But if you’re manually posting each Reel, especially multiple times a day, you’re doing more harm than good. Your team will end up spending hours each week on a repetitive task that can easily be automated with a social media scheduling tool.

Scheduling Instagram Reels in advance helps you post consistently, hit peak engagement times and focus on creating better content. It’s also a great way to keep the algorithm happy and rake up those views, likes, comments and shares.

In this post, we’ll show you 3 ways to schedule Instagram Reels.

Can you schedule Instagram Reels?

Yes! You can schedule Instagram Reels in three different ways:

• Natively using the Instagram app
• Using social media scheduling tools (e.g., Sprout Social)
• Using Meta Business Suite

We’ll show you how to schedule your Reels with each method below.

Note: Scheduling Instagram posts and Reels is only available for Instagram Business or Creator accounts (not personal accounts), so make sure you check your account type before diving in. Learn how to switch to a professional account here.

How to schedule Instagram Reels from the Instagram app

Third-party scheduling tools for Instagram have been around for a while, but the app itself did not support native scheduling until the end of 2022. Users can now schedule up to 25 posts daily and up to 75 days in advance directly through the Instagram app only. Scheduling is only available through the native app and not through desktop login.

Keep in mind, only Instagram Business and Creator accounts have access to this feature. Personal profiles are unable to schedule content.

Follow these steps to get started.

Step 1. Create a new Reel

Open your Instagram app and tap the + at the bottom of the screen or swipe right on your home feed to create a new Reel.

Select Reel from the content types at the bottom.

Step 2. Film or upload your video

Either shoot clips directly using the in-app camera, or upload videos from your phone.

Step 3. Edit and finalize your Reel

Add text, stickers, music, effects, etc., then add your caption.

Step 4. Schedule your Reel

Tap More options at the bottom of the screen.

Toggle the Schedule this reel option on, then select your preferred date and time from the menu that appears.

Go back to the previous screen and tap Schedule.

While Instagram’s native scheduling is straightforward, it has some limitations. For example, you can’t cross-post to other accounts. So if you need to share content across multiple platforms, check out methods two or three for scheduling Reels.

Using a third-party scheduling tool also gives you access to more in-depth analytics to track the performance of your Reels. We’ll talk more about that later.

How to schedule Instagram Reels with Sprout Social via desktop

Scheduling Reels through Instagram’s native app works fine for some businesses. But if you’re a business dealing with a larger social strategy, you’ll need a tool that lets you easily schedule and manage content across multiple platforms.

Sprout Social is one of those tools that let you do more than just schedule Reels. You can cross-post on other networks, collaborate with your team, engage with your audience and track in-depth analytics—all in one place.

Here’s how to schedule Instagram Reels with Sprout on your desktop.

Step 1: Sign up and connect your Instagram profile

Before you can schedule your Reels via Sprout Social, you need to connect your Instagram profile(s). Log in to your Sprout dashboard or sign up for a free 30-day trial here.

Click Connect a Profile and choose Instagram from the various options. Then, follow the on-screen guidelines to link your Instagram profile to your Sprout account.

Note: Link all your Instagram profiles to Sprout to schedule Reels to multiple accounts. You can also connect your other social profiles, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (X).

Step 2: Compose your Instagram Reel

Once you’ve connected your profile, click Publishing on the left to open Sprout’s social media calendar. You can switch between list, week or monthly calendar views.

Hover on your calendar to schedule a Reel on a specific day. There’s also an option to leave notes (e.g., Reel ideas you want to share with the team).

You can also skip the calendar view and click the blue pencil/paper icon in the top right corner from any screen to create a new Reel.

Select the Instagram profile you want to publish to from the drop down menu.

Now, you can start composing your Reel. If you’re looking for inspiration, here are some Instagram Reel ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

Add your Reel video

Start by uploading your media. There are several ways to do this in Sprout:

• Upload your Reel video directly from your computer
• Import from Bynder, Dropbox or Google Drive
• Add a video from your asset library in Sprout

Once you’ve uploaded your video, you can change the thumbnail frame by clicking on the pencil icon that appears when you hover on the attached media. You can also upload a different image to use as your thumbnail.

This is also where you can toggle the option to share your Reel to your profile feed or have it appear only in the Reels tab.

Write your caption

Next, write an engaging caption for your Reel. You can also add relevant Instagram hashtags, or tag users and other brands in your caption (e.g. during a partnership).

Sprout pro tip: Use our Enhance by AI Assist feature to generate more caption ideas and speed up your creative process. If you’re not sure what to post about, Enhance by AI Assist can help you create content based on a draft you input into the Compose box. If you’re looking to change the tone of the content (think: confident, friendly or professional), try Suggestions by AI Assist to align captions with your brand’s tone of voice.

Set a Mobile Publisher (optional)

If you want to use audio from Instagram’s sound library in your Reel content, you’ll need to choose a Mobile Publisher. This person will post your Reel from Instagram’s mobile app and will get a reminder (push notification) from Sprout’s mobile app on their device when it’s time to do so.

Step 3: Schedule your Reel

Scroll down to When to post and select your preferred date and time. This is when your scheduled Reel will go live. You can also adjust the time zone if your audience is located in a different country or region.

If you’re not sure when to post your Reel, select Optimal Send Times to see data-driven recommendations when your audience is most likely to see your content. Sprout’s ViralPost™ technology suggests the best times to post based on your historical engagement data to help you maximize your Reel’s impact.

After finalizing the date and time, click Submit or Schedule to add it to your calendar.

How to schedule Instagram Reels with Sprout Social via iOS app

Scheduling Instagram Reels using Sprout’s iOS app is similar to doing the same on desktop, with some minor differences. You can easily schedule videos on the go from your phone.

Follow the steps below to schedule Instagram Reels using Sprout’s iOS app.

• Step 1: Tap the Compose box and select your Instagram profile.
• Step 2: Upload your Reel video from your iOS device or Asset Library to the Compose box.
• Step 3: Write a caption, add your hashtags and insert any mentions or tags.
• Step 4: Tap Done and add Mobile Publisher Notes.
• Step 5: Tap Notify and then choose a publishing date and time for your Reel.
• Step 6: Tap Save. Your Reel is now scheduled and will appear on the publishing calendar.

How to schedule Instagram Reels from Meta Business Suite

You can also schedule Instagram Reels using the Meta Business Suite.

First, connect your Instagram account to your Facebook page so you can access both from the Meta Business Suite. Then follow the steps below to schedule your Reel.

Step 1. Create a new Reel

Log in to the Meta Business Suite, and click Create reel.

Step 2. Add media and caption

Upload one or more videos for your Reel content.

This is also where you can write a compelling caption to go with your video. Include any relevant hashtags, location tags or mentions.

Step 3. Edit your Reel

You can make basic edits to your Reel before you publish or schedule it.

Crop your video, add trending sounds from the built-in library, insert text and even enhance the original audio. There’s a timeline editor at the bottom to make editing and syncing audio easier.

Step 4. Schedule your Reel

Hit Next and select a date and time to schedule your Instagram Reel.

You can also add a poll and adjust privacy settings (Public or Restricted) at this step.

When you’re done, click Schedule. Your Reel is now ready to go live at your chosen time.

Why should you schedule Instagram Reels?

If you’re like most marketing teams, you’ve figured out that Reels are your ticket to growing on Instagram. But if you’re posting your videos manually throughout the day, you’re doing it the hard way.

Here’s why scheduling your Reels in advance might be the best thing you do for your Instagram strategy.

Maintain a consistent presence

Scheduling Instagram Reels ahead of time helps you consistently post fresh content, which keeps your audience engaged and your brand top-of-mind.

It also signals to your followers that you’re active and invested in connecting with them. Without consistency, even the best content can get lost in the noise, and your audience may drift away.

Sprout’s scheduling tools make it easy to maintain a regular posting cadence. You can plan your publishing calendar well in advance and make sure you’re not just posting Reels but also mixing in other content types like image posts, Carousels and Stories.

Maximize reach and engagement

Reaching your audience when they’re online is key to getting your Reels noticed. Instagram’s algorithm rewards content posted at the right time with more visibility and engagement.

But figuring out the best times to post isn’t always easy, especially when your audience is active in different time zones.

That’s where Sprout’s ViralPost™ feature can help. It analyzes your audience’s activity and recommends the best times to post for max engagement. Instead of guessing, you can rely on data to schedule your Reels for when they’re most likely to make an impact.

Save time and improve efficiency

Posting Reels manually every day can take time away from other important things like strategy building or content creation. Scheduling lets you batch your work, which frees up time to focus on those big-picture tasks that truly matter.

Need proof? Our Social Media Productivity Report revealed 63% of marketers feel that manual tasks hold them back from doing high-impact work. With the right social media management tools, however, 59% find they have more time to finish their tasks.

With Sprout’s publishing tools, you can upload and schedule Reels in bulk, plan weeks ahead and eliminate the stress of daily posting. With everything organized in one platform, you’ll have more time to think creatively and engage meaningfully with your audience.

Improve content quality

Creating great Reels isn’t just about hitting “post”—it’s about planning, editing and crafting content that truly resonates with your audience.

When you schedule your Reels in advance, you have more time to research customer needs and preferences, brainstorm content ideas, refine your visuals, write thoughtful captions and pick the best hashtags to boost visibility.

Combine that with Sprout’s AI Assist to get caption suggestions and help with drafting posts. Our smart writing tools make sure every Reel you share is polished and high-quality.

Streamline your workflow

Managing social media content can get overwhelming, especially when you’re juggling multiple platforms or working with a team. Scheduling keeps you organized and prevents last-minute issues like mistakes, typos or missed deadlines.

Sprout Social simplifies this further with a centralized workflow for drafting, approving and scheduling Instagram Reels and other posts. Team members can collaborate on, review and approve social content, making sure it’s aligned with your brand before it goes live.

Make data-driven optimizations

Understanding how your Reels perform is crucial for improving your strategy. Metrics like reach, views and engagement rates reveal what’s working and where there’s room to grow. Without these insights, you’re just guessing what your audience wants.

Sprout Social’s powerful Instagram analytics let you track your Reels’ performance in real-time. With granular data on your audience as well as individual posts, you can adjust your content, target the right audience and improve ROI in the long run.

Start scheduling Reels today

Let’s be real: manually posting Reels throughout the day is probably not the best use of your time. Sure, Reels are crushing it on Instagram right now—but spending hours on publishing means less time actually creating great content.

Good news? Scheduling changes everything. You’ll keep a consistent posting rhythm and free up time to focus on growing your brand on Instagram. No more dropping everything to post a Reel right this second.

Using a tool like Sprout makes this even easier, giving you everything you need to manage, schedule and optimize your Reels in one place. Sign up for a 30-day free trial now and see the difference scheduling makes.

The post How to schedule Reels on Instagram in 3 ways appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this post, we take a deep dive into the art of social media listening for Instagram. We explain why it’s important, how it works and how to build an Instagram social listening strategy. Let’s get started.

What is Instagram social listening?

Instagram social listening is the process of tracking relevant conversations on the platform. It involves listening in on conversations about specific keywords, topics, hashtags and competitors. This helps you extract valuable insights to inform other aspects of your Instagram marketing strategy.

Not sure what to post? See what your followers are buzzing about to get inspiration for new content ideas. What memes are they sharing? What topics are they discussing?

Similarly, these conversations help you:

• Identify potential customers and influencers
• Assess your overall brand health and sentiment
• See what your competitors are doing
• Guide customers on their path to purchase
• Stay on top of the latest industry trends

Instagram social listening gives you firsthand, actual answers based on facts. So you’re no longer wasting your efforts and resources on guesswork.

