In this article, we’ll define the different types of brand mentions and show you how to monitor them. Plus, we’ll share tips for tracking and increasing brand mentions so you can feel empowered to make informed decisions, build stronger audience relationships and improve your brand reputation.

What are brand mentions?

A brand mention is any reference to your brand’s name, products and services on a blog, website, news article, forum, social media post and other digital channels. Brand mentions can be direct and indirect.

Types of brand mentions

Here’s an overview of the different types of brand mentions across social and other forms of media.

Direct brand mentions

Direct brand mentions are clear references to your brand and occur when someone uses the brand’s name, logo‌ or another identifiable element in their content. They can involve tags, hyperlinks and @-mentions. In the post below, notice how the user includes two @-mentions to thank the brands, Fenty Beauty and Savage x Fenty, for hosting an event.

Imagine a celebrity donning your apparel and posting a picture with your brand account tagged—that’s the kind of brand mention that can send your visibility soaring. Responding to this brand mention is a golden chance to boost brand recognition and engage with your audience in an organic way.

Indirect brand mentions

Indirect brand mentions are more subtle. They happen when someone talks about a product, service‌ or event associated with the brand, but they may not use a tag or @-mention. They may not say the brand’s name, but allude to it. For instance, if someone says how much they love the latest Star Wars movie, it would be an indirect brand mention for the Walt Disney Company. In the post below, a user shares an unboxing video showing Fenty Beauty’s 2024 advent calendar. Notice how the user doesn’t tag the brand directly, doesn’t capitalize the brand’s name or use the official name of the product.

Indirect mentions can also include misspellings, slogans without brand names and product-only references. For example, someone saying they prefer iPhones because they enjoy using FaceTime would be an indirect mention.

Social media mentions

Social mentions are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. These are brand mentions on social media networks including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter). An @-mention typically marks them, but they can also be in the form of tags, hashtags, comments or posts. For example, if someone posts about how much they love your new product and tags your company with a branded hashtag or @-mention, that’s a social media mention. Social media mentions can also be indirect, such as someone discussing your brand in a thread. For example, Hyatt Centric Midtown Atlanta tagged the accounts for non-profit Atlanta Pride and AtlannaTonight, a media company, in a post about their partnership for Atlanta Pride Weekend.

Blog mentions

These brand mentions occur when your brand, product, service or even specific content you’ve created is referenced in someone else’s blog post. This could be anything from a brief mention with a hyperlink to an in-depth discussion. For instance, if a food blogger writes about their favorite products and includes your brand in the listicle, that’s a blog mention.

Media mentions

This is a broader brand mention term that encompasses any mention of your business in the media, including both traditional and digital publications. This includes news articles, editorial pieces, TV or radio broadcasts, podcasts, magazines, etc. A newspaper writing an article about your company’s recent production innovations is an example of a media mention. Media mentions can include social media and blog mentions, but they’re not limited to these. For example, Sprout Social data was highlighted in an AdAge article about athlete-influencers.

Reviews and testimonial mentions

These are instances where your brand, products and services are discussed on review platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews or TripAdvisor. For example, if a customer writes a review on OpenTable about their experience with your restaurant, that’s a brand mention on a review site.

Forum and community mentions

These occur when your brand, products or services are mentioned or discussed in online forums or communities used for open discussions and can include sites like Discord, Reddit, Quora and specialized forums (e.g., tech forums, gaming communities). If someone posts a question about your software on a tech forum and other users respond with their experiences, those are considered brand mentions.

Understanding the different types of brand mentions are important because they reflect brand sentiment, or in other words, how and where your brand is perceived.

Why brand mentions are important

Recognizing the importance of brand mentions is key for businesses looking to improve their online visibility and customer relationships. Brand mentions help fuel online reputation monitoring. These unsolicited references can help you gauge brand awareness and customer sentiment, giving you the information you need to make informed decisions and adjust your strategies based on data.

Brand monitoring and awareness

Brand mentions are a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness. If you track and monitor brand mentions, you get a clear picture of your brand’s reach and how well it’s recognized. They have an impact on SERPs because Google recognizes brand mentions as a trust signal and rewards sites that have a strong reputation online. By tracking how often, where and what is said about your brand, you can understand how effective your marketing efforts are and identify growth opportunities to help you allocate more resources. This will also help you optimize your campaigns and maximize your visibility in a competitive environment. Overall, paying attention to brand mentions aids with determining awareness, along with brand monitoring.

It’s important to note that brand monitoring and social media monitoring are not one in the same, but they do complement each other. ‌​​Social monitoring focuses on social media coverage, while brand monitoring covers social media plus other external places where people are talking about your brand. Brand monitoring combines social monitoring and social listening with other methods of tracking brand mentions on non-social media channels to collect audience insights.

Customer feedback and sentiment analysis

Brand mentions offer a unique opportunity to gather customer feedback through sentiment analysis. Mentions are part of sentiment analysis because all brand mentions are either positive, neutral or negative—regardless of if they are direct or indirect. Brand mentions provide real-time insights that enable businesses to understand how customers perceive their brand, products and services. By comprehending the content and sentiment of brand mentions, companies can glean valuable insights into their customers’ perceptions and preferences. Positive mentions signify customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and advocacy, while negative mentions reveal issues, dissatisfaction or unmet expectations. This information can help your team make informed decisions about product development, marketing and customer service strategies.

Strengthen customer care

By keeping an ear to the ground, you can swiftly respond to praise and criticism, demonstrating your brand’s attentiveness and commitment to customer satisfaction. Addressing concerns raised in negative mentions, companies can demonstrate responsiveness, rectify issues and strengthen customer relationships. For instance, if a surge of negative mentions is detected, social and care teams can promptly address the underlying issues to turn the tide. If you track brand mentions, you can engage in real-time conversations and interactions with your customers. This proactive approach to social listening enables you to respond to customer inquiries, address concerns and build stronger, loyal relationships.

Competitor analysis

Brand mentions support competitor analysis by providing insights into public perception of your industry contenders, helping identify market gaps and opportunities, and allowing for comparative analysis of brand visibility and sentiment. They also offer real-time updates on competitors’ activities and can highlight customer preferences, enabling businesses to strategically position their offerings. Additionally, monitoring competitor brand mentions can uncover crisis management strategies and areas where competitors may be faltering, presenting opportunities for differentiation.

How to monitor brand mentions

By being proactive in tracking brand mentions, you can stay ahead of the curve and respond to feedback quickly and effectively. There are several techniques you can use to monitor brand mentions.

Manually search brand mentions

One effective method for tracking brand mentions is to manually search social media and websites for relevant keywords. This includes major networks like Facebook, Instagram and X, along with popular forums and review sites. By regularly checking these, you can identify brand mentions and engage in conversations with customers.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool that can help you save time manually tracking mentions. You can create alerts for your brand name and other relevant keywords. Once you set the cadence for alerts, you’ll get email notifications each time a brand mention appears in search results, simplifying the process of tracking and monitoring brand mentions.

Social listening and monitoring tools

You can monitor brand mentions manually, but we recommend using a social listening or monitoring tool like Sprout to automate the process. Sprout is a powerful tool for monitoring and tracking brand mentions across various platforms. Here’s how you can use it to stay on top of conversations about your brand:

• Social Listening: Set up Sprout Social’s Listening solution to track mentions of your brand name, product names and relevant hashtags across social media, including X, Instagram, Facebook and more. This will help you capture direct mentions (like @-mentions) and indirect mentions (where your brand is discussed but not tagged).
• Custom queries: Create custom queries to monitor specific keywords, phrases or even competitor brands. This enables you to tailor your listening to capture the most relevant conversations.
• Sentiment analysis: Sprout analyzes the sentiment behind brand mentions, helping you understand whether the conversations around your brand are positive, negative or neutral. This can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and potential issues.
• Real-time alerts: Set up alerts to receive notifications whenever there’s a significant spike in brand mentions or negative sentiment to respond quickly to emerging issues or capitalize on positive trends.
• Engagement: Sprout’s Smart Inbox enables you to view and respond to brand mentions directly on the platform. This is crucial for engaging with customers, addressing concerns and building relationships—it also eliminates the need to respond natively and toggling between multiple networks.
• Reporting and analytics: Use Sprout’s Reporting tools to track trends in brand mentions over time, identify peak conversation times and measure the impact of your engagement efforts. This data can inform your social media strategy and help you make data-driven decisions.
• Competitor analysis: Monitor mentions of your competitors to gain insights into their strategies, customer sentiment and market positioning. Identify opportunities to differentiate your brand, fill gaps and improve your offerings.

