But when it comes to social media, data collection is complex. Teams who struggle to share meaningful insights usually don’t a) have enough data, b) have a way to turn a massive volume of raw data into actionable business intelligence (BI) or c) understand how their efforts fit into the big picture.

Can you visualize a time when you received a social team report that only contained one-off metrics (like follower count and impressions) with no throughline to business goals? Or when a report included so many numbers it was impossible to decipher, leaving your head spinning as you tried to process all the metrics and what they mean?

Data-driven marketing is about more than asking every team to submit regular dashboards or spreadsheets with KPI updates. It’s about empowering your team to mine impactful performance and audience insights. This will require investing in training, the right tools and refining your data collection process. But by harnessing the wealth of social data available, you will tap into an insights goldmine for every part of your organization.

At Sprout, we believe in the power of social data to transform every part of an organization—whether that’s using insights to change customer care processes, revamp your hiring plan or create new product lines.

Alicia Johnston

Senior Director of Content and Campaigns, Sprout Social

In this article, we explain how you can find and use social data that enables you to outpace the competition, improve your content strategy, iterate on new product development and build more impactful, long-term campaigns. We also examine common data-driven social media marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is when you inform your business strategy with marketing BI (examples: social content performance data, social listening insights, website analytics, email marketing metrics and more). The strategy can apply to functions within and outside of marketing, including customer care, product development and growth.

Social media intelligence is a critical input for building an effective data-driven marketing strategy. With it, you can predict future audience behavior, gain unfiltered insight into the success of your campaigns and product launches, drive revenue gains and make your team the linchpin for making key business decisions.

The advantages of data-driven marketing

According to The Sprout Social Index™, many marketers already connect the value of social to business goals. Over half of brands (60%) quantify the value of engagement on social in terms of revenue impact, 57% use it to track conversions and sales directly resulting from social efforts and 51% use it to optimize their product development or marketing strategy.

Likewise, The 2023 State of Social Report found that virtually all business leaders believe social media data and insights have a profound positive impact on top business priorities—including building brand reputation and loyalty, improving competitive positioning and gaining more customer knowledge.

Here are ways you can use social media to fuel your data-driven marketing strategy, with expert recommendations from Sprout leaders and other brands.

A clearer view of your audience

To build comprehensive buyer personas, you need to understand your audiences’ pain points and challenges. Your target audience is talking about your brand (or at least your industry) on social right now.  By tapping into social media listening tools, you can understand what rising trends they care about, products they love, why a competitor is performing well or poorly, why a campaign is resonating and how an audience is responding to a conference or event.

Listening also tracks touchpoints on your customers’ digital customer journey, so you can better understand how consumers interact with you online. For example, many social teams underestimate how much of the social chatter surrounding their brand is pre-purchase (acquisition) and post-purchase (retention).

One company guessed their acquisition and retention conversations made up 0-5% of their social buzz. However, when their agency started using tags to categorize their social activity, they found acquisition alone made up at least 5%—but sometimes 70% in one month. By investigating this data, your team can develop creative ways to remove roadblocks and incentivize purchases, and align social with your sales funnel.

More targeted, relevant content

Trend cycles have never moved faster, making it difficult to tell what will resonate with audiences and what will flop. For example, Team Sprout uses our AI-powered Listening solution to vet topics before we develop content—both for one-off posts and long-term campaigns.

According to Johnston, “Social listening data helps us validate whether trends we’re seeing on our feeds and from customers are resonating with a wider audience, and uncover additional conversation themes and subtopics to dig into. This means we can create more relevant, high-performing content. It helps us respond promptly to trends.”

Social insights also help us create more compelling evergreen content. From our social profiles to our blog, we enrich our content with Listening data that supports our thought leadership, empowers our sales team and helps us relate to our audience more effectively.

To pressure test our insights, we use the Post Performance Report to analyze content down to the individual post level. The report provides a unified view of post performance across networks, so we can see which messages performed the best and on which platforms. This analysis reinforces us to test our strategy and pivot effectively if needed. Listening and analytics data work in tandem to help us iterate on our content.

Better competitive intelligence

Listening also makes it easy for Sprout to access all conversations about/around our brand and the social media industry as a whole. We use listening data to answer questions like:

• How does our brand image compare to our competitors?
• What are our competitors’ sentiment trends?
• How much social volume does our PR efforts and thought leadership content generate? What about our competitors?

Our Competitive Analysis Topic Tempate aggregates and presents this data so we can see how our engagements, sentiment and overall volume compare. With that intel, we orient our strategy to fill industry white space and find our unique footing in the market.

Proactive crisis management

A single negative customer experience can turn into a full-blown crisis if not addressed appropriately. Social listening data enables our social team to keep a constant pulse on our brand health and sentiment. We track data trends related to our share of voice, conversation volume and positive sentiment ratio. This allows us to swiftly respond to customer care inquiries and manage would-be crises with grace.

Refined product development

At Sprout, we’re always making updates to our platform based on customer feedback. For example, we expedited the launch of Dark Mode after the social team noticed a lot of social conversations and inbound questions about it in our comments and messages. They were able to use Listening and qualitative data to inform the need for the new product feature.

Remember: When people talk about your brand, your product or their pain points, they usually don’t tag you. Listening helps us stay vigilant and tuned into all the conversations that can help us improve our offerings.

More efficient spending

By taking a data-driven approach to social media strategy development, brands are able to invest where it counts—both in their organic and paid initiatives. As many marketing leaders are expected to do more with less budget, the pressure is on to deliver results.

With social media data, you can demonstrate how key metrics like brand awareness, engagements and traffic correlated with an increase in sales. For example, when Figo Pet Insurance began investing in their social video strategy, they used real-time data to refine their approach and determine which videos to amplify with paid budget. Their efforts resulted in audience growth, multiple viral videos and revenue-driving ads.

The challenges of data-driven marketing

Many brands don’t have a clear roadmap to developing a data-driven approach to social media—or marketing in general. If your team is still struggling to translate metrics to meaningful decisions and strategic plans, here are some of the things that could be holding you back.

Collecting data

Marketing data collection has a reputation for not providing CEOs and other leaders with enough concrete information that matters to overall business goals (like revenue and customer acquisition). With Google finally phasing out of cookies and third-party data, marketing teams are under even greater pressure to find new ways of capturing critical insights. Manually collecting this data is time-consuming, tedious and ineffective, restricting teams’ ability to measure their impact.

Fragmented tech stacks

When data is siloed across multiple systems, this leads to data quality and integrity issues. Having team members switch between many different platforms for functions like social media management, customer care, content performance and sales data is not only inefficient, it also disrupts the customer journey and makes it difficult to have a cross-channel view of your audience.

Analysis

If the tools you use for data collection and analysis are cumbersome or complex, you might become over-reliant on an analytics team or person to pull relevant intel. When data isn’t accessible across teams, the result is opportunity cost. What creative work could your teams do if they had more time back? How could teams across the company use that data to iterate on customer outreach, product development, customer care and more?

5 tips to develop a more data-driven marketing organization

Here are five actionable ways you can overcome those challenges and build a data-driven marketing organization that fully harnesses the potential of social insights.

Identify and clarify the data you want to track

The first step toward creating a data-driven culture is to define which metrics matter to you, your department and the rest of the organization. While these metrics will vary company to company, revisit your business’ goals, learn to speak the language of your CFO, and find the balance between brand and performance marketing to effectively outline them. Share the metrics you’re measuring with your team and across leadership.

