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.

Take the introduction of new AI tools recently. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 81% of marketers already say AI has had a positive impact on their work. The takeaway? Teams who don’t have tools with up-to-speed AI features are already falling behind.

Between new platforms and new innovations, there’s a lot keeping marketers on their toes—and their schedules full. You need the best tool for the job. Hootsuite is a major player in the social media marketing platform space. And whether you want an option with different pricing, more specialized or just want to try something new, we’re here to help you do your research.

Use this list to brush up on Hootsuite alternatives in a few categories to kickstart your search:

1. Best overall Hootsuite alternative
2. Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing
3. Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics
4. Hootsuite alternatives for social listening
5. Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service
6. Hootsuite alternatives for influencer platforms
7. Free Hootsuite alternatives

Areas to focus on when comparing tools and Hootsuite alternatives

Social teams should regularly evaluate whether their current tools are hitting the mark, or if it’s time to try something new. A social team can only be as agile as their tech stack enables them to be.

Whether you’re curious about Hootsuite alternatives or you just want to see what’s out there before you make a decision, it’s always beneficial to see what other platforms have to offer.

Here are some key areas to look for when researching a new tools for your team.

Quality customer support

Customer support is everything. And it’s two-fold for social media tools—on the one hand, you need a tool that enables you to enact timely quality support. On the other, your team needs to receive quality customer support too.

When sourcing a tool, pay attention to whether they have readily available customer service to help your team. You need to be able to get help quickly to ensure your tool never slows you down.

According to the Index, 58% of marketing teams say they either share social customer care with their customer service team, or they own it but sometimes customer service will step in. Which means you need a tool that enables collaboration between your teams—ideally with AI capabilities to speed you up too.

Strong innovation

Marketers move at the speed of social. And tools must also follow this fast pace to help teams do their best work.

But making these changes and evolving to keep pace with the digital space takes time. The tools that will most benefit marketing teams are those that prioritize innovation by constantly looking for ways to enhance their roadmap and evolve.

Proven ROI

Proving social media ROI is a key success indicator that social teams must demonstrate. It also happens to be the most difficult.

A robust social media analytics and reporting tool enables social teams to demonstrate and prove ROI, and understand the full impact of their efforts. This means offering different kinds of reports that span channels, individual post breakdowns and paid vs. organic metrics.

A robust reporting tool also enables you to demonstrate ROI to leadership and other teams. Your platform should have sharable reports for stakeholders and clear, easy-to-understand data visualizations like charts and graphs.

Best overall Hootsuite alternative

Before we dive into the full list, let’s start with Hootsuite competitors that encompass every category on this list.

1. Sprout Social

We have to toot our own horn a little. Sprout Social is a stand-out all-in-one alternative on this list—especially for mid-size, large and enterprise businesses.

But don’t take our word for it—from AI-powered capabilities that fuel your social strategy end-to-end to high-level integrations with tools like Salesforce and Zendesk that unify your tech stack, check out what makes Sprout the best tool below.

Then try it free for 30 days yourself to compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite for yourself.

Start your free Sprout trial

Scheduling and publishing

Efficiently plan, schedule and publish social posts from a centralized social media calendar. Features like the campaign planner and tags take the guesswork out of reporting on content and campaign success.

The calendar also enables seamless collaboration with in-calendar notes, content placeholders, drag-and-drop functionality and Approval Workflows that enable internal and external stakeholder reviews.

Sprout’s AI and automation features also act as a virtual data or copy assistant. Suggestions by AI Assist generate captions with tone options in seconds. And Optimal Send Times uses 16 weeks’ of audience data to suggest seven “best times to post” as you schedule.

From our “SproutLink” link-in-bio tool, to URL tracking to measure success in Google Analytics, an Asset library and more, Sprout’s publishing capabilities simplify your scheduling process.

Analytics and reporting

Sprout’s analytics and out-of-the-box reports do the heavy lifting of gathering and synthesizing your data for you. This frees you up to focus on the higher-level thinking that requires a creative human behind the wheel, like strategic and creative planning.

Sprout’s analytics provide deep insights that make measuring ROI and benchmarking against competitors to stay ahead a breeze. With Sprout’s ability to plug into your CRM, get a full 360-degree view of your customer, and the customer journey. And our Tableau integration to create dynamic reporting dashboards, further breaking down social data silos.

Sprout’s analytics and reporting enable you to get a full view of your strategy performance, to benchmark against competitors and helps transform your social media intelligence into shareable business intelligence. Find out more about Sprout’s analytics and reporting capabilities here.

Social listening

Sprout’s social listening solution and AI-driven technology offers custom topics, or pre-built topic templates that enable you to perform competitor analysis, analyze brand health, uncover industry insights, analyze campaigns and monitor events in a snap.

Our social listening solution empowers you to be proactive by grasping how your audience feels about you and your competitors, uncovering influencers to partner with, identifying trends as they emerge and by getting ahead of crises with custom alerts and granular sentiment analysis.

If you want to try our social listening solution, reach out to us for a personalized demo.

Request a demo

Customer service

Sprout’s social media customer service solution goes beyond responding to comments. Our features enable smooth team collaboration and provide ways to improve the customer experience across platforms.

Manage conversations yourself, or create a Case for other team members to complete. See in real-time when other team members are responding to comments in the inbox to avoid duplicate work and a disjointed customer experience.

Meet customer needs quickly with Sprout’s copy AI features, or with canned FAQ answers stored in the Asset Library. And further free up your team’s time with a customizable SproutBot that can handle the common inquiries for you.

With Sprout’s customer service solutions, directly engage with customers and see the extent of past interactions for more context. And with our Salesforce and Zendesk integrations, effectively bridge the gap between sales and customer service to get a 360-degree view of your customer and their journey with your brand.

Influencer marketing

The future of social media marketing involves creators and influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, over half of marketers are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset their primary challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

With Tagger by Sprout Social, we offer a creator and influencer marketing solution to help you ease into the future of social media.

Discover authentic and impactful creators to partner with, and use Tagger to manage your relationships, contracts, campaigns and more in one centralized platform. And Tagger takes the guesswork out of creator partnerships by measuring the success of your collaborations.

Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing

A robust social media scheduling tool is a must to keep your posts timely and accounts consistently active. Yet, 35% of marketers cite their brand’s scheduling tool as their top challenge when planning and scheduling content, according to Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report.

A solid publishing and scheduling tool must be intuitive on top of easing the publishing process. And with 43% of social teams feeling siloed, according to the Index, collaboration features are key, too.

Check out these Hootsuite alternatives for their scheduling and publishing features.

A quick note: Our pricing sections highlight “billed monthly” plans, but most of these tools also offer annual plans.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an end-to-end social media management platform with features that cover inbox and publishing, a unified social inbox, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration needs.

Agorapulse supports publishing and scheduling on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Google My Business and TikTok. And their high “Ease of Use” ranking on G2 is reflected in their intuitive, clean publishing calendar. Communication features enable smooth, real-time collaboration with shared notes, tracked action items and visibility into who is communicating what.

Agorapulse’s calendar offers other staple features as well, including UTMs and an AI assistant. But one unique feature is its grid layout feature to preview upcoming Instagram posts, making Agorapulse an interesting option if you prioritize Instagram.

Pricing: When billed monthly, standard plan at $69/mo, Professional at $99/mo, Advanced at $149/mo and a Custom plan.

(Source: Agorapulse)

3. Buffer

Buffer has been around nearly as long as Hootsuite. While Buffer won’t have as many features as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, it’s well-suited to creators, individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Buffer offers a simplified publishing calendar and core team collaboration features, like post reviews and account management. In their analytics, they also offer your best days, types of content and posting frequency to power smarter publishing.

Like many social media management platforms, Buffer has an AI Assistant feature that helps you brainstorm, repurpose and tailor posts to publish across platforms, and will provide suggestions for posts from long-form content. What makes it unique is that, as of the writing of this article, Buffer offers their AI Assistant to all new users, including those on the Free plan. While Hootsuite’s is currently free of charge to its users, that offer is for a limited time while OwlyWriter AI is in beta.

Pricing: When billed monthly,, they have a Free plan, then paid plans start at $6/month, making Buffer an extremely affordable option.

(Source: Buffer)

4. Oktopost

Oktopost touts itself as a tool best suited for B2B companies looking for a full social engagement suite.

The platform emphasizes its calendar’s focus on managing campaigns, with every cross-channel post published categorized with a specific campaign. The calendar is visually appealing and has color-coding and drag-and-drop functionality for quick adjustments.

Like other platforms, it also offers an asset library, UTM tagging and team collaboration functionality like revision history. Additionally, Oktopost puts an emphasis on their brand safety features. Their “banned keywords” function assures everyone is adhering to brand voice and company standards.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on customer needs.

5. Eclincher

Reviews praise Eclincher for being easy to use for scheduling, and overall, for having supportive customer service.

The platform has many of the key features we’ve talked about for publishing, including an intuitive drag-and-drop calendar for cross-network publishing, link in bio for Instagram, best times to post feature and agencies/team collaboration features. Additionally, it offers a local SEO tool to show how well your business ranks for any keyword, which can help inform content.

Pricing: Eclincher is an affordable solution, with a Basic plan at $65/month, Premier at $175/month, Agency at $425/month (all while billed monthly) and an Enterprise plan at a custom price.

Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics

The way that brands use social media analytics is expanding beyond the marketing team. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.

Here are some Hootsuite competitors who are worth looking into for their analytics and reports.

6. HubSpot

While other platforms on this list are social-specific, HubSpot is a “customer platform” that connects marketing, sales, content and customer service teams and efforts.

HubSpot enables you to see marketing, sales and service data in one place, breaking down silos with out-of-the-box social reports and analytics. HubSpot’s reports give you a holistic view of how your platforms and campaigns perform.