By combining manual monitoring with automated tools, you can keep a close eye on brand mentions across channels, so you’re always in tune with the market and your customers’ needs and expectations.

Tips for tracking and increasing brand mentions

Tracking brand mentions is a crucial part of measuring the success of your marketing efforts and uncovering valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors. To monitor and increase brand mentions, consider implementing these tips:

• Regularly monitor platforms where your audience is most active: Keep a close eye on social media review sites, forums and industry-specific blogs where your target audience is likely to engage and discuss topics related to your brand.
• Use social listening tools: Automate brand mention tracking with social listening tools like Sprout. These robust tools offer comprehensive monitoring and analytics. You can get real-time data, filter mentions by sentiment and track keywords and hashtags so you can gain more insights into your brand’s digital footprint and customer interactions.
• Encourage user-generated content: Encourage your customers and followers to actively share their experiences, reviews and opinions about your brand by promoting user-generated content (UGC) campaigns. UGC increases brand mentions while building credibility and community with your target audience. Consider organizing contests, giveaways or challenges to incentivize customers to share their UGC and amplify your brand’s reach.
• Engage with your audience: Respond to brand mentions promptly and thoughtfully. Engaging with your audience shows you value their opinions—whether it’s positive or negative—and nurtures customer relationships.
• Collaborate with influencers and industry thought leaders: Form partnerships with industry experts, leaders, journalists and media professionals to increase your brand mentions and expand your reach. Collaborate with influencers who share your brand’s values and target audience to create sponsored posts, reviews or product demonstrations that showcase the benefits of your brand and encourage their followers to engage.
• Optimize your website and create content for search engines: Make sure your website is optimized for search engines by incorporating relevant keywords, updating meta tags and descriptions and creating engaging content that speaks to your audience. By boosting your search engine rankings, you’re more likely to have your brand mentioned in online conversations, articles and others’ blog posts. Create blogs and social media content about your brand’s story, products and services to build awareness and provide value to your target audience.

Use brand mentions to prove your social ROI

By monitoring brand mentions, you can gain immediate feedback on customer perceptions and market trends. Whether you use manually or automated brand mention tracking, taking a proactive approach enables you to adapt quickly to market demands, boosting customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth. See our social listening ROI guide to help you further maximize your investment in social media marketing.

The post How and why you need to track brand mentions across networks appeared first on Sprout Social.

You’re able to level up your marketing efforts through a more streamlined omnichannel strategy to improve your online presence and user engagement. Plus, you dissolve digital siloes and provide smooth customer interactions that lead to better conversions, ultimately increasing revenue.

Read on to explore the different ways you can take advantage of social media integrations to grow your business. Plus, find real-life examples of brands that use social media integrations to strengthen their omnichannel presence to provide a cohesive customer journey.

What is social media integration?

Social media integration is the practice of connecting a brand’s social media platforms with other digital tools like CRMs, e-commerce platforms or websites to create a seamless, unified experience for users. It enables customers to easily use their social media account or associated email address to interact, shop or sign in without switching between different apps or sites for an enriched omnichannel customer experience.

Social media integration also helps marketing teams have smoother social media workflows. It gives them valuable customer and market insights, helping them understand the impact of their social media efforts on conversions and brand sentiment.

Benefits of social media integrations

Social media integrations streamline customer interactions across digital platforms and provide valuable insights to marketers to achieve business goals. Here are more benefits in detail.

Streamlined workflow

Integrating social media platforms with your digital tools like CRM software, email marketing, sms marketing and analytics simplifies and automates your social media workflow. Teams can manage content creation, scheduling and performance tracking, without missing a beat. You’re also able to integrate your social platforms with customer service platforms, like Salesforce Service Cloud, to manage queries and complaints for faster customer support on social media.

Enhanced customer insights

Social media integrations help you connect your social data with your customer databases, which gives you a better, well-rounded understanding of your audience. This enables you to develop data-driven proactive marketing strategies that are personalized and targeted for better results.

Improved engagement

According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 51% of consumers think the most memorable thing a brand can do is respond to customers on social.

Social media integrations enable real-time interaction across platforms so your customer care teams respond faster to customer inquiries and complaints, as well as positive feedback.

This prompt and regular engagement helps create a memorable brand experience, which fosters better customer relationships.

Centralized analytics

Social media integrations with analytics tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Insights help you track performance across channels to understand how your social media efforts are influencing traffic, engagement and sales. Plus, consolidating data from different platforms into one dashboard enables you to monitor key metrics and measure performance to make data-driven decisions more efficiently. It also helps you prove your social ROI to decision-makers and leadership teams through impactful data storytelling.

Cross-channel consistency

Brands can build consistent brand messaging across multiple channels, making it easier to maintain a cohesive online presence. For example, you can link all your social media profiles with your websites, blogs and other apps so customers can buy your products or services directly through social media posts or ads. Audiences can also share your content or engage with you on whichever platform they frequent.

How to use social media integrations in your marketing strategy

Social media integrations help you optimize your marketing strategy and improve your product offerings based on customer interactions. Here are some ways you can use integrated tools to engage customers, drive conversions, monitor sales and increase revenue.

Connect e-commerce with social media

Connecting your e-commerce to social media is one of the best marketing strategies to impact sales. For example, e-commerce social media integrations like Shopify and Facebook Shops enable you to create shoppable posts, making it easy for customers to purchase directly from your social media platforms without leaving the app.

If you already use Shopify or Facebook Shops, Sprout’s social commerce integration is a great way to streamline order management and customer information. You can increase your product awareness and add engaging sales opportunities to your content by scheduling posts with product links.

You can also help customers more efficiently by accessing all relevant order information from one dashboard instead of toggling between different platforms. Plus, respond with personalized messages that help them make prompt purchases. Explore platforms like TikTok and YouTube for shopping integrations by linking videos to product pages, making it easy for customers to shop in-app.

Personalized ads on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok help you retarget customers who have visited your online store but haven’t bought anything. You can feature the exact products they’ve browsed or combine them with promotions or discounts to encourage conversions.

Further boost your omnichannel strategy by adding email marketing to the mix. Supercharge your email campaigns with insights from your social data. Expand the reach of your newsletters and grow your audiences through targeted links.

Keep track of your social commerce analytics often to see how well it’s working and how much traffic comes from referrals. This will help you improve your strategy over time. Building UTM parameters separately for your most-used links every time you publish on social media can be a hassle. But, it can be seamless with Sprout’s Google Analytics and Bitly integrations that bake link creation into your Publishing workflow.

Sprout’s Google Analytics integration helps you create tracking rules to automatically append parameters to your links in the posts you share in Sprout. These parameters then add the tracking results in Google Analytics (which you can also see in Sprout’s Google Analytics Report). You can create and edit URL tracking rules within Sprout, which will get automatically applied in Sprout’s Compose publishing window when the URL is added to a post.

Sync social media with your CRM

Integrating social media with your CRM tools is a powerful way to centralize customer data and interactions. For example, with Sprout, you can connect your LinkedIn account to your Salesforce CRM software. This will let your sales teams track leads, view social interactions and manage customer relationships directly from the CRM, making it easier for them to nurture prospects.

It also helps track customer engagement, conversations and customer preferences within one system.

You can link existing Salesforce contacts to new social profiles in the same workflow. If there isn’t an existing Salesforce contact, you can create one directly from within Sprout to capture the new lead in your marketing funnel. Once a lead has been created or linked, you can see Salesforce Contact and Case info related to this specific user directly from the reply layer in Sprout’s Smart Inbox.

Sprout’s lead management integrations also include Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Once integrated, you can use this funneled data to create personalized marketing campaigns. By tracking how customers use your products and services on social media and in your CRM, you can send them offers that are right for them. You can also retarget users and improve your messages for higher conversion rates.

Plus, real-time social media interactions feeding into your CRM also help your support and sales teams respond more effectively to customer inquiries or complaints. Thus, creating a seamless experience to build stronger customer relationships and drive strategic marketing initiatives.

Explore review and reputation management integrations

Review and reputation management integrations like the ones Sprout has for review platforms like TrustPilot or Glassdoor help you strengthen your online reputation. This social integration enables you to monitor and manage reviews across your business and locations in one centralized stream.