Invest in team development

Once you know which metrics matter most, invest in training and resources to ensure everyone across your team is data literate, understands how to do basic analysis and prioritizes data collection with the highest impact. According to The State of the Social Media Industry report, 93% of brands say that social data is expected to become a major source of business intelligence for their company in the next three years. All teams—but especially social teams—need to be ready to analyze and contextualize data to extract meaningful insights. 

Look for opportunities to centralize data in your tech stack

Nix point solutions in favor of platforms that integrate with your most critical systems, like your CRM, BI tools, marketing automation platforms and social media management solution. Find ways you can consolidate data, making it easier to measure key performance results and improve the customer experience.

For example, with Sprout’s Tableau integration, you can visualize data from multiple marketing channels in one place, giving you a more complete view of your customers and how they interact with your brand across the buyer’s journey.

Automate analysis wherever you can

To overcome the time-consuming nature of data analysis, automate wherever you can. Use AI to surface social data across your entire organization faster and make it easier for your teams to identify trends or potential crises before they crest. This is a chance to wipe the slate clean and radically rewire data collection processes or tasks that aren’t serving your employees.

Queries by AI Assist uses Sprout Social’s integration with OpenAI to generate keyword suggestions for Listening queries, expediting your social listening efforts. This helps your team fine tune Listening results, and deliver more insightful outputs—while making time for more creative work.

Establish reporting rituals

Create a regular cadence and format for sharing data across marketing, with other departments and with leadership. Data is only valuable when it’s consumed.

By using a social media management platform like Sprout, your team can view and share presentation-ready reports in our analytics suite. Reports like the Paid vs. Organic report visualize performance on individual platforms and reveal ways to improve future strategy and tactics.

Use social media insights to become a data-driven marketing leader

When you have a data-driven strategy, you’ll never have to ask your team to “show you the data” again. Data-driven marketing is the key to future-proofing your business and helping it grow.

Social media data is the missing link to understanding your audience and competitors, refining your content strategy and product development, and making better investments. But first you need powerful tools to capture it.

The right social media management platform drives revenue, boosts team efficiency and enables a data-driven focus that helps you outperform the competition. Use our social media management buyer’s guide to choose the right platform for maximum impact.

The post Data-driven marketing: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.

For example, maybe you’re completely loyal to the airline whose customer service rep magically found you the perfect flight. Even in the face of price increases and flight cancellations, you’ll never book with another airline again.

On the other hand, you might still be furious at the furniture company that delivered the wrong items to your home and refused to refund you. Even after five years, nothing can persuade you to end your boycott of the brand.

Many of us know firsthand that poor social customer service has consequences, but we also remember those positive moments that create a lasting impression and the data agrees. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers agree they notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support.

Only the brands that go above and beyond for their customers receive enviable brand loyalty. In this article, we’re breaking down the essential social media customer service metrics you need to track to ensure you provide exceptional service and care on social. As customer service inquiries continue to increase on the channel, up-leveling your efforts will help you future-proof your business and stand out from your competition.

• What are social media customer service metrics?
• How to use customer service metrics to improve your org-wide performance
• Speed and efficiency customer service metrics
• Volume and team productivity customer service metrics
• Sentiment customer service metrics
• Provide your customers with an unforgettable social customer service experience

What are social media customer service metrics?

Social media customer service metrics are data points that help you tell the story of how well your customer care efforts are satisfying your customers. These metrics uncover what your social customer care team is doing well, where there are opportunities to improve and what tools are needed to fill those gaps. Social customer service metrics can be grouped into three categories: speed and efficiency, volume and team productivity, and sentiment.

Social customer support data also reveals how your support strategy on social fits into the omnichannel customer experience your brand provides. Using data empowers you to answer questions like:

• Where are our customers most likely to make service inquiries?
• How satisfied are our customers with the support we provide on social? How does it compare to other channels?
• What are our customers’ most common questions?
• Where in the funnel are our customers most likely to get stuck?

How to use customer service metrics to improve performance

Tapping into customer service metrics will help evolve your approach to customer care. With these findings, you will be on track to cultivate an emotional connection with your audience, build brand loyalty and foster customer retention and advocacy.

But the use of these metrics goes beyond improving customer satisfaction and experience. Social media customer service metrics have the power to transform the way you do business—from refining product development to building your company-wide strategy. For example, the team at Grammarly uses incoming customer support messages to surface valuable user stories for their product and user experience teams, as well as company leadership.

And they’re not alone. The 2023 State of Social Media reports that 62% of customer service strategy is informed by social media data.  Customer insights gleaned from service interactions on social are your “secret sauce” for building cross-functional collaboration at your company. Let’s get into the 10 social customer service metrics you need to monitor, and how you can track them with Sprout Social.

Speed and efficiency customer service metrics

How quickly your brand responds on social media contributes to your reputation for providing good customer service. According to our Index data, 69% of consumers expect a response from brands on social within 24 hours or less.

Measuring your team’s response rate efficiency is imperative. Look to the following metrics to help benchmark and improve your response time and overall performance.

1. Average first reply time

Average first reply time refers to the time it takes for your team to send out the first reply to an inbound customer message within business hours.

2. Average reply wait time

Measuring the time to your first response is just the beginning. Average reply time reveals how long customers wait in between responses until their issues are resolved, which is equally important.

For example, if it took five minutes for you to reply to their first message, and 10 minutes to reply to their second, the average reply wait time would be seven minutes.

3. Service level agreement (SLA) adherence

A social media service level agreement outlines terms of service, responsibilities and expectations between a company, its social team and their clients regarding quality of service. Departments within the same organization can also have SLAs. Regardless of the parties involved, SLAs establish commitments and guidelines for standards, protocols and key performance indicators. Guidelines will vary by company, but social media SLAs can include response time guidelines, issue resolution protocols and a crisis communication plan.

SLA adherence refers to the percentage of customer queries resolved within the agreed-upon time frame specified in the SLA. For example, let’s say a SLA sets a goal of responding to inbound inquiries within three hours or less. If the company responds within that timeframe for every inquiry, the SLA adherence would be 100%.

4. Customer abandonment rate

Customer abandonment rate refers to the percentage of customers who abandon their support requests before receiving a resolution. High abandonment rate can indicate poor customer support, leading to unsatisfied customers and lost business. Tracking customer abandonment rate can help you identify areas of improvement.

How to track these in Sprout Social

In Sprout Social, the Smart Inbox unifies all your incoming messages into a single stream, enabling you to monitor incoming messages, foster conversations and respond to your audience quickly. The Inbox also creates multiple reports that visualize and contextualize your team’s customer service performance.

The Inbox Team Report enables you to evaluate your brand’s reply times at a team level and distill the metrics down by team member. The report also demonstrates median first reply times, slowest reply times, unique messages replied to and total replies listed by team members.

Use these insights to evaluate agent response performance more accurately, identify bottlenecks within your team’s workflows and closely monitor each agent’s activity for quality assurance or training purposes.

By using features like this in Sprout, MeUndies reduced their average response time to less than 20 minutes.

Volume and team productivity customer service metrics

High-quality customer service isn’t just about response times. Measuring customer support requires demonstrating you’re resolving all customers’ problems, questions and inquiries that require comprehensive solutions. To do this, compare your productivity data to your overall volume and social media customer service stats in your industry.

5. Total received messages

The number of total received messages indicates how many total customer messages landed in your inbox.

6. Total replies or response volume

This figure represents the total number of responses your team sends to customers.

7. Reply or response rate

Response rate is the rate that brands respond to messages or comments that they receive on a daily basis. Not every single comment or message will need a response, and the amount you need to respond depends on the needs of your customers. Social media response rates vary by industry.