HubSpot’s ability to integrate with your CRM helps you see your social media efforts in the context of your larger business by: tracking leads, new customers and website traffic—a metric 60% of mid-management social media pros track regularly, according to the Index.

Pricing: Their Marketing Hub pricing is broken down by team size.

(Source: HubSpot)

7. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the more specialized Hootsuite competitors on this list. It’s meant for analyzing competitor content and discovering content and influencers with an emphasis on journalists.

For competitor analysis, BuzzSumo can ID the most-shared content and how it performs by network and format. Their Facebook Page Analyzer helps you benchmark and compare up to 10 Facebook pages for content engagement. And if YouTube is your focus, BuzzSumo’s video marketing feature helps analyze and optimize your videos, surface popular video content by topic, ID gaps on competitor channels and more.

BuzzSumo also has a robust influencer marketing tool. With a focus on Instagram, X and the web, this tool helps you uncover influencers and creators who post about topics relevant to your brand.

Pricing: When billed monthly vs. annually, BuzzSumo offers a Content Creation plan at $199/mo, PR & Comms plan at $299/mo, Suite at $499/mo and Enterprise at $999/mo.

(Source: BuzzSumo)

8. Rival IQ

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that solely offer analytics, Rival IQ is hyper-focused on analytics and reporting. Its suite of reports and analytics tools includes solutions for competitive analysis, social post analysis, social media audit tools that you can compare directly to competitor performance, hashtag analytics and social listening solutions.

Their tools can surface phrases and topics that drive social engagement in your content, helping you optimize it. The post type analysis feature helps you see engagements by different types of media and posts. And custom dashboards or templates help you present your data the way you want to.

Pricing: They do offer a free analytics plan. For their monthly billed plans, they also offer a Drive plan at $239/mo, Engage at $349/mo and Engage Pro at $559/mo

(Source: RivalIQ)

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management tool made for large companies and enterprise. Their Marketing Analytics feature gathers data across 30+ digital channels. And those insights are added to a dynamic, AI-powered dashboard that unifies your cross-channel data and makes it visible to everyone.

Marketing Analytics enables you to look at campaigns, marketing insights and general trends in one source of truth, breaking down silos and streamlining data. These reports can be customized to reflect content performance, for example, to better understand what performs well.

Curious about how Sprout stacks up? Compare Sprout Social vs. Sprinklr here.

Pricing: You can only request a customized quote.

(Source: Sprinklr)

Hootsuite alternatives for social listening

As social data becomes more impactful and utilized across whole companies, marketers will also need more sophisticated tools to uncover impactful insights. That’s where social media listening comes in.

Social listening unpacks insights about competitors, products, audience sentiment and more. Here are a few Hootsuite competitors for social listening and some of their features.

10. Brand24

Brand24 is among the specialized Hootsuite alternatives that purely handle social listening—not management or publishing. While it features media monitoring, it’s multi-purpose at what it touts as a lower industry price point.

Brand24 offers many of the core features that marketers look for in a social listening platform. It pulls insights from 25 million digital sources to support social media monitoring (in addition to media monitoring). And it can ID influencers, send alerts for discussion changes, measure customer sentiment and track hashtags. And it supports up to 108 languages, making it widely accessible.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $99, a Team plan at $179, a Pro plan at $249 and an enterprise plan at $499.

(Source: Brand24)

11. Keyhole

Social listening is just one of Keyhole’s products—they also offer solutions for publishing, influencer marketing, analytics and data, and trends. And G2 reviews often highlight its user-friendly design.

Like other social listening solutions we’ll talk about, Keyhole offers many of the core features you would need for industry research, benchmarking, brand monitoring and influencer marketing. And their QuickTrends feature enables you to easily identify opportunities in your industry.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $79/mo, Team at $149/mo, Pro at $249/mo, Advanced at $449/mo and Enterprise at $833/mo (billed annually).

Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service

Social media customer service is an increasingly important piece of the marketing puzzle. It can make or break a brand’s connection with customers, and their loyalty.

According to the Index, 51% of consumers say that the most memorable brands simply respond to them on social. So you must take advantage of every chance to interact.

If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives that are specifically built for customer service, here are a few options to consider, and some of the features they offer.

12. Zendesk

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that only handle customer service, Zendesk is built purely for managing customer relationships, and for helping sales teams.

While not social media specific, Zendesk allows your social and customer service teams to deliver personalized interactions, across multiple touchpoints—from social media channels like Facebook and WhatsApp to Slack, mobile apps and your website.

Zendesk offers robust automation and AI capabilities that enable agents to quickly respond and provide self-service articles that Zendesk suggests for you to share. Zendesk also helps you create new help articles on the fly—write a few bullet points and the platform will help turn it into a customer service hub article. And their Content Cues help you understand what gaps exist in your help center articles.

Pricing: Zendesk comes at a high price point, but has a lot to offer. Their monthly billing plan offers a Suite Team at $69/agent/month, $115/agent/month, $149/agent/month and Suite Enterprise, which is a custom price.

(Source: Zendesk)

13. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a dedicated customer service tool that emphasizes its solutions for social customer care. They also provide an all-in-one customer service tool vs. offering multiple products that must be purchased separately—a factor that makes LiveAgent an especially budget-friendly option.

LiveAgent also highlights its social media monitoring and customer service platform as part of its software, further bridging the gap between customer service and social team workflows.

Pricing: LiveAgent’s monthly billing plan offers a Small business plan at $15/agent/month, Medium business plan at $35/agent/month, a Large business plan at $59/agent/month and an Enterprise plan at $85/agent/month.

14. Hiver

The factor that makes Hiver one of the unique Hootsuite competitors is that this customer service platform was built for Google Workspaces and as they put it, “transform your Gmail into a multi-channel helpdesk.”

Hiver enables agents to manage support channels, like email, live chat, phone and beyond, directly in their Gmail inbox. Agents can add color-coded tags and automated rules that help categorize business communication emails directly in their inbox to sort by priority.

It promotes itself as easier to use and cheaper than Zendesk. The catch is that Hiver only supports WhatsApp when it comes to social media.

Pricing: Hiver’s billed monthly option offers their Lite plan at $19/user/mo, Pro plan at $49/user/mo and Elite at $69/user/mo. They also offer custom quotes for brands that need over 50 licenses.

Hootsuite alternatives for influencer marketing

According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 300 marketers, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy.

Creator and influencer marketing is only going to become more important. And over half of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms, like Tagger, to help offset their main challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

Here are a few platforms to consider for influencer marketing.

15. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ offers a database of over 17 million creators from all niches. Their platform offers robust search tools to help you unearth the right creators to partner with, including enriched creator profiles that highlight brand affinities, and AI-powered advanced search that helps you search by metrics, keywords, hashtags and more. They also offer creator recommendations that uses a helpful proprietary scoring system that helps automatically and quickly narrow your search.

They also offer an extensive list of 13 solutions that span discovering and managing creators, a creator CRM, competitor benchmarking and team collaboration tools.

Pricing: They prompt you to sign up for a free demo and to request pricing.

16. Heepsy

With a free plan complete with 360 monthly creator search results and core filters that help you surface relevant creators, Heepsy is among the most budget-friendly options.

This platform supports sourcing creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube across all payment plans. Heepsy is more focused on the search element of influencer marketing, including features focused on finding influencers, influencer search, influencer statistics and influencer lists. With features like an authenticity analysis, they make it easy to find quality influencers to partner with.

Pricing: Free Plan, then their “billed monthly” plans are as follows: Starter Plan at $49/mo, Plus Plan at $169/mo, Advanced Plan at $269/mo and Heepsy services or Enterprise plans that prompt you to talk to their sales team.

(Source: Heepsy)

17. Influencity

Influencity offers a robust community of influencers to choose from at 200 million influencer profiles worldwide to search through in their library. And the emphasis they provide on their site highlighting their high G2 rating makes them a stand-out.

This platform offers an extensive lineup of features and products that span influencer discovery to relationship management and campaign reporting. This makes them a competitive end-to-end solution for finding and managing influencer partnerships.

Pricing: Influencity plans range from Basic at $168/mo, Professional at $348/mo, Business at $698/mo and a custom plan, making them a great option for mid-market and large enterprise businesses who want to expand their influencer marketing strategies.

Free Hootsuite Alternatives

Free tools will always be the most budget-friendly option, including the aforementioned Buffer. However, free tools also have more limited features and options—like limited profiles or no analytics options.

But if you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that are free, here are a few tools to check out.

18. Social Champ

Social Champ is a full social media management platform that provides a calendar, publishing capabilities, analytics and an inbox solution.

Social Champ’s free plan enables one user to connect up to three social accounts and have 15 scheduled posts active in their queue at a time. While you have access to sentiment analysis, you can only use their AI Imaginator and AI content wizard tools three times in total.

Social Champ’s free plan offers a robust lineup of content suggestions, GIFs for content and reports. But your reports only gather data as far as two weeks in the past.

All-in-all, this is a solid option if you want to try Social Champ out, or if you have a handful of social accounts.

(Source: Social Champ)

19. SocialBu

SocialBu is an all-in-one social media management solution specifically geared towards small businesses. It’s also a newer tool, having launched in 2018.

SocialBu’s Free plan enables you to connect up to two profiles, with your choice of Facebook, X or Mastadon. You can publish up to 40 static posts per month, and can surface hashtag suggestions, design with Canva and discover content within the platform. However, just note: This tool doesn’t offer an inbox in the Free plan.

When it comes to your tech stack, it pays to do your research

Your tech stack is your lifeline. And in the social media marketing world, it has the power to make or break your workflows, strategy and ability to grow the entire business.

That’s why choosing the right solution for your social media needs—from publishing and engagement to influencer marketing and analytics—is critical.

When it comes to new tools, it always pays to try before you buy. Check out Sprout Social’s different plans to evaluate which is right for you. Then try our platform free for 30 days, or reach out to us for a personalized demo.