Why Instagram social listening matters

Brands shouldn’t live in a bubble when it comes to their Instagram activity. Listening puts your mentions, interactions and comments into context. This helps you engage people and grow your account.

Below are some specific ways that Instagram empowers you to connect with customers.

Learning what your audience wants on a personal level

Social listening on Instagram lets you hone in on the needs and pain points of your target audience. It shows you what conversations people are having, even outside of your brand’s account. This gives you a better idea of what they want based on the posts they’re creating and the comments they’re leaving on a friend’s or influencer’s post.

These insights will then inform your social media content strategy and promotion strategy. Knowing what your audience wants can even guide your product development efforts.

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Providing more impactful Instagram customer service

“Good” service goes hand-in-hand with having a pulse on customer questions, comments and concerns.

This becomes challenging when people use Instagram to vent their frustrations instead of talking to you. Instagram social listening ensures that you never miss a @mention. It also helps you track posts containing branded keywords. So you can stay on top of customer service conversations beyond your direct call-outs.

That way, you can respond swiftly and step up your social media customer service efforts.

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This could be a game-changer, with 76% of consumers in our 2023 Sprout Social Index™ report valuing how quickly a brand responds to their needs. Our report found that consumers also equally appreciate it when a brand prioritizes customer support. 70% also expect to get a personalized response for their customer service needs.

Discovering meaningful customer content to promote your brand

Your customers are your best marketers. Listening can clue you in on valuable content and social proof you can promote yourself. This might include:

• Positive reviews, testimonials and customer success stories
• User-generated content (think: customer photos and videos)
• Shout-outs from potential co-marketing partners (think: brands, influencers and creators)

Rather than dig for these opportunities, listening ensures that they all come to you.

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Instagram social listening vs. social media monitoring

Quick side note! Let’s take a moment to break down what Instagram listening isn’t.

Listening is about more than @mentions, comments and #hashtags

Terms like “monitoring” and “listening” often get used interchangeably among marketers. They aren’t the same, though.

• Social media monitoring is the act of tracking @mentions, comments and hashtags. Monitoring is a crucial aspect of listening, but it’s only part of the process.
• Instagram social listening involves translating conversations and customer talking points into action.

Interactions matter, but so does context. Think about it. Someone tagging a fashion brand in their OOTD post versus calling out that brand’s products are apples and oranges.

A tag simply means, “This is what I’m wearing/using.” A call-out goes deeper into what they love about the product or why they chose it specifically. Also, not every mention of your business on Instagram involves a direct call-out or tag. This is likely to happen when people are complaining about your brand or expressing their frustration.

Social listening for Instagram is about deciphering the context behind those relevant conversations. This then empowers you to take appropriate action and make informed decisions.

The takeaway? If you’re only looking for mentions of your brand name or campaign key terms, you’re missing out on key conversations.

You’re also missing opportunities to intervene and take action to engage customers. That’s why it pays to be proactive via listening.

How does Instagram social listening work, though?

Good question! Instagram is a strange beast as far as listening to customer interactions goes.

For starters, you’re juggling a lot of different queries. Tags, mentions and branded keywords are just the beginning.

And although IG search has improved, you need to do some digging to find and pull together relevant conversations.

Instagram social listening involves the following three-step process:

• Creating queries based on your business, hashtags and terms relevant to your industry
• Monitoring mentions, tags, comments and interactions
• Assessing all of the above to take action

This action could be something as simple as responding to a post. Or it may involve a bit more complex process of solving a customer’s problem.

Starface uses brand tags and hashtags to find relevant customer content. The following Reel shows how a customer created a DIY bag charm using the brand’s star balm. Starface responds with a comment about how smart this is. Even a simple acknowledgment like this is enough to build a strong brand community.

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Features such as Instagram’s keyword search and tags can help you dig out content relevant to your brand. Coupled with your comments and brand tags, you have a decent idea of what people are saying about your business.

This is obviously a lot to sift through by hand. Again, Instagram doesn’t make listening particularly easy by default.

The good news is that there are tools out there to help. Sprout’s social media listening tool helps you hone in on relevant Instagram conversations. Brands can create their own listening queries for Instagram via Boolean syntax and rules logic.

Choose from existing templates to simplify your Instagram social listening efforts. Monitor brand health, discover industry insights and analyze your competition. Or check out how your campaign is performing and how people are responding to an event.

Sprout’s Query Builder is where you enter the words, phrases or hashtags you want to track. For Instagram, it’s crucial to include hashtags as a part of your Query since Sprout uses hashtags to collect data from the platform.

Not sure what words or phrases to track? Queries by AI Assist is a useful feature that automatically suggests additional words or phrases. Enter one keyword relevant to your industry and the capability comes up with other related keywords to add to your Query.

Optionally, exclude specific words and phrases and select industry themes to reduce noise in your social listening data. You can also configure your alerts and apply additional filters to streamline your search.

How to build an effective Instagram social listening strategy

Of course, understanding Instagram listening and how it works is only half the battle.

How do you turn all of these metrics and observations into action?

Your social listening strategy ultimately boils down to your goals. Below is how brands can use Instagram social listening to level up their marketing efforts.

Conduct competitive analysis to find ways to stand out

One of the best uses of social listening is competitive analysis.

Consider ultra-competitive markets such as the beauty industry, for example. New products are constantly popping up every day, with new brands adding to the competition. Tracking tags and trending discussions will show you which brands are dominating the space and why. So you can better position yourself in the face of stiff competition.

Meanwhile, direct mentions and branded hashtags highlight conversations specific to your brand. This helps you uncover what makes your brand different.

Uncover opportunities to improve your products

If you want to know how to improve your own products and services, who better to ask than your own customers? Prompted or not, followers can clue you in on new ideas.

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Of course, not all feedback from your followers is going to be direct. People might create posts or Stories complaining about your products without tagging you. Using an Instagram social listening tool will help you zero in on those relevant discussions.

Likes, comments and shares also help you measure how customers are responding to certain products. Look at an influx of interactions to see which products are a customer favorite. Alternatively, posts with a lower engagement can show you which items are falling flat.

Make valuable customer touchpoints on the path to purchase

The latest Instagram stats show that 70% of shoppers look to the platform for their next purchase. And over 60% research brands and products on the app. So if you take the opportunity to engage these potential customers, you could effectively grow your sales.

Instagram comments are a goldmine for finding folks interested in your products. This rings true for people who don’t know about you yet or might be looking for a new spot in your space.

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Listening makes it easier to maintain relationships with satisfied customers, too. This includes check-ins and opportunities to earn more UGC.

Discover industry and content trends relevant to your followers

Social listening is invaluable for tracking industry trends. For starters, you should know the tags your audience follows. But are how they responding to such trends? What’s the context behind those trends? How can you apply them to your own campaigns?

On a related note, Instagram listening can keep you from accidentally copying your competition.

For example, brands need to differentiate their tone, content calendar and captions if they want to stand out on Instagram. Effective listening can help you uncover tags and trends that your competitors might be missing out on and how you can fill the void.

Monitor your customer sentiment and keep people happy

Let’s say you’ve launched a new product or campaign.

You obviously want to know how your audience feels about it, right? Are you building the kind of buzz you expect? Or is the campaign falling flat with your audience?

Again, you may not always get those answers from direct mentions. Chances are there are users out there who can provide a concrete answer, though. You need to keep track of the posts people are creating about the product or campaign to get an idea of its impact.

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This is where sentiment analysis comes in, helping you gauge how folks are reacting to your brand on Instagram. Track the sentiment around specific campaign tags and products. Whether it’s “yay,” “nay” or “meh,” sentiment analysis can inform you to better serve customers and score more love from your Instagram followers.

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What Instagram social listening tools are available to brands?

Native Instagram search tools allow basic brand listening. But the process is manual and taxing, especially if you’re going all in with Instagram social listening.

After all, brands need to track multiple tags and competitors. That’s not even considering your own mentions and branded keywords. Given the sheer amount of content posted to Instagram daily, sifting through it all is no small feat.

Investing in a proper Instagram social listening tool saves you the trouble of digging through thousands of posts each day.

Sprout’s robust suite of social listening features is a game-changer for brands looking to step up their Instagram presence. Businesses can track dozens of queries beyond simple hashtags with the help of our Query Builder. This gives you a holistic understanding of your brand and industry to inform your larger marketing efforts.

Reporting and analytics provide a quantitative look at your listening so you can make data-driven decisions. Second-guessing a campaign or your next move on Instagram? Look no further than your numbers for peace of mind.

Listen, learn and grow with Instagram social listening

Social listening on Instagram helps you tap into the pulse of industry trends and conversations. These insights inform various aspects of your business—from your content to your product development.

Stay on top of those critical conversations with Sprout’s robust social media listening solution. Try it for free for 30 days to see how it can power your Instagram social listening efforts.

The post Instagram social listening: Transform your brand’s strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Learning how to schedule Instagram posts in advance frees up your social media team to focus on more important tasks, like building an Instagram marketing strategy, creating quality content, analyzing performance and engaging with your audience in real time.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the different ways you can schedule your Instagram content, the benefits of doing so and a few great scheduling tools to consider in your techstack.

Can you schedule Instagram posts?

Absolutely! There are several ways to schedule Instagram posts:

• Using Instagram’s native app
• Using Meta Business Suite
• Using social media scheduling tools (e.g. Sprout Social)

We’ll walk you through each method in the next few sections.

But first, let’s talk about why scheduling is so important for brands on Instagram.

According to our Social Media Productivity report, 63% of marketers feel that manual tasks hold them back from doing high-impact work. But with the right social media management tools, 59% find they have more time to get things done.

Think about it: when you’re not scrambling to post content manually or setting alarms for optimal posting times, you can focus on what really matters—creating unique, compelling content and building authentic connections with your followers.

Now, let’s look at the different ways you can schedule Instagram posts in advance.

Quick note: Scheduling is only available for Instagram Business or Creator accounts (not personal accounts), so make sure you check your account type before diving in.

How to schedule Instagram posts from the Instagram app

After years of users asking for it, Instagram finally added in-app scheduling near the end of 2022. Users are able to schedule up to 25 posts per day and up to 75 days in advance.

Keep in mind, only Instagram Business and Creator accounts have access to this feature. Personal profiles are unable to schedule content.

Follow these steps to get started:

Step 1: Open your Instagram app and tap the + at the bottom of the screen or swipe the home feed to the right to create a new piece of content.

Step 2: Select Post or Reel, depending on the type of content you’re creating.

Step 3: Either take a photo or record a video using the in-app camera or upload one from your camera roll.

Step 4: Add any text, stickers, music, effects, etc., then add your caption.

Step 5: Tap Advanced Settings at the bottom of the screen.

Step 6: Toggle the Schedule this post option on, then select your preferred date and time from the menu that appears.

Step 7: Go back to the previous screen and tap Schedule.

Keep in mind, scheduling within the Instagram app prevents you from cross-posting to other accounts, such as a Facebook profile or Page or even Threads. If you’d like to schedule and cross-post to other accounts, explore the next two options.

How to schedule Instagram posts from Meta Business Suite

You can also use the Meta Business Suite to schedule your Instagram content. First, connect your Instagram Business Account to your Facebook Page so you can access both from the Meta Business Suite.

Then follow these steps:

Step 1: In Meta Business Suite, click Create post or Create reel.

Step 2: Specify which Instagram account you want to share your post or Reel to. It may also include your Facebook Page—it’s up to you whether you also want it to post to your Facebook Page or only to Instagram.

Step 3: Upload your media, then write out your caption. Be sure to include your mentions and hashtags (you can even save hashtags to reuse in your content). You can even geotag a location if you wish.