8.  Resolution rate

Resolution rate—the percentage of customer inquiries that are fully resolved—reveals how equipped your entire company is to address customer inquiries. This data illustrates how well your internal teams collaborate to find solutions for customers in a timely manner. It’s calculated by dividing the number of total actioned messages by the total number of messages.

9. Average Handling Time (AHT)

Average handling time (AHT) refers to the average time it takes for a customer service representative to handle a customer inquiry from start to finish. Calculating AHT can help teams ensure inquiries are addressed and resolved in a timely manner. It can also illuminate opportunities to streamline workflows and identify which support scenarios require more attention.

How to track these in Sprout Social

Maintaining customer satisfaction requires an all-hands-on-deck approach because customer service is a team sport. Index data shows 36% of businesses say social customer care will be shared between marketing or customer service teams in the future. Measuring customer service productivity across teams is made easy with Sprout—here’s how you can do it.

The Inbox Activity Report provides a holistic view of your team’s social care efforts by presenting trends of incoming message volume and identifying the rate and speed of actions taken on messages by your teams. This report answers how much your team is accomplishing in the Smart Inbox.

You can also use the Case Performance Report to measure your team’s productivity and efficiency based on case management. The report compares the number of assigned cases with the total completed cases. AI can save your agents time and effort with auto-generated replies that elevate an agent’s quality of response. For example, Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist helps customer care teams tailor their messages faster.

Sentiment customer service metrics

With so much valuable performance data, it might be tempting to zero in on ways you can optimize your social customer care strategy. But don’t forget about the big picture. The insights you gain from your customer interactions are integral to your entire company’s strategy. Maximize the impact of your direct access to the customer by sharing sentiment analysis data companywide.

10. Positive, neutral and negative sentiment

Through sentiment analysis, you can learn a lot about what your customers think about your brand, products and services. Overall, sentiment can be described as generally positive, neutral or negative. Although that doesn’t encompass the full context of a customer’s experience or opinion, monitoring sentiment trends helps you track and maintain a healthy ratio of positive sentiment. Be on the lookout for changes over time.

11. Most used quick replies

If you use a chatbot to optimize customer interactions on social, most used quick replies refer to the most commonly selected options. Use this data point to identify customer support trends, and optimize your customer service process to address these common requests quickly.

12. Most received topics and subtopics

The keywords or themes that pop up in your inbox often are your most received topics and subtopics. Tracking these topics and subtopics is challenging without the use of a tagging system or machine learning capabilities—however, tuning into them is essential for learning about your audience.

13. Voice of the customer data

Social media could be described as the world’s largest focus group. It unlocks an unprecedented amount of voice of the customer data, which helps you get to know your customers’ behavior, pain points, preferences and needs on a deeper level. This customer service metric is less quantifiable, but nonetheless rich in value.

14. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)  vs. workload 

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures satisfaction with a company’s product, service or interaction on social media platforms. CSAT is measured individually through surveys with questions like “How satisfied are you with your experience today?” and “How would you rate our product/service?”

CSAT is a powerful customer support metric because it enables businesses to gauge customer satisfaction while gathering actionable data to further improve the customer experience. CSAT vs. workload refers to the comparison of customer satisfaction scores with the overall workload of the customer service team.

How to track these in Sprout Social

When you receive incoming messages in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you are able to add tags that indicate the content of the messages. For example, you can tag for audience type or service issue. Tagging your messages will enable you to visualize trends and report findings. Sprout users on the Advanced Plan can tap into AI-powered sentiment in the Smart Inbox and Reviews Feed. Posts will automatically be assigned a positive, neutral, negative or unclassified value, making it seamless to isolate messages and even assign Automated Rules according to sentiment.

You can use Sprout’s artificial intelligence-powered listening tools to uncover sentiment trends from the Inbox. Listening tools make it easy to track changes in sentiment, which empower you to share reports in a timely manner—and act on negative sentiment before it’s too late. You can also bolster your listening queries with our Queries by AI Assist feature, which uses OpenAI’s GPT model to serve up a vast range of suggested terms to include in your tracking.

And you can use the customer feedback tool to build custom surveys for X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram and Facebook. Then view and analyze your results in the Customer Feedback Report.

Provide your customers with an unforgettable social customer service experience

Whether you’re part of a social media team handling social support or a customer care professional on a dedicated support team, ground yourself in your goals for customer service. Then, as you measure performance and social media customer service metrics, you can adjust and better cater to your customers.

Try Sprout Social free for 30 days to start gathering these insights and get to know your customers on a deeper level.

The post The social media customer service metrics that experts measure appeared first on Sprout Social.

Because interactions with Stories are crucial for business accounts to track.

Brands rely on Stories to stay front-and-center in followers’ feeds. Stories are also among Instagram’s most popular and engaged-with features.

From content formats to messaging and more, Stories are a goldmine of marketing data.

That said, it’s easy to overlook siloed Story data among the rest of your Instagram analytics.

Below we explain how to check Instagram Story analytics and identify actionable insights.

What are Instagram Story analytics?

Instagram Story analytics represent the measurement of your IG Stories performance.

The metrics you can track via Instagram analytics are broken down into three types:

• Engagement metrics that measure interactions (ex: likes, shares and replies)
• Reach metrics that measure the total impressions and accounts reached by your Stories
• Navigation metrics that track actions taken by Story viewers (ex: taps back, DMs and more)

All of the above signal how well you’re engaging your audience. Likewise, your numbers uncover new opportunities to interact with them.

How to see your Instagram Story analytics

Chances are you already check your real-time analytics when your Stories are live.

However, your performance data doesn’t disappear when your Stories do after 24 hours.

If you’re only tracking single Stories as they happen, you’re missing out on bigger trends and insights. The good news? IG now aggregates your Stories data for up to two years.

More good news: there are multiple ways to view your Instagram Story analytics ASAP. This includes Instagram’s native Insights and reporting with tools like Sprout Social.

Note: you need either a business or creator account to access your Stories data.

How to view Instagram Story analytics using Instagram Insights

Granted you have the appropriate account type, below is a snapshot of the steps involved.

Step 1. Tap the (☰) menu from your profile to access “Settings and privacy.”

Step 2. Scroll and select “Insights” (found under “For professionals” in a creator account).

Step 3. At the Insights menu, scroll down and select the “Content You Shared” menu. Tap “Stories” when prompted to select a content type.

Step 4. From here, you can scroll through your most recent Stories (or filter content based on metrics such as reach or impressions).

Step 5. Tap a specific Story for a detailed breakdown of its analytics and performance data.

And you’re good to go!

Note: You can also track your Instagram Stories analytics via Story Highlights. Simply go to your highlights and tap “Activity” on the Story you want to measure. You can see most of the same metrics as above. While you cannot see viewers on your Stories, you can see people who “Liked” them.

How to see your Instagram Story analytics using Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s suite of Instagram analytics tools makes it easy to uncover your Story data. The bonus of using Sprout is the ability to track performance alongside all of your brand’s content.

Here’s how to measure your Stories with Sprout’s Instagram Business Profiles report:

Step 1. Once you’re logged into your Sprout Dashboard, go to “Overview.”
Step 2. Select a business profile or account to analyze using the “Filter” option.
Step 3. Select “Performance Summary.”
Step 4. Select “Stories performance.”
Step 5. Select a date range for your Stories. You’ll then see a breakdown of various reports and performance metrics.

Now, let’s look at the process when using the Post Performance report in Sprout Social. Assuming you’re logged in, here’s all you need to do:

Step 1. Select the Instagram profile(s) you want to view Story analytics for.
Step 2. When prompted to choose between Post Types, select “Story.”