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In this guide, we show you some of the best tools to help you with social media. From free social media tools to AI solutions, let’s check out the best social media tools for your brand in 2024.

Table of contents:

• What are social media tools?
• What you should look for in a social media tool
• Best all-in-one social media tool
• Free social media tools
• Social media tools for scheduling and publishing
• Social media tools for analytics
• Social media tools for content development
• Social media tools for content ideas
• AI social media tools

What are social media tools?

Social media tools are tools used for performing various activities related to social media. This includes scheduling, publishing, analytics, content creation and even automation. The term “social media tools” encompasses different kinds of tools dedicated to all these aspects of social media.

What you should look for in a social media tool

With so many options available in the market, it can be overwhelming to decide on the right tool. To guide your decision-making, here are a few things to look for in a social media tool.

Boosts your ROI

The tool should be able to positively contribute to your social media ROI. For example, a tool that helps you produce high-performing content at scale will boost your ROI. Similarly, something that helps you drive more engagements and visibility makes a good investment.

Improves efficiency

Saving time and improving social media efficiency are two of the biggest reasons why people turn to social media tools. So you should be looking for tools that let you automate or simplify certain tasks.

Gives you performance insight

Knowing how your existing efforts are performing is vital for building a strategy that delivers results. Social media tools should help you with this by providing vital performance insights to inform your strategy. Look for a tool that comes with robust social media reporting and analytics features to understand your performance.

Best all-in-one social media tool

Let’s face it–it would be so much easier if we could manage all our social media activities in one place. No more confusion, no more switching between multiple tools. That’s why you need an all-in-one social media tool that supports everything from publishing to analytics and monitoring.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media platform that helps you do it all.

It’s more than a social media management platform; it’s an all-in-one solution for your social media needs. This includes features for composing and scheduling posts and engaging your audience. It even supports social media listening, campaign management and performance analytics.

Sprout’s visual calendar helps you plan your social media content and strategically diversify your posts. You can set up posts to go live automatically and even maximize audience engagement with Optimal Send Times. This tells you the best time to publish your posts based on 16 weeks of audience data.

Speaking of engagement, Sprout’s Social Inbox helps you manage all your social comments and messages in one place. From here, get crisis notifications and automatically detect which messages to prioritize. Sprout even helps you enhance your responses using AI Assist,

These comprehensive features make Sprout perfect for businesses and agencies like. With approval workflows for teams and message tagging, Sprout aims to take the difficulties out of your social media workflow. As an added benefit, you get presentation-ready reports without additional work.

Free social media tools

Sometimes, the additional investment in tools can eat away at your marketing budget. Startups and solopreneurs don’t always have the extra money to spend on expensive platforms to support their social media goals. Fortunately, there are several free social media tools that are just as capable (albeit with a few limitations).

2. CapCut

If you’re looking for a social media tool to create awesome video content, CapCut is the answer. This all-in-one video editor is free to use and comes with effects, filters, music and stickers to turn a generic video into something unique. You can choose from hundreds of templates and customize them to quickly create engaging video ads.

Ideal for creating Reels and TikTok videos, CapCut provides advanced tools to support smart video creation. It lets you convert text to speech and vice versa, remove backgrounds and enhance video quality in just a few clicks.

3. Canva

A personal favorite, Canva is a free social media tool to create original graphics. It lets you create social media visuals in just a few clicks with hundreds of pre-designed templates. These are templates optimized according to each platform’s recommended social media image sizes. So you don’t have to worry about cropping and resizing the graphics after creating them.

What’s great about this tool is that it offers template collections according to the latest social media trends. For example, you can find templates for “camera roll dump” or “#WithMe” social media posts. This helps you create content that’s relevant and on-trend to better engage your audience.

4. Wistia

Another one for video marketers, Wistia is a free platform for creating and editing videos. It lets you record your screen and webcam, making it ideal for creating educational and how-to social videos. You can even add background music and customize the player controls to make videos that are on-brand.

Social media tools for scheduling and publishing

Successful social media marketing relies heavily on posting strategically. It’s not just about posting great content; it’s about posting great content at the right time. So you need social media scheduling tools to help you with automated publishing.

5. CoSchedule

CoSchedule offers a social media calendar to help you visualize your social media publishing strategy. You can create predefined social sharing plans and reuse them as templates to simplify your publishing efforts. The ReQueue feature lets you continuously publish your best content to keep your calendar filled.

It supports automated publishing across multiple social networks. Not only that, but the Best Time Scheduler optimizes your send times to reach your audience when they’re most active.

6. Post Planner

Post Planner simplifies cross-channel publishing by letting you create multiple posts in one go. You can tailor these posts for each network to ensure that they’re optimized according to the platform’s unique best practices. It even lets you save texts such as hashtags and CTAs so it’s easier to reuse them over and over again.

Post Planner supports one-click scheduling and lets you reuse your top-performing posts. It allows you to randomize the order of posts to keep things varied and interesting.

7. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar simplifies social media publishing with a limitless content library. The tool saves all your posts so you can repurpose them whenever you run out of ideas. You can automate your publishing strategy with unlimited scheduled posts. So your content goes out at the desired time without you having to post it manually.

Social media tools for analytics

Social media analytics tools offer you a variety of data. They show how well your posts, as well as campaigns, are performing, what your competitors are doing and track keywords.

8. Rival IQ

Rival IQ offers the ability to immediately benchmark your own post and profile performance against others. It’s great for tracking what your competitors are doing and what strategies are working for them. This tool highlights where your competitors are focusing their efforts. It even compares profile attributions such as a bio or about statement.

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the perfect tool for tying your social media efforts to your website performance data. You can use it to track how many visitors you’re attracting from social and from specific campaigns. This helps you figure out how your social media efforts are contributing to your larger business goals. Check out our guide on Google Analytics for social media to get started.

10. Audiense

Audiense is a consumer intelligence platform that gives you a better understanding of your audience. It goes beyond demographic data and uncovers insights about their interests and personality. It even helps you identify the influencers and brands that they follow. This allows you to craft more impactful social campaigns and messages that resonate with your audience.

Social media tools for content creation

Whether you’re creating videos or original graphics, social media tools can make your content look more attractive. Use the following tools to create high-performing posts no matter the type of content.

11. Animoto

Animoto helps you easily create videos from your phone or desktop. Using your own media or their stock library, adding elements like music and text has never been easier. The company also provides templates, plenty of tutorials and the option to customize for your brand on the paid plans.

12.  Venngage

Venngage turns anyone into an infographic designing pro. It offers plenty of infographic templates that you can customize with a robust editing tool. So you’ll find yourself creating presentations and social media-ready graphics in no time. This is a great tool for those who find themselves in need of business graphics.

13.  Unsplash

Unsplash offers professional photos for free, thanks to a community of photographers who donate their work. With over two million hi-res images and a robust search engine, even the smallest of brands will find something to use here. The Unsplash image license grants both commercial and non-commercial use. And there’s no need for attribution (although it’s appreciated).

Social media tools for content ideas

Finding the best content to share for your brand is a balancing act. The following tools do the heavy lifting on content curation by surfacing trending topics and articles. Trendspotting for social media content curation is an important portion of a marketing strategy.

14. BuzzSumo

Designed with content marketing in mind, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool for discovering content ideas. Its robust research tools provide you with the necessary info for deciding on which content and keywords to focus on. Not only does BuzzSumo share information on how hot a link is, but it also provides details on who shared it and where.

15.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a search engine that focuses on current and recent trending events. Using data from Google’s search engine, it documents keywords that are trending in any particular location. When you enter a keyword, you’ll find historical data and be able to plot them against other keywords.

16. Feedly

Feedly helps you read the Internet. Subscribe to any website that has an RSS feed and organize the feeds into different topics. With Leo, the AI research assistant, you can train it to focus on the topics and keywords you want. Paid plans offer the ability to follow newsletters and annotate articles for your fellow team members.

Even better? It’s a Sprout Social integration, which means you can curate and read the article in Sprout and share it as a post, all without leaving the Sprout app.

AI social media tools

AI marketing tools add speed and accuracy to your social media efforts. From content creation to brainstorming, these AI tools let you automate different aspects of your social media.

17. FeedHive

FeedHive has an AI Writing Assistant that helps you fine-tune your social media posts for optimal performance. With over 3,000 idea templates, you can easily come up with content ideas in a matter of minutes. The platform’s AI makes predictions on how your post will perform and gives you suggestions on how to improve your posts. Additionally, FeedHive suggests the best times to post based on how active and engaged your followers are at certain times.

18. Flick

Flick uses AI to improve your social media content and scheduling strategy. The AI Assistant generates hundreds of content ideas for you to choose from so you never run out of what to post. A key highlight of this tool is the caption writing feature, which lets you auto-generate unique captions in your brand voice and tone.

19. Ocoya

Ocoya speeds up social media content creation with AI-powered writing. The AI Assistant lets you generate social media text posts in 26 languages. You can then use the platform’s pre-designed templates to create eye-catching visuals to accompany your text.

Test out a new social media tool

Being a social media manager involves more than publishing posts. A social media manager is a graphic designer, content creator, salesperson and customer care advocate rolled into one. To keep on top of all these responsibilities and tasks, social media tools are important and necessary.

Finding the right tools that fit within your workflow and proving your investments via ROI is a delicate dance. Make the decision process a little easier by signing up for a Sprout Social trial.

The post 19 social media tools for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

In the early days of social media customer care, speed was the most critical performance metric. In 2022, 77% of consumers reported expecting a response from brands within 24 hours—with 13% expecting a response in mere minutes, according to The Sprout Social Index™. Our latest Index report suggests consumers still want swiftness, but are more concerned than ever about quality customer service: 70% expect companies to provide personalized responses to customer service needs.

But departmental silos, limited understanding of the value of social customer care and clunky tech stacks hinder businesses from delivering best-in-class service. Leaders who don’t invest in solving some of these issues will be leaving money on the table and putting their customers’ loyalty up for grabs.