Step 4: Click on Schedule, then select your preferred date and time. Click Active times to access a popup showcasing some of the upcoming times that your audience is active.

Step 5: Once you’ve selected your time, click Save then click Schedule.

How to schedule Instagram posts using Sprout Social

Scheduling Instagram posts natively is straightforward, but how about when you have a larger social strategy across multiple platforms to plan and schedule?

With a dedicated social media publishing tool like Sprout, you can do so much more. Cross-posting, team collaboration and permissions, in-depth analytics—the list goes on.

We make it so easy to schedule all kinds of Instagram posts, including single posts, Reels, Carousels and Stories. Whatever you want to upload, simply finalize your content and schedule it on desktop or mobile. You can also use Sprout’s Instagram grid planner to visualize how your scheduled posts will actually look on your profile.

Follow the steps below to learn exactly how to schedule Instagram posts using Sprout.

Step 1: Connect your Instagram profiles to Sprout Social

The first thing you need to do is log in to Sprout Social and link your Instagram profile (If you don’t already have an account, sign up for a free 30-day trial).

From the dashboard, click Connect a Profile and select Instagram from the different options. Then, follow the on-screen instructions to easily connect your Instagram profile.

Quick tip: Have more than one Instagram profile? Connect them all. Sprout lets you manage and schedule posts to multiple accounts from one dashboard. In fact, you can also link your other social profiles, including Facebook, Twitter (X) and LinkedIn.

Sign up for a free 30-day trial

Step 2: Open your Sprout publishing calendar

Once you’ve linked your profile, click Publishing in the left menu to open Sprout’s social media calendar. You can view this as a list, week or monthly calendar.

Next, it’s time to choose the image(s) or video to post. If you’re not 100% sure what you should publish, check out our in-depth guide on Instagram post ideas.

You can directly schedule posts or leave notes by clicking through the spaces in your calendar. This keeps you organized and gives you a bird’s eye view of your content strategy.

Step 3: Compose your Instagram post

Hover on your calendar to schedule a post on a specific day, or click the blue pencil/paper icon in the top right corner of your screen to create a new post.

Choose the Instagram account you want to publish to and specify the type of content you want to schedule—post or Story.

At this point, you can start composing your post. Start by writing a compelling caption for your content. You can also add relevant Instagram hashtags or tag users in your caption.

Sprout pro tip: Use our Enhance by AI Assist feature to generate more caption ideas and speed up your creative process. If you’re not sure what to post about, Enhance by AI Assist can help you create content based on a draft you input into the Compose box. If you’re looking to change the tone of the content (think: confident, friendly or professional), try Suggestions by AI Assist to align captions with your brand’s tone of voice

Now, upload your visuals. There are several ways to do this in Sprout.

You can upload an image(s) or video directly from your computer or mobile. Another way is to choose a visual from the Asset Library. This is helpful if you already have shared media uploaded on Sprout, such as company or product photos.

Upload images directly from Canva

If you don’t have any premade assets to upload and want to create beautiful Instagram posts on the spot, our Canva integration can save the day.

To create and export images directly from Canva, click Upload Media in the compose window and select Design on Canva from the drop down.

Log in to your existing Canva account on the screen that pops up or create a new one in a few minutes. Then, select a template, customize it and click Export to Sprout when you’re done. Easy!

Step 4: Select your preferred date and time

Scroll down in the Compose box to the When to post section. Choose your preferred date and time. You can also specify the time zone if your audience is located in a specific region.

Alternatively, select Optimal Send Times to see data-driven recommendations when your audience is most likely to see your content. Our ViralPost technology suggests the best times to post based on your historical engagement data for maximum reach opportunity.

Step 5: Stage your post for scheduling

After your content is edited and approved, you can click Schedule to add it to your calendar.

Other scheduling options in Sprout are to Draft, Queue or Submit for Approval. Let’s take a look at each option:

• Draft: Not sure if your post is ready to go live quite yet? Want to create multiple “backup” Instagram posts for the future? Draft is a great spot to park your unfinished content or items that still need approval.
• Queue: The Sprout Queue is ideal for edited posts ready to go live—especially if you’re not sure when to post your content. When you queue your Instagram posts, Sprout picks the best time to publish within the window you specify.
• Submit for Approval: Choosing an approver ensures your content is properly edited, timely and on-brand. Select specific approvers to review your content before it goes live. This option is perfect if you have or plan to establish a social media workflow.

Benefits of scheduling Instagram posts

Businesses have begged for scheduling features on Instagram for years. But why are so many marketers eager to queue up their content? Below are some of the biggest benefits of scheduled Instagram posts.

1. Develop a more comprehensive and consistent content strategy

Food for thought: Different types of content (think: carousels, images, Stories and Reels) all receive different rates of engagement. This means brands need to diversify their content strategies and not just post the same type of content over and over.

When you schedule posts on Instagram, you give yourself time to actually assess your content calendar, identify gaps and opportunities, and gather the various assets you need to create fresh, compelling content.

Scheduling also enables you to stay consistent with your posting strategy, whether it’s one daily post or multiple posts a day. This helps keep you top of your followers’ minds (and feeds) and also gives you a boost with the Instagram algorithm.

2. Allows for more real-time engagement with followers

If nothing else, scheduling Instagram posts can free up some serious time in your schedule. That means more opportunities to interact with followers and reply to comments.

Even the best Instagram scheduler can’t do the legwork of building relationships with customers. When you stick to a social media post scheduler consistently, you create more time for dedicated customer engagement.

3. Better time management means increased productivity

Think about the effort that goes into creating Instagram posts or campaigns beyond writing captions and editing images. There’s also tagging accounts. Adding locations. Checking hashtags. And that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Creating Instagram posts last-minute is a recipe for burnout. When you schedule Instagram posts in advance, you can batch your time and be more productive. For example, you could write all your captions in one sitting or edit a week’s worth of images at once.

This helps your brain stay focused instead of constantly switching between different types of work. The result? You get more done in less time and craft more meaningful posts.

4. Create seamless marketing campaigns beyond Instagram

Your social media campaigns shouldn’t be siloed.

From organic and paid social to email and beyond, all of your channels should be on the same page in terms of creatives, landing pages and promotions. This creates a better customer experience.

Through social scheduling, you ensure that your posts fire off at the right time. If you’re using a social media management tool such as Sprout Social, you can actually sync all of your social channels (think: Instagram, Facebook and TikTok) so you don’t have to publish manually or in real-time.

5. Encourage collaboration and brainstorming

Again, scheduling encourages brands to begin working on posts well in advance.

This means marketers and colleagues have time to partner on messaging and creative assets.

For social teams and brand marketers looking for feedback or approval workflows, collaboration and Instagram scheduling go hand in hand. Coupled with a social media approval process, it’s a cinch to get multiple sets of eyes on your content before it goes live.

Tips for scheduling posts on Instagram

We’ll say it again: You can’t just queue up your posts months or weeks in advance and expect your Instagram to grow on autopilot.

Below are some key considerations for brands looking to leverage Instagram scheduling.

1. Optimize your post timing to maximize engagement

A nice added bonus of scheduling is that your business isn’t beholden to “business hours.”

Based on our research on best times to post on Instagram, there’s a correlation between time of day and engagement:

Although these numbers aren’t the be-all, end-all of follower activity and vary based on your time zone, they’re eye-opening in terms of when the average Instagram user is active:

Marketers using Sprout social as their Instagram scheduler can increase engagement with our ViralPost algorithm that optimizes post timing. Rather than guess or decide when to post via trial and error, you’ll know exactly when to post, based on real follower engagement data.

2. Take extra care when crafting your captions

It’s no secret that Instagram captions represent valuable real estate when it comes to engagement.

They shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. For each post, consider:

• Which hashtags are you using? How many? Are they in your first comment?
• Do you need to tag any accounts?
• Did you write a strong call-to-action?
• How does this caption compare to your most recent one(s)?

Much like your content strategy needs to be diverse, the same rings true for your Instagram captions.

When you schedule posts in advance, you have time to put your captions under the microscope and ensure there’s some variety. Likewise, you can confirm that you’re using the right Instagram hashtags and aren’t missing any key details before your post goes live.

3. Keep a close eye on your content calendar

Scheduling based on a defined content calendar encourages both variety and consistency in terms of your posts.

As you queue up your posts, ask yourself:

• Are we hitting the appropriate publishing frequency?
• Is there enough variation in our content schedule?
• How are we promoting this content to encourage engagement?
• Are there opportunities to cross-post or repurpose this content to other networks?
• Have the appropriate stakeholders reviewed this post before it goes live?

The answers to all of the above ensure more thoughtful, goal-driven posts that are poised to perform well. Below is a quick snapshot of what a content calendar looks like in Sprout:

4. Block off time to engage with customers

Despite popular belief, scheduling Instagram posts doesn’t make your presence more “passive.”

Quite the opposite, honestly.

Yet again, scheduling frees up your schedule to interact with customers in real-time.

Mind your notifications and make sure your comment section never gathers cobwebs. Be proactive and make a point to respond to social customers ASAP for the sake of satisfaction and loyalty.

In addition to Instagram scheduling, Sprout aggregates messages from all your social networks into a singular Smart Inbox that you can use to filter and categorize messages, while also allowing for real-time collaboration between your team. No message goes unanswered and you’ll also avoid response collisions.

5. Know when to hit “pause” on your scheduling

Whether due to a brand emergency or a bigger crisis management effort, sometimes you need to put a stop to your scheduled content.

Failure to do so could come off as inauthentic or result in otherwise poor engagement when your followers’ minds are elsewhere. For example, publishing promotional content during certain holidays, on somber occasions or in the wake of tragedies could result in adverse affects on your brand reputation.

This speaks to how Instagram scheduling is so much more than putting your brand on autopilot. Sprout has built-in features to pause scheduled posts and resume them when the time is right.

Instagram scheduling tools to use

Third-party tools can make Instagram scheduling even easier than the in-app tool. Additional apps allow you to schedule content to multiple social media platforms at once, offer more features and can help with your overall social media management, from automation to analytics.

Here are three tools you might consider.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform that allows users to schedule and publish content across various social media networks including Instagram. It provides a visual content calendar for planning and organizing posts and offers analytics to track post-performance and engagement. Sprout Social also includes features for social listening and engagement allowing users to monitor mentions and conversations about their brand.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that focuses on automating content recycling and evergreen content. Users can create a library of content categorized by topic and schedule posts to be automatically shared and reshared across their social media channels including Instagram. MeetEdgar aims to help users maintain a consistent social media presence with minimal ongoing effort by automatically filling their content calendar.

3. SocialBee

SocialBee is another social media management tool designed to help users plan content across multiple platforms including Instagram. It offers features like content categorization, a visual content calendar and post-performance analytics. SocialBee also emphasizes content variation with options to customize posts for each social media platform, ensuring optimal messaging and format for different audiences.

Learn how to schedule posts on Instagram today

If you want to build a better Instagram presence and free up more time in your busy day, you need to start scheduling.

Doing so might seem simple, but making the most of Instagram scheduling means understanding the key details of any given post and how to best engage followers.

With the tips above and a tool like Sprout, you can create a compelling content calendar that does exactly that. Sign up for a free 30-day trial and check it out for yourself.

The post How to schedule Instagram posts: The complete guide for 2025 appeared first on Sprout Social.

That’s where Twitter tools come in. There are many tools available that can help you with managing your Twitter account, from scheduling tweets to analyzing your performance. But with so many options to choose from, it can be tough to know where to start.

In this article, we share a comprehensive list of Twitter tools that’ll empower you to manage, track, schedule and elevate your Twitter presence.