Step 3. The report will aggregate your Stories. You can use the list view to sort your Stories based on date and/or performance. You can also export your data from here.Easy enough, right?

6 Instagram Story metrics you should be tracking

Keeping an eye on your Instagram metrics goes hand in hand with growing your account.

Because data can clue you in on what’s working and what’s not when it comes to engagement.

But again, tracking Story metrics can be tricky because they’re kind of siloed on their own.

This signals the value of using a tool like Sprout Social. The platform seamlessly filters specific Story metrics and offers in-depth reports for them. This means you can focus on your priority metrics and stop digging through IG Insights.

But what metrics should you be tracking when checking your Instagram Story analytics? Sure, interactions and engagements are obviously crucial. They aren’t the only ones, though.

Below are some additional data points to consider that often get swept under the rug.

Story Replies

Story replies are the number of Instagram DMs you received on your Story during its lifetime.

Getting unprompted (positive!) replies from your Stories means you’re nailing your content. More interactions and engagement signal strong relationships and loyalty with your audience.

If you’re lacking in Story Replies, you may want to consider a more direct response to your posts. Not to mention inserting more calls-to-action (but more on that later).

Story Taps Back

Story Taps Back are the number of times people tapped to return to your previous Story.

These are interesting because they offer insight into Stories beyond the post you’re tracking.. For example, taps back can highlight how a previous post in a series of Stories was notable. This doesn’t necessarily mean the post you’re looking at was “bad” or “boring,” though.

This highlights the importance of looking at your Instagram Stories analytics holistically. Context matters, especially when publishing multiple Story posts side-by-side.

Story Taps Forward

Story Taps Forward are the number of times people tapped your current Story to move on to your next Story.

You can think of taps forward as a sort of bounce rate or retention metric. If you post a series of Stories and someone sticks around for all of them, that’s typically a good sign.

On that note, taps forward can also highlight how long your brand’s series of Stories should be. Maybe you retain most viewers with five Stories but see a big drop-off beyond that. If so, you should keep that in mind next time you make a series of posts.

Consider also that taps can also happen out of impatience. You have to read between the lines here since you can’t monitor the amount of time spent on your Stories. Again, context matters.

Story Exits

Story Exits are the number of times people swiped to stop viewing your Story during its lifetime.

Pay close attention to exits, especially when experimenting with new types of Stories. For example, you might see a spike in exits during video Stories or after posting a long series.

If so, take note and keep that in mind for your upcoming content strategy. While Story Exits don’t necessarily mean any given Story was “bad,” they can signal the following:

• Your series of Stories was too long (think: seeing 10+ Stories slides might turn users off)
• Your content was repetitive or redundant
• Your audience wasn’t interested in your Story

Story Impressions

Story Impressions are the number of times your story was displayed to users during its lifetime.

The more eyes on your Stories, the better! Earning impressions beyond your own followers is also a positive sign for your Stories. Take note of Stories with the highest impressions.

Average Reach Per Story

Average Reach Per Story is the average number of unique users who viewed your story during its lifetime.

Ideally, your average reach per Story should grow alongside your account. This highlights the importance of consistently measuring your Instagram data. Otherwise, you won’t know whether your posts are moving the needle.

Speaking of, Sprout makes it a cinch to consolidate all of these metrics (and more). Seeing your Stories data alongside the rest of your IG performance offers a holistic understanding of what’s working and what’s not.

Tips for optimizing your strategy using Instagram Story analytics

Tracking your Instagram Story analytics is obviously important. But what about actually seeing those numbers move in the right direction?

To wrap things up, let’s dig into how to optimize your Instagram marketing and earn engagement with Stories.

Take advantage of interactive Instagram Story features

Don’t’ sleep on all of the Instagram features built specifically to engage your Story viewers.

Stickers serve as a natural way to earn interactions and serve as creative calls-to-action. While not every Story needs a sticker, brainstorm ways to integrate interactive elements like:

• Polls
• Quizzes
• Sliders
• Countdowns
• Emoji reactions
• Links

Stickers can help you come across as engaging with your audience versus talking at them. Not to mention they help inject a sense of personality into your calls-to-action.

Feature UGC and tag other accounts in your Stories

Anything you can do to feed the IG algorithm is a plus. That means driving tags, shares and interactions with your audience and customers.

Note that many retail brands use Stories as a place to highlight UGC beyond their feeds.

This is a low-hanging way to get additional shares and more eyes on your content as creators repost your content. This can be done for organic UGC and content from influencers alike.

Over time, you can assess which types of UGC Stories earn the most engagement. This gives you opportunities to refine your content strategy even further.

Share your Stories at the best times for engagement

We’ll bite: Stories are tricky when it comes to picking best times to post. Unlike Reels or Carousel posts, it’s pretty standard for brands to publish multiple Stories throughout the day.

That said, you can still try to stick to times where Instagram users are typically most engaged.

Picking the “best” time for your brand depends on a few variables, though. Consider:

• A consistent cadence of Stories means you’ll stay visible in your followers’ feeds. Try spreading your Story posts throughout the day versus dumping them all at once.
• On the flip side, you may find that a rapid-fire cadence works best for your audience. This speaks to the importance of checking your Instagram Story analytics. Don’t assume! 
• If you schedule Stories with Sprout, you can hit your desired frequency without posting in real-time.

Many brands will publish a series of three-to-five Stories side-by-side for promotions. This is in addition to consistently republishing their Reels or Carousels to their Stories. Finding a publishing frequency that makes sense for your brand requires some trial-and-error. 

Use Instagram audience insights to guide your content formats

Not to sound like a broken record but every brand’s Instagram target audience is different.

Some audiences prefer videos while others skip them. You might find that your followers love polls and going back-and-forth with you. Maybe you actually find you earn more Stories engagement when you post less.

Regardless, you need to keep a constant pulse on your Instagram analytics to make informed decisions. With a tool like Sprout, you can pick your prioritize metrics across IG and track them with ease.

What can you learn from your Instagram Story analytics?

Given how competitive Instagram has become for brands, tracking your metrics is a must-do.

But Stories require special attention.

The fact that you can publish them so often versus other post types is a gift for marketers. Stories offer a way to consistently learn from your audience and figure out what makes them tick.

However, making the most of that data requires consistency and context. That’s exactly where Sprout Social comes in clutch as you track all of your brand’s Instagram analytics in one place.

If you haven’t already, check out Sprout’s Instagram analytics features to see what insights your brand can learn to grow engagement faster.

The post Instagram Story analytics: how to track the right metrics for your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social-driven business-to-business (B2B) market research insights help you respond to market dynamics swiftly and foster stronger, more targeted cross-functional decision-making.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report ™, 95% of business executives feel it’s imperative to prioritize social media data for informed decision-making beyond marketing. They’re using it to anticipate industry shifts and address customer pain points head-on to build trust and solidify their company’s position amidst tough competition.

This article explores how B2B market research enables better decision-making, including overlooked methods and social data that will help you explore new depths in audience insights.

What is B2B market research?

B2B market research encompasses collecting and analyzing data about what businesses are looking for and need to improve their operations. This includes the engagements between a company providing a product or service and the businesses it aims to reach as prospective customers.

B2B research involves both qualitative and quantitative research such as ratings, surveys, customer experience (CX) analysis and social media listening. It provides decision-makers with actionable insights into key areas like industry trends, competitors and macroeconomic factors, which impact a sale, purchase or partnership between two companies.

B2B market research is different from general or business-to-customer (B2C) research because it involves a more complex decision-making process. For example, in contrast to B2C interactions, the B2B buyer journey usually involves multiple stakeholders with different roles and interests in the buying process.