What customers expect from your service: quality and speed

In a world where social DMs have become a form of texting in their own right, brands replying quickly to customers is table stakes. Consumers want more than a fast response, they want the right response. One that means they don’t have to reach out again or deal with another issue a few weeks later. They want to feel like their problem is your first priority.

Take this stat from our latest Index report: A majority of consumers (76%) place equal value on brands that respond quickly to customer needs and brands that prioritize customer support.

Unfortunately, most consumers don’t believe they’re getting high quality care. According to Zendesk CX Trends Research, 62% of consumers believe businesses could be doing more to provide personalized service. As only 30% of brands have implemented customer care processes and tools to actively engage with customers on social, this isn’t a major surprise.

But that doesn’t mean consumers are making concessions or lowering their standards. The same Zendesk report highlighted that 70% of consumers expect anyone they interact with to have full context surrounding their customer service inquiries. What good is meeting your response time service-level agreements (SLAs) if you’re not actually resolving customers’ issues or leaving a mediocre impression?

Read more about how top brands provide exceptional customer service and support.

Common roadblocks to delivering high quality customer service

Though 88% of business leaders agree social media is a critical tool in providing customer care and service, there are still knowledge gaps that prevent teams from accessing the tools and resources they need, and gaining stakeholder buy-in.

Here’s how social media marketers and care teams describe their greatest challenges to delivering exceptional customer care and experiences:

The pressure to be “always on”

According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 63% of customer care professionals said a high volume of customer care requests is their most prominent obstacle. As one member of The Arboretum, Sprout’s online community for social professionals, put it, “The most significant challenge I face when managing customer care on social media is the expectation to be available to answer questions 24/7. Plus, pressure to make sure each answer is 100% correct and can’t be misinterpreted in any way that could reflect poorly on the business.”

Another added, “Social platforms have become essential for customer support. However, it can quickly become overwhelming for businesses due to the sheer number of inquiries they receive and the expectation for quick responses from a real person.”

In an era where customers want to be able to connect with a service agent the moment they need help, it’s critical to have agents available at all hours. But without proper staffing and handoff, this can stretch social and service teams thin and lead to burnout, on top of dissatisfied customers who don’t feel prioritized or like they’re getting an authentic response.

Departmental and technological silos

When it comes to ownership of customer care in 2024, only 8% of customer service teams plan to own this function exclusively. Shared ownership requires reimagining your teams’ entire approach to collaboration. From your tech stack to your internal workflows, pressure test each stage of your social customer care process to find out where silos are slowing service down, and where there’s too much strain on one team.

For example, social teams are often not equipped to handle complex customer service needs, but they’re often asked to do so anyway. As one member of The Arboretum described, “A social media manager doesn’t have the resources to resolve every customer complaint. Customers use social more and more for issue resolution, but there’s a solid wall between customer care (which leverages traditional communication channels) and social media engagement.”

Others agreed that collaboration between teams at their org is lackluster. “Our team’s inability to provide quick and effective customer care is due to the lack of timely interdepartmental communication,” says one social marketer.

Lack of training and education

Social customer care is a new domain, with most teams struggling to keep up with best practices. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse survey, 35% of businesses plan to hire additional agents and host additional training to improve the quality of customer interactions on social.

But these gaps are often the product of social customer care being thought of as an ancillary duty rather than a business-wide priority. As one member posted in The Arboretum, “There is a lack of recognition that social media ‘counts’ as customer service and care. Engaging with customers and your audience through comments and DMs doesn’t get the same respect or regard that dealing with customers through email, phone or in-person channels often does.”

While social professionals and service teams understand that social customer care is key to resolving issues on channels where customers provide open, honest—and very public—feedback, internal education to other departments is needed to help others see its impact. Enable key stakeholders and senior leadership to see how the ability to interject, navigate and even control the conversation can help retain customers and build the bottom line. Ensure training and education is happening org-wide, not just for the marketing and service teams.

Not having the right tools

Many social and service teams don’t have the tools needed to provide both quality and speedy customer care. With disjointed tech stacks and disparate communication channels, the work of customer care becomes like shoveling snow with a teaspoon—cumbersome and inefficient.

Our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey reveals many organizations’ most prominent challenges stem from technology breakdowns—48% are left with manual tasks that take up significant time, 41% with gaps in available customer care intel for agents to reference when handling requests and 26% cite a lack of technological resources. The lack of investment in customer care processes and tools to actively engage on social is a major hurdle to developing a sophisticated strategy.

An Arboretum member describes how not having the right tools impedes quality: “Customers appreciate personalized responses that address their specific concerns. However, doing this effectively on social media, where conversations can be disjointed and context may be lost, can be difficult.”

According to the Index, 50% of marketers plan to implement advanced social media management software to streamline workflow efficiency, which suggests leaders are aware technological investments are crucial to crafting a cohesive customer experience. More brands see the potential of social media management software—not just for posting and reporting, but as the central hub for social customer care functions.

How to provide high quality customer service, fast

What it takes to deliver memorable and positive customer experiences is changing. As customer expectations evolve, so too should the best practices your teams follow and the processes and tools you use.

These are actionable steps to overcome the challenges and meet customers where they are.

Use AI and automation for support

Social care teams are hesitant to use AI, fearful that it could damage the relationships they’ve built with customers and make interactions seem less human. Nearly half of marketers (49%) say their top concern in regards to AI is job displacement or reduced human involvement in social media management, according to the Index.

But the reality is by thoughtfully tagging in AI to handle customer care tasks like answering frequently asked questions, marketers and service agents will have more time to allocate to their most meaningful work. The Index highlights that 81% of marketers say AI has already positively impacted their work, citing benefits like more time for creativity (78%) and increased efficiency (73%). Another 47% say they will begin using AI in 2024 to handle basic customer inquiries and asks. It may sound counterintuitive, but emerging technologies can reallocate care teams’ time and help them meet consumers’ demands for authenticity and human connection.

For example, in the Sprout Social platform, our Case Management solution enables your team to automatically create Cases for each social message that needs a reply—and route them to the right team or individual based on custom criteria and rules.

Each team in Sprout has access to a distinct queue, where they can see all incoming messages assigned to them and key details about each Case. Teams can access Cases via a specific pane in the primary navigation menu.

The Case Management solution is a part of the Smart Inbox, where all incoming messages from across social channels are visible in one single stream. The inbox also includes other tools that empower your team to resolve issues faster, with AI-enhanced agent replies that make replying fast and easy, tags that allow for efficient sorting and filtering, and bulk actions to quickly manage Cases.

Here’s an example of how chatbots can be set up to help automate repetitive conversational tasks (like gathering information), resolve customer issues at a faster rate and provide 24/7 service, even when no agents are available.

Personalize the experience

Using name-only-personalization has been the extent of personalization for most of modern marketing (email, direct mail, etc). While using a customer’s name is a tried-and-true best practice, true personalization goes deeper. Consumers don’t want to be thought of as one of thousands (or millions) of people who receive the same canned response, they want to be seen as a VIP who deserves an experience that meets their unique needs.

Truly resolving customers issues starts with data, and finding meaningful data requires integrating social with other business intelligence software like your CRM. By having a centralized, 360-degree view of your customers, you will increase the quality of service you provide and break down departmental silos. This data will deliver key insights about your customers, from the first time they sent you a DM to the last time they made a purchase. Our Q3 Pulse Survey data reveals about 38% of customer care leaders indicated consolidating agent and customer data to guide business decisions was already at the top of their wishlist.

Sprout enriches your Salesforce CRM records with social data to provide a comprehensive view that enables your team to engage in real time with the right context. Notice how the sidebar is populated with Salesforce Service Cloud data in this example of an agent responding to a customer via the Smart Inbox.

Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence Connector takes it a step further by combining social data in an omnichannel view with other marketing data. By harnessing this intel, customer care and marketing leaders can work together to align on the business value of social customer care and elevate it into strategic planning conversations.

Use listening and social data to understand what your customers care about

The best customer care is proactive. Understanding what your customers care about, the common issues they’re having and how they feel about your brand will shape your brand’s care strategy. According to our Pulse Survey, 23% of customer care leaders count an inability to make data-driven decisions among their most pressing challenges, and another 37% are eager to adopt social media management tools that increase the value and business impact of customer care.

By using a social media listening solution like Sprout Social, you can leverage AI to uncover critical customer insights. With Sprout’s suite of Listening tools, you can automatically sift through billions of data points to zero in on trends and key learnings you need to guide future strategy. For example, you can find out how your customers are reacting to your latest product launch through the Sentiment Analysis tool, and use that data to train your team and inform future product development.

Be an example of high quality customer service

In this new generation of customer care, speed is no longer the only king. Responses don’t just need to be fast, they need to be thoughtful and tailored to an audience of one. As the volume of messages and mentions you receive rises, so too will customer expectations of your business on social. To stand out from the competition, you need to invest in the right training, processes and tools to propel your business forward.

Audit the tools and processes your organization currently uses to find gaps and redundancies. Build the case for shared ownership of customer care and access to social data. Identify the new skills you and your team need to lead a robust social care strategy. For help getting started, read the latest edition of The Sprout Social Index™, and dive into the latest data about creating customer experiences that drive business value.

The post How to balance speed and quality customer service appeared first on Sprout Social.

To help you get ahead with your social media marketing and maximize your social channels in the coming year, we’ve compiled a list of 16 essential social media best practices for 2024.

1. Focus on responsiveness and personalization
2. Automate where you can—with a human touch
3. Examine your social customer service approach
4. Be more business-focused and strategic with sharing your social data
5. Leverage AI…and refine how you use it
6. Iron out your approval process
7. Reimagine your team’s structure and size
8. Feature customers and trusted faces on your feed
9. Be selective about taking a stand
   
10. Leverage your employees
11. Use video…but mix it up
12. Redefine your relationship with trends
13. Highlight your product in action
14. Think platform-first
15. Optimize existing platform strategies
16. Optimize for social commerce

These best practices for 2024 are grouped below in different key areas for your business, including customer care, bringing authenticity into your strategy and beyond.

