams are also highly engaged, as are some executives.

But what’s been especially interesting to watch, Traver said, is how enthusiastic Simpli.fi employees retained from the previously acquired companies are about the employee advocacy rollout. “We told these employees that we hoped they would want to be a part of this effort, and some of them have become our most active participants,” he said.

What are the benefits of employee advocacy? You’re putting your brand in the marketplace more often and in more relevant places. You’re also taking your content a step further. But I think the real secret sauce is the connectedness it creates within your own company.

Spencer Traver
Director of Content

Monitoring growth to double down on audience engagement

Traver isn’t alone in tracking the performance of Simpli.fi’s employee advocacy campaign. He works closely with Mackenzie Land, who joined the company’s marketing team in the fall of 2022 and took on the role of Social Media Coordinator in March 2023.

“Now that we have Mackenzie on the team, we can truly focus on executing a full social media strategy—including a robust video strategy, which we didn’t have before,” said Traver. He explained that as part of that work, he and Land keep a close eye on various metrics to track social media performance, including reach, impressions, audience growth rate, total engagements and engagement rates.

Land says one of the best parts of her job is using Sprout to track the growth in engagement rates and experimenting with other reports in Sprout, like Profile Performance and Post Performance. “Sprout’s Reports are helping us learn how to make the most of every social channel and what content types best suit our audiences’ natural experiences,” she said. “Through various tests, we’ve discovered how to boost total engagement by adding more relevant photos and videos to posts, for example.”

“Employee advocacy helps us to expand on those metrics we’re reporting on,” Traver said. “And we’re already seeing huge results from the program.”

To learn more about how Sprout can help your business achieve its goals on social, request a demo today.

The post How Simpli.fi drove 7x ROI in 3 months of using Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Matthew McConnell, Plaid’s Social Media Lead, is tasked with increasing the brand’s social engagement to help the company overcome these challenges. And with help from Sprout Social, McConnell said Plaid is connecting with its diverse audiences much more effectively on social platforms—particularly on LinkedIn. The company has built a robust following on the network over the past year, increasing its followers by 60%—from about 70,000 to more than 131,000 as of May 2023.

Shifting perception by providing relevant information to diverse audiences on social

McConnell explained that Plaid was “a disruptor brand” in the financial services space when it first hit the market a decade ago. It had to work hard to help consumers and financial institutions understand how open banking worked. That work is paying off: More than 12,000 financial institutions and companies now work with Plaid, and over 8,000 digital financial services have been built on its developer-friendly platform.

“Plaid has worked closely with banks to implement tools that help them combat complex issues like fraud,” McConnell explained. “We now have a robust partner network, and we’re able to highlight some of the cool use cases these apps and services can support because of Plaid. For example, some providers are helping underbanked people and those with thin credit files to build healthier financial lives.”

Plaid uses social media to help educate people, at a high level, about what Plaid does, according to McConnell. “We want to empower our followers with useful content, so they can help spread the word about Plaid,” he said. “If they’re a developer, we want to give them access to ideas for improving their app or service. For financial institutions, we want to highlight interesting use cases. If they’re consumers, we want them to understand why our technology is safe and helpful.”

Tracking multiple KPIs with Sprout to assess and improve audience engagement

McConnell said LinkedIn has emerged as an essential platform to educate audiences about how Plaid helps companies grow their businesses and deliver better user experiences. Examples of content Plaid has recently shared on LinkedIn include tips for organizations that want to get started with open finance and customer stories featured in the company’s “#PoweredbyPlaid” campaign.

Sprout’s LinkedIn management tools are crucial to McConnell’s everyday work because they make it easy for him, as a team of one, to share posts, engage with followers, and track and measure content performance.
“Luckily, Plaid had implemented Sprout right before I joined the company in April 2022,” said McConnell, who started using Sprout in 2014. “I’m glad they saw the value of Sprout because the platform plays such a vital role in my day-to-day work.”

McConnell uses Sprout “to track and report on everything from reach, click throughs to Plaid’s site, lead generation, form fills, mentions and sentiment.” He explained, “I’m looking at those key performance indicators (KPIs) that span awareness, consideration and advocacy.”