B2B sales cycles are typically longer than B2C ones too. This is because B2B purchase decisions need careful deliberation on factors like contract negotiations, alignment with regulatory bodies, specific needs of the customer and tech stack considerations.

What are the benefits of B2B market research?

B2B market research gives a company in-depth insights into its business landscape and evolving customer behavior. This helps you fine-tune your sales, marketing and product strategies. You’re also able to develop more effective go-to-market (GMT) plans that meet the specific needs of your prospects and differentiate your brand from competitors.

These insights also enable you to strengthen your brand positioning, improve strategic relations with partners, and resonate with current and potential customers better. The trick to ensure your research helps all these elements is that it’s fresh, relevant and in tune with the market. And that’s by conducting continuous research.

So now that we know how B2B research can help you strengthen your market positioning, let’s look at how exactly your teams can use it to their advantage while building strategies.

1. Plan goals strategically

Set realistic business goals, prioritize resource allocations more effectively and build well-calibrated partnerships. Regularly running research helps you measure brand perception and get insights in near real-time, which enables you to refine your positioning and product offering so they’re aligned with market shifts.

2. Identify growth opportunities

Capitalize on emerging trends and innovations to identify growth opportunities such as new customer segments, product/service offerings gaps or ways to increase customers’ lifetime value.

3. Understand evolving customer needs

B2B market research will also help you track customer preferences based on their evolving needs and recurring pain points. Use this knowledge to tailor your brand messaging and improve products and services to meet client expectations more effectively.

4. Gain a competitive advantage

Regularly monitor the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) of your competitors to make your brand more differentiated and gain a competitive edge. Monitoring their social media activity and customer interactions will help you benchmark your company’s performance against industry standards and identify areas for improvement or innovation.

5. Prepare for potential challenges

Prepare for challenges caused by market fluctuations such as geo-political factors, foreign exchange rates or environmental policies that can affect your business. Proactively address these hurdles with nuanced insights from cutting-edge machine learning (ML)-powered social listening and data analysis tools that can meticulously extract actionable insights from millions of data points across various social and online channels such as X (formerly Twitter), blogs, forums and news articles, in near real-time.

Thus, giving you the tools you need to make strategic decisions in an uncertain business climate with confidence and nurture trust among stakeholders and customers.

6. Optimize marketing and advertising strategies

Tailor and pivot marketing and advertising strategies as needed for maximum impact. Insights from continuous market research help your teams develop targeted content and engagement initiatives that resonate with your B2B audiences.

B2B market overlooked research methods

Let’s take a detailed look at some potent but underutilized B2B market research strategies that can give you a competitive edge.

1. Understand B2B customers through keyword research

Keyword research is a tactical market research methodology in the early stages of the buyer journey, where the intention is to explore brands and businesses that match a company’s needs. And B2B buyer behavior is significantly changing in this aspect. As a recent report showed, B2B buyers are exploring more avenues outside of vendors, especially third-party resources, to make a purchase decision.

Commonly used keyword research tools include search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Google Trends, Answer the Public, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and Google Keyword Planner.

Discovering how businesses seek solutions online (for instance, mentioning pain points or searching alternatives to your competitors) can help you build a more holistic business strategy to deliver hyper-relevant information to your target audience. This will significantly improve your brand visibility and attract more marketing-qualified leads.

2. Analyze industry and brand-relevant social conversations

Analyzing social listening data for industry and brand-relevant conversations provides you with timely and relevant B2B market research insights.

It gives you an insider view into customers’ opinions, experiences and their sentiments towards your business. You get a real-time reflection of current trends and discussions and use them to identify emerging topics, new trends and evolving customer preferences.

Also use these insights to align your content marketing strategy with what your audience is discussing to enhance engagement and develop a more targeted B2B social media strategy.

This research doesn’t need to be a passive process. Engage in discussions in industry forums and thought leader groups to gauge industry trends and the competitive landscape. These discussions enable you to learn first-hand what audiences think. They’re also great for promoting a higher brand recall and adapting your strategies to influence customers and stall attrition.

3. Examine competitors on social media

Social listening can also provide you with a transparent view of how your target audience perceives your competitors. Analyzing conversations around competitors will reveal their strengths and weaknesses, and yours too, contextually.

This granular competitive intelligence is valuable for refining your go-to-market strategy and brand positioning. It’s also crucial for content planning and your larger marketing strategy because it highlights topics that resonate (or don’t) with your ideal customers.

4. Dig into ratings and reviews

Traditional B2B market research methods such as customer surveys and focus groups are time-consuming and don’t capture real-time data—unlike social insights that provide instant feedback and insights.

Analyzing customer opinions in reviews forums enables you to go beyond typical review metrics like star ratings and net promoter scores (NPS). Gather qualitative data around customer pain points (and what they love about your brand), so your team can proactively address and respond to their needs. This will build customer trust, encourage engagement and improve brand recall.

Your teams can analyze data on forums and review sites like Reddit, G2 and Capterra to glean insights from unbiased ratings on user satisfaction, features, price and other key factors. App reviews are another great source to understand how businesses use your software and collect information that may even inform the product’s direction.

5. Analyze industry influencers

Trust is a significant factor in a business relationship and most prospects trust third parties more than vendors. This makes influencers a great source of audience insights. Use social listening to identify the influencers and advocates within your industry to see who is influencing discussions in different domains and driving conversations.

Analyzing their content will give you a better understanding of your brand perception, the competition and emerging market needs. This research will also enable you to explore possibilities to collaborate with the right influencers for your brand to amplify brand reach and credibility.

How to use social media to conduct B2B market research

B2B market research involves a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods that include surveys, interviews, customer data analysis and industry monitoring. Social-driven B2B research and analytics enable all of this at a fraction of the cost and time, so you can supercharge your marketing strategies including customer care requirements and brand management.

Here’s a look at how a powerful social media management solution will bring your data to life and enable you to leverage the methods noted above efficiently.

Monitor market trends by tracking keywords and hashtags

Use social listening for real-time B2B market research by tracking keywords and hashtags in customer conversations. This will reveal insights on competing brands and upcoming trends in your industry.

For example, Sprout’s Listening solution, with our AI-powered Query Builder, enables you to apply a keyword search on thousands of social conversations across networks to gather targeted insights on your brand and business environment.

Your teams can customize searches by including or excluding keywords most relevant to your business and analyze results to discover what’s top-of-mind among your customers. Thus, your teams have access to a significant sample size for market research without being overwhelmed.

Watch this video to see how the Query Builder helps research teams glean targeted information from social data.

Track B2B competitors across key performance indicators (KPIs)

Analyze social media data, such as customer conversations, trending topics and hashtags, to identify top competitors within your industry, including direct competitors or companies offering similar products or services.

This approach also gives you insights into what social media networks your competitors are most active on and if there is a gap that you can fill. For example, you may notice your competitors have become more active on LinkedIn vs. Facebook.

Sprout Social’s Competitive Analysis Listening tool gives a comparative analysis of key metrics across social such as audience sentiment, total engagements and share of voice. Monitor competitors’ follower growth and engagement on their social media profiles.

Also identify which types of content generate the most interaction in your target audience and how they react to it.

Analyze sentiment to improve customer experience

Conducting social media sentiment analysis enables you to see how B2B audiences feel about your brand, products and services as well as your competitors’. For example, Reddit has a reputation for being a place where people share unfiltered opinions. Mining insights from threads related to your industry can help you map gaps in brand perception that may not have been on your radar.