Best practices for world-class social customer care

In today’s competitive social landscape, stellar social media customer care is a non-negotiable. Leave it behind in your strategy, and your consumers will leave you behind in the feed.

Here are a few social media marketing best practices for stellar customer care.

1. Focus on responsiveness and personalization to build loyalty

According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs.

But the quality of your responses also matters—70% of consumers expect a company to give them personalized responses.

Ensure your team has the tools they need to shorten your brand’s response times and create more quality responses. A few ways to start:

1. Audit your current response time average. A report like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report will quickly calculate your performance by response rate and percentage.
2. Use tools like customer service chatbots to have chat coverage 24/7 for low-lift questions to free up your team.
3. Ensure your team is engaging with positive comments to build loyalty, too—not just questions or complaints.

2. Automate where you can—with a human touch

A greater need for personalized, frequent responses means more time for your already-strapped teams. Enter AI and automation.

For example, in 2024 54% of marketers plan to employ customer self-service tools and resources like chatbots, FAQs and other forms to scale social customer care. They also want to use AI copy tools, like ChatGPT or Sprout Social’s Suggestions by AI Assist, as a starting point to generate real-time responses to customer questions and FAQs inside self-service tools.

Just always edit to humanize and stay on-brand—you don’t want to lose trust with consumers who are already wary of brands speaking to them through AI.

3. Examine your social customer service approach

Prioritizing social media customer care is crucial as more people turn to social for their customer support needs. 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. Rethink how you approach social customer care, and whether you’re prioritizing it.

The Index also found that 58% of social and marketing teams will either share social customer care in 2024, or customer service will be assisting marketing. If you’re not already collaborating across these teams, it’s time to start. Think: splitting up social monitoring, or working together to create FAQs, canned responses and bot copy.

And scale social customer care by utilizing the right social customer service tools, including AI and automation. A tool like Sprout Social will give you a 360-degree view of your brand’s interactions with your customers—integrating the worlds of social media and customer service.

Redefine how you work and social’s role in your business

Social media insights have impact and implications beyond social—just look at the need to prove social media ROI. And according to the Index, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.

But just as social media changes, teams must also change to keep up with the demands put on them. Here are a few tips to bring into your workflow.

4. Be more business-focused and strategic with sharing your social data

According to the Index, social media traffic to the website is a top metric that 60% of marketing strategists, managers and directors track regularly. This is your sign to start tying your social media data to larger business goals.

Turn to your fellow marketers for reference. The Index found that in 2024, most marketers plan on connecting the value of social to business goals by quantifying the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue, tracking conversions and sales from social and using social data to inform areas outside of their team.

A few key ways to do this:

• Use UTMs to connect social media posts and strategy directly to website traffic and sales.
• Consider a more sophisticated tool like Sprout’s social listening to uncover deeper data insights that has org-wide uses, including product analysis information, consumer sentiment, competitive share of voice data and beyond.
• Create reports for collaborators outside of the social team to expand social’s impact cross-org. Get started with these 10 social media report examples.

5. Leverage AI…and refine how you use it

The Index found that 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work—especially freeing up time for creativity and boosting efficiency. And the questions around AI have shifted from “will it take my job?” to “will it impact consumer trust?”

As you move into a new phase of the AI era, refine how you use it. Experiment with it for customer care responses, and content ideation and creation. But ensure you’re always editing for brand voice, humanizing the copy and personalizing customer-facing messages.

Apply it: Start using AI for the repetitive tasks you complete regularly, from strategy planning to content creation and data analysis. Try Sprout’s AI Assist technology to see how we can streamline your day-to-day across publishing, engagement, reporting and beyond.

6. Iron out your approval process

Trend cycles move at the speed of light. Which means your approval process must keep up.

If you’re feeling bogged down by a slow approval process, take the initiative to create an optimized workflow for your team and cross-collaborators. Build a seamless social media approval process all drafters and approvers can agree to. It could be the difference between going viral and getting left behind.

Apply it: For best results, use a social media collaboration tool like Sprout Social to formalize your approval process. Sprout’s Approval Workflow also lets you add and remove external stakeholders so they can review social posts before they’re published without needing to log in to Sprout.

7. Reimagine your team’s structure and size

The way you use social data, insights and platforms has evolved. And so too must your team.

We’ll always say that now is a good time to add fresh talent to your team. But it’s not just team size that needs to be rethought—it’s your team structure and how you work. For example, 64% of social teams are organized by network. That is, one team member is responsible for TikTok, one for Instagram, etc. But this approach may not be as effective as it once was as teams share insights beyond social.

Even though social data can inform other departments, 43% of social teams are still feeling siloed. If you can relate, it may be time to see how a new team structure might help. Can a team member focus on engagement, and another awareness? Or can a team member be dedicated to analytics, and another to content creation?

Best practices to bring authenticity into your strategy

There’s a reason why Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-year in 2023 is “Authentic.”

Between the rise of AI and shaky brand promises in recent years, audiences are wary of inauthentic messaging. In fact, authentic, non-promotional content is the number one thing consumers report not seeing enough of from brands on social, according to The Sprout Social Index™.

Creating authentic content is one of the quintessential best practices for social media. Here are a few ways to do it.

8. Feature customers and trusted faces on your feed

Featuring actual customers and user-generated content on your feed helps build social proof and trust, and bring authentic voices into your content.

Partnering with creators and influencers also adds a trusted voice to your content and extends your reach. In fact, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy in our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

52% of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset the challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns. If that’s something you’re looking for, consider adopting a platform like Tagger to manage your partnerships.

9. Be selective about taking a stand

Only a quarter of consumers polled in the Index said that the most memorable brands on social speak out about causes and news that align with their values.

Audiences are wary of inauthentic brand statements and promises. Know your values, and take a stand on issues that are aligned with them. Take L.L Bean, for example—they took a social media pause for mental health awareness month because it aligned with their brand values and mission.

10. Leverage your employees

Some of your most influential brand advocates are the people behind your brand: your employees. Adding employee advocacy to your social strategy is one of the most effective ways to amplify your content, humanize your brand and engage your audience.

Launch an employee advocacy program and curate a pipeline of content to ensure long-term success. In a Sprout survey of 1,110 US social media users across industries, over half of engaged social users are most likely to share employee updates. So create a “meet the team” series to showcase your employees.

Social media best practices for evolving your content

Just as people’s interests and tastes change, so too do the types of social content, preferred formats and trends they follow.

Here are a few social media best practices to evolve your content for optimal engagement.

11. Use video…but mix it up

Video’s popularity is here to stay, at least according to the 66% of consumers who say short-form video is the most engaging in-feed content.

But we’ve also seen a renewed focus on static content in 2023. Even Instagram pared back their focus on video to renew focus on photo posts.

Fill your content calendar with a healthy mix of video, carousels, polls and static photo or graphic-based posts. And pro tip: lighten the video lift by recruiting social video talent from your team and beyond.

12. Redefine your relationship with trends

Using trends is a great way to build awareness. But you don’t have to jump on every single one—that’s inauthentic and unsustainable. According to the Index, 38% of consumers say the most memorable brands on social prioritize original content over trending topics.

Use a healthy mix of on-brand trends and original content, and keep looking at your social analytics to find your top-engaged and most successful formats. If you use Sprout, the Post Performance Report surfaces your top posts across networks by your metric of choice.

13. Highlight your product in action

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, 51% of consumers like to see brands highlighting their product or service in their social posts.

But remember, your product or service shouldn’t be the hero of your posts. Instead, demonstrate how it empowers your target customers to overcome their challenges. With your customers’ use cases in mind, show your product or service in action.

14. Think platform-first

It’s true that you should repurpose posts across social networks to alleviate workload. It’s also true that you need to adjust each post to feel native to each platform.

Approach your content in a platform-first way, so each post you publish fits on the networks you’re posting to.

Here are a few social platform guides and best practices to follow:

• Best practices for Facebook
• Best practices for Instagram
• Best practices for X (formerly known as Twitter)
• Best practices for LinkedIn
• Best practices for YouTube
• Best practices for TikTok

15. Optimize existing platform strategies

New platforms are bound to emerge—just look at the recent launch of Threads.

Experimenting with new platforms will always be important. But optimize the content and approach you take on the platforms you use—and that your audiences uses most often.

Here are a few tips:

• Find the best times to publish: Optimizing your publishing time is an easy way to achieve more engagement. Check out our best times to post guide, pinpoint the best times for your brand to post based on channel and industry, and use Sprout’s Optimal Send Times as you schedule your posts.
• Post regularly: Consistency is key—74% of consumers think the publishing sweet spot for brands is one to two posts per day. Check out our article on how often to post on social media.

16. Optimize for social commerce

By 2025, social shopping is set to become a $1.2 trillion channel. And with TikTok recently rolling out TikTok Shop in the US, platforms are continuing to invest in this approach. Social commerce is a great way to sell directly on social.

Have a point of view and use data to back up your decision on where your customers want to buy, and optimize your social commerce tools on platforms where they are ready to go all in.

Whether you set up shop directly in your platforms or link to products in posts, optimizing your social channels for social commerce directly connects your customers and products. Start enhancing your omnichannel customer experience with all-in-one social commerce tools the help reduce friction in the buying process—for example, you can use Sprout’s social commerce solutions to integrate your social and commerce workflows.

Develop your social media best practices this year

Social media is always shifting. Platform shake-ups and new frontiers push social managers to learn new skills, change how their team works, experiment with emerging technologies and refine their approach on a regular basis.

Ground your 2024 strategy—and beyond—in social media best practices to help you weather all the uncertainty. We recommend that you bookmark this list so you can revisit it when you need help optimizing your social efforts.