Similarly, connect your social accounts with Google My Business (GMB). Set up custom notifications every time a review comes in and sort reviews into custom priority inboxes. For example, set up alerts from negative reviews with one or two stars. Respond right away to reviewers from within Sprout to address a poor customer experience, offer a resolution, clarify doubts‌ or thank them for leaving a review.

Review integrations also help you share positive reviews across your social profiles to boost your brand’s credibility. This approach strengthens your brand reputation and builds customer relationships by showing that you value their feedback.

Tracking reviews and social media interactions from one single source of truth also makes it easier for you to spot trends in market demands and customer sentiment.

Integrate customer support with social media tools

Customer care integrations are all about passing customer tickets and information between teams. These integrations are a great fit if you find that customer questions on social media often need to be passed to a different team to answer. They also give teams visibility into customers’ previous contact history with your organization for faster, more personalized care.

Sprout’s integration with Salesforce Service Cloud is a game-changer in customer care. Salesforce’s global partnership with Sprout gives you a comprehensive view of your customers. This enables you to deliver world-class social customer care plus turn your social data into crucial business insights.

Your care teams can talk to customers in real-time to fix issues with all the right information. They have access to ‌CRM data along with social data like conversation history and customers’ contact information for a seamless workflow—all through one unified dashboard.

In addition, Salesforce’s AI assistant, Agentforce, enables customer care teams to gain insights into customers’ history with your brand through AI-populated summaries of sentiment and cross-channel case overviews. This helps care agents and managers improve customer experience with deeper customer insights–delivered in real-time–translating into faster case resolution time.

Similarly, Sprout’s Zendesk integration with Facebook helps customer support teams track and respond to support requests to ensure a quick and smooth customer service experience. Once connected, Sprout automatically looks up users who’ve messaged you from your Zendesk instance and matches them with an existing profile. If a profile doesn’t exist, you can create one.

This helps customer care teams create Tickets easily and assign priority tags to the comments more easily. They can also coordinate with other team members more easily and document the Ticket status.

Another example is Sprout’s Hubspot integration, which fortifies customer support with intuitive ticket routing and updates. Manage your HubSpot contacts and tickets directly from Sprout’s Smart Inbox. Link relevant social profiles to HubSpot contacts and then view, edit, create and comment on all HubSpot tickets directly from Sprout.

Create meaningful customer experiences by tailoring your messages to customers’ unique needs and also use the data to identify trends to improve your care.

Schedule a Demo Today

Combine social media data with business intelligence for cross-channel insights

Social data is the bedrock of business intelligence because it brings context to organization-wide data. It uncovers audience insights needed to interpret trends, develop predictions and create informed, data-driven decisions.

With Sprout Social’s Salesforce integration and Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can leverage the power of social data to create a 360-degree view of your customer and inform wider business insights.

For example, if your brand has a sophisticated social presence that’s grown to include customer care, you’d want to analyze agent performance across data sources. This will inform your marketing strategy, product development and other organizational focuses. However, if your team uses Tableau, for instance, to aggregate marketing and customer care data without social data, a big slice of the customer view is missing.

Connect your Sprout data to Tableau and get an omnichannel view of all your social data plus automated and consolidated reporting and analytics. With customizable visuals and metric definitions, you’re able to slice the data based on your KPIs and business needs to create a compelling data story with social media intelligence for actionable insights. And do all this without expensive developer resources.

4 real-life brand examples of social media integrations

Here are four brands that use social media integrations to create stronger omnichannel marketing strategies. Let’s dive into the details of how they’re boosting the impact of social media on business and using it to their advantage.

1. Amazon

Amazon uses social media integrations for an omnichannel strategy that includes strategic advertising, engaging customers and driving traffic to its website—all while enhancing the entire shopping experience.

The brand integrates its product catalog with Facebook and Instagram Ads and uses targeted Ads based on customers shopping behavior and interests. For example, if a customer browses a product on Amazon but doesn’t make a purchase, they may see a retargeted ad on Instagram or Facebook offering a discount or free shipping, encouraging them to complete the transaction.

Amazon also successfully uses influencers to grow its brand. Its influencer program incentivizes bloggers and influencers to share Amazon products via links across platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. During Prime Day, Amazon partners with TikTok influencers to create viral videos around Prime Day deals. TikTok users who interact with these videos are directed to Amazon’s app or website, where they can browse and purchase Prime Day deals.

Amazon also integrates its product listings with Pinterest, where users can discover and pin products from Amazon’s vast catalog. Plus, social reviews on platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), tagged with #FoundItOnAmazon, help the company integrate user-generated content into product listings.

Amazon also takes advantage of social media for prompt customer service. Its @AmazonHelp account on X is where customers can tweet their issues, questions or concerns and get quick help from the Amazon customer service team.

The company also uses interactive shopping through Amazon Live for live-streamed events where viewers can engage in real-time and buy featured products directly.

All these social media integrations help Amazon build engagement, drive traffic and increase conversions. It also gives its customers a cohesive shopping journey and a memorable brand experience.

2. Sephora

Sephora uses social media integrations to create a seamless omnichannel marketing experience. The brand ensures a smooth customer journey from discovery to checkout by integrating its Instagram and Facebook Shops. This helps customers explore, review and purchase products directly from social media.

Similarly, through Pinterest’s “Shop the Look” Pins, users can explore beauty tutorials and product recommendations, leading directly to Sephora’s e-commerce site for effortless purchasing.

Sephora also enhances engagement with YouTube, creating shoppable tutorials and demos where viewers can purchase featured products through linked descriptions.

Their email-social integration ties email marketing to social media platforms, retargeting users with personalized ads based on their email interactions. This ensures consistency in messaging and drives conversion across platforms.

Sephora’s Beauty Insider loyalty program is integrated across social media, e-commerce sites like Groupon and in-store, encouraging customers to earn and redeem rewards from various touchpoints. Plus, their AR integration with Snapchat enables users to virtually try on makeup and links directly to Sephora’s store for purchases, creating a complete cycle from virtual trial to checkout.

3. H&M

H&M integrates social media into its omnichannel marketing strategy to create a seamless shopping experience across platforms. By using shoppable Instagram and Facebook posts, the clothing retailer enables customers to browse and buy products directly through social media, linking these platforms to their website and app for easy purchases. Plus, it uses Pinterest’s “Shop the Look” pins, turning fashion inspiration into quick sales by directing users to product pages.

The company also uses email integrations for social retargeting. It uses personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram to re-engage customers who interacted with their website or email campaigns but didn’t complete a purchase. They further integrated their mobile app with social media, encouraging users to follow H&M for exclusive deals and collections. They also provide the ability to save products from social posts for future purchases.

H&M takes advantage of user-generated content (UGC) through branded hashtags like #HMxME featuring real customer outfits both on social media like their YouTube and product pages to foster engagement.

The brand also collaborates with influencers on TikTok and uses paid ads to promote new collections, so users can shop directly through the app. This consistent, omnichannel approach helps H&M build engagement and drive sales across multiple touchpoints.

4. Shopify

Shopify used social media integrations to transform e-commerce processes for businesses looking to combine their social media presence with e-commerce capabilities.

The brand enables users to benefit from social selling on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, empowering them to engage with their audiences and grow to their full potential.

And since Shopify is a platform centered on integrations, naturally they’re using them to their advantage internally, too. It integrates with Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and other platforms to run targeted ads promoting its tools, features and testimonials to reach entrepreneurs, attract businesses and generate leads.

The brand also uses social media integrations to boost its customer care efforts by integrating with platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This way, it provides users with real-time customer support and builds engagement to improve the brand experience.

Beyond these workflows, the brand positions many of its social media integrations as partnerships to market itself and attract attention from business owners looking to use social media for growth.

Shopify often collaborates with TikTok and Instagram to create joint marketing campaigns to showcase their integration capabilities. It also uses TikTok and YouTube videos to highlight its new features and share tips for entrepreneurs. This helps it position itself as the prominent choice for anyone looking to benefit from social commerce.

The brand also partners with influencers and content creators to promote itself. These influencers share tutorials, case studies and discuss reviews, positioning Shopify as an advanced but user-friendly tool for those wanting to build and grow their online business. Shopify also relies on user-generated content to build trust among its audiences and encourages merchants to share success stories on their social platforms.

Shopify’s story is unique—they’ve made an entire business model out of social media integrations and how they can elevate a brand’s online presence.

Experience seamless business integrations with Sprout

Sprout is built to remove digital silos, so our customers immediately tap into the robust power of social. While organizing and integrating your ecosystem of tools can sound overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be. Integrating the tools you rely on most makes your team more informed and efficient and your customer experience stronger. Plus, it gives you all the insights you need to create an evergreen brand and stay ahead of the competition.