Similarly, your teams can dive into the comments and brand mentions across social channels to gauge customer sentiment and identify recurring themes, common feedback and issues customers may be facing. This kind of qualitative research provides valuable insights into what your customers actually think about you.

Sprout’s sentiment analysis solution powered by natural language processing (NLP) and named entity recognition (NER) helps you explore positive and negative sentiment in brand mentions and conversations about you effortlessly. Get rich insights into what your customers like about you, or what product features are most popular amongst your customers and why.

These findings will help you optimize marketing strategies, spark product improvement ideas and improve the customer experience.

Identify influencers to build your brand

Build your brand by researching influencers such as industry experts, analysts or thought leaders within your B2B niche. Actively engaging with these social influencers by participating in webinars, events and discussions will boost your company’s share of voice significantly.

This not only gives you access to fresh perspectives on relevant industry topics but also opportunities to observe unique perspectives and best practices.

Sprout’s Influencer marketing solution helps you collaborate with verified influencers that best appeal to your brand so you reach new audiences on the social platforms they use most.

Keep a close eye on the conversations and discussions initiated by your chosen influencers. Your teams can use the“People View” within Sprout to discover and organize profiles that interact with your brand to manage VIP lists and view conversation histories with these influencers.

Also analyze comments and responses from their followers to get additional insights into industry trends, challenges and customer sentiments. Influencers are an investment in your brand awareness, so assess the impact of influencer collaborations on your B2B market research efforts by tracking KPIs such as engagement, reach and the quality of insights gathered through these initiatives.

Integrate social insights with your CRM data

Integrate your social media market research with your customer data in your CRM tools to better understand your B2B customers and improve the customer journey for a smoother partnership. For example, use Sprout’s powerful Saleforce integrations to leverage your social data to tailor sales and marketing campaigns to your customers for faster decision-making.

Similarly, Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector enables you to aggregate insights from multiple systems to get important metrics from all stages of your customer journey. Track brand mentions and competitive share of voice and map conversion rates to your sales data.

Stay focused, relevant and informed with B2B market research

Knowledge is currency. And when it’s timely and targeted, it’s the foundation of informed decision-making.

Your social data is not just information—it’s the catalyst for innovation that can help your business reach new heights. So take advantage of this treasure trove of potent market wisdom to foster continuous growth and alleviate growing pains.

Use precise, social and AI-driven intelligence to double down on customer-centricity and help your brand exceed market expectations. You’ll empower your teams to unearth timely opportunities and forge stronger partnerships across the org with meticulously crafted insights.

Download the guide to turn your B2B social data into a revenue driver and bring your vision to life.

The post 5 overlooked B2B market research methods for understanding your customers appeared first on Sprout Social.

Here’s a comprehensive guide on what a target audience is, and how to find and reach yours through social media.

What is a target audience?

In simplest terms, a target audience is a group of people that’s most likely to be interested in your product or service. And members of this group usually share common traits. A brand can have several target audiences segmented based on shared characteristics.

Let’s look at a few target audience examples to better understand how it works.

Canva, the design tool, has an audience of designers and design enthusiasts, this audience can be further segmented by how they use the tool.

For example, one of Canva’s target audiences is teachers, who may use the tool to create worksheets, infographics or posters.

Another major target audience group for Canva is social media professionals. This group typically uses the tool to create captivating visuals for their brand’s social media and digital campaigns.

What types of target audiences are there?

There are several types of traits or characteristics that can tie a group of people together. These shared characteristics help you to segment your audience into highly relevant categories.

Demographics

You can group together your audience based on shared characteristics such as marital status and age. These demographic factors may influence people’s needs and pain points. For example, new parents may have different needs from child-free couples when buying or renting a new house.

Location

It’s also common to segment audiences based on where they’re located. This isn’t just limited to a country or a city but may include more specific location factors like neighborhoods and school zones.

Interest

You can segment your audience based on different interests, including activities and hobbies. This helps you deliver meaningful messages that your audience can relate to. For example, you may create separate messaging to resonate with a gamer audience and an audience that enjoys traveling as a hobby.

See how Coldwell Banker speaks to football fans in the following Instagram post. The real estate company makes a comparison between two cities with a caption that would resonate with people who follow football.

Image Source: Instagram

Purchase intent

An intention to buy a specific product is another common way to segment your target audience. Someone looking to buy a car may have different priorities than someone who’s shopping for a laptop. As such, you’ll want to tailor your messaging to better address each of their unique needs and priorities.

Subculture

A subculture is a group of people with a shared experience such as a genre of music or an entertainment fandom. Think Whovians or punk rock fans who may each have different motivations for relating to your brand.

Check out how Dick’s Sporting Goods expertly targets the Taylor Swift fandom in the Instagram post below. The comments section alone gives you an idea of how effective subculture-based targeting is.

Image Source: Instagram

Existing customers

You may even need to create targeted segments of existing customers. For example, you may have a group of inactive customers you want to reengage. At the same time, you may also have a group of long-term and high-paying customers you want to reward.

Why should you define your target audience?

Wondering why you should put so much effort into your target audience definition? Here are some ways you can benefit from marketing to a targeted audience:

• You can spend your advertising budget more effectively.
• You know which social media platforms to focus on.
• You can develop messaging that truly resonates with current and potential customers. This makes it easier to connect with them and earn their loyalty.

Now that you know why you should define your target audience, let’s find out who your target audience is.

Start by taking a closer look at your target audience

To understand your target audience, start by taking a closer look at who’s already following you or buying from you. This will help you identify patterns and trends to segment your existing audience into sub-groups.

Here are a few questions that’ll help you with this step:

1.     Who is your current audience?

Monitor who follows you on social media and interacts with your posts. Who likes, shares and comments on your content? Look for common characteristics such as age, location, language and interests.

Then you can use that demographic information to understand the people who make up your existing audience.

2.     What kind of information are they looking for and why?

Knowing the kind of information your followers look for and interact with will help you understand your audience. And you’ll identify their needs and how to approach them on social media.

People will have different reasons why they follow brands on social media. And you’ll have to adapt your social media content strategy accordingly.

According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index™, the top reasons consumers follow brands on social are:

• To stay informed about new products or services (68%)
• To have access to exclusive deals or promotions (46%)
• They find the brand’s content enjoyable and entertaining (45%)

3.     Where do they go for this information?

Which social media platforms does your target audience frequent the most? The answer to that question will help you know where to focus your marketing efforts.

For instance, launching an X (formally known as Twitter) campaign doesn’t make sense if your target demographic mostly uses Instagram. Understanding what your target audience wants and on which platform will define your content strategy.

4.     What are they talking about?

Make use of social listening to analyze social media conversations that your audience is participating in. This step will help you understand their biggest pain points and desires.

What are their likes and dislikes? What challenges do they have and what solutions are they looking for? What are they saying about your brand or products?

Sprout Social makes distilling online conversations easy with its social media listening tool. This tool tracks conversations around your brand and identifies trending topics. These insights then help you discover your target audience’s interests, preferences and pain points.

5.     Who do they trust?

Having a good idea of who your audience trusts can inform different aspects of your marketing strategy. For instance, knowing their favorite influencers will help you develop relevant influencer partnerships.

Look into your target demographic’s social habits: Which brands do they engage with? Are there any common influencers they seem to love? What is their go-to content source? Do they read online reviews or ask other consumers for opinions to make their purchase decisions?

These insights can inform how to strengthen your brand reputation and establish trust with them.

How to define a new target audience

When defining a target audience, you need to look into data from multiple sources. This includes buying trends, consumer engagements and social media behavior. Here are four main ways to define your new target audience.