Benefits of using Twitter tools

Twitter tools can help you with the following:

1. Scheduling your Twitter (X) posts in advance

Plan and schedule your Twitter posts ahead of time to ensure a consistent posting schedule and reach your audience when they are most active. Twitter tools streamline the process and save time.

2. Tracking your Twitter analytics

Regularly review your Twitter analytics to gain insights into your audience, engagement rates and overall performance. A centralized Twitter tool can deliver the data to identify trends, optimize your Twitter content and measure the effectiveness of your strategy.

3. Growing your Twitter following

Use Twitter tools to implement strategies to attract new followers and grow your Twitter audience. This includes discovering relevant hashtags, engaging with followers and users, running contests or giveaways and partnering with influencers.

4. Managing your Twitter reputation

Monitor your Twitter presence and respond quickly to mentions, comments and messages with a tool that includes social listening and social monitoring capabilities. When you address any negative feedback or criticism constructively and quickly, you maintain a positive online reputation.

5. Engaging with your Twitter audience

Interact with your followers by responding to their tweets, reposting their content and starting conversations. Host Twitter chats, ask questions and encourage discussions to foster a sense of community and build stronger relationships with your audience. With a Twitter tool, you can manage and track all parts of a conversation in a centralized dashboard.

Now that you know the benefits, let’s take a look at some of the best Twitter tools available.

14 best Twitter marketing tools

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s Twitter management tools encompass nearly all the tasks you’d need to accomplish—management, scheduling, listening, monitoring, analyzing and more.

Easily manage multiple Twitter accounts in one place, whether you’re working with multiple brands or locations, or if you have Support accounts to maintain. Publish or schedule your content from one easy-to-use dashboard and measure its performance.

Sprout’s AI-powered analytics provides marketers with actionable insights within the dashboard based on business data. Analyze by AI Assist looks at your social data and gives you important insights so you can modify your social strategy where needed. For example, Sprout can identify the most frequently used hashtags and keywords in your audience’s conversation. It can also highlight significant shifts in brand sentiment and pinpoint spikes in mentions or engagements. Analyze by AI Assist automatically surfaces these insights, saving social media managers time and allowing them to quickly understand their Twitter performance.

Try Sprout for 30 days free

2. Planable

Planable is a social media collaboration and scheduling tool that allows teams to visually plan and schedule their Twitter content in a calendar view. The tool also facilitates team communication and streamlines the approval process with features like commenting and real-time feedback directly within the platform. Planable also offers analytics to help users understand the performance of their Twitter content.

3. Ritetag

RiteTag is a hashtag analysis tool that can help brands optimize their posts by suggesting relevant and trending hashtags that align with their brand. It analyzes hashtag performance in real time and provides instant feedback on hashtag engagement potential, which can help increase visibility and reach. Ritetag also offers features like hashtag comparisons and the ability to track hashtag performance over time. RiteTag is just one tool within RiteKit’s suite, which includes RiteForge for publishing content, Rite.ly for short-link CTAs and RiteBoost for enhancing posts in your current scheduling tool.

4. Audiense

Audiense is an audience intelligence and Twitter analytics platform. It provides in-depth insights into your audience’s demographics, interests and behaviors. It allows users to segment their audience, identify key influencers and understand their social media conversations. With Audiense you can tailor your Twitter content to specific audience segments and identify opportunities for engagement.

5. Tweepi

Tweepi is a Twitter management tool designed to help users grow and manage their Twitter following. It offers features like identifying relevant users to follow unfollowing inactive accounts and cleaning up your Twitter lists. Tweepi also provides analytics on your follower growth and engagement helping you to optimize your Twitter strategy.

6. Circleboom

Circleboom is a follower analysis tool that can help brands clean up and manage their Twitter accounts. With Circleboom, you can identify inactive accounts, spam accounts and fake followers to curate your following and improve your feed. It also offers tools to help manage your Twitter lists and provides analytics on your account activity. The tool also provides Twitter audience insights so brands can make sure they’re generating followers that match their target demographics.

7. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a great tool for finding accounts to follow and analyzing your existing follower count. It allows users to analyze and compare Twitter accounts based on various factors like location, bio keywords and who they follow. This tool can help you find influencers in your niche, discover potential followers and understand your audience demographics and interests. Followerwonk also provides insights into your followers’ activity patterns and social authority.

8. Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool for gathering insights on your Twitter posts and overall account performance. Get an idea of how many tweets you’ve published in a given time period, the number of engagements they’ve received, likes, clicks, retweets and so much more. It provides real-time data and visualizations to help you understand the reach and impact of your Twitter campaigns and identify trending topics. Keyhole also allows you to track competitor activity and measure the performance of your social media strategies.

9. Trendsmap

Trendsmap is a tool for monitoring conversations on Twitter. Keep an eye on relevant trends so that you can incorporate them into your content or get an idea of when topics are being widely discussed. It provides a real-time visual representation of trending topics and hashtags on Twitter across different geographical locations. This tool allows you to see what’s trending in specific cities, countries or regions. It helps you understand local conversations and tailor your content to different audiences. Trendsmap can be useful for identifying emerging trends and engaging with relevant conversations in real-time. Get alerts based on keywords you’ve set about various topics of conversation so you can be a part of the discussion.

10. Mention

Mention is a tool for monitoring online conversations around your brand, competitors or any keywords across Twitter and other online platforms. It provides alerts in real-time, enabling you to quickly respond to comments and engage in relevant conversations. Mention also helps you analyze sentiment around your brand and identify potential influencers or brand advocates.

11. Daily 140

Daily 140, named for the original Twitter character limit, is a great tool that provides a daily email digest of the Twitter activity from accounts you select to follow. This includes their latest tweets, retweets, likes and the new accounts they follow. It’s a good way to keep up with the activity of specific accounts like industry influencers, competitors or thought leaders without always checking Twitter.

12. Twitonomy

Twitonomy is a great Twitter tracking tool because it offers a ton of information all at once. Gather in-depth analytics and insights into your Twitter activity and that of any other public Twitter account. You can analyze tweets, retweets, replies, mentions and hashtags to understand engagement patterns and identify influencers. Twitonomy also allows you to download data for your tweets, followers and lists for further analysis or archiving.

13. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to create and schedule a library of evergreen content for your Twitter account. It automatically varies the scheduling and re-shares your updates to maximize visibility and reach. MeetEdgar also includes features like A/B testing for tweets and category-based scheduling to help streamline your social media management.

14. Twitter

While often thought of as a social media platform, Twitter itself offers a variety of built-in tools that can help with social media management. Users can compose and schedule tweets in advance, ensuring a consistent flow of content. To share longer-form content and narratives, Twitter allows users to create threads linking multiple tweets together. Important or evergreen content can be highlighted by pinning a tweet to the top of a profile.

Beyond content creation, Twitter provides basic analytics to track tweet performance and audience engagement through impressions, reach and other metrics. While Twitter’s built-in tools may not be as comprehensive as some third-party platforms, they provide a solid foundation for managing your Twitter presence.

Find the best Twitter tools for your needs

Not every Twitter tool will work for your brand and your team’s needs. Do your research and read through our descriptions of each tool to find the best one for you. Or, take advantage of Sprout Social’s all-in-one Twitter management tool. Get started with our 30-day free trial and see if our solution will work for your brand.

The post 14 Twitter tools to boost your brand’s marketing in 2025 appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll dive into what Reels are and how your brand can take advantage of these bite-size videos. We’ll share tips from Meta for creating a successful Facebook and Instagram Reels strategy, including how to boost your Reels to reach a wider audience.

What are Instagram Reels?

Instagram Reels are short-form videos that offer you options beyond the square sizing of the network’s feed. Reels have a 9:16 aspect ratio and can be 15 to 90 seconds long. Users have the option to add background audio, whether a voiceover, music or trending sound. In contrast to long-form and typically more polished videos, Instagram Reels are bite-sized, casual and highly discoverable. When posting a Reel, you can choose to add it to Facebook and Threads too.

Joana Rocha, Senior Technical Partner Manager for Reels Ads, Video and Threads at Meta, says Reels are a major driver of Instagram traffic.

“Approximately 50% of time spent on Instagram is on Reels,” she says. “Reels is a rich, growing, creative canvas where brands can turn attention into action.”

Rather than showcasing long-form scripted content such as an in-depth tutorial, these are meant to be quick videos for entertainment or education. You can select a cover for your Reel, so it seamlessly blends into your main feed’s grid style. Instagram profiles also have a Reels section that displays a Reels only grid.

Instagram and Facebook Reels algorithm explained

Meta’s goal is for users to easily find and view content that resonates with what they enjoy and Reels play a key role.

“Our aim is to make Reels entertaining, relevant and inspiring,” Rocha says. “We know it’s important to recommend content that does that, and will continue iterating on the experience to make it better.”

Instagram and Facebook’s algorithm takes several factors into consideration when serving content to users. This includes inputs from individual users themselves and broader patterns from the community. The algorithm caters suggested content to users based on their interests and content they’ve liked or commented on. Trending and popular Reels from across Instagram are also suggested. Rocha says the goal is for both types of content to inspire individual users to create Reels of their own.

How to make a Reel on Instagram and Facebook

We’ve put together a quick start tutorial for how to make a Reel on Instagram and Facebook so you can get started.

How to make a Reel on Instagram

Follow these steps to create a Reel on Instagram:

1. To get started, navigate to your brand’s profile page and tap the plus sign at the top right of the app.

2. Select Reel from the Create menu.

3. Once you’re here, you’re ready to start making your Reel! If you’ve pre-recorded and edited a video, you can upload it from the initial Reels screen. Otherwise, choose Camera near the top right to record a new Reel.

4. Before you record, choose your timeframe. You can select 15, 30, 60 or 90 seconds from the Length option on the right side of the screen. This will determine how long you can spend recording your Reel.

5. You can stop and start recording at any point to switch camera angles, record different subjects or do quick costume changes. Be as creative as you want when creating a Reel on Instagram. You can also use different templates or effects on Reels when recording on your phone.

Before moving on to your next snippet, you can delete and re-record or trim any parts of your previous snippet. Instagram also gives you the option to speed up or slow down your Reels recording for an added effect to your video.

6. Once you’ve finished recording, you can add music and effects, including on-screen text. Press the forward arrow to preview your Reel and make sure it’s what you want it to be.

When adding text and overlay effects to Reels, keep in mind key video specs. Rocha recommends, “Work within the safe zones so your text sticker overlays, calls to action or key messages aren’t obscured by the Reels user interface. Keep the bottom 35% of your 9:16 creative free of text, logos and other key elements.”

7. Lastly, write your caption and search for Instagram Reel hashtags to add to your caption (or comments after publishing). Then decide where to share your Reel on your profile before you publish it.

How to make a Reel on Facebook

Publishing a Reel on Facebook is fairly similar to Instagram, especially in terms of features and effects. Follow these steps to create a Reel on Facebook:

1. Go to your brand’s profile page and select Video. Here, you’ll see a Create Reel option listed before your previously posted videos.

2. Begin recording or select a previously recorded video. You can select different effects, use a green screen, change the speed and more. You can stop recording and start again at any time to create a new scene. You can also add music or other audio and any additional effects before publishing. Remember Rocha’s tips about overlay and text placement apply to Facebook as well.

While you can craft a Reel in the Instagram and Facebook apps, Sprout Social’s platform makes it easy to upload and post Reels. You can upload a thumbnail image for the main feed. You can use the Compose feature to plan out your content in advance, schedule it and track performance against your goals. When choosing a day and time to schedule, consider the best times to post on Instagram or use Sprout’s Optimal Send Times™ to automatically select the time your audience is most active.