Experience seamless business integrations with Sprout. Sign up for a demo today.

The post Social media integration strategies your brand needs appeared first on Sprout Social.

Our global partnership with Salesforce means we’re making it easy for Salesforce customers to manage their full social media presence while maintaining a 360-degree view of their customer.

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

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

What is Salesforce Social Studio?

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

Source: Salesforce Ben

What does Salesforce Social Studio do?

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

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

Social Studio replacement success stories

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

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

Casey’s

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

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

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

Jasmine Riedemann
Social Media Manager, Casey's

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

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

Hudl

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

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

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

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

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

Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator, Hudl

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

Why is Sprout the best alternative for Salesforce Social Studio?

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

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

Sprout moves at the speed of social

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

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

We’ve built even more power into our platform by combining Sprout’s proprietary machine learning and deep automation capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT model. We’re also leveraging AI through our integration with Salesforce’s Agentforce assistant for Service Cloud. With this integration, Sprout’s social data seamlessly flows into your Service Cloud’s conversational AI assistant, providing care teams with a comprehensive, multi-channel view of their customers, enabling them to resolve cases faster and with more personalization. In addition, our recent acquisition of Repustate adds 15 years of proven success in sentiment and textual analysis. Pair that with smart recommendations from AI Assist and other automation tools, and you get even faster time to value.

Sprout offers a complete social media management toolkit

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

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

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

Sprout is committed to customer success

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

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

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

Sprout maintains enterprise-grade security practices

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

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

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

Find your Social Studio replacement

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

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

Transform your business with Sprout and Salesforce

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

From scheduling posts and engaging with audiences to analyzing metrics and staying on top of trends, social teams always have their hands full.

Technical integrations that seamlessly connect with your existing stack to manage all your social media operations can save the day. They provide social teams with the ability to manage multiple workloads simultaneously, so they can focus on optimizing your brand’s social ROI.

By connecting your systems and automating routine tasks, technical integration makes it easier for your team to focus on what really matters—creating powerful narratives and driving meaningful engagement. Thus, turning social media management into a well-oiled machine where everything clicks into place effortlessly.

In this article, you’ll read how the Sprout Social API does just this for your brand. In particular, find out how our brands and partners use our API for publishing and reporting.

Does Sprout Social have an open API?

Yes, Sprout Social has an open API. The Sprout Public API enables you to extend your external workflows by integrating with our Publishing and Reporting tools.

Streamline your critical content creation workflows and funnel all your social profile data into your dashboards for centralized, automated reporting. This way, you’re able to meet your unique reporting needs and integrate social data into your broader analytics processes.

You can easily export post drafts, including text, images, videos, carousels and links, from your current project management software or content management tools to the Sprout platform. Also, plan and schedule the exported content in Sprout without disrupting the project management workflows you’re already working on.

Plus, your dedicated development teams can build custom integrations with your existing project/content management tools as and when you require them.

To access the Sprout Public API, your account must be authorized for API-use by your Sprout account representative. Once your account is provisioned, you can either ​​create an Account-scoped access token or an OAuth access token (using our OAuth 2.0 provider) to authenticate API requests.

Here’s a quick look at what the Sprout API includes:

• Owned profile data: Matches the data available in Sprout’s Profile Performance, X Profiles, Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages, Pinterest Profiles, TikTok Profiles and YouTube Videos Report.
• Post data: This matches Sprout’s Post Performance Report data.
• Owned demographic data: View the data available in Sprout’s Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages and TikTok Profiles Reports.
• Message data: Get detailed information, including metadata, about your messages. This includes messages received by and replied to from your profiles.
• Publishing posts: Create posts within Sprout.
• Media upload: Upload Media for use with publishing posts.
• Direct Tableau Connector: The Tableau Connector uses the Sprout API to pull your social data into Tableau. The metrics and data points are collected directly from those available in the Sprout API. This enables you to easily analyze Sprout API data directly in Tableau.
• Listening Topics: Retrieve earned media-related metrics and messages found within your Listening Topics.

Find out more details about the Sprout API.

How brands and partners use the Sprout Social Publishing API

Our customers and partners use the Sprout Social Publishing API to streamline their workflow, creating and publishing on-brand social content faster and more efficiently. Here are use cases from a few of our integrations, which are available with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

Slate

The Sprout Social Publishing API integrates with the Slate CRM platform. You can craft and publish social content via Sprout, plus track content performance through our Reporting.

Create content in Slate’s Web Editor and send it directly to Sprout. Social teams can then log into Sprout to check the content before publishing or scheduling it.

The integration also enables you to reuse your top-performing content from Slate and send it to Sprout to schedule and publish across networks.

Once your content is published, you can track the performance of your social content through the Post Performance Report. Customize your reports by using Tagging to focus on the content you want to track based on your goals and objectives.

More about our Slate integration.

Opal

Our Opal integration enables brands to export and schedule branded content into Sprout, making it easy to collaborate with broader marketing teams.

This content is delivered seamlessly, so the content library in the Sprout platform is always updated. You can then log into Sprout to review the delivered content and publish it on your social profiles. You can also schedule the delivered content for publishing based on your campaign calendar. Once the post is published, you’ll receive a live URL on Opal from Sprout.

All the content that’s delivered from Opal is ​​added to the Sprout Library. If a piece of content is already in the Sprout repository, our tool will automatically link to the existing asset to avoid duplicates. This way you’re not worried about unnecessary data clogging up your asset library and have the relevant content you need at your fingertips.

As for content types, Sprout supports a wide variety on Opal. This includes Facebook posts and videos, Instagram posts, videos, Reels and carousels, TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, X (formerly Twitter) posts and videos‌, and YouTube videos.

Optimizely

Sprout integrates with Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to give you seamless workflows for managing social media campaigns. The integration enables large teams to collaborate more effectively by helping them plan their content better and schedule posts for publishing in one single workspace.

Import approved social content, including text, image and videos, to Sprout as post drafts and schedule them across your social networks as needed. Thus, eliminating the need for manual curation and giving time back to social teams so they can focus on the more strategic aspects of their work. Another key integration feature is Task-Based Publishing, which enables marketers to publish posts directly from tasks within the Optimizely CMP.

The Optimizely integration is available with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

How brands and partners use the Sprout Social Reporting API

The Sprout Social Reporting API helps brands select metrics that best match their business goals and prove the impact of their data. Teams can view important insights in presentation-ready reports, which can also be quickly distributed to key stakeholders within the larger organization.

Here’s a walk-through of how brands and partners use some of our integrations.

Tableau

Our Tableau BI Connector helps you combine the power of your social data with all your important data streams.

Brands can connect Sprout into Tableau without additional developer resources and customize data visualization based on your data storytelling requirements. Choose the metrics you want and need per your priorities to understand how your social data fits into your overall business strategy. This helps you get an omni-channel view of your business insights as they funnel through all your key channels.

Connecting to Tableau from your Sprout account is easy. Use your Sprout API token to set up the Tableau Connector and then log into Tableau.

Navigate to Data > New Data Source > Web Data Connector

Once you’re in the Web Data Connector, enter the URL (https://api.sproutsocial.com/tableau), paste your Sprout API token and click Connect.

With this connection in place, your Sprout data will automatically appear in Tableau. ​​Now you can customize your Tableau dashboards to slice and dice your Sprout data as needed.

Datorama

Sprout Premium Analytics users can ​​bring their social marketing analytics into their marketing dashboards in Datorama, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform.

This Sprout Salesforce integration gives you metrics such as post-level data, Sprout Tag and campaign data as well as network metrics that aren’t available in Datorama, such as TikTok. You can also manage all profile permissions and reauthorizations in one place.

To start using the Sprout integration exclusively in Salesforce, use the API key, which you can generate by going into:

Account and settings > Settings > Click API Tokens under Reporting and Listening > Click Sprout’s Analytics API Terms of Service to review the terms > Select Agree, and Submit

Once you click Submit, your API key will be generated. Create a name for your Token and click Create Token.

Copy and paste your token in Datorama, and you’re all set.

Chattermill

The Sprout Social API integrates with customer experience (CX) platform, Chattermill, so brands can benefit from Sprout’s comprehensive analytics and reporting.

You can connect all your social media accounts on Sprout via Chattermill to track and measure customer feedback in social mentions. This enables you to have detailed reporting on common customer complaints, trends and spikes in conversations in one central dashboard. Teams get these insights in easy-to-understand reports and can easily share them with leaders and stakeholders to highlight and prove the brand’s social ROI.