Additionally, McConnell uses Sprout’s Reports to share insights with his broader team about content performance. And he makes full use of Sprout’s features to refine strategies on the fly and work more efficiently. He said his go-to tools include Listening to get a comprehensive view of certain keywords and hashtags to analyze sentiment and uncover trends on social media. He also relies on Tagging to group and categorize posts.

“Tagging in Sprout helps us know which content we’re sharing that’s performing best,” said McConnell. “And if something isn’t working well, we can dig in to understand why, and recalibrate our strategy to make sure we’re providing our diverse audiences with access to the information they want, in the way they want to consume it.”

Sprout’s integration with LinkedIn has been a huge game-changer. Being able to use Sprout to monitor and respond to comments and handle community management on LinkedIn is a lifesaver. It saves me at least 20 hours per month—and time is literally money, after all

Matthew McConnell
Social Media Lead

Expand your audience and save valuable time with Sprout

McConnell said one aspect of Sprout that he especially appreciates, in addition to providing “all the capabilities you could want,” is the company’s ability to keep its technology current. “Sprout keeps pace with rapid change in social media quite well,” he said. “Sprout makes it simple and easy to do whatever I need to do on social platforms, which are always evolving.”

Sprout is incredibly user-friendly and intuitive. In about 30 minutes, I can get someone comfortable with handling tasks on their own, like posting schedules or dealing with messages. As a team of one, it’s a relief to know I can easily hand off those responsibilities when needed.

Matthew McConnell
Social Media Lead

Sprout’s publishing, response management and productivity tools and analytics save McConnell at least 20 hours of work per month. That gives him even more time to help Plaid grow its community, and find compelling ways to educate them about the company’s mission.

Find out how Sprout Social can help your business use social platforms like LinkedIn more effectively to amplify the power of your social content, educate and engage with your target audiences, and build brand awareness to grow market share. Request your free demo today.

The post How Plaid grew its LinkedIn audience by 60% in one year with Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

When Hudl’s customers have questions about or issues with the company’s tech, they want answers fast—it could make all the difference in the outcome of a game. Hudl uses Salesforce Service Cloud to help agents quickly connect with customers, whether they’re contacting the company by phone, email, chatbot or @HudlSupport on Twitter. Hudl uses the partnership between Sprout Social and Salesforce to ensure a full 360-degree customer view.

We wish we’d switched from Social Studio to Sprout Social sooner to handle our customer support. The implementation support was top-notch—the Sprout team made the process a breeze.

Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator

Raising the bar on customer support efficiency by switching to Sprout

The need to reduce the amount of tool-hopping for Hudl agents is especially critical during peak customer usage periods, such as during the American football or basketball season. “Our customer support team may need to field between 1,000 and 2,000 support requests per day—primarily by phone, email or Twitter,” Koenig explained.

Customer satisfaction and “speed to answer” are among the top metrics that Hudl’s customer support team uses to track their performance. Streamlining the internal experience for agents on the Salesforce platform helps them improve resolution times, reduce duplication of efforts and serve customers more effectively overall.

Koenig, whose primary responsibility at Hudl is Salesforce CRM system administration, said Hudl’s transition from Social Studio to Sprout at the beginning of 2023 was quick and easy.

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year moving from legacy Salesforce tools into Salesforce Flow and increasing automation in customer support,” she said. “The fact that Sprout Social is already in the Salesforce Flow workforce automation solution was huge for us. Many other integrations we’ve plugged in over the past several years are still being built on Salesforce’s legacy automation.”

“The integration between Sprout Social and Salesforce Service Cloud aligns with our goal to unify the internal experience for our customer support reps into a single platform. Instead of having agents log into multiple systems to handle calls, chats and Tweets, we want every interaction they have to happen within Salesforce Service Cloud.”

Easy-to-implement customizations to support preferred workflows

Another benefit of switching to Sprout is the fact that the solution “was very powerful right out of the box,” Koenig said. “Many vendors say their products integrate with Salesforce, but it requires an extremely heavy lift from multiple engineers to create a custom integration,” she said.

Sprout’s integration with Salesforce was quite literally plug-and-play, which is exactly what we were looking for.

Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator

Sprout was also easy to customize, according to Koenig. “We wanted a few customizations to suit our preferred workflows, and the Sprout team was very responsive to our requests,” she said.

One customization was skills-based routing. “Depending on what channel a customer message comes through and the product type it refers to, we route the case to a specific rep,” Koenig explained. “We needed to customize the Salesforce Flow for Sprout cases so that we could easily move new cases into specific queues to reach agents with specific skills.”

Koenig said Sprout’s support team walked her through the whole process: “They explained how Sprout’s Flow works, and exactly where I could make modifications to adjust it.”

Accurate, actionable social data helps Hudl assemble team lineups

In the few months since Hudl implemented Sprout’s social media integration with Salesforce, Koenig said she’s heard plenty of positive feedback from the customer support team about how much their everyday work experience has improved.

“The team really appreciates the ability to use Sprout in Salesforce to scroll through Twitter interactions just as you would online, and get all that context,” she said. “What did the customer say to this response? What was the flow of the interaction? It seems like such a simple thing, but it wasn’t easy for our reps to see all that detail when we were using Social Studio.”

Hudl’s leadership is also gaining access to accurate, actionable social data they never had before. “When you start implementing different connections to your CRM, that data can get muddy if you’re not careful,” Koenig explained. “One of our top objectives for this year is to make sure that we equip our business decision-makers with high-quality data, including social data.”

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

Koenig added, “Sprout has really helped us clean up our social data, especially in terms of measuring the sheer number of interactions we have with our customers. It was very hard to measure that with our previous tool and know just how many people we were actually communicating with.”

That insight from Sprout is helping Hudl to create a more efficient customer support function because leadership has a better understanding of how many agents are needed, and when.

“One of the most helpful metrics we get from Sprout is volume—especially, our seasonal volume,” Koenig said. “We don’t train every rep to handle social media work. And in the past, it was very difficult for us to forecast our staffing. The reports we generate from Sprout allow us to gauge when we need to ramp up social support, and when it’s best to guide customers to self-service support and tutorials.”

Sprout’s easy implementation process can help make you an MVP

Looking back on the experience of implementing Sprout’s integration with Service Cloud, Koenig said Sprout’s “top tier” support throughout the process was invaluable. It also boosted her reputation internally.

“I took on this implementation alone at Hudl,” she said. “The way that Sprout structured the process helped me communicate to my bosses where things stood at all times. My bosses were impressed by how few resources were needed for the implementation—and that I was able to do it on my own.”

If you’d like to learn how Sprout’s Salesforce integration can help you manage all customer care from your Salesforce instance, request a personalized demo.

The post Hudl drives all-star customer support by switching from Social Studio to Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Medallia Experience Cloud uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to track and analyze customer “signals.” Those signals can include direct and indirect feedback from surveys, reviews, contact center interactions, comments on social media, and digital behaviors on websites and apps—across the customer journey. From the insights gained, organizations can understand their audiences better and develop more engaging, personalized experiences faster.

Medallia’s technology is powerful. But until recently, the company’s efforts to use content to build brand awareness and inform and inspire audiences around the globe about the platform weren’t reaching their full potential, including on social media. One factor: The company struggled to speak to all its target audiences and verticals from one brand account, unable to offer tailored content they’d find relevant and compelling.

When Justin Herrick, Senior Manager, Content Marketing, was tapped to lead Medallia’s content strategy in early 2022, he was more than ready for the challenge. And he knew Sprout Social would be a key tool for helping them increase the impact of their content, uplevel their social media management, and amplify employee advocacy. “It was like getting the keys to the car,” Herrick said.

Sprout quickly clarifies what content resonates with Medallia’s customers—and doesn’t

After analyzing the historical performance of Medallia’s content and creating benchmarks to measure the impact of future efforts, Herrick and the Communications & Content team got to work using Sprout to execute their new strategy. They leveraged features like Tagging to track content performance and Premium Analytics for accelerating data collection and focusing on relevant metrics to prove the return on investment (ROI).