Reels best practices and tips

With so many options to create and customize your Reels, here are some best practices and tips to help you navigate where to begin.

Create engaging content

Sometimes the social media content you make doesn’t need to have a sales or conversion objective. Instagram Reels give you the opportunity to make and share content simply for your audience to enjoy, helping you build customer relationships and connection with your followers. Showcase your product, your team or your service in an authentic way by creating unique content.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Make fun content for your audience. The entire point of Reels is to make bite-sized content that excites your audience and gets them to follow along for more great content.
• Create tutorials. Instagram Reels is the perfect place to make short, easy-to-follow tutorial clips that showcase how to use your product or service, or how to do something that’s relevant to your industry.
• Share behind-the-scenes videos. Introduce employees, show off new products yet to launch, share how your product is made, etc.
• Show off products. Take videos highlighting new product releases or showcase how your products can be used.
• Repurpose videos. Has your brand already developed a presence on other networks that support video? Repurpose your videos to save time from creating net new content.
• Promote sales with Instagram Reels. Let your audience know when you’re offering sales and discounts by sharing announcements on your Instagram Reels.
• Make educational content. Instagram Reels is a great place to put 15-90 seconds educational snippets that explain a concept to your audience that’s relevant to your business or industry.

As part of your engagement plan, make sure you post your unique content during the best times to post on Facebook or Instagram to maximize visibility and engagement with your audience.

Add interactive elements

Reels can up level your visual content by making it more interactive. Beyond inspiring discussion in your comments, interactive stickers and text can grab viewers’ attention and keep them focused on your content longer. Add a poll or quiz to incorporate trivia or get a feel for customer opinion on a topic. Insert a question submission box as part of an “ask us anything” Reel and respond in future posts or on an Instagram Live. You can also add emoji sliders and animated graphics for additional quick but fun interactions.

Use trending songs and sounds

Instagram trends are often tied to specific audio. Newly released songs that trend on social media often find their way to the radio and older songs can experience a resurgence in popularity if they go viral. Audio and visuals go hand in hand in this medium, according to Rocha.

“Audio—whether that’s music, voiceover or sound effects—is a key driver of engagement and entertainment on Reels,” she says.

When making a Reel, browse trending sounds and select one that fits your content. Sometimes these sounds have memes or dances tied to them, so consider participating the way other users are if possible. Look for sounds emerging in popularity instead of one that’s already viral to stay ahead of the curve. Be sure to listen to the full sound and understand how it’s being used to confirm it’s brand appropriate. Also consider consulting with your brand’s legal counsel during internal content approval processes to confirm usage rights and legal compliance.

Respond to comments and feedback

Once you’ve posted your Reel, it’s validating and exciting to see comments roll in. Be sure to respond to comments, especially relevant ones, on a regular cadence. Whether answering questions or playing off of humorous comments, your brand’s audience will appreciate the reciprocation.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox will help you respond to comments across networks. Comments left on your posts appear in the Smart Inbox, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between apps and tools.

Partner with creators and influencers

Reels can be an impactful addition to your influencer marketing approach. Influencers and creators can be concepting and production partner for Reels. Rocha says influencers fuel the Reels ecosystem and can drive business outcomes from discovery to purchase.

“53% of people we surveyed agree they are more likely to purchase an item if it’s been promoted by a creator on Reels,” she says.

Rocha says that adding partnership ads on Reels to existing campaigns can led to a median 5% improvement on cost per result and a 20% higher conversion rate. In short, partnering with an influencer on a Reel can mean big return on investment (ROI) for your brand.

When selecting influencers to work with, look for those using Reels successfully. Sprout Social’s influencer marketing platform can help you locate and connect with influencers who’ll be a great fit for your brand. You can negotiate a partnership that includes Reels specifically, whether made by your brand featuring the creator or crafted by them.

Boosting Reels on Instagram and Facebook

Boosting your Instagram Reels extends your reach. You can boost Reels on Instagram when publishing them. You can also boost a Reel on Facebook by selecting the “Share on Facebook” option before publishing and then following the prompted option to boost to more people. To boost a Reel, choose it from your profile and then select Boost Reel in the bottom right. This will take you to a dashboard where you can choose a target audience, duration of ad and other specifics for your boost.

You don’t want to boost every Reel you post, however. Be strategic in your selections. You may want to boost Reels that tie to a broader campaign, feature new products or are part of your holiday marketing strategy, for example. You can boost a Reel you just published or previous ones that have performed well.

Within Sprout, boosting Reels on Instagram or Facebook is easy and shows up in several areas within the platform as an option. You can boost any post you publish within Sprout with the “boost post” option in the publishing workflow. You can also find options to boost in the content calendar and in reports. If you see a post is performing well, you can boost it with just a few clicks.

How to measure Reels performance

Once you’ve done the hard work of creating, editing and sharing a Reel, you’ll likely be eager to see how it performed. Track metrics like comments, shares, likes and engagement rate. For Reels specifically, you can add views as an additional video-specific metric.

Instagram insights and Facebook analytics enable you to monitor how your Reels are doing within native dashboards. You can see insights for individual posts and view them alongside all of your Instagram or Facebook content.

With Sprout’s analytics dashboard, you can track all of these metrics from Instagram and Facebook in one location. Reporting in Sprout streamlines data from all of your other social networks to give you a look at the bigger picture. This can help you understand how your Reels are received on Instagram and Facebook and uncover nuances between the two audiences and channels.

Start creating Reels today

There’s no better time to get started with Reels on Instagram and Facebook. With these short, digestible videos, you’ll be able to build a more engaged audience. Using the tips in this article, you’ll be able to start experimenting and find what resonates most with your customers. Once you find your rhythm, boosting will maximize your efforts and increase social ROI for your brand. Having the right tools in place will help you seamlessly integrate Reels into your social strategy–explore our guide to the top Instagram marketing tools to consider.

The post Your complete guide to creating a Reels strategy for Instagram and Facebook appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 91% of business leaders agree that their company’s success will depend on how effectively it can use social data and insights to inform business strategy.

Putting your social interactions into context can uncover new opportunities to grow and expand. Social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.

Below, we’ve broken down some of the best social media monitoring tools out there. We’ve also included tips to help you craft a successful social media monitoring strategy.

Table of contents:

• What is social media monitoring?
• Benefits of social media monitoring
• Social media monitoring tools to use
• Tips for social media monitoring

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and reacting to social engagements. These engagements include @mentions, comments, #hashtags and keywords related to your brand.

Despite the name, “monitoring” is not a passive activity. Brands should track everything from shout-outs and reviews to questions and complaints. More importantly, brands must react to all of the above. This is the distinction between social monitoring and listening.

Social media monitoring involves much more than just direct mentions and branded keywords, too. For example, a competitor call-out presents an opportunity for your brand to intervene. The same rings true for people asking for product recommendations.

The problem? These types of conversations don’t typically pop up in your notifications. This is especially true if you’re active on multiple networks. That’s why brands use social media monitoring tools to supplement their native data.

4 benefits of social media monitoring

Using data to fuel your campaigns is always a smart move. But what kind of data does social monitoring help you get? How can you use it to grow your business?

Here are some specific benefits of social media monitoring for your brand:

Maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns

Social media monitoring helps you gather valuable data to inform your future campaigns.

For example, by understanding what resonates with your audience, you can craft more engaging posts that boost brand visibility and sales—directly impacting your social media ROI.

Also, you can use this data to run more targeted ads and choose the right influencers to work with. This ensures your content reaches people who are genuinely interested in your products or services— giving you more bang for your buck.

Get insight into your industry and competitors

Social media monitoring is more than just tracking brand mentions—it’s about keeping an eye on emerging trends, industry news and what the other players are doing.

This helps you make proactive decisions like creating viral content, adopting new strategies or tools and even developing product features that give you a competitive edge.

Competitive intelligence also helps you set realistic benchmarks for your brand’s performance. What’s the engagement like for the top players in your industry? How efficient is their customer service? How frequently do they post and which channels do they use the most?

Reputation management

Social media is a great place to manage your reputation.

In fact, according to State of Social Media Report, 9 out of 10 business leaders agree that social media insights help them proactively manage crises and create effective PR strategies.

For example, you can catch negative comments or reviews about your business early on and prevent issues from escalating.

Plus, with regular customer sentiment analysis, you’re always up-to-date on how customers feel about your brand. If there are any unexpected drops, you can go back to the drawing board and take swift action to get your brand’s social media reputation back on track.

Social media monitoring also helps you deliver exceptional customer service. Research shows 69% of customers expect brands to respond within 24 hours on social. By promptly addressing queries, comments and messages, you can improve public perception of your brand.

Monitor your brand mentions on social media

Want to gauge your brand’s actual popularity? Start listening. What are customers saying about your products? Which influencers are using your hashtags? Do you have any haters spreading negative vibes about your brand?

Monitoring your brand mentions can answer all of these questions. Better yet, it can reveal valuable insights about customer sentiment, product strengths and weaknesses, competitive opportunities and even user-generated content.

18 social media monitoring tools to use

Social media monitoring tools let you track your brand’s meaningful engagements wherever and whenever they happen.

There’s no shortage of monitoring tools out there. The following list can help you hone in on a tool that makes sense for your brand based on your needs.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives you everything not only to track important interactions but also to act on them.

For starters, our platform keeps track of mentions, comments and keywords across multiple networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The ability to condense all of your interactions into one platform is a massive time-saver. Doing so ensures that you don’t miss any noteworthy mentions or let customer service concerns go unanswered.

For example, Sprout’s Smart Inbox provides a real-time, up-to-date list of all of your social interactions. This includes communications between leads, followers and customers.

With a collaborative inbox, you and your team can reply to mentions and call-outs without leaving the platform. These features speed up response times and allow your team to offer a consistent experience to your customers.

Beyond monitoring, Sprout’s s suite of social listening tools is equally powerful. You can track specific queries using boolean operators to zero in on conversations that matter most. We make it easier to detect call-outs and shout-outs as they happen.

And with Sprout’s social analytics, you can report on all of the above to track the progress of your social presence.

Keep track of metrics including average response times and engagement volume to ensure that you’re consistently growing and improving. Consider that the best social media monitoring tools work across multiple platforms and encourage growth wherever your team is active. That’s exactly what Sprout does.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse’s platform lives up to its namesake with features to help brands keep a better pulse on their social mentions.

The platform’s monitoring and listening features are designed to help brands focus on “what counts.” With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands to sift through, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

To combat comment overload, Agorapulse allows users to set parameters to filter specific phrases and platforms out of their monitoring feeds. The platform also makes it a cinch to label and organize notable customer conversations and competitor activity. This activity includes negative competitor mentions and opportunities for your brand to intervene.

These features highlight the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of social media monitoring and why tools matter so much.

3. RivalIQ

Perhaps not surprisingly, RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis to help brands keep an eye on their business rivals.

Monitoring and benchmarking features allow brands to understand their share of voice and how they’re growing versus their competitors.

The most notable features of RivalIQ are the platform’s variety of real-time alerts. For example, the platform can identify when a competitor has changed their social media bio as soon as it happens. Recent features include the ability to also see when a competitor boosts an organic post as an ad.

These alerts can give you a head start on understanding your competitors’ positioning, promotions and campaigns.

4. Mention

Mention is yet another monitoring tool that lives up to its namesake as a powerful @mention tracker.

For brands and agencies alike, the platform claims to monitor over one billion sources for relevant mentions and comments. With so many conversations to sift through, the platform offers plenty of filtering options to help brands “eliminate noise.”

Likewise, the platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop. Additional features of the platform include identifying spikes in mention volume. These instances can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity sooner rather than later.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole’s monitoring abilities are primarily focused on helping brands find influencers to work with.