To put these best practices for social media in action, we also recommend using a tool that supports all of them—from finding your best posting times, to auditing your content. Begin your free Sprout trial today, and transform every area of your organization and team.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post 16 social media best practices to use to succeed in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Myths and misconceptions like these exist everywhere, but they’re incredibly common in topics that people feel familiar with. Take social media, for example. The more people use social, the more they think they understand the inner workings of social media marketing.

The result of this is a lot of social media myths that have gone unchecked. Some are harmless, but some can greatly impact how social media and marketing professionals work. That’s why marketing leaders need to equip themselves with the right information to get their teams up to speed.

To help, we used data from The Sprout Social Index™ and other sources to dispel eight common social media myths. Let’s get into it!

Myth #1: Memorable content makes brands best in class on social

“Let’s make this go viral!”

You’ve probably heard this or something like it from a well-meaning colleague or two. In a crowded social media landscape, everyone wants their turn in the spotlight. This desire for mass awareness is why many marketers believe creating memorable social content is the most important aspect of becoming best in class. Consumers, on the other hand, think otherwise.

The Index found 51% of consumers believe responding to customers makes brands memorable on social. Prioritizing original content over trends and audience engagement also make consumers take notice.

While this may be surprising to your greater organization, it’s also a helpful way to reset some internal expectations. After all, virality is more luck than strategy.

Next time someone asks you to add “going viral” to your to-do list, here are some more impactful action items you can offer instead:

Speed up your social media response time

Nearly 70% of consumers expect responses within 24 hours or less on social. Improving your social media response time can assist customer retention while giving your brand a competitive edge.

But timeliness is only a prerequisite to consumer expectations for customer care on social. Index data shows 70% of consumers expect brands to provide personalized responses to customer service needs. We also found 76% of consumers notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support. This means teams must be proactive to achieve high quality customer care.

Create an escalation management strategy

Preventative measures like outlining an escalation management strategy creates a process for responding to timely issues–good or bad. Highlighting a response protocol along with example scenarios will help your organization understand how to manage the concerns people surface on social. Remember: You can never be too prepared.

Integrate your social media management platform across your martech stack

To provide the most effective service on social and achieve the personalization customers seek, marketers need visibility into the end-to-end customer experience. Drafting a social media management integration plan can help remove the digital silos that prevent your team from offering superior service.

Myth #2: Follower count is a vanity metric

People have called follower count a vanity metric ever since buying followers in bulk rose to popularity in the early 2010s. On the surface, this argument makes sense. After all, what does a high follower count matter if your engagement rate is low?

As it turns out, it can count for quite a bit.

Writing follower count off as a fluff metric lacks some critical nuance. Mainly, it doesn’t account for the “90-9-1 rule”. According to this rule, only 1% of social media users create content, 9% share, like and comment on that original content and 90% of users simply lurk. Lurkers may not contribute to your overall engagement rate, but that doesn’t make them any less valuable.

Our Index data shows 68% of consumers primarily follow brands on social to discover new products and services, followed by having access to exclusive promotions (46%) and entertaining content (45%). Just because they’re not liking or commenting doesn’t mean they’re not gathering information that can eventually drive buying decisions.

Myth #3: Consumers aren’t heavily swayed by influencer marketing

Our Q3 2023 Pulse Survey of 309 US-based marketers found 79% of marketers describe influencer content as necessary for their customers’ experiences, and 81% describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social media strategy. The data also reveals social marketers rate influencer marketing as having a significant impact on their brand’s efforts including brand awareness (89%), increased brand reputation (87%) and customer loyalty (87%).

Consumers are looking for authentic, engaging content and collaborating with the right influencers can help achieve that genuinity. In our LinkedIn influencer marketing roundtable, Peter Kennedy, founder of Tagger, emphasized how influencer content often fuels higher engagement than branded content. Lia Haberman, Insider’s Top Creator Economy Expert, also shared several examples of influencers doubling and tripling engagement in our webinar, Making Dollars and Sense Out of the Creator Economy.

But to reap the benefits of influencer marketing, identifying the right influencers is key. The influencer identification process is one component of measuring influencer marketing return on investment. Another common misconception surrounding influencer marketing is that they can’t be used across the customer journey. When most people think of influencer marketing, they imagine purchase-stage content like product reviews and tutorials, but marketers can partner with these digital trendsetters across the entire customer journey.

Myth #4: Social data is strictly a marketing resource

Social data is invaluable when it comes to informing team decisions, but savvy brands know it can be used for much more. The 2023 State of Social Media Report reveals that organizations view social data as a multi-team strategy resource, expanding its impact well beyond the assumed marketing silo.

Brands are using social media data to inform their organization’s business strategy from customer service and brand awareness to lead generation and product development. The report also found 95% of business leaders agree companies must rely more heavily on social media insights to inform business decisions outside of marketing.

Although leaders agree social data is a valuable resource beyond marketing efforts, nearly 7 in 10 agree that social data and insights are underutilized. However, a majority say they plan to use social data more in the next three years.

This signals the current era in social media management software where analytics are used for proactive decision making. From product development to customer support, social data can answer the most important questions about how to manage and expand a business across every department.

Grammarly, for example, uses social listening insights to surface valuable user stories for their product and user experience teams. With Sprout’s Social Listening tool, they turn feedback from priority platforms into actionable recommendations for the business.

If companies want to dispel this social media myth once and for all, they’ll need to rethink how other parts of the organization see social. Start by identifying areas of your business that can benefit from social insights, and build your organization-wide social listening strategy from there.

Myth #5: Social marketers have perfected video production

The value of video on social cannot be understated. The 2023 Content Benchmarks Report shows over two thirds of consumers (66%) find short-form video the most engaging content format, followed by static posts. However, with limited bandwidth and resources, video production still feels out of reach for many social marketers.

While there have been several advancements in remote video production tools over the past few years, for some it can still feel like too much to take on. But marketers can’t afford to abandon video completely. Social networks are rolling out more video-focused features, so demands for video content creation will only rise. Getting ahead of these requests by preemptively growing your team can help brands maintain an engaging social presence while mitigating the risk of burnout.

If your team isn’t able to fully embrace the role of video in your social content strategy, it may be time to build a case for expansion. Consider how to optimize your video conversion rate to help secure more buy-in and resources.

Myth #6: You need to be on every social media platform

Our benchmarks report shows that nearly half (46%) of marketers cite new platforms as a challenge when planning and scheduling content. But your brand doesn’t need to be on every social media platform. Meeting your target audience where they already are matters more than trying to balance content on every network.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider emerging networks like Threads or rising technologies like the metaverse, but brands don’t need to hop on every new wave. Focus on nurturing quality across your relevant networks and experiment as needed.

Index data shows 64% of social media teams are organized by network. This means one team member may be responsible for TikTok while another focuses on Instagram. But with frequent changes to the social media landscape, this approach may dissolve in the future.

As new platforms emerge and consumer preferences shift, staffing team members to specific networks can create both gaps and redundancies.

Myth #7: Artificial intelligence will replace marketing roles

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in marketing has sparked enthusiasm and skepticism. With more organizations implementing AI in social media, some marketers fear being replaced. But our Index data disproves this social media myth: more than 80% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work.

There are so many AI use cases in marketing from scheduling and posting to ad reporting. In 2024, marketers plan to use AI to support social media data analysis, content creation, campaign targeting and more.

But you don’t have to wait until the new year to invest and adopt because the future of AI in marketing is here. Chief marketing officers are successfully reaping efficiency gains by using AI in marketing to support brainstorming and other tasks.

Myth #8: Third-party platforms harm post visibility on Facebook

There’s been a lot of discourse surrounding whether third-party social media management platforms that offer scheduling and publishing functionality negatively impact post visibility and engagement. The short answer is no.

There aren’t many studies on the topic, but it’s important to note it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason a post was successful because there are so many variables. Each social media network has its algorithm and requirements for extending reach and engagement. For example, Facebook users once had the option to hide content scheduled via third-party apps. However, this feature was removed by Meta on November 15, 2023.

Social media myths, busted

It’s easy for people to get caught up in what they think to be true, especially when they’re not keeping tabs on the constant evolution in social media. Advocate for your team by continuing to debunk these common social media myths. Tapping into the power of social doesn’t just benefit your team’s marketing efforts—it benefits your entire organization.

For more insights on the landscape of social media is changing, download The Sprout Social Index™. Inside, you’ll find more research on how businesses are using social media to set themselves apart from their competitors and meet tomorrow’s customer expectations today.

The post 8 social media myths to unlearn (and dispel across your organization) appeared first on Sprout Social.

And perhaps that’s why social media predictions are so interesting and pervasive. Who doesn’t want to know what the future of social media holds?

To find out, we turned to the experts in The Arboretum—Sprout Social’s community of professionals—and beyond to reveal some of the biggest predictions for social in 2024.

Prediction 1: Authenticity will be more important than ever

Authenticity may sound like a buzzword. But it’s only going to be more important to your strategy.

As Carolyn MacLeod, Senior Manager, Social Media at PBS Kids, tells us in the Arb, “Authenticity will continue to be the name of the game, especially as AI becomes a more commonly used tool. In a way, social media managers may want to think more like creators.”

Consumers are only becoming more choosy and wary of content in their feeds. According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, authentic, non-promotional content is the number one type of content consumers don’t see enough of from brands on social.

And good old-fashioned responsiveness boosts authentic marketing and trust, too. Carolyn continues, “With the advent of Meta’s Threads, I think we’ll see more of an emphasis on conversation and direct engagement with our audiences. Audiences and Fans are looking for the feeling of engaging with a real person with interests and opinions.”

How to prioritize authenticity in your strategy

First things first: What’s authentic for individuals you follow on social won’t seem authentic from a brand. Tactics like shock-jock social marketing may work for some quick impressions, but if you want a lasting impact, you’ll need to think differently.