Sprout customers can also use the Chattermill integration to analyze brand sentiment in customer feedback on review websites. This helps you understand your customer experience more holistically and draw actionable insights for tangible improvements to products and services.

Track your social ROI to propel your brand forward

Measuring and tracking your social ROI isn’t just about proving the value of your efforts—it’s a strategy that can move your brand forward in the right direction. Through integrations, teams can work smarter, saving time and resources spent on manual tasks or jumping between platforms for activities that have a greater impact.

The Sprout Social API helps you integrate your social data with your CRM and CX tools so you gain the insights you need. This helps you refine your marketing approach, optimize campaigns and make data-driven decisions that help you remain competitive, ever-green brand.

These metrics also give you the ability to allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that every action contributes to your brand’s growth and success.

Explore Sprout’s Premium Social Media and Analytics Reporting to improve your social strategies and prove your impact for sustained long-term success.

The post How brands and partners use the Sprout Social API appeared first on Sprout Social.

But what’s the best way for brands like yours to use the app?

Snapchat’s distinctive features and authentic vibe make it an excellent avenue for influencer marketing. This playbook will help you harness the power of Snapchat influencer marketing with guidance on forging partnerships, creating engaging content and tracking business results.

Partner with the right Snapchat influencers

To optimize your influencer marketing strategy on Snapchat, it’s crucial to collaborate with the right influencers. Conduct thorough research to identify influencers whose values align with your brand, who resonate with your target audience and who can help you achieve your campaign objectives.

Here are four factors to keep in mind when searching for Snapchat influencers:

1. Know your audience

Different generations have unique platform preferences for social media. According to a Sprout Social Q2 Pulse Survey of more than 2,000 consumers across the US and UK, Gen Z and Millennials are the generations you can expect to see most on the platform, with Gen Z ranking Snapchat as one of their top three most-used social platforms. When you search for influencers, look for those who’ll resonate with younger generations.

2. Relevance matters

Seek out individuals whose content aligns with your brand values and whose followers match your target demographic. Use tools like Social Blade and Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger) to pinpoint the best fits.

3. Prioritize engagement, not just follower count

While a large follower count is appealing, high engagement rates are a truer measure of an influencer’s impact. Focus on influencers who receive substantial interaction on their posts, such as comments, shares‌ and views.

4. Build long-term relationships

Develop long-term relationships with key influencers. Consistent partnerships lead to more authentic and impactful collaborations. Consider turning successful influencers into brand ambassadors. Ambassadors can provide a steady stream of content and maintain a continuous connection with their audience.

Harness Snapchat’s unique features

Like any social platform, unique features are what keep audiences coming back. Build your campaigns around Snapchat’s functionality to create content that resonates.

Stories

Snapchat Stories are ideal for sharing temporary, engaging content that creates urgency. Use Stories for behind-the-scenes glimpses, product launches‌ and exclusive previews. Collaborate with influencers for Snapchat takeovers, giving their followers direct access to your brand.

Geofilters

The future of influencer marketing will extend beyond the screen. According to Sprout Social’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report, most consumers agree they’re more likely to buy from brands who partner with influencers on more than just social content—like IRL events.

To capture this intent, use influencers and geofilters to bring event activations to life. Design branded geofilters for specific events or locations, and have your influencers apply them. Anyone in the area can use these filters, boosting brand visibility and encouraging user interaction.

Lenses

Develop custom Snapchat lenses to allow users to interact with your brand in a playful and immersive way, from simple overlays to sophisticated augmented reality experiences. Partner with influencers to showcase these lenses on their accounts and encourage audience to do the same.

Incorporate Snapchat Ads

Complement influencer content with Snap Ads to extend your reach. These ads reinforce your campaign message and drive additional engagement. You can also sponsor content to amplify reach further—enhancing the impact of your influencer campaigns.

Craft authentic and engaging content

Sprout’s 2024 Influencer Marketing Report also found that the best brand and influencer collaborations are honest and unbiased, entertaining or educational.

Keep those factors in mind while building your content strategy, and use the tips below to craft engaging content.

Stay authentic

Allow influencers the freedom to present your brand in their unique style. Authenticity resonates strongly with their audience, making the content more impactful. Collaborate closely with influencers to co-create content that’s both creative and aligned with your brand messaging, but let them guide the approach to foster innovation and engagement.

Take audiences behind-the-scenes

Humanize your brand with behind-the-scenes content. This approach makes your brand more relatable and accessible. Encourage influencers to tell a story through their snaps and give audiences a sneak peek at what it’s like to work with your brand. Storytelling makes the content more engaging and memorable for the audience.

Share user-generated content

Encourage influencers to share user-generated content. This strategy helps boost engagement while building credibility and trust in your brand. It fosters a sense of community, making followers feel valued and part of a larger group.

Run contests and giveaways

Contests and giveaways are powerful tools for driving engagement. Partner with influencers to run these campaigns, offering followers chances to win exclusive products or experiences. Provide special deals or discounts to the influencer’s followers. This creates a sense of exclusivity and urgency, driving immediate action.

Stay updated with trends

Keep up with new Snapchat features and trends. Early adoption of new tools can give your brand a competitive edge and keep your content fresh. Be aware of cultural and social trends that resonate with your target audience, and incorporate these trends into your content to make it more relevant and engaging.

Take CeraVe, for example. The brand leaned into Snapchat’s AR trends and partnered with Snapchat creators for a campaign to raise product awareness.

Creators used AR to “apply” CeraVe products on screen while explaining the product’s benefits to viewers in real time.

Use analytics to understand performance

Dig into your native Snapchat analytics to see how your influencer campaign impacts real business results. Then, based on what you learn, iterate and improve your campaign strategy. Here’s what to do:

Track performance

Use Snapchat’s analytics tools to monitor the performance of your influencer campaigns. Key metrics include:

• Engagement metrics: Track interactions like views, shares‌ and screenshots to gauge user interest.
• Reach and impressions: Measure the number of unique users who have seen your content and the total views.
• Story views and completion rates: Understand how many users view your stories and complete them.
• Swipe-ups: Monitor the number of times users swipe up for more information or links.
• Demographic data: Gain insights into the age, gender and location of your audience.
• Time spent: Measure how long users spend viewing your content.
• Conversion tracking: Track actions taken by users after viewing your content, such as website visits or purchases.

Refine your strategy

By analyzing audience behavior and preferences, you can tailor your campaigns to better meet the needs of your target audience. The data you collect can tell you the strength of specific influencer partnerships, the campaign content that resonates the most and what other opportunities exist to differentiate your brand. Turn your data into impact by finding insights and creating new ideas to refine your strategies.

Maximize Snapchat influencer marketing ROI

Using Snapchat in your influencer marketing strategy involves a blend of creativity, strategic planning‌ and a deep understanding of the platform’s unique experience. By selecting the right influencers, crafting authentic content‌ and effectively using Snapchat’s tools, brands can create impactful campaigns that resonate with their audience. Use this playbook to build an influencer strategy that works, and learn how Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform can help you execute Snapchat influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish.

The post The ultimate playbook to build a Snapchat influencer marketing strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Through that time, our north star has always been to help our customers not just manage but maximize the power of social. It’s the reason why we are constantly, thoughtfully investing in our platform—because our industry doesn’t move forward unless we’re equipping our users with the tools they need to do exceptional work.

Which is why I’m thrilled to share that Sprout has launched Breaking Ground: a new quarterly program to keep our customers up to date on everything you need to know about our latest product advancements, so that you can drive more business impact from social.

Here’s a glimpse at what we’re releasing this quarter.

Advancing AI to make space for human creativity and connections

Social media teams are at max capacity. Our recent Social Media Productivity Report found that almost half of social marketers feel they sometimes or rarely have enough time to get their work done, and even more (63%) agree that manual tasks prevent them from doing high impact work.

At Sprout, we embrace a human-centric philosophy to developing AI capabilities that empower the people behind your brand to work faster and smarter. Over the years, we have consistently invested in AI and machine learning at Sprout, but 2023 marked a significant leap forward with the introduction of numerous AI Assist capabilities.

Our latest AI and automation capabilities build on this momentum, helping you focus on what matters most: the creativity and strategic thinking no machine can emulate. Listening customers will be able to tap into Analyze by AI Assist and Summarize by AI Assist, new widgets that will help you distill content and surface important conversation trends faster. For customer care teams, updates including AI conversation summaries, Response Recommended and Message Intent will make it easier for agents to get an at-a-glance view of incoming messages, ensuring the most urgent ones get routed and responded to promptly.