Automated keyword and hashtag searches uncover influencers posting about topics relevant to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to highlight influential accounts, posts and conversations around any given topic.

6. HubSpot

If you’re already using HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring tool of choice.

HubSpot’s features aren’t radically different from most tools on our list. The platform tracks interactions, engagements and content performance.

Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between top-performing content and social interactions with sales. For example, you can see if customers interacted with a certain piece of content or a team member via social. This goes hand in hand with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.

7. Brand24

Brand24’s media monitoring features include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all of your social mentions. The platform can also detect trending hashtags that relate to your brand.

A notable feature of the platform is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. The platform’s “summary” feed also makes it easy to track your brand’s PR efforts from week to week.

8. Atribus

Atribus is a consumer intelligence tool with an emphasis on social media monitoring. Helping brands uncover “unmet needs,” the platform digs deep into customer conversations and data.

Specifically, the platform highlights common complaints within any given industry through sentiment analysis. This provides opportunities for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Atribus is capable of automatically classifying mentions into complaints versus inquiries, too.

9. Zoho Social

If you’re using Zoho as a CRM, the platform’s complimentary social media monitoring features are incredibly useful.

Beyond the standard monitoring features we’ve talked about, the platform lets you build a custom listening dashboard. From hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets, this gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence at a glance.

10. Awario

Awario’s monitoring features are also similar to many of the platforms mentioned above.

That said, Awario Leads is a noteworthy addition to the platform’s regular monitoring and listening capabilities.

In short, Awario can identify specific instances of people asking for recommendations for a particular industry. This again shows how monitoring is an active process that can help you win more business.

11. Cyfe

Cyfe is an analytics platform that lets you create custom dashboards to monitor key social media metrics from one centralized location.

Track followers, engagement, reach, top posts and more on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Cyfe is particularly helpful for observing trends and patterns across your social media KPIs over time.

Using Cyfe’s dashboard also makes reporting a breeze. You can easily present all your social media metrics to team members, clients or managers.

Plus, most metrics are presented in the form of data visualizations like colorful charts. This helps you make sense of the data and understand the overall performance of your brand.

12. Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media management tool that lets users track analytics, generate reports, and design, schedule and publish content across multiple social media networks without leaving the platform.

You can keep tabs on brand mentions and industry keywords, and even respond to comments on multiple platforms from within Sendible.

The tool is built with agencies in mind, so if you’re monitoring the social presence of multiple client accounts, you can create a separate dashboard for each one. They also offer white-label solutions for those looking for customized software aligned with their brand.

13. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media analytics platform known for its advanced social monitoring capabilities, including sentiment analysis and trend tracking.

The tool integrates with all popular apps and networks, and can gather data from millions of sources. It can also perform deep, granular analyses of social conversations and create custom dashboards to help you measure performance.

You can also use Brandwatch’s AI smart alerts to take swift action in response to unusual trends, such as spikes or drops in brand mentions.

14. Meltwater

Meltwater provides a holistic approach to brand monitoring—it combines social media, news and blog tracking. In fact, it even uses AI to find brand mentions in podcasts.

The platform lets you search for unlimited keywords and queries, dig into industry trends, scour historical analytics and even generate reports to uncover the meaning behind all that data. You can also leverage sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about your brand.

Another cool feature Meltwater offers is visual analytics searching to analyze image/video content shared on platforms like Reddit, blogs, forums and news sites.

15. YouScan

YouScan specializes in visual content analysis—it uses AI to scan social media for images and videos that include brand mentions, logos and relevant scenes. This lets you uncover brand-related content that might be missed by traditional text-only social monitoring tools.

The platform also analyzes sentiment in visual content and puts it into context to help brands better understand how they’re perceived on social media. It’s a valuable tool for brands focused on visual branding and those interested in tapping into user-generated content.

16. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows your brand to set up real-time alerts for any keyword, brand mention or competitor. This means you can instantly track conversations relevant to your brand, industry or specific campaigns. You can monitor mentions across various social media platforms, news sites, blogs and forums, ensuring comprehensive coverage of online discussions. This broad reach helps you stay informed about what people are saying about your brand, identify potential crises and discover new opportunities for engagement.

Beyond tracking mentions, BuzzSumo also provides analysis of social media data. You can analyze the sentiment around your brand, identify key influencers driving conversations and track the performance of your social media campaigns. This data empowers you to understand audience perception, refine your social media strategy and measure the effectiveness of your efforts.

17. Emplifi

Emplifi’s social listening tools allow you to track mentions of your brand, competitors and industry keywords across various social media platforms. You can monitor conversations in real-time, identify trending topics and analyze audience sentiment to understand how people perceive your brand. This enables you to proactively address customer concerns, identify potential crises and discover opportunities for engagement.

Furthermore, Emplifi’s listening capabilities extend beyond just text. Its image recognition technology can analyze images and videos to identify brand logos and visuals, providing a more comprehensive view of online conversations. This is particularly useful for tracking brand mentions in visual content, such as user-generated photos and videos shared on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

18. Statusbrew

Statusbrew’s social listening features enable you to monitor keywords, brand mentions and competitor activity across multiple social networks. You can set up real-time alerts to stay informed about important conversations and quickly respond to comments, questions and reviews.

This proactive approach helps you build stronger relationships with your audience, manage your online reputation and identify potential crises before they escalate. Statusbrew also allows you to track hashtags, identify influencers and analyze audience sentiment, providing valuable insights to inform your social media strategy.

4 tips for social media monitoring

Tracking social metrics and mentions on social will only get you so far. The tools above offer plenty of other powerful features to help position your brand for success.

Follow the tips below to make the most of your social media monitoring efforts:

1. Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Instead of just tracking brand mentions, keep tabs on specific keywords related to your brand and industry. This could include product names, features, popular hashtags, common industry phrases and even competitor names.

For example, a fitness app might monitor keywords like “workout”, “fitness tips” or “healthy living.” This could help them identify trends in the fitness sphere, such as a rising interest in at-home workouts. They could use that info to create more relevant content and features.

2. Monitor across different channels

Your audience is spread across various social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit and others. And every channel has its unique dynamics.

You need to monitor your online reputation, customer sentiment and key metrics on every platform your audience is active on to create targeted strategies for each one.

For example, you might find engagement is low on Instagram but great on LinkedIn. Digging deeper might reveal you’re just posting at the wrong time on Instagram.

Luckily, most social media monitoring tools let you track insights across multiple channels from one dashboard. Sprout Social, for example, lets you create consolidated reports and get a birds-eye view of your overall social media performance.

3. Monitor customer sentiment

Understanding how people feel about your brand is just as important as knowing what they’re saying. Sentiment analysis involves studying the tone and emotions behind all the comments, reviews and mentions—so you know exactly what customers are thinking.

Customer sentiment can be positive, negative or neutral. Some tools like Sprout Social give you a sentiment score to help you quantify that metric. Use it to adjust your strategy to improve customer satisfaction and overall perception of your brand.

4. Monitor your competitors

Don’t just monitor your own brand. Use these tools to keep an eye on your competitors and their strategies. What kind of content are they posting? Is their brand getting more mentions than yours? What’s the customer sentiment like?

Sprout gives you visual reports to help you monitor your competition and benchmark performance across various channels:

Tracking your competitors’ campaigns, publishing behavior, engagement rates, interactions, response timings and other strategies helps you learn from them, anticipate their moves and capitalize on any gaps in their strategy.

Competitive analysis also helps you differentiate yourself from the crowd. What unique value do you bring to the table? Is there anything that your product offers that theirs is missing? Focus your energy on highlighting those areas in your promotions and campaigns.

Use social media monitoring to build better campaigns

Stepping up your social monitoring should be a top priority regardless of your industry.

The closer you track what people are saying about your brand, the better you can serve your target audience.

Likewise, you can form more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers. That’s because you’re already clued into their wants, needs and pain points.

Doing so means having the right social media monitoring tools at your fingertips. Try a tool like Sprout Social to align your publishing and customer service strategy with your monitoring insights in one place.

The post 18 social media monitoring tools you need in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Why? Because the more eyes on your TikTok content, the better your chances of growing your reach and engagement.

Building a TikTok marketing strategy means experimenting with new ways to get views.

However, getting those views isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair. You need options based on your brand and audience. Below we dig into 16 different strategies to get more TikTok views.

What is considered a view on TikTok?

Views on TikTok are counted after someone watches at least one second of a video. Even if they scroll away immediately after that, it’s still counted as a view.

For creators monetizing their videos through the TikTok Creator Fund, views only count when someone has watched a video for five seconds or longer. These types of views on TikTok are referred to as “qualified views.”

How much does TikTok pay for each view?

There’s no set rate that TikTok pays per view.

However, TikTok’s own Creator Academy has stated in the past that creators can earn between two and four cents per 1,000 views.

As of this post, the minimum payment threshold for revenue earned through the TikTok Creator Fund is $50.

Should you buy views on TikTok?

Under no circumstances should you ever buy likes, views, followers or any other type of social media metric. TikTok views are no exception.

The numbers might look nice on paper but inflated metrics won’t translate to long-term success. In the end, this may actually harm your business as you violate TikTok’s Terms of Services and Community Guidelines.

Instead, try advertising your content using TikTok Promote or follow our tips for getting more views on TikTok organically. And put that wallet away!

Why views matter on TikTok

Views are a crucial TikTok metric. Views highlight how many times people have seen your videos and signal interest in your content. The more views you get, the more your videos are shown, suggested and shared.

More views on TikTok translates to more opportunities to receive other types of engagement. This includes comments, follows and shares. While your follower count is the most straightforward way to measure an account’s size, your view count—the people actually seeing your videos—matters just as much.

Simply put, you need to learn how to increase TikTok views in order to grow your account, reach a wider audience and positively impact your business’s bottom line.

How to get more views on TikTok: 16 essential strategies

If you’re looking for ways to increase your views on TikTok, we’ve got you covered! Below are sixteen strategies to get more eyes on your videos.

1. Add hashtags to your content

Hashtags exist on nearly every social media platform as a way to categorize, tag and search for content.

Well, TikTok is no different. TikTok hashtags are used similarly—but can also be used for trends and challenges.

Using hashtags in TikTok captions can help even more users discover your content and boost your view count.

However, you need to be strategic about your hashtag use. Make sure you’re using hashtags that are both relevant to your content and are popular, ensuring you can generate some reach from your hashtags.

Here are a few key ways to find the best hashtags for more TikTok views:

• Pay attention to the hashtags your competitors are using
• Use a third-party tool like TikTok Hashtags to find popular tags
• Take advantage of TikTok’s autocomplete features to find hashtags
• Browse through the For You Page to discover trending hashtags
• Search TikTok’s Creative Center to find product-related tags in your industry

Here’s an example of how you can incorporate hashtags into your caption to help boost your videos:

Three to five hashtags seems to be the sweet spot with TikTok hashtags and getting relevant reach. Experiment with different tags and try to keep them consistent with similar topics. This will help the TikTok algorithm understand what you’re posting about and get your content in front of the right audience.

2. Create a multi-part series

If you’ve created a video that’s performed well, use that to your advantage.

Make it a multi-part series by coming up with more content of a similar nature.

For example, the Morning Brew team created a single video translating words into corporate speak. Their audience loved it, so they started creating more of the same types of videos with the same theme and format. The TikTok videos below are part of a series that they were able to build on.

TikTok allows users to create playlists that are perfect for putting together a video series. You can even add all of the parts of each series to a list, making it easy for users to view all similar videos within one single feed.