Bringing more creators into your strategy lends a trusted, familiar voice to your brand and helps you expand your audience. You can also lean on your employees to achieve a similar goal. Prioritizing employee advocacy, proactive engagement and team spotlights can be your secret sauce for keeping it real on social next year and beyond.

You can also spur this connection by simply engaging with your community. According to the Index, 37% of consumers say the most memorable brands on social prioritize engaging with their audience vs. publishing a lot of content. So double down on your customer engagement.

And use your content to provide a peek behind the scenes. Tapping user-generated content also enables you to bring authentic customer reviews, testimonials and content into your strategy.

Prediction 2: Creators and influencers, and knowing how to work with them, will continue to be important

The days of asking, “to work with creators, or not to work with creators?” are ending. The increasing importance and prominence of creators and influencers isn’t going anywhere.

As Oatly Community Manager Paula Perez predicts, “I think brands will finally realize that they need creators much more than creators need them! Now that creators are figuring out how to monetize their platforms beyond just brand partnerships, they’ll become much more selective about which brands they partner with.”

According to our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, 81% of social marketers say influencer marketing is an essential part of their strategy. And with the rise in the need for authenticity, it’s no wonder why.

How to work with creators as they become more discerning

So how do you meet creators where they are? Perez had some stellar advice: “The best partnerships will allow creators as much creativity and freedom as possible, and authentically fit their interests & audience.”

I think brands will finally realize that they need creators much more than creators need them! Now that creators are figuring out how to monetize their platforms beyond just brand partnerships, they’ll become much more selective about which brands they partner with.

Paula Perez
Community Manager at Oatly

One way to find these authentic partnerships is to find creators and influencers already in your audience. After all, half of marketers say they ensure authenticity in influencer marketing campaigns by choosing influencers who are already fans of their products.

Social listening platforms are a key way to seek out and find influencers in your audience—even when they don’t tag you. For example, Sprout’s Social Listening enables you to sort posts about your industry, brand and products by the follower count of the person who posted.

You can also lean on an influencer marketing platform, which over half of marketers do. A tool like Tagger by Sprout Social helps you find and manage your influencer partnerships and campaigns.

Prediction 3: There will be a renewed focus on social media customer service

Customer service and social media go hand-in-hand. According to our Index, over half of customers said the most memorable brands on social simply respond to customers.

And Heidi K, Director of Marketing and Communications in the financial services industry predicts customer service on social will continue to be key. “I’ve noticed customers using social media increasingly for customer service. We currently have one person who oversees our social media, and more of their time is being used to handle customer service issues vs. content creation and strategy.”

The Index also found that in 2024, 36% of teams say their social and customer service teams will split the responsibility of social customer care. So this is your sign to work cross-functionally to ensure both teams have the resources they need to succeed.

How to double down on social media customer service (without burning out)

Consumers are putting an emphasis on personalized responses—which takes time your social and customer service teams may not have.

To free up some of that time, tap AI and automation to take care of tedious or repetitive tasks. This will enable your teams to focus on audience engagement. You can even use AI as a starting point for your copy, then personalize that copy with your own edits.

According to the Index, 54% of marketers plan to use customer self-service tools and resources like FAQs, forms and chatbots to scale modern social customer service. And using AI copy tools gives your teams a starting point for their responses, which they can customize and humanize.

Pro tip: It’s best to use a centralized tool to house the resources and data your social and customer care teams need. In Sprout, for example, you can jump between a customizable customer care bot, Copy Suggestions by AI Assist and saved responses in one fell swoop.

Prediction 4: Brands will use a variety of content types

It’s no secret that short-form video has been the king of content recently—for consumers and algorithms alike.

While video is here to stay, it’s time to differentiate your focus. We, along with members of the Arb, predict that in 2024, social pros will use a mix of content—not just video. Just look at how Instagram lessened their focus on Reels in the past year, paving a comeback for static posts.

Focus on diversifying content. Fill your content calendar with a healthy mix of videos plus multi-content carousels and static photo posts. And start to experiment with tailoring posts to feel native to each platform.

How to tailor content for each platform in a sustainable way

Creating custom posts for each platform is a lot to ask. Instead, repurpose copy and content for each platform vs. creating unique posts. For example, a lengthy LinkedIn poll and post can be shortened into an engaging Instagram Story with a poll sticker.

Pro tip: Schedule your content ahead of time. This ensures you publish your tailored posts without needing to jump between those platforms when it’s time to push them live. Using a tool that combines your social content calendar and publishing functions, like Sprout, enables you to get a holistic view of what’s going out on each channel and what to repurpose.

Prediction 5: Data usage will become more sophisticated and cross-functional

Social media pros have always known the importance of using data. But we predict the use of that data is evolving—both inside social teams, and out.

As Brittany Weinzierl, Assistant Director of Digital Engagement at the Air Force Academy Association and Foundation, predicts in the Arb, 2024 will include evolving your use of analytics and metrics. “As social media marketing becomes more sophisticated, there may be a shift toward advanced analytics and metrics to measure campaign performance accurately. SMMs will need to adapt to these changes to make data-driven decisions.”

We already see social teams planning to use their data to connect their efforts to larger goals. In 2024, 60% of marketers plan to connect the value of social to business goals by quantifying the value of social engagement in terms of potential revenue impact, according to the Index. And a similar percentage of marketers plan to track conversions and sales resulting from social efforts.

We also predict sharing social data outside of the marketing team will become more common. Business leaders are more aware of how social data has cross-org implications. And the Index also found that 76% of marketers agree their team’s social insights inform other departments.

Paula Perez of Oatly predicts this will be the case for the community side of social, as well. “Community Managers will be recognized for all the valuable insights they can provide internally, and community teams will serve as a center of insights & knowledge for other teams (comms, PR, creative, even sales and HR). CMs know your audience’s pain points, preferences and even their other favorite brands & interests better than anyone – it’s time to fully tap into those insights!”

The takeaway? You’ll need to become more sophisticated with the use of social data on your team and find new ways to share it.

How to get more sophisticated with your data, and how to share it

The more sophisticated your use of data, the more specific your reports should be. Creating custom reports for your specific purposes and for other teams is your key to success.

Tap into data storytelling to make your data make sense; both to your team and to other departments. Data visualizations package your data in a visual, easy-to-digest format.

Finally, consider leveling up how you gather data. Adopting a social media listening tool, like Sprout’s, can help you gather higher-level insights, for your team and beyond. Think: product insights, competitive analysis and audience sentiment.

Prediction 6: Optimizing existing platforms

First TikTok, then Threads—social teams are no strangers to adopting and investing in new platforms.

New platforms are worth jumping on and experimenting with—but not at the expense of the platforms where you’ve built an engaged audience.

In 2024, we predict that teams will focus on optimizing and investing in the platforms they’re already on—including newer ones like Threads and TikTok. And that even if a flashy new platform emerges, the focus will be on existing accounts. And we saw members of the Arb predict this, as well.

How to optimize your existing social profiles

Your social data will be vital to refreshing your network approach this coming year.

Take a look at long-term trends in individual network performance. If you’re using Sprout, use the Cross Channel Profile Performance Report to compare trends in growth and engagement. This report will help you dig into both high and low performers.

Prediction 7: The future of AI in social media will remain top-of-mind

The future of AI in social media is already here—according to the Index, 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work.

Today, the conversation around “should I use AI?” has evolved into questions about AI ethics and how to craft effective AI prompts. And we predict the way marketers use it and the thoughtfulness behind it will stay top-of-mind.

The use of AI in social media marketing was an overwhelming prediction Arb members contributed to this thread. In 2024, AI will continue to be an important tool for social marketers to adopt. But audiences and marketers alike are already wary of AI-generated language and the impact it has on trust. So we also predict that social teams will need to make sure they use it responsibly, and preserve an authentic, personalized brand voice.

How to bring AI tools into your strategy

We already mentioned how and where to bring AI tools into your workflows. But this is your sign to also bring AI tools into your strategy in a responsible way.

We’ve heard the fears surrounding brand safety when it comes to AI tools. So take the safe route; Work with your legal team to create an AI use policy to protect your brand, and the people on your team.

And be sure to adjust and edit any AI-generated copy to match your brand voice and, in customer care responses, to be personalized and human.

Get ahead of the future of social media marketing now

The world of social media is constantly changing. And so too are the ways social marketers and teams work.

But we’re an adaptive bunch. And you’re ready for what 2024 and beyond holds for you. Use the predictions in this article to stay ahead of the future of social media today, and prepare your strategy for whatever tomorrow holds.

The best way to stay ahead of social media’s changes is to connect with other social pros and to keep learning. Join our community of social media marketers in The Arboretum to stay ahead of the future of social media with exclusive webinars, stimulating conversation topics, job postings and more.

The post What’s next? 7 expert predictions on the future of social media for 2024 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.

After all, everyday TikTokers are the ones responsible for the trends, challenges and viral videos that rack up billions of views.

Oh, and don’t forget the billions of dollars in ad revenue.

The platform owes much of its booming growth to creators and TikTok regularly goes out of its way to acknowledge their impact.

And by introducing the TikTok Creator Fund back in 2020, the app aimed to provide financial support to top-tier content creators. From the outset, there was criticism of the fund’s low payouts. Sometimes, only a few dollars for hundreds of thousands of views.

In February 2023 TikTok announced a new monetization method, the TikTok Creativity Program with improved payouts for popular creators. The new program was Initially rolled out as an invite-only beta. In November 2023 TikTok announced the Creator Fund would be replaced by the Creativity Program in some key markets.

We see a lot of questions surrounding the new Creativity Program, where and when it is rolling out and who can still avail of the Creator Fund. In this post, we’ll break it all down!