AI has been vital in helping Thailand-based Minor Hotels expand its online presence to match its growing physical footprint. Before using Sprout, their social team had minimal insight into how their efforts were performing—whether their campaigns were resonating or bringing in new customers. In a fiercely competitive travel and tourism industry, they needed a way to grab analytics more frequently and uncover market trends.

Enter Sprout. With AI Assist and Listening, Minor Hotels increased the frequency of their reporting twofold and saved over 192 hours annually on pulling reports. Today, our AI capabilities allow the Minor Hotels team to proactively monitor performance, adapt their social content and inform business strategy.

On the content front, we’ve also introduced Generate by AI Assist. This innovation automatically produces alt-text for social post images, making it easier to build a more accessible social presence.

“Working to make my social content accessible to all has been a top priority of mine for years, so Sprout’s new AI-generated alt text feature has been a major win. The detail picked up in the description is impressive and much more accurate than I’ve experienced with other AI tools. This saves me time and mental focus on each post, which I can put back into the content,” said Jessie Brown, Social Media Specialist at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Telling a richer story about how social impacts the business

Connecting your social strategy to business-wide sales and revenue goals remains one of marketers’ most elusive challenges—especially for those lacking the right tools. Almost twice as many social media marketers who use a dedicated social media management platform say their brand’s social efforts contribute significantly to revenue compared to those without, according to the Social Media Productivity Report.

Which is why we’re excited to roll out new capabilities like My Reports, a new Premium Analytics reporting interface that lets users dig even deeper into their data. Users can customize their reports using a breadth of data points—including post-level performance, customer care and even Employee Advocacy metrics—to tell a more detailed story about social’s impact on the business.

For iHeartRadio Canada, which manages a portfolio of over 300 social accounts, Sprout has been essential in not just scaling but proving the power of their content strategy. As Clayton Taylor, National Content Manager – Digital Radio, explained, “In terms of ROI, Sprout helps us gain recognition with our direct audience while also demonstrating value to our branded partners and sponsors. We can also show our music label partners why it makes sense for them and their artists to work with iHeartRadio Canada.”

Drawing a clear line from influencers to revenue

How do you typically measure the impact of your influencer marketing efforts—Post views? Impressions? Comments?

These are each reliable ways to quantify the power of influencers, but the truth is this: Influencer marketing has a greater impact on conversion and sales than we give it credit for. Almost half of all consumers (49%) make purchases at least once a month because of influencer posts, according to The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report.

With Sprout Social Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger), we’re making it easier to track how influencer partnerships add to your bottom line. Instagram Tap Tag mentions will allow influencers you partner with to organically integrate product tags directly into their posts. On the reporting side, users can track engagement, reach, and conversions—helping you develop long-term relationships with the influencers driving both awareness and sales for your business.

Consider the role influencers played in Lovesac’s 25th anniversary campaign, “Rewriting the Rules of Comfort.” With help from their agency KWT Global, they used Sprout Social Influencer Marketing to recruit long-time brand fans and new influencers (including celebrities like Olympic snowboarder Shaun White, Brandy and Travis Barker) to show how they rewrite their own rules of comfort at home with Lovesac styles.

As Erin Ally, Vice President of Social Media and Influencer Marketing at KWT Global explained, “We wanted to be able to find influencers proactively, report effectively and easily on influencer successes to stakeholders, and manage it all through one platform that is intuitive and anyone on our team could learn to use…After evaluating various solutions, choosing Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform was a no-brainer for us.”

With our platform, Ally’s team can tell a stronger story about the success of campaigns like Lovesac’s—which was particularly impressive. The months-long effort generated $8.48M in earned media value, 57 million impressions and a 14.3% increase in Lovesac Q3 sales year over year.

Helping brands meet their audience in more places

Today’s social media ecosystem is made up of a growing list of networks, each with unique algorithms, content formats and audiences. Consumers are using a mix of them all to consume content and connect with their communities. In fact, 38% of consumers plan to use more networks this year compared to 2023, according to a Q4 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

One of the latest networks captivating consumers and brands alike? Threads.

Marketers across industries have experimented with the community-centric platform since it launched in July 2023—but now they can elevate their approach with Threads scheduling, engagement and reporting capabilities in Sprout. In less than a year, Boston-based public media producer GBH has started posting to Threads across 15 production units—growing an audience of nearly 180,000 followers.

“Now that Threads publishing and scheduling has been added to Sprout, GBH’s social media managers—who are responsible for growing and engaging audiences for their specific productions or units—can more easily and efficiently leverage the platform to build and deepen connections with our communities,” said Zack Waldman, GBH Social Media Strategist.

Ready to break barriers?

Our vision at Sprout is to be the social platform powering the world’s most innovative brands. But we only get there by building software that exceeds our customers’ needs both now and in the future. We can’t wait to see the ground-breaking work marketers and customer care professionals accomplish with some of these latest releases.

But again, these are just a few highlights of the product updates we have and will be unveiling. Register for our Breaking Ground Q3 2024 launch event to learn more about our upcoming releases.

The post Breaking Ground: The latest Sprout updates you need to know about appeared first on Sprout Social.

As Threads continues to roll out new product features and expand API capabilities, the platform has become an engagement generator for brands, pushing more of them to create a presence. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 70% of marketers are currently using Threads, and another 21% anticipate using the platform in the near future.

How are brands carving out space on this new network? How does Threads contribute to their overall social strategy? We took a closer look at five brands on Threads inspiring us, and stitched together key takeaways from their approaches. Use their trailblazing strategies to chart your path.

What is the opportunity for brands on Threads?

According to Meta’s Q4 2023 earnings call, there are 130 million monthly users on Threads, up from 100 million in Q3. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO, says the emerging platform continues to grow rapidly. This growth is bolstered by the roster of new features released since the platform launched.

Just in Q1 2024, Threads has introduced saved posts, saved drafts, adding images to posts, adding trends to the search page and For You feed, and a new API update that enables social teams to manage their presence in social media management platforms like Sprout Social. Threads is also beta testing “swiping” posts so users can express their interest (or disinterest) in content in their feed.

As the platform expands—both in user size and functionality—it can become a place for meaningful, authentic engagement between brands and their fans. Which is exactly what audiences are looking for. The Sprout Social Index™ research found that “authentic, non-promotional” content is what most consumers wish they saw more of from brands on social. Another 51% say the most memorable brands respond to their customers, while over one-third (37%) wish brands would engage directly with their audience instead of publishing a lot of content.

Responding to customers and building community on Threads can increase consumer satisfaction, and also boost critical KPIs. Engagement is the big opportunity on the platform, and almost three-quarters (74%) of VPs and executives look to social media engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) to determine the value of their team’s social efforts, according to the Index.

How 5 brands are finding a new home on Threads

Let’s dive into our lineup of brands who stand out on Threads, and zero-in on how their approach maximizes engagement on the platform.

GBH

GBH is a Boston-based public media producer, creating local news, nationally-distributed television programs, classical music programming, educational resources, events and more. We asked GBH’s Social Media Strategist, Zack Waldman, to fill us in on their Threads content strategy.

“Threads isn’t even 10 months old yet—it’s still an infant learning to crawl. With that in mind, experimentation has and continues to be the name of the game. We’ve found that high-performing witty and colorful posts on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram tend to also play on Threads, but we’d be lying if we said we’ve found the formula for success,” says Waldman.

Some of their best performing content includes fan favorites from public radio and television programming, like this post featuring Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.

Or behind-the-scenes content, like this office tour with iconic journalist and NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross.

GBH also uses Threads to boost their influencer marketing efforts, like this post promoting an influencer’s new PBS social media series. This is a strategy we’re seeing from brands more and more. According to Q3 Pulse Survey data, almost half (45%) of marketers use Threads when implementing their influencer marketing efforts.

Waldman says Threads’ growing user base and text-centric format makes it easy to experiment and complement efforts on other channels. “Threads provides GBH’s national and local production units the opportunity to reach and engage with a sizable audience. Given that text-heavy posts continue to dominate the Threads landscape, there is a lower barrier to success compared with video-centric platforms.”

But there are still challenges when it comes to data synthesis. “Discerning what works and what doesn’t work is particularly challenging because of the lack of data available on the platform beyond followers, post likes and replies,” Waldman adds.