A few ideas for different playlists and content themes include:

• Customer showcases and testimonials
• Product demos and how-tos
• Reaction videos
• Reply videos
• Q&A videos featuring your audience
• “Tip of the week” videos

All of the above provide opportunities to both educate and entertain viewers. Given how much TikTok leans into the concept of “edutainment,” this strategy can be an effective way to get more TikTok views. If you find that a series gets traction, it makes sense to continue your momentum and make similar content.

3. Include popular music and trending audio

When in doubt, use popular music and sound clips within your video content. If someone likes the music clip, they can click on the spinning album in the bottom right corner to view more videos that use it, potentially leading them to discover your content.

TikTok now makes it easy to search for trending audio for your videos, including royalty-free songs and audio that’s cleared for commercial use.

Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily have to do a TikTok dance or anything controversial. Just a bit of creativity can help you incorporate trending sound bytes into your videos to get more TikTok views.

Leveraging trending music and audio is an easy way for brands to boost their reach and potentially get picked up on the TikTok FYP. The key is using music that makes sense for your content and not forcing yourself onto a trend.

4. Follow viral TikTok trends

Speaking of trends!

TikTok is all about following viral trends and they’re a great way to get more reach. Thankfully, there are many different types of trends to choose from. This includes dances, challenges, memes and more.

There are also truly organic events like the “Demure” trend that took over TikTok a few months back. Brands, influencers and everyday creators alike got in on it and got massive reach as a result. This example highlights again how you can use trending TikTok audio to get more views.

One of the best ways to gain an understanding of viral trends on TikTok is to spend a good bit of time simply consuming content on the platform.

Take a look at competitors and other brand accounts, but simply scroll for a bit each week as well to make sure you stay up-to-date on new TikTok content ideas. Also, pay close attention to the FYP and what’s trending among your target audience.

Note that content and trends move extremely quickly on TikTok. If you want to integrate these sorts of trendy ideas into your content calendar to get more views, you need to act on them quickly. Think days, not weeks or months.

5. Know your target audience

If you’re wondering why your views are low on TikTok, maybe it’s time to think about why your content isn’t hitting.

Pop quiz: who’s your target audience? Knowing your customers and who you’re trying to reach on TikTok can help you to create content that they want to see.

When you create content that your target audience actually enjoys, they’re going to be more likely to engage with it, share it with their friends and follow your account.

And all of the above leads to even more views.

Start by creating a customer persona. Put together a profile of exactly who you’re trying to reach—especially when you use social media data to do so. This can give you an understanding of which types of content each persona would be interested in consuming.

For example, are your customers looking at reviews? Are they looking up answers to questions or specific pain points? This is where doing research related to TikTok keywords can be a huge help, especially as the platform leans more and more into its search features.

TikTok’s keyphrase autocomplete can give you a ton of ideas related to your industry and customer pain points to create content that not only gets views but also ranks for keywords.

Next, analyze your competitors. What are they posting? Better yet, which of their posts gets the most views and engagement? How can you incorporate similar strategies with your audiences?

Then, start creating! Cater your content to your specific audience. And adjust your content strategy based on their reception.

6. Find the best times to post on TikTok

Posting at the right times can also ensure better odds of your audience seeing your content. According to our data, the best times to post on TikTok include:

• Tuesdays from 4 to 6 p.m.
• Wednesdays from 9 to 11 a.m., noon, and 2 to 6 p.m.
• Thursdays from 9 to 11 a.m. and 2 to 6 p.m.
• Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m.

However, these times can change by industry and by brand. Consider also that other variables impact TikTok views and whether the algorithm picks up your content. Rather than stick to one-size-fits-all advice, it’s important to experiment with different publishing frequencies and schedules.

To find your own best times to post, pay attention to your TikTok analytics and when your audience is most likely to be online. Then, schedule your TikTok posts accordingly.

7. Cross-promote your videos

Rather than look for some sort of TikTok view trick, consider how a bit of cross-promotion can go a long way.

For starters, share your TikTok videos on other platforms to further spread the word. You can easily share them on Instagram Stories, or you can repurpose TikTok videos as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts.

Consider also sharing links to your TikTok videos on X (formerly known as Twitter) to cast a wider net.

Beyond that, don’t be shy about promoting your TikTok presence across additional channels. Consider where else you can promote your TikTok presence and videos, such as your marketing emails or even product pages.

8. Create videos from TikTok comments

If someone comments on a video with a question, you can reply to it as a text comment or respond with a new TikTok video. Doing the latter creates a link from the new video to the old.

Those interested in seeing what the comment stemmed from will then go watch the original video, netting you even more views.

As you can see in this brand example, you can use this tactic as a way to announce or highlight products you’re promoting. The social team used this comment to showcase the product’s aesthetics in a way that got solid views and was likewise entertaining to the brand’s audience.

Note that you can couple this strategy with other tactics to get more views on TikTok. For example, you could make a full-blown series where you reply to customers or answer questions regularly. The bonus of using comments as content is that it naturally drives discussion and therefore more engagement and interactions, which drive views on your TikTok content.

9. Duet and stitch popular videos

Another way to create new TikTok videos is by dueting or stitching an existing TikTok video. A stitch plays part of an existing video before you take over with your own recorded video. It’s a great way to add additional context or commentary to someone else’s video.

A duet places your video alongside an existing video. This is perfect for reacting to another video, like OREO did by reacting to a creator’s video featuring their cookies.

Incorporating duet and stitch videos into your strategy can be a great way to generate more views—especially if you use videos from well-known creators. Like other tactics, it’s important to make sure you’re replying to relevant videos and not just trying to piggyback on trends for the sake of it.

10. Work with influencers and UGC creators

Speaking of well-known creators, partnering with them as part of your influencer marketing strategy can be a great way to reach an even wider audience on TikTok.

If users see a familiar face, such as a social media influencer, athlete or celebrity, they’re likely to stick around and watch, share and follow your content.

Similarly, if you have influencers create content featuring your brand on their own channels, their viewers may tap over to your profile and start watching some of your videos.

If you already incorporate influencer or user-generated content into your TikTok strategy, you’re on the right track. Pro-tip: you can drive engagement and views further by tagging creators in your content like in the post below. This goes goes hand-in-hand with permitting creators to promote their videos but also increases the chances for creators to cross-promote your content to their own audiences. It’s a win-win!

Consider that simply featuring real people in your content is a proven way to boost views as content with people gets more engagement, especially on TikTok. This is why many brands incorporate in-house employees or UGC creators to produce content for their TikTok accounts.

11. Participate in TikTok challenges

There are many different types of TikTok challenges, but the main two types are branded challenges and community challenges. Branded challenges are challenges that relate back to your product or service and that your brand creates to engage your audience. Community challenges are started by creators and TikTok users.

Try creating a unique branded challenge for your audience to participate in to see how much reach you can generate. Or, keep an eye out for community challenges that make sense for your brand or product to join. TikTok challenges can do wonders for your reach.

12. Create a lot of content

TikTok still says to post 1-4 times/day. If you want to keep up the momentum and grow your account, it’s a good idea to share as much content as often as you can.

Consider batch-creating content so that you have a lot to share for a week or two before you need to create more. Post daily at a minimum—more, if you can—to increase the number of views your TikTok account can get. In fact, it may be worth creating a social media content calendar to help plan your TikTok content in advance.

However, keeping up with this sort of content demand can be daunting which speaks to the importance of having a diverse content calendar. While some videos should be planned carefully, not all of them need to be.

By incorporating creators and customers into your strategy and posting off-the-cuff content, you can post more content without doing as much editing. Many of the best brands on TikTok have a wide variety of content on their feeds for a reason.

13. Engage with your community through comments and live streams

TikTok has leaned heavily into its live-streaming features lately. Chances are you’ve seen your share of TikTok LIVE presentations popping up on your feed as a result.

Check out how Stratia Skin does a TikTok LIVE to promote products and engage customers in real time:

Filming a TikTok Live is no small feat and requires a lot of legwork and prep to do effectively. That said, it’s a prime way to make connections with your audience and get closer to them.

Even not doing that, you can use comments to engage people as well. Brands that frequently reply to creators can drive engagement and get more views as a result. Showing customers that you care builds loyalty and long-term viewership.

14. Experiment with new video formats and styles

Experimenting is crucial on TikTok, especially as the algorithm and what ranks in the FYP changes rapidly.

You can’t post the exact same types of content over and over and expect more views. There are plenty of details big and small to play around with for any given video, including:

• Video lengths (sub-15 second vs 30+ seconds vs 1+ minute videos)
• Voiceovers vs no voiceovers
• Music versus trending audio
• Content featuring customers vs brand-generated videos

Another big detail to experiment with is less polished content. Many brands make the mistake of going overboard with editing and making their content feel too produced. Notice that most of the viral TikTok content is raw and off-the-cuff like this example. That’s no coincidence. This detail is even more important for branded accounts that generally get less reach.

You may be surprised at what works and what doesn’t. You’ll never know until you create it. This relates to our previous tip on keeping up a good posting frequency with diverse content.

15. Collaborate with other accounts to reach new audiences

Collaborating with other creators can be a great way to reach a wider audience. This could include people in your industry, other brands, or anyone else who might be a good fit. For example, if you’re attending an event or doing a cross-promotion, it makes sense to get the most out of that partnership.

Check out this celebrity crossover with Airbnb’s TikTok account for inspiration:

Successful collaborations require planning. Think about your partnerships, events, product launches and other opportunities. Then, figure out how to align them with your TikTok content strategy.

16. Leverage TikTok analytics to understand your audience

Your TikTok analytics are a treasure trove of insights to help you understand what videos get the most engagement so you can do more of what works.

You can use hard data to see if long or short videos are more popular, if people watch your videos all the way through, and if hashtags are helping you reach new viewers.

By analyzing all of this information, you can identify trends and optimize your content strategy to get more views. If you find that a specific video-length, topic or format is really successful, it makes sense to keep doing more of it.

Start getting more views on TikTok

Getting more views on TikTok doesn’t happen by accident. You need a strategy and consistency. By following the tips in this article, you can start to see results, especially since many of these strategies complement each other.

And if you need more help, check out our full guide to building and improving your TikTok marketing efforts so you can boost your view count sooner rather than later.

The post How to get more views on TikTok: 16 essential strategies appeared first on Sprout Social.

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.

Twitter’s built-in analytics provide basic metrics such as follower counts and impressions. Third-party analytics tools give you deeper data—the kind that reveals what’s really working, where you can optimize and, most importantly, how your Twitter strategy impacts your overall business goals.

In this article, we’ll explore why you need a Twitter analytics tool and list seven third-party X/Twitter analytics tools designed to help you track and improve performance.

Why do you need an X/Twitter analytics tool?

An X/Twitter analytics tool optimizes your social media strategy by providing detailed insights into content performance, audience behavior and competitive positioning. It enables you to understand what’s working and what’s not, adapt your messaging and stay ahead of competitors.

Here’s exactly how it helps.

Identify top-performing content

Knowing which posts in your Twitter marketing strategy resonate most with your audience helps refine your strategy and allows you to continually build on what works. With an X/Twitter analytics tool, you can easily pinpoint posts with high engagement metrics like reshares and build on those insights to replicate success.

Understand audience demographics

Insight into your audience’s age, location and interests helps you tailor your messaging. This deeper understanding of who’s engaging with your content lets you create campaigns that directly address their interests and boost conversion rates. This could be through more targeted ads or curated content that speaks to their needs.

Track brand sentiment

Customer sentiment analysis helps you gauge how people feel about your brand in real time. Tracking brand sentiment allows you to amplify positive feedback or address complaints swiftly, preventing them from escalating and maintaining your brand’s reputation.