We’re heavy users of Premium Analytics. Getting to build custom reports and distributing them uniquely to specific stakeholders is important because not everyone needs to know everything — instead, we want to give stakeholders what they’re likely to find useful.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

These features, along with Sprout’s enterprise-ready social listening solution, are helping Herrick and the team learn how to use content more effectively to engage with Medallia’s customers in different industries and across the five key “horizontals” where the company operates—customer experience, employee experience, contact center, digital experience and market research.

The platform has also helped them gain a clear understanding of what and how often Medallia should be posting content on social, particularly on LinkedIn, where the company has more than 100,000 followers.
“We were posting way too often,” said Herrick. “Now we only post twice a day, at most.

They also learned that call-to-action (CTA) links on LinkedIn don’t deliver high-impact results when used regularly. Essentially, they’re a wasted effort without a diverse mix of other content types being shared. What does grab the eyeballs of Medallia’s customers on social media, according to Herrick, is content featuring video and imagery, which they learned by using Sprout.

Since Medallia has focused on using video and imagery more often, and more strategically, it’s seen some impressive results. That includes a year-over-year increase in video views of 174%, a nearly 50% boost in engagements, and a 39.5% uptick in engagement rate on LinkedIn. And video views on Twitter have skyrocketed—up nearly 1,884%, year over year.

“With the insights we get from Sprout, we can say with confidence to our stakeholders, ‘If we use links, we can expect only this average number of impressions with a clear ceiling. But if we use video and imagery, we can almost guarantee X amount of impressions.’

Sprout empowers Medallia employees to post meaningful content for their connections

Employee advocacy is also helping Medallia to improve content performance and drive customer engagement in its markets worldwide. In 2022, it completely revamped its employee advocacy program, with guidance from Sprout’s professional services team. And after relaunching the program in August, Medallia increased its employee advocacy user base by nearly 45% in just two weeks.

As part of the relaunch, Medallia also re-introduced the weekly email digest that it uses to alert employees to relevant, localized content they can easily share. It didn’t have to wait long to see results. “Employee shares of content essentially doubled starting on day one,” said Herrick.

Herrick attributes this growth to the Sprout platform increasing his team’s ability to deliver more relevant content to employees in both US and international markets, and to automate the distribution of content. And he said he’s feeling confident about future growth: “This year, we’re even more focused on mobilizing our people to use their connections to get the right content in front of the right audiences. Nearly two dozen posts are shared from Advocacy by our employees each weekday on average, and we’re trying to increase that by getting more of our employees active through gamifying Advocacy with the leaderboard.”

Using Sprout to improve our employee advocacy efforts has been a game-changer because we’re now satisfying the content needs of so many groups at Medallia. Sprout also provides our regional teams with a distribution mechanism to mobilize our salespeople all around the world.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

Working faster with Sprout Social

Herrick said he doesn’t know what his lean team would do without the timesaving features in Sprout, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox to manage messaging and identify new engagement opportunities. They’re also using Sprout to schedule and publish reports automatically in a highly readable PDF format.

We don’t have a dedicated social media manager at Medallia—and everyone on our content team needs to be a five-tool player. We need the Sprout platform to help us do more with less, from analyzing data to automating tasks like scheduling and publishing our social media content.

Justin Herrick
Senior Manager, Content Marketing

Learn how Sprout Social can help your organization understand what content will resonate best with your users—and how you can maximize employee advocacy. Request your free demo today.

The post Medallia reignites employee advocacy and sees exponential growth with Sprout appeared first on Sprout Social.

Casey’s Social Media Manager, Jasmine Riedemann, faces a dual challenge in creating an effective social media strategy for a company that’s been around since 1968: keeping loyal customers feeling good about the brand while introducing Casey’s to new audiences.

“We have older and newer generations of customers, or ‘guests,’ who have passion for Casey’s,” she explained. “We’re just trying to win the hearts and minds of Casey’s customers in the best ways possible—and sell more pizza, of course.” Those efforts, according to Riedemann, include providing strong customer care and creating content to engage and entertain audiences.

Building a thriving, online community of guests is a top priority for Casey’s. That’s why Riedemann and her team use Sprout Social—after recently transitioning from Social Studio—to help them execute a data-driven strategy that amplifies the brand’s reputation on social media They’re also working closely with Casey’s Guest Relations Team (GRT) to make sure customers have a positive experience when communicating with the brand online.