Waldman hopes Sprout’s new integration with Threads will make management and performance analysis easier. “Now that Threads publishing and scheduling has been added to Sprout, GBH’s social media managers—who are responsible for growing and engaging audiences for their specific productions or units—can more easily and efficiently leverage the platform to build and deepen connections with our communities.”

Get Thready with it: As your brand builds a presence on Threads, continuously test and learn. To keep an eye on performance trends and schedule posts in advance, try Sprout’s Threads integration free for 30 days.

American Red Cross

The American Red Cross, the nonprofit humanitarian organization that provides emergency assistance, disaster relief and disaster education in the US, has built a solid following on Threads. The brand’s strategy is rooted in building community and humanizing their brand.

As Rebecca Torriani Márquez, Manager of Social Engagement at the American Red Cross, says, “It’s okay to have fun, engage with other brands and explore different types of content to see what works. Threads is continuously rolling out updates and features to enhance the user experience—like polls and trending conversations.”

She also points out that the tone on the channel feels different: “Brands on Threads are more playful than you typically see on other platforms, and are willing to engage with their audience beyond typical customer care responses.” Like when the brand responded to a post about bringing books in your first aid kit:

To the American Red Cross, Threads is essential for audience building, content experimentation, channel diversification and brand visibility. As Torriani Márquez says, “Threads allows us to tap into a new audience we may not normally reach on other platforms. And as early adopters, we can experiment with new ideas that help evolve our content strategy as new features and functionalities are released. We are simultaneously figuring out what content resonates with our audience and learning from other brands and their successes.”

Get Thready with it: Take a cue from the American Red Cross, and keep a pulse on new platform updates/trends and audience demographics. Threads is constantly evolving, creating new opportunities for audience growth and engagement with untapped markets.

CNN

CNN, the multinational news company, uses Threads to keep followers informed about breaking news and current events. In their posts, they share story headlines and key takeaways, and include links so users can read complete articles on their website.

Threads presents an opportunity for the brand to be the first to share a story. Compared to other channels where short-form and long-form video reign supreme, text and image-focused updates are common on Threads. Which means CNN can publish more frequent, lower-lift posts that stay ahead of the 24/7 news cycle.

Get Thready with it: As social becomes more decentralized and new platforms emerge, the pressure on social teams to produce content increases. On Threads, brands can post regularly—which builds their thought leadership, audience and community—without getting burnt out.

Ooni

Ooni is an outdoor pizza oven company based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The brand specializes in high-temperature ovens for residential customers. On Threads, Ooni shares drool-worthy images and videos of unexpected recipes consumers can make with their ovens. Like this gooey egg and bacon quesadilla.

Followers comment on the content sharing love for the brand, their products and the recipes they share.

Ooni supplements their food inspo content with text-based posts that rack up engagements, like this one which asks users to share the best pizza maker in their family.

Get Thready with it: Like Ooni, your content mix on Threads isn’t limited to one format. While there are many low-lift engagement opportunities you can capitalize on, there’s also an opportunity to share video content from other channels. Try testing a variety of formats and topics to see what resonates with your audience.

Reddit

Reddit, the social network known for its community forums, is grabbing attention on Threads. Even though it might seem unexpected for one social platform to shine on another, that’s exactly what Reddit has achieved.

Reddit understands that every social media user has an ecosystem of content they consume across networks. Their content strategically reaches potential audience members, and draws people to Reddit. Most of Reddit’s Threads posts are memes created by users on their platform.

They even spotlight Reddit forums about Threads on the network (meta, right?).

Reddit shares product updates about their platform, too. This reminds users of the experience it offers, and suggests Reddit’s Threads strategy is rooted in staying top of mind for their audience.

Get Thready with it: Even if it seems unexpected for your brand to join Threads, you can still cultivate your audience there. Especially if their interests and trending conversations align with your brand or products.

Keep pulling on Threads that lead to audience engagement

Audience engagement plays a pivotal role in building a community online and measuring your brand’s success. Threads is an engagement magnet. Like a social media network from the early 2000s, the focus of Threads is on building connections instead of just going viral.

To build a Threads presence that works, remember to:

• Lean into experimentation—from your content formats and topics to your general strategy. Keep an eye on upcoming platform updates to help guide you.
• Humanize your brand by engaging with your audience and other brands in playful ways. Your tone on Threads doesn’t have to be as serious as on other channels.
• Use the low-lift nature of Threads’ text posts to your advantage. It doesn’t always take flashy visuals or high production quality to stand out.

Want to learn more about optimizing your brand’s Threads presence? Read how Sprout’s Threads integration helps you create authentic connections at scale.

The post 5 brands on Threads putting their own spin on the platform appeared first on Sprout Social.

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

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

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

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

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

Why should your brand use social messaging apps?

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

Engage in conversational commerce

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

Provide customer service and care

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

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

Build a pool of brand evangelists

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

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

Navigate a social media crisis

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

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

11 most popular social messaging apps

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

1. WhatsApp
2. Instagram direct messages
3. Messenger
4. TikTok direct messages
5. WeChat
6. SnapChat
7. Telegram
8. Discord
9. Viber
10. Twitter direct messages
11. Zendesk

1. WhatsApp

Monthly active users: 2 billion

Key benefits:

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

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

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

2. Instagram direct messages

Instagram monthly active users: 2 billion

Key benefits:

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

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

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

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

3. Messenger

Monthly active users: 1.3 billion

Key benefits:

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

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

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

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

4. TikTok direct messages

TikTok monthly active users: 1 billion

Key benefits:

• Integrated with TikTok
• Custom auto-replies

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

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

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

5. WeChat

Monthly active users: 1 billion

Key benefits:

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

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

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

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

6. Snapchat

Monthly active users: 500 million

Key benefits:

• Disappearing images and videos
• Custom filters, effects and drawings

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

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

7. Telegram

Monthly active users: 500 million

Key benefits:

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

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

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

8. Discord

Monthly active users: 350 million

Key benefits:

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

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

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

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

9. Viber

Monthly active users: 250 million

Key benefits:

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

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

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

10. Twitter direct messages

Twitter monthly active users: 217 million

Key benefits:

• Integrated with Twitter
• Chatbots
• Built-in GIF and sticker gallery

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

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

11. Zendesk

Key benefits:

• Omnichannel customer care
• Voice chat
• Chatbots

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

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

Manage your social messaging apps in one place with Sprout Social

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

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

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

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

The post 11 Social messaging apps every marketer should know in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Consumers have to weigh many options any time they make a purchase. So it pays for your brand and products to stand out against the competition.

But what does make your offerings stand out? And how can you be “the only choice” against your competitors? This is where a competitive analysis for your products comes in. It’s the best way to understand how to outpace your competitors, and where you may be falling behind.

All of the information you need is at your fingertips—you just need the right tools to access it. We’ll walk you through how to do a competitive product analysis today to inspire your offerings and brand positioning for tomorrow.

• What is a competitive product analysis?
• How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?
• How do you analyze competitor products?
• What to look for during a competitor product analysis

What is a competitive product analysis?

A competitive product analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ products to determine how prolific they are in the market, gaps they leave and what threats they pose to your products.

This process enables you to:

• Determine what features competitor products have
• What your target market likes and dislikes about competitor products
• What products your competitors are not offering that you can offer

This process can be done for any type of product, including physical products (toys, games, tools, appliances, etc.), digital products (digital tools like Sprout Social or applications), experiences (museums, bars or restaurants) and services (cleaning services or moving services).

Conducting a product-focused competitive analysis should be done when you’re creating or considering new offerings, but also to optimize and improve upon what you already offer.

How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?

It’s competitive out there. And the process of a product competitive analysis helps businesses gather competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the competition and differentiate themselves in the market.

Here are a few actionable ways a product analysis of your competitors’ offerings is integral to your business.

Establish your unique selling propositions (USPs)

Establishing your USPs is a crucial piece of setting your offer apart from competitors’.

Conducting a competitive analysis will help you determine what differentiates your products, which will help you set them apart in marketing materials and beyond.

This could be as simple as differentiating your product by price point or feature. For example, AllBirds and Nike both offer sneakers. But what differentiates AllBirds is their core focus on extra comfort and sustainability, which is a big part of their message and brand.

https://www.facebook.com/weareallbirds/posts/pfbid02fYoesSZTYjQBpJ5XkenaEda6jLq8K3orys65kkxC5Dh29kmGhBCmu9DuYqKPHYbDl

While Nike differentiates their shoes and products by focusing on sports, activewear and performance—like this video highlighting how their product performs in cold, winter conditions.