Market research

Start by looking at your current market to identify any gaps that your product can fill. Are there any unmet needs experienced by consumers in the market? What unique value can you present to set yourself apart? This is an important step to identifying the types of people who will find value in your offering.

Industry trends

Similarly, the same market research can reveal trends shaping the industry. Look at changes in regulations and consumer behavior. Then try to analyze how these changes could lead to the rise of new trends influencing your target audience definition.

Social media data

Social media has a wealth of information on consumer behavior and preferences. Look into this data to understand what people are talking about and how they’re engaging with content.

Make use of Sprout’s analytics tools to centralize your social media data collection. This makes it easier to analyze how people are responding to your posts across multiple channels. That way, you can understand content preferences and define your target audience accordingly.

Analytics data

Your website analytics data can also provide you with valuable insights into your visitors. You can define a target audience based on where they’re coming from, which pages they visit and more.

Conduct social media competitor analysis

A social media competitive analysis is a vital step for defining your target audience. Take a closer look at your competitors’ social media strategy and ask the following questions:

• What types of people are your competitors targeting?
• How are they reaching out to their target audience?
• What are they doing right?
• What’s missing from their strategy?
• What key benefits are they emphasizing in their marketing?
• How often are they posting?
• Which content formats seem to work the best for them?
• What tone are they using?

Once you understand your competitors, you’ll be able to identify your key competitive advantages.

For example, Netflix’s original shows give the platform leverage over its competition. To make the most of this unique selling point, the company builds a loyal community around those shows. It targets different fandoms by starting conversations related to their favorite shows such as “The Crown.”

Image Source: X

Define the key benefits of your products or services

With a better understanding of your target audience, you can now explain how your products or services solve their problems. What value does your business offer? Think about how their pain points align with your key benefits. This will help you position your business in a way that resonates with your target audience.

Create content for your social media target audience

Once you have all this insight about your target audience, it’s time to start creating content that resonates with them.

Here are a few best practices to guide you:

• A/B test different content elements, formats and publishing times. Fine-tune your content strategy based on the types of posts your target audience tends to engage with. Monitor what kind of captions they like and which timing works best to engage them.
• Create content for different stages of the marketing funnel. Entertaining content may be great for capturing attention at the awareness stage, for example. But those at the consideration stage are likely to find more value in informative and instructional pieces.
• Be more direct with your audience research. Instead of relying on analytics data alone, get straight to the source and put those insights into context. Conduct polls and ask them questions so you can engage them better. And create customer personas to ensure your content is highly relevant for all members of your target audience.

Ready to connect with your target audience?

Now that you’re armed with the knowledge to identify and engage with your target audience, you can create a strategy to connect with them. To take it one step further, use our free worksheet on how to create authentic connections with your audience.

The post Social media target audience: How to find and engage yours appeared first on Sprout Social.

As Florence explains, “Social is a non-negotiable part of driving brand awareness and building connections with patients, physicians and community members. But it can be a challenge for the marketing teams on the digital front lines to overcome the concerns of security and privacy teams—especially at the intersection of HIPAA and social media.”

Many organizations report HIPAA compliance measures inhibit their strategy, as some of the most engaging healthcare content they create features innovative studies, patient testimonials and medical breakthroughs, which require lengthy approval processes and careful execution. In this guide, we’re breaking down what you need to know to remain HIPAA compliant on social media, and sharing examples of healthcare brands who shine on social—despite regulatory limitations.

Please note: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice. Please review our full disclaimer before reading any further.

HIPAA’s impact on your social media content

HIPAA privacy laws protect sensitive patient information from being disclosed publicly, including on social media. The HIPAA Privacy Rule expressly protects patient health information as it relates to how the data is shared, including in marketing and advertising efforts.

Sensitive protected health information (PHI) includes data about a patient’s past, present or future medical conditions, provision of healthcare to the individual and past, present or future healthcare payments. Given social media platforms gather user information, track behavior and have license to use your visual assets, it’s easy to see why these regulations exist.

In the age of sharing patient before and after photos, testimonials and other sensitive information, healthcare providers should exercise extreme caution when crafting social media content. HIPAA regulations also mandate healthcare companies carefully manage customer interactions on social media—which includes preventing patients from sharing PHI, and deleting it if they do. Failing to comply with HIPAA regulations is costly—both financially and to your brand’s reputation.

However, as Katherine Van Allen, Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, points out, the benefits of social outweigh the risks. “Social media should be part of healthcare organizations’ strategy. The people you need to reach are on social—whether it’s prospective patients or employees. Without a social presence, you aren’t a part of vital conversations happening about your system. From discourse about a team member or location, clerical mistakes and legal actions, or rapidly spreading misinformation about a disease or treatment plan. Tuning into social media listening will help you pinpoint key areas of opportunity.”

How to create brand guidelines to support HIPAA and social media

Though you should always consult your legal counsel and compliance team regarding HIPAA compliance on social media, here are general best practices to follow as you create your brand guidelines.

Craft policies and train your team

Start by consulting with your legal and compliance teams, and make them a key partner in validating the legality of your strategy, campaigns and content. Work with them to develop a social media compliance protocol, which should include instructions for corresponding with people via social media.

Familiarize your team with this protocol by co-creating HIPAA compliance training programs that feature social media education. In your training, highlight proper usage of customer data on social media and common HIPAA violations.

Follow de-identification best practices

When crafting new social media content, remove all PHI from your posts. PHI includes health information used alongside the following identifiers:

• Names (first, middle and last)
• Geographical indicators smaller than a state
• All elements of a date (except year)
• Phone and fax numbers
• Email addresses
• Social security numbers
• Medical record, health plan beneficiary and account numbers
• Certificate or license numbers
• Vehicle identifiers
• Device attributes
• URLs and IP addresses associated with patients
• Biometric identifiers
• Photographs of full faces and other unique physical identifiers
• Any other numbers or codes that could identify an individual

For more context, while a patient’s name paired with their vital signs is considered PHI, their vital signs alone are not.

Monitor for HIPAA violations

Even if you take every precaution to limit the use of PHI in your content, patients can still put your compliance at risk by sharing personal information themselves. Prevent this by adding disclaimers to your direct message interactions and brand profiles. Ask patients to refrain from sharing any PHI and inform them where they should route inquiries.

If a patient should mention or DM you and compromise PHI, delete the message immediately, and route them to a more appropriate channel. Florence advises, “Even if you add a disclaimer to your profile or DMs, some patients will still seek out medical advice. To combat this, some organizations use chatbots and triaging tools to automatically alert them of potential PHI, and respond to or delete sensitive content.”

By using a tool like Sprout Social’s Saved Replies, you can use pre-written replies to quickly respond to customers and redirect the conversation to a secure channel. You can also use Sprout’s chatbot builder to automatically reroute social users to an email address or other secure channel for healthcare-related conversations.

With Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can use tagging and filtering to flag messages that contain PHI, and build workflows that delete those messages.

Build a process for patient approvals

There might be some cases where patients (or their families) are interested in sharing their stories with your audience, like this adorable Halloween TikTok from Cleveland Clinic’s NICU.

Have a streamlined and clearly documented process in place for gaining written consent and HIPAA authorization to disclose PHI from a patient before sharing those stories, photographs and/or videos.

Stay up to date on legislative changes

Make it a regular practice to stay up to date on legislative changes at the federal and state levels. Regularly review resources like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. You can also follow the HHS and National Law Review on social for real-time updates, including case rulings regarding HIPAA data breaches.

Looking for more resources? We put together a HIPAA compliance on social cheat sheet that can help you remain compliant, while executing an effective and creative social strategy.