To achieve that goal, the two teams are making full use of the partnership between Sprout Social and Salesforce.

The integration has been a game-changer. It’s opened a floodgate of communication right within the tool between our social and Guest Relations Teams.

Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager

From days to hours: Accelerating social media response time through Sprout’s Service Cloud integration

Riedemann, an Iowa native, is a longtime fan of Ankeny, Iowa-based Casey’s, which she says is all about “good times, good food and good people.” And she worries about the potential brand impact when the company can’t respond promptly to guests who reach out on social media—primarily on Facebook—to say good things about Casey’s, ask questions or share concerns.

Until recently, it took up to three days, on average, for Riedemann and her team or the GRT to respond to guests online. A lack of visibility and general miscommunication about whether a response was being handled and by whom were at the root of the delays. Casey’s guests now receive responses to their messages within three to five hours, on average, according to Riedemann. This represents a 90% faster response time for guests.

The reason for this dramatic change? The company recently transitioned from Social Studio and implemented Sprout’s Service Cloud integration, which creates one centralized location for Salesforce customers to gain a full, 360-degree view of customers and support them on any channel. Riedemann’s team and the GRT can now respond directly to customers from within Service Cloud, and they can optimize the customer experience through intelligent, automated case creation and routing.

Riedemann said that learning how to work with the new tool has been a “snap” for everyone involved. Importantly, the integration helped Casey’s improve its social responsiveness essentially out of the gate.

We saw a dramatic improvement in our response times within just two weeks

Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager

She added, “By having these two tools working together, our team can see the full picture of what’s happening with guests, including their case history. The reporting is amazing, too. For example, we noticed that on one Saturday a few weeks ago, our response time had increased to about seven hours. We alerted the GRT, and they investigated the issue to pinpoint the reason for the anomaly to prevent it from happening again.”

I cannot applaud the Sprout Social and Salesforce integration enough for what it’s done for our teams. The communication between our Guest Relations Team and social team has improved tenfold because we can see who addressed a case and what actions were taken.

Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager

Riedemann said her team loves the real-time capabilities of Sprout’s Service Cloud integration, which helps ensure they never miss a beat in helping Casey’s deliver standout customer care. “If my social media specialist and I are both in the tool and looking through the inbox, we can see if the GRT has responded to a message or if we should do it,” she said. “We can even see if someone from the GRT is in the process of typing a response, so we don’t duplicate efforts.”

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

Pivoting content strategy on the fly to respond to real-time trends surfaced with Sprout

Beyond the integration, Riedemann and her team are using many of the Sprout platform’s features to help Casey’s live up to its brand promise, “Here for Good.” Insights gleaned from Tagging and Listening help them stay nimble and create social media content that resonates with Casey’s diverse audiences. That includes creating localized campaigns for customers in the 16 states where Casey’s operates.

Sprout’s social media analytics and reporting tools give Riedemann and her team visibility into the performance of Casey’s campaigns and content on a monthly basis, or more often if needed. They also use the Post Performance Report in Sprout to analyze content performance at a granular level. “During our biweekly check-in with our creative and social teams, we look at the Post Performance Report more in-depth and also examine real-time trends to decide whether we should shift gears with our content plan to take advantage of those trends,” she said.

Tracking social media metrics with Sprout helps Riedemann and her team confirm they’re hitting their goals for increasing impressions and engagement across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It also helps them set the bar higher with more confidence. “For example, our organic reach rate on Facebook is about 3%,” said Riedemann. “We know that’s pretty high, but now we want to hit 4%.”

Sprout Social helps Casey’s keep its guests coming back for more

Looking ahead, Riedemann said her team intends to use insights from Sprout to guide future investments that can help Casey’s build deeper connections with its guests — and increase its slice of market share as a convenience store and pizza chain. They also plan to experiment more with LinkedIn, to connect more effectively with B2B customers, and TikTok, where the brand could potentially increase its collaboration with social media influencers.

If you’d like to experience firsthand how Sprout Social can help your brand amplify its presence on social media, sign up for a free 30-day trial. And to find out how Sprout’s Service Cloud integration can help your business deliver world-class social customer care, request a personalized demo.