Table of Contents

• What is the TikTok Creativity Program?
• What are TikTok Creativity Program eligibility requirements?
• What was the TikTok Creativity Program Beta
• TikTok Creativity Program vs Creator Fund
• Where is the TikTok Creativity Program available?
• Where is the TikTok Creator Fund still available?
• What is the TikTok Creator Fund?
• How to join the Creator Fund on TikTok
• How do TikTok Creator Fund payouts work?
• Pros and Cons of the TikTok Creator Fund
• Does the TikTok Creator Fund or Creativity Program make sense for you?

What is the TikTok Creativity Program?

The TikTok Creativity Program is the platform’s new creator reward program. Payments are based on the performance of longer videos that meet certain follower and viewer requirements.

What are TikTok Creativity Program eligibility requirements?

The requirements to join TikTok’s Creativity Program are similar to the Creator Fund with one key difference:

• Creators must be over 18 years of age
• Have at least 10,000 followers
• Have at least 100,000 views in the last 30 days
• Make high-quality videos of over 1 minute

This last requirement for longer-form content is what differentiates it from the Creator Fund criteria. It is an interesting metric for a platform that has made its name on short-form video content. TikTok add that creators have the potential to earn 20 times the amount previously offered by the Creator Fund.

What was the TikTok Creativity Program Beta

The TikTok Creativity Program Beta was an invitation-only test of the platform’s newest monetization method launched in February 2023. To be invited to the beta users had to be:

• Over 18 years of age
• Have at least 10,000 followers
• Have at least 100,000 views in the last 30 days
• Make high-quality videos of over 1 minute

Clearly, the test was a success as they have decided to roll out the Program more widely.

TikTok Creativity Program vs Creator Fund

The creativity program and creator fund have many similarities including:

• Users must be over 18 years of age
• Have at least 10,000 authentic followers
• Have accrued at least 100,000 views in the last 30 days

After this there are some notable differences between the two reward systems:

• Content length: For a TikTok creator this is the most significant difference. Users in the creativity program must publish content over 1 minute long whereas the Creator Fund still rewards shorter content.
• Funding source: When TikTok launched the Creator Fund they announced payments would be made from an initial $200 million allotment reaching $1 billion within three years. TikTok did not indicate how the Creativity Program is funded.
• Reward levels: TikTok say those in the Creativity Program have the opportunity to earn 20 times as much for their content compared to the Creator Fund.

Although these are the most significant differences it is worth checking TikTok’s own content on getting paid to create.

Where is the TikTok Creativity Program available?

TikTok announced in November 2023 that they are shutting down the Creator Fund for producers in the US, UK, Germany and France on December 16th. Creators in these countries will switch to the Creativity Program.

Where is the TikTok Creator Fund still available?

The existing Creator Fund will still be available for users in Italy and Spain. Keep reading to find out more about it and how it works if you are based in those locations.

What is the TikTok Creator Fund?

The TikTok Creator Fund was an official fund established by the app to compensate creators for their content.

According to the platform themselves, the purpose of this nest egg is to “reward” users for their “incredible TikTok videos and creativity.”

Months after the Creator Fund’s initial announcement in June 2020, the official TikTok @CreatorPortal account released a series of videos breaking down what the fund is and how it works.

Here are some fast facts:

• Established in 2020, the TikTok Creator Fund began with an initial investment of $200 million. Currently, TikTok’s goal is to grow the Fund to over $1 billion within three years.
• Compensation and eligibility for the Creator Fund are based on a creator’s metrics. This includes meeting specific thresholds for views and engagement.
• Part of the Fund’s initial mission was to provide creators means to “earn livelihoods” and “spark careers” through TikTok.
• TikTok is adamant that they want creators of all shapes and sizes for the Fund (hint: not just beauty/fashion vloggers or stereotypical “influencers”).
• The Fund also emphasizes the importance of “original and authentic” content that ties back to TikTok’s mission of “inspiring joy and creativity.”

Note: The TikTok Creator Fund is focused on compensating creators for organic content rather than sponsored content. This is in direct contrast with the TikTok Creator Marketplace where brands directly hire and pay creators for promotional posts.

What’s the purpose of the TikTok Creator Fund?

TikTok claims that the Fund is there to support creators. Reading between the lines, consider additional motivations such as:

Incentivizing more content

According to TikTok, 56% of users claim they’re inspired to create videos after seeing compelling creator content. The Fund is a unique push to encourage even more activity and time spent on the app.

Capitalizing on the popularity of influencers

The explosion of TikTok influencer marketing is well-documented. Through both the Creator Fund and Marketplace, TikTok is making moves to keep creators focused on seeking compensation on the platform.

Although not explicitly stated, this serves as a way to deter creators from seeking out agencies or influencer contracts independently.

Building rapport with creators and the social-savvy public

The more creators go viral, the more positive buzz TikTok earns.

The Creator Fund serves as a way for the platform to highlight its “best” users. If nothing else, providing compensation and supporting the creator economy could be good PR for TikTok.

How to join the Creator Fund on TikTok

Interested in joining the Creator Fund on TikTok or just want to see what it’s all about? TikTok is pretty direct in terms of what you need to do. Check out the steps below.

Meet the Fund’s eligibility requirements

Remember: the Creator Fund is reserved for creators with significant audiences and strong engagement.

Specifically, creators selected for the Fund must meet the following criteria:

• Your TikTok account must have at least 10,000 followers
• You must have at least 100,000 views on your videos within the last 30 days
• Your  account must be in good standing, adhering to the platform’s community guidelines and best practices
• Content published to your account must be original (not cross-posted or otherwise repurposed)
• You must be at least 18 years old

Not sure if you’d make the cut?  You can see some of these requirements when you attempt to join TikTok’s “Creator Next” monetization program. The platform will let you know which criteria you’ve met and which you haven’t (see the grayed-out checkboxes below).

TikTok notes that individuals selected for the Creator Fund are evaluated by the platform. In other words, acceptance or rejection isn’t automatic based on the details above.

Complete and submit your Creator Fund application

Let’s say you do meet the requirements of the Fund.

To apply, you must submit your  Creator Fund application within the TikTok app. You won’t find the application for the Creator Fund on TikTok’s website.

Once logging into your account, go to your account settings and select “Creator Tools.” Under “Creator Next,” you’ll see the “Creator Fund.” This is where you apply.

Note that you must be accepted into the Creator Next platform prior to joining the TikTok Creator Fund.

How do TikTok Creator Fund payouts work?

TikTok is clear that the Creator Fund is not a revenue-sharing program. In their words, performance is “dynamic” and based on a “variety of factors” that are ever-changing.

This vagueness and lack of specificity has been criticized by creators. To be fair, the Fund is still in its early stages.

TikTok says the following factors impact how much a creator gets paid for any given video:

• Number of views
• Authenticity of views
• Content engagement rate

To put it simply, creators act as independent contractors that get paid by TikTok for views accrued monthly.

There is technically no earnings cap for creators. Funds are calculated within 30 days of the prior monthly reporting period. From there, TikTok will compensate creators for views and engagement during that period. There is a minimum payment threshold of $10 (formerly $50) which is transferred from your account to your digital wallet.

How much does the TikTok Creator Fund pay?

The biggest criticism of the TikTok Creator Fund relates to how much (or little, rather) creators are compensated.

For example, this breakdown highlights how a viral video earning over 21 million views netted a total of $340.33. That’s a fraction of a cent per view.

This is staggering when compared to how much some influencers charge ($1,000+) per post on the Creator Marketplace. That’s for significantly less engagement, too.

To be fair, comparing branded content versus purely viral content is apples and oranges. This payout is still paltry compared to the likes of competing video platforms like YouTube.

This phenomenon of low payouts isn’t just reserved for smaller creators, either.

Recent articles by TechCrunch and Engadget further highlight creators’ qualms with the platform.

This criticism is understandable given that TikTok initially marketed the Creator Fund as a career path. In their own words, the Fund provides an opportunity for creators to “turn their passion into a livelihood.” TikTok has since softened its language.

In fact, the platform has been pretty quiet about the Creator Fund recently. The last official update on the Fund’s status was in March 2021. Likewise, TikTok’s @CreatorPortal hasn’t posted about the Fund since 2021. They’ve since focused on the Creator Marketplace and more traditional brand-creator partnerships.

Is the Fund being revamped? Is TikTok pivoting? We’ll have to wait and see.

Pros and Cons of the TikTok Creator Fund

As to whether you should join the Fund, the short answer is “it depends.” Let’s look at the pros and cons to help you decide.

Pros

• You get paid! Even if the compensation isn’t stellar, earning money for content you’d otherwise be creating anyway is a nice bonus.
• The Creator Fund doesn’t impact your content or engagement. TikTok is explicit that joining the Fund doesn’t inherently boost or restrict your reach. Compare this to #gifted or #ad posts which tend to see less engagement. In other words, you don’t have to change your content.
• The fund doesn’t lock you into a contract or require you to cease partnerships elsewhere. If nothing else, it’s just another revenue stream.

Cons

• Payments aren’t great. Again, creators can earn so much more through either the Marketplace or independent brand partnerships.
• Income is inconsistent. Are any creators truly earning a livelihood through the Fund alone? Probably not. Still, the vague nature of TikTok’s compensation formula doesn’t clue creators in on how much they should plan to earn.
• The Creator Fund doesn’t earn you more TikTok followers or otherwise boost your visibility.

Does the TikTok Creator Fund make sense for you?

If you’re a TikToker who wants to test the waters of getting paid for content creation, the stakes are pretty low.

TikTok wants to support creators financially. If you meet the location and the eligibility criteria, the Creativity Program may be worth a try. Although it is early days, some creators are saying they are earning more for their longer videos via the Creativity Program. If you are based in Spain or Italy, we hope we have provided a summary of what you expect if you join the Creator Fund.

If you want to learn more about the state of TikTok marketing and what’s popping off on the platform, check out our post on the latest TikTok trends.

The post TikTok from Creator Fund to Creativity Program: what to expect 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.