Common HIPAA violations and social media’s role

While HIPAA compliance on social is complex, the monetary, reputational and, most importantly, patient well-being risks are too steep to get it wrong. Here are the most common HIPAA violations you should avoid.

Hiding patient details in plain sight

Even if you don’t explicitly include faces, names, dates or other obvious identifiers, some situational details can reveal a patient’s personal information. Both Florence and Van Allen advise close review of photography and videos before posting. Ensure there is no protected information in the background of your media.

Van Allen warns, “Something that seems as innocuous as a photo of a staff room can be a violation. Someone could zoom in on a patient’s chart sitting on the table, and be able to identify their name or other PHI.”

Validating health information

“A lot of patients message healthcare brands thinking their message will reach their doctors—which means they include sensitive PHI in their outreach,” Florence says. As we mentioned in the previous section, it’s critical to delete any PHI, even when the patient provides it unprompted.

But one critical nuance many organizations miss is that you should also refrain from validating PHI. For example, if a patient comments on your post and reveals they have an illness, you should not acknowledge that illness in your response. It could be a HIPAA violation. Here are a few example scenarios:

Example patient message: @Hospital, I have recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and I was wondering which of your doctors specializes in diabetes care?

Not HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we know navigating a new diabetes diagnosis can be challenging, and we’re here to help. Call Dr. Smith’s office directly to schedule a consultation.

HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we have deleted your comment to protect your privacy. Please call or reach out to our team via email for help.

Limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel

By limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel, healthcare organizations create knowledge gaps that can cause major fall-out. For example, an excited intern could post a selfie with a patient. Or a residency student could accidentally reveal PHI in a funny TikTok.

Healthcare organizations should remember that HIPAA applies to everyone under the control of a covered entity—including volunteers, students and unpaid personnel. It also encapsulates social profiles beyond the corporate account, including the personal accounts of staff members.

What HIPAA means for your social media vendors

HIPAA compliance and security should be top of mind when selecting software vendors and tools. During your platform evaluations, expect your security and privacy teams to be vigilant about the ways data is used when it’s integrated into larger tech stacks.

Find a management solution with permission levels and message approval functionality to ensure only responsible parties can post. Ensure that cybersecurity measures are in place to protect PHI on electronic devices such as encryption or firewalls.

Take it a step further and find a social media management solution that is willing to sign a business associate agreement (BAA)—a legally binding contract that specifies each party’s responsibilities when it comes to PHI and HIPAA compliance. As Florence details, “You should work with a partner like Sprout Social that can sign a BAA, and take on the risks and responsibilities with you.”

Healthcare brands to learn from

These four healthcare organizations demonstrate that having an active social media presence is still possible and important, even in regulated industries.

Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic, the top-ranked hospital in the nation, uses social media to build their employer brand. Like when they reshared a post from a Transplant Chair who celebrated a successful month. Notice how the post doesn’t reveal any sensitive patient information, but instead focuses on the accomplishments and high caliber of the transplant team.

Mayo Clinic also shares profiles of their volunteers, physicians and other personnel to further humanize their company, like this heartwarming video about a Holocaust survivor-turned-volunteer.

The hospital system supplements these posts with general health and lifestyle tips to inspire their followers, and promote well-being, like in this carousel about the benefits of daily movement.

Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic, a leading academic medical center, stays on the pulse of trending healthcare conversations and uses their expertise to keep their community informed of new public health reports.

Like in this Reel where they investigate the benefits of the latest social media health craze, cold plunging or cold showering. The post breaks down how to reap the rewards of the trend, while staying safe and healthy.

The medical center also shares top-of-mind public health reports produced by their organization. They typically briefly summarize the key findings of the report, while including the link so people can read more, like they did in this post.

Boston Children’s Hospital

Boston Children’s Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based pediatric research program in the world. The organization uses their social channels to highlight groundbreaking research (and the researchers behind it) like they did in this post about a top clinical geneticist advancing children’s health outcomes.

They also feature the patients who benefit from their state-of-the-art treatments by interviewing their families, like in this feature on Facebook about the power of genetic testing for children with epilepsy.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield is a trusted health insurance plan provider. On social, they share meaningful statistics about the value they offer their members, including this post about the return on investment employers gain from investing in workplace addiction recovery and support.

They also share awards and accreditations that demonstrate their commitment to member care and excellence, like this post about their recognition by NCQA.

As a popular insurance plan provider, they receive a lot of inquiries about member policy details on social. Their care team illustrates how to route conversations from public forums to more appropriate, secure private channels, like in this reply where they ask a member to email their help center.

Navigate HIPAA and social media with confidence

HIPAA compliance on social media is a multi-step, ongoing process that involves closely aligning with your legal and security teams, and developing interdepartmental education. By following key best practices that protect patient data and your organization’s brand health, you will be equipped to navigate complex HIPAA protocols and develop your social presence with confidence.

Next steps: Now that you’ve read this article, put a meeting with your legal and security teams on the calendar to start planning your org-wide education efforts, and brush up on healthcare social media benchmarks to better understand social’s role in your community engagement toolkit.

Disclaimer

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice; all information, content, points and materials are for general informational purposes. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Incorporation of any guidelines provided in this article does not guarantee that your legal risk is reduced. Readers of this article should contact their legal team or attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter and should refrain from acting on the basis of information on this article without first seeking independent legal advice. Use of, and access to, this article or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader, user or browser and any contributors or contributing law firms. The views expressed by any contributors to this article are their own and do not reflect the views of Sprout Social. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed.

The post A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer intelligence is converging on social

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of social media management is…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of contents:

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

What is social SEO?

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

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

Is SEO needed for social media?

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

What is the connection between SEO and social media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media profiles consistently rank among top search results

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

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

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

Google Analytics highlights social media as a significant traffic source

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

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

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

Social media links serve as a traffic funnel

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

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

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

Social search optimization matters for social networks

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

How to optimize your social profiles for SEO

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

Fill out your social profiles with as many details as possible

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

Integrate keywords into your profile(s) and posts

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

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

Point links back to your site

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

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

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

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

Publish content that’s worthy of backlinks

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

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

How to optimize your social posts for social search

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

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

4 quick social media tips to support your SEO efforts

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

Make your website content easy to share

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

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

Translate your social data into content ideas

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

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

Fine-tune your publishing frequency

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

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

Foster relationships with your audience and influencers

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

Create a strategy for SEO and social media

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

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

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

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

Why do you need a LinkedIn analytics tool?

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

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

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

Which LinkedIn analytics tool is the best and why?

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

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

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

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

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

1.     Sprout Social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $249 per month

Free trial: 30 days

2.     Keyhole

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

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

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

3.     SocialPilot

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $30 per month

Free trial: 14 days

4.     SocialInsider

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

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month

Free trial: 14 days

5.     Brand24

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

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 14 days

6.     Social Status

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $9 per month

Free trial: 14 days

7.     RivalIQ

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $239 per month

Free trial: 14 days

8.     DrumUp

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month

Free trial: 14 days

9.     Iconosquare

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month

Free trial: 14 days

10.  Talkwater

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

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

Pricing: On request

Free trial: No info available

11.  Inlytics

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $12.50 per month

Free trial: Free plan with limited analytics

12.  Hootsuite

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

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

Pricing: Starts at $99 per month

Free trial: 30 days

Which LinkedIn analytics tool will you choose?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What custom reporting in Sprout looks like

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

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

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

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

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

Request a personalized demo

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

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

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

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

In-depth campaign performance reporting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tailored benchmarking and quarterly reports

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A holistic view of organic vs. paid performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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