Since we’ve implemented a strong, data-backed strategy using insights from Sprout, we’ve seen our content performance grow significantly year over year.

Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager

The post How Casey’s uses Sprout’s Service Cloud integration to deliver world-class customer care appeared first on Sprout Social.

Nutrisense uses multiple social media channels—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram—to deliver content designed to educate audiences.

“We use our social media platforms primarily to amplify our mission and educate audiences to improve their metabolic health, and impact our marketing funnel” said Luz Cortázar, Marketing Manager at Nutrisense. “We want to empower people with knowledge and show them how Nutrisense can help them make lifestyle changes to achieve better health.”

Nutrisense had about 25,000 followers across its social media profiles in July 2021, when Cortázar took on the responsibility of creating and managing the company’s social media content. Fast-forward to the end of 2022: Nutrisense’s social media engagement grew by 45% and their community had expanded to more than 130,000—an increase of 469%. According to Cortázar, one of the vital factors in that growth has been maximizing user-generated content (UGC) with help from Sprout Social.

“Sprout helped me see that UGC—not just pictures, but also video—is the key to generating engagement with Nutrisense’s audiences,” Cortázar said. “People love seeing other people’s stories.”

Using insights from Sprout to amplify UGC that advances the customer journey

Cortázar said UGC is especially effective for entertaining Nutrisense’s target audiences. Although her team was aware of the power of UGC, using Sprout Social made it easier to collect UGC, amplify their potential subscribers and keep current members engaged.

With Sprout’s Reports, Cortázar can identify which content resonates best with Nutrisense’s audience so that they can replicate success on other channels. “I can see performance by profile, post and other metrics that help me understand how our content drives engagement and impressions,” she said.

That, in turn, allows them to collaborate more effectively with other departments, like paid media and partnerships. “Sprout helps us work together better to move people down the funnel,” Cortázar said.

“Being aware of what’s working in organic and what our members are sharing helps us provide insightful information with the Paid Media team.”

Cortázar offers this example to underscore how the strategic use of UGC impacts Nutrisense’s brand awareness efforts: “We started working with a partner who was using our program and gaining popularity on TikTok. He was sharing his food experiments on his profile, so we started creating ‘explainers.’ I would write a script, and one of our registered dietitians would explain his reaction to the experiment. The combination of those two formats, experiments and explainers—with the added push of our paid media team—helped us add almost 79,000 followers during the third quarter of 2022.”

The growth we’ve seen in our social media community reflects our team’s investments in content creation—and how the insights we’re getting from Sprout are paying off.

Luz Cortázar
Social Media Marketing Manager

Finding more time for content creation thanks to Sprout’s timesaving features

The exponential growth of Nutrisense’s social media community is an outcome that Cortázar didn’t necessarily plan on when she first started using Sprout. She also emphasized that for Nutrisense, having an engaged community is more important than fostering a massive following.

“As a content creator, it’s the engagement that matters,” she said. “If a person interacts with your content—liking it, commenting on it, saving it or sharing it—you’ve done something well.”

What Cortázar initially wanted from Sprout was a community management tool that would help save her time so she could focus more on what she loves to do most—creating content, especially video. But Cortázar said what really sealed the deal for her when selecting Sprout, was the Smart Inbox.

“We can monitor everything in one place—Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, comments from organic. It’s a game-changer,” she said. And because Sprout has made community management so much easier, Cortázar has delegated that responsibility to Nutrisense’s customer success team, so she can now devote about 70% of her average workday to content creation and the rest to strategizing.

A sustainable social strategy starts with smart insights

With Sprout, the Nutrisense team can prioritize the work that matters most to their business and members.

Learn how Sprout Social can help you better serve your target audiences by elevating your community management and increasing collaboration across your teams. Request your free demo today.

We are a data-driven team, so the reports I can pull from Sprout help me understand which content performs better. This helps me plan, strategize and see what things move the needle across the funnel—which is important on platforms that continuously change their behavior. Sprout’s Reports are my best ally. It’s the tool I value the most.

Luz Cortázar
Social Media Marketing Manager

The post How Nutrisense grew its social media community by over 400% with help from Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.