Increase market share by filling gaps and solving pain points

Gaps left by your competitors provide space for you to fill with your product offerings. A competitive product analysis can tell you where your competitors are lacking and opportunity for you to step in.

Similarly, analyzing conversations customers are having about your competitors can surface pain points they face thanks with their offerings.

Gain market intelligence

Understanding how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors also helps you determine the biggest threats to your business. It reveals if you’re falling behind the competition, and what people prefer about other brands. The truth may hurt, but it’s vital information that you can use to improve your business.

It’s also helpful when your competitors launch new products. Examine how people react to their new products or services. Where are the shortcomings? What do people love that you can use to inspire your product development? 

Add new features

Product analysis isn’t just about looking at what products and features your competitors do have—it’s also identifying what they lack.

Analyzing gaps left by your competitors’ products gives you a major advantage. It helps you identify where there are gaps to fill, and opportunities you can take advantage of by offering a new or updated product that solves pain points your competitors’ customers face.

Inform marketing campaigns

There’s much more of a through-line between product analysis and marketing than meets the eye.

Once you know where you have an advantage when it comes to products or product features, this is valuable information to highlight in marketing campaigns—whether you’re marketing the launch of a new product, updates to an old one or just creating new campaigns that highlight what sets you apart.

https://www.facebook.com/weareallbirds/videos/lifes-uncomfortable-moments-wool-runner-2-allbirds/662539902747409/

Learn from competitor mistakes

The digital space is a goldmine of product feedback—about you and your competitors. Just as you learn from negative feedback about your products or services, you can learn from negative feedback on your competitors’ too.

Negative feedback on your competitors’ social channels or reviews surfaces pain points your target audience finds with their products. And this presents opportunities for you to fix those pain points in your offerings to stay ahead.

Similarly, examining positive reviews of your products alongside the negative feedback against competitors can further inform what sets your products apart.

How do you analyze competitor products?

You can manually sift through individual competitor reviews and the comments section on their social media posts. But that’s an unrealistically time-consuming process.

An effective competitor analysis needs to balance out manual research with automated tools to help you remain agile. Here are a few competitor analysis tools and sources that will help you keep an eye on the competition frequently and efficiently.

Social media listening

To get an up-close look at what your target audience is saying about your competitors’ products (and yours), you need to be a fly on the digital wall—which social media listening enables you to do.

With social listening, you “listen” in the digital space to filter out mentions of your competitors’ products, brand name and keywords—even if your competitors, and you for that matter, aren’t tagged.

With Sprout, you can also use sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors’.

If you want to try social listening for product analysis, competitor analysis and deeper social media insights, reach out to us for a demo.

Schedule a Demo

Online reviews

Reviews written about your competitors are a valuable resource when it comes to competitive product analysis. You likely already have a system for managing online reviews for your business and product—add analyzing competitors’ review into the mix.

Dig into reviews, good and bad, about your competitors and their products—on their site, Google reviews, official review sites (TripAdvisor for experiences, Yelp for the food industry or G2 for tech products and software), Reddit and any other sources you can think of.

Digging into what people love, or dislike, about your competitors’ products and offerings can unearth opportunities and inspire new products or adjustments to existing ones.

Social media monitoring

Any social media pro knows that customer feedback and questions don’t just come in through reviews. They also show up in the social comments section every single day.

Use your social media monitoring tools to keep track of what people are saying about your products and your competitors’—it’s the perfect way to outpace them, and constantly be improving your offerings at the same time.

It’s best to formally track this type of feedback so you don’t have to dig through hundreds of comments to resurface feedback later. With a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you’re able to manage mentions of your brand—even when you’re not tagged—with keywords and incoming messages across all of your channels in one central hub.

And use Tags to keep track of product feedback by creating a special label like, “Product Feedback: Positive” and “Product Feedback: Negative” so you can easily surface these insights.

Try competitor products for yourself

This is one of the more hands-on methods. Trying a competitor’s products for yourself is one of the best ways to get an up-close understanding of their product—from functionality and areas of frustration you experience to design triumphs and shortcomings.

Pairing firsthand experience with feedback you see from customers is a powerful way to get a 360-degree assessment of the situation, and how yours might stack up against it.

Third-party research

Competitive research is certainly a large task, especially within industries with saturated markets. You can always employ third-party research to learn more about your competitors, their products and how people feel about them. For example, hiring an outside company to survey your target market. This is a great way to get in-depth, direct information about how your target market feels about your industry, competitors and what they love or hate in a product.

What to look for during a competitor product analysis

We’ve covered the “how” and “why” behind product competitive analysis methods. Now let’s get into what you actually want to track.

Think about some of the end goals we’ve mentioned for a competitive product analysis. For example, it helps you stay ahead of your competitors by identifying opportunities, finding gaps and weaknesses and unearthing differentiators for your products.

Here are some elements to look for as you conduct your analysis, and to inform competitive benchmarks.

1. Aesthetic or design of your products or services

This can refer to the physical or digital attributes of a product, or the experience of a more experiential-based product (think museums, theme parks, etc.)

How do the physical attributes or appearance of your competitors’ products or services stack up to yours? How do the two compare?

For example, let’s say you have a beauty brand. If you find that consumers love the packaging offered by your competitors’ products, it may be time for a packaging refresh.

Here are a few broad physical attributed to track and explore:

• What’s the packaging for your competitors’ products?
• What do consumers love, or hate, about the look of your competitors’ products?
• Are there certain colors or sizes your competitors don’t offer that you can?
• What are the physical attributes of your competitors’ products? How do they compare to yours?
• What effect does their design or choice of color have on the experience of using their product?

Pro tip: Social listening is a great way to surface keywords people often use to describe your competitors or their products and packaging. Sprout’s word cloud, for example, helps surface commonly-used keywords around these attributes to help you filter and prioritize feedback.

2. Pricing model

Sometimes the greatest differentiators aren’t so much about the products themselves, but rather their pricing.

How many times have consumers chosen your product, or your competitors’ products, because they were at a better price level or offered different price options?

During your competitive product analysis , consider these questions:

• How do your competitors’ prices compare to yours?
• For software or services, do they offer a free version?
• Do they offer flexible pricing, or pay-later plans?
• What do they claim their most popular pricing plans are?
• If they’re subscription-based, how often are people charged? What are the pricing tiers?

3. Utility

Look at the functionality of your competitors’ products, or try them out for yourself. This will help you understand how they outpace your offering, or how they fall behind.

Consider:

• What problems do your competitors’ products solve?
• What gaps do they leave?
• What customer pain points are your competitor’s products solving, or creating?

4. Product quality

A product is only as good as its quality. And your audience loyalty hinges on this, too.

A major way to pull ahead of the competition is by clearly offering a higher-quality product.

As you conduct your research, while you look through reviews or try your competition’s products for yourself, pay attention to:

• How easy is the product to use and learn? Is it intuitive?
• How high quality is it? Does it easily break?
• Is it durable?
• Does it scratch easily?
• For software, is it vulnerable to crashing or slow processing?

 5. Customer service

The quality of the customer service you provide has the power to set you apart from your competitors—or send you falling behind them.

It doesn’t matter how great a product is—if customers can’t get the help they need from a customer service team, the experience with the product and brand is soured.

During you competitive product analysis, evaluate the quality of customer service your competitors offer. Consider:

• Are there common customer complaints? What are the themes?
• What do people love about your competitors’ customer service?
• Are their customer care responses personalized? Or impersonal and sloppy?
• What is the tone of their customer service voice?
• How helpful are their agents? How often do they appear to miss messages?
• Is their engagement proactive? That is, do they engage with and celebrate positive comments, as well as questions or complaints?

Through this process, you’ll have a better idea of where they stand out against you, or where they fall behind.

Leverage social media and AI to conduct an in-depth competitive product analysis

Gone are the days where product analysis always required a lengthy process, customer interviews or focus groups.

Everything you need to know about your competitors’ products and yours is at your disposal—you just need to know how to mine it.

Leverage the billions of conversations across social media to gain a better understanding of how people feel about your competitors’ products. And use that information to inspire your own, and understand how to outpace other brands.

With the power of social media platforms and AI tools, unearthing these insights is automatic, immediate and a breeze. Try Sprout Social free for 30 days, or request a personalized demo of our social listening solution.

The post How to conduct a competitive product analysis, and why you should appeared first on Sprout Social.