Measure campaign performance

Analytics tools help you analyze your own strategies—whether it’s engagement rates, content themes or audience interaction patterns. These tools also give you a clear picture of social media ROI and the insights needed to optimize future campaigns.

Monitor competitors

Stay ahead of your top competitors by analyzing their strategies with X/Twitter analytics tools. Competitive monitoring tracks competitor X/Twitter post performance in terms of engagement rates, follower growth and hashtag use. And you understand your competitors’ overall share of voice, compared to your organization’s, on the topics that matter to your brand.

7 best X/Twitter analytics tools

We’ve evaluated several tools based on features, usability and the depth of insights they provide. Here are some of the best X/Twitter analytics tools.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social delivers in-depth insights into account performance, audience engagement and content effectiveness across multiple X/Twitter profiles.

Analyze key metrics such as impressions, engagements and follower demographics to refine audience targeting and optimize your X/Twitter content strategy alongside other networks. Plus, identify your best-performing posts and conduct a competitive analysis to see how you stack up against industry leaders. These X/Twitter insights give you a detailed look at what your audience likes, how they engage and when they’re most active—so you can tweak your strategy for maximum punch.

Sprout’s Premium Analytics further enables you to select metrics that align with your X/Twitter goals. Create presentation-ready reports to showcase the impact of your strategies and share insights easily with key stakeholders through shareable links. You can also compare performance across multiple profiles with Sprout’s cross-channel capabilities to get a holistic view of your brand’s X/Twitter presence.

In addition to these X/Twitter-specific functions, you get access to a full suite of social media management tools—from publishing and analytics to engagement—to streamline your X/Twitter strategy.

Features:

• An easy-to-use dashboard that offers a unified overview of your platform, including demographics and profile insights
• Hashtag tracking to learn what hashtags your audience is already using to reach and grow your audience
• Summarize by AI that distills complex data into actionable insights, making it easier to understand your X/Twitter performance at a glance
• X/Twitter Listening capabilities to understand audience sentiment and identify advocates and influencers
• Device demographics to inform your content strategy based on how your audience accesses X/Twitter
• Customizable reports on audience growth during your selected reporting period
• Analyze by AI Assist to track metrics, hashtags, keywords, Smart Categories and emojis to uncover major insights
• Several report options to guide your X/Twitter strategy, including:
  • Post Performance Report to identify your best-performing content and analyze engagement metrics
  • X/Twitter Profiles Report for tracking changes in performance over time, including engagements, replies, likes, reposts and audience growth
  • Competitors Report to see how you compare to rivals
  • Paid Performance Report to track ROI from Twitter ads

2. Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is a built-in analytics tool only available to Twitter Premium users.

It’s a useful tool for getting started and providing a snapshot of what’s working on your account—helping you identify quick wins.

To access, head to analytics.twitter.com, or from your regular Twitter feed, click More in the left sidebar, then click Analytics. Here, you get basic insights into your best-performing X/Twitter posts, how your last 28 days compared to the previous period and how much engagement your individual posts get.

Features:

• Monthly highlights that show your top X/Twitter post, mention, followers and other key updates
• Detailed breakdowns of engagement metrics, showing likes, profile clicks, reposts, replies and detail expands
• Average monthly engagement rates, number of replies and reposts

3. SocialPilot

SocialPilot offers social media scheduling, content curation, its own browser extension, help with ads as well as analytics.

Features:

• Automated reporting that generates and delivers daily, weekly or monthly reports
• Custom filters to perform tailored analysis, track performance over time, make historical comparisons and assess goal achievement
• Top Mentions Posts that highlight the number of times your brand gets mentioned
• Most Engaged Followers metric shows you who interacts with your posts, so you can reciprocate or give free products as a thank-you

4. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media monitoring and analytics tool that helps you track your online presence. In fact, it differs from some of the other tools we’ve already covered because their entire focus is on social listening.

Monitor hashtags, keywords and trends across various platforms in real time to get insights into engagement and sentiment analysis. It also offers cross-platform publishing so you can schedule all your upcoming posts for all your channels (including X/Twitter) from one dashboard.

Features:

• Automated, comprehensive reports that eliminate human error in spreadsheets
• Campaign-specific reporting so you can see how individual social media promotions are performing
• Hashtag reporting to track user-generated content and relevant hashtags your brand is promoting
• Analysis of post types and times that will generate the highest levels of engagement, such as likes, clicks and shares

5. Meltwater

Meltwater provides tools for social media monitoring, media analysis and audience segmentation that help you understand market trends and customer sentiments.

Meltwater is ideal for global brands who want to track multilingual conversations and stay culturally relevant while addressing market-specific trends.

Features:

• Multi-brand search functionality for various research purposes
• Data sources include social media platforms as well as traditional media like radio and TV
• Assisted search feature as an alternative to manual boolean searches
• Data storage covering a 15-month period

6. Fedica & Followerwonk

Fedica and Followerwonk provide powerful tools for detailed social media analysis, especially on X/Twitter.

Fedica brings together publishing, analytics and engagement tools that help you improve your social media strategies across platforms. With the Follower Segmentation tool, you can group followers by different traits to target specific audience segments.

Now part of Fedica, Followerwonk adds features like bio search, user comparison and follower tracking, which helps with competitor analysis and audience insights. Together, these tools help you check the quality of your followers and track engagement.

Features:

• X/Twitter account analysis to find the accounts influencers follow—a way to pinpoint potential customers to interact with
• X/Twitter user comparison to find gaps or overlaps in how your followers line up with your competitors
• Follower growth analysis over a specified period to monitor how your account is expanding
• Audience interest and sentiment analysis to reveal trending topics, concerns or praise among your followers
• X/Twitter engagement dashboard to keep an eye on how your followers are receiving your X posts

7. Brand24

Brand24 helps you monitor and analyze brand mentions across various online platforms, including social media, blogs, news sites and forums.

It uses sentiment analysis to label mentions as positive, negative or neutral to help you understand public perception in real time. The platform’s Brand Reports pinpoint emerging trends and correlations, highlight key mentions and identify key events.

Features:

• Automated sentiment analysis gives you a quick view of public opinion about your brand, helping you react faster to changes in sentiment
• Mentions feed for easy tracking and response to all X/Twitter brand mentions
• Marketing analytics to monitor positive and negative mentions over time
• GPT-powered recommendations to identify growth opportunities and fine-tune your strategy

Evaluate your current X/Twitter marketing strategy and build from there

Ramp up your X/Twitter marketing with the best Twitter analytics tools for auditing your performance. An audit uncovers gaps, optimizes underperforming posts and aligns your content with audience expectations—ensuring your efforts on the platform actually pay off. Select the right platform for your brand and perform an X/Twitter audit so your content connects with your audience and drives meaningful engagement.

The post 7 X/Twitter analytics tools to amplify your strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

But if you’re not thrilled with your Instagram growth and engagement, you’re not alone.

Competition on the platform is fierce. And cracking the code of Instagram’s algorithm can be tricky.

However, taking steps to grow your audience is absolutely worth it. That’s because the bigger your audience, the more opportunities to delight your customers.

In this post, you’ll learn about five powerful strategies to tweak your presence and get more followers on Instagram. Let’s break them down.

5 key strategies to get followers on Instagram (for free)

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, this post is about building an organic following.

And yes, the distinction matters!

Some brands want to take shortcuts when it comes to trying to get more Instagram followers. We don’t pretend these pay-for-play sites don’t exist.

But these services aren’t worth it for brands long-term. The Instagram algorithm weeds out low-quality accounts and faux engagement from paid bots.

Growing your audience authentically gets you results that actually matter to your business: brand awareness, revenue and loyal customers.

Read or watch the video below for our best tips on getting more Instagram followers (the right way).

1. Optimize your Instagram account

Before you worry about how to get followers, consider how your Instagram business profile is set up first. Ask yourself:

• Does your profile “look the part?”
• Can your audience easily find it?
• Does it encourage them to take action?

Here’s how you can optimize your Instagram profile for maximum impact.

Choose a professional profile photo

Your profile photo is part of your brand identity on Instagram.

For businesses, a high-quality and appropriately-sized logo is ideal. Any text in your profile picture should be legible on a smartphone screen.

Place keywords in your name, handle and bio

If you want more followers, your profile needs to be discoverable by your target audience.

For starters, add the right keywords to your account. There are three places to focus on here:

• Your username (or handle)
• Your profile name
• Your bio (description)

To have a search-friendly username, stick to either your brand name or whatever’s closest to your existing social handles.

If your name is too long, shorten it to a variation your audience would recognize (ex: Cold Stone Creamery’s account is @coldstone). You can always write the full version in your profile name.

Next is your bio. You can use this space to add keywords related to your niche, industry, products or services. Check out Peach Slices’ Instagram bio as an example.

With these keywords naturally weaved into the description, their account is more likely to pop up for search terms like “k beauty”, “skincare” and “acne”.

Organize stories as highlights

Ever created a killer story that you wish could live on your profile forever? With story highlights, it can.

Highlights are groups of select old (expired) stories. You can organize them by theme or topic, such as Q&As, tips or events — making it easier for people to find relevant stories.

Story highlights are also located at the top of your profile, which makes users more likely to check them first before scrolling down to your posts. Think of them as a curated portfolio that showcases the best of your brand.

Add your location and relevant links

Adding location info pushes your profile higher up in search results for local audiences.

This is especially important for businesses targeting nearby audiences or those wanting to drive more foot traffic to their physical store (e.g. restaurants).

Business accounts can also add multiple links in their bio. This is crucial for turning your followers into meaningful traffic or customers. On Instagram, bio links are your only way to funnel social traffic to your site and promotions.

Linking to your homepage is fine but not always ideal. To encourage more meaningful interactions, add links to specific product pages or even a social landing page that points to multiple links.

This gives your audience total control of how they engage your business next. That means a better experience for your followers.

Showcase your Instagram wherever you can

Don’t be shy about promoting your Instagram if more followers are your goal.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to promoting your ‘gram, either. Here are a few ideas:

• Add social media icons to your website and emails. Social media icons make it easier for people to find your business and help you connect with customers.
• Feature an Instagram feed on your homepage or product pages. Many e-commerce and consumer brands have dedicated UGC feeds on-site (see Sony’s example below).
• Re-share Instagram-specific content or announcements on other social channels. For example, you could talk about an upcoming IG Live via TikTok or Facebook.

Pro tip: Use Sprout Social’s social media scheduling and publishing features to easily plan posts across multiple social media platforms from one dashboard.

2. Develop a solid content strategy

Instagram success doesn’t happen by accident. It takes a clear strategy — one that shows off your brand’s unique side and helps you create content that clicks. When you nail that, engagement goes up, your community gets stronger and new followers roll in.

Let’s dive into the tactics that make this strategy work.

Schedule Instagram posts in advance

There’s no denying that brands are at the mercy of the Instagram algorithm for reach. Still, posting at the right times can still give your posts more visibility. Anything you can do to maximize engagement is a plus.

This speaks to the value of scheduling Instagram content. With Sprout’s newest tools, brands can schedule Stories, Carousels, Reels and Posts.

Scheduling content in advance ensures control and organization. Instagram scheduling tools ultimately help you hit that cadence we mentioned earlier. The ability to crosspost content from other networks helps here, too.

You can also use Sprout’s ViralPost feature to nail down your timing, too. Our platform analyzes your engagement history and identifies the best times to post.

Keep a consistent content calendar

Momentum matters on Instagram. In other words, you likely won’t get followers on Instagram if you post at random.

Creating content and providing value is what builds your audience. Doing so consistently is what helps you keep them.

That’s why sticking to a regular posting schedule is crucial.  In terms of when and how much to post, you don’t have to stick to a set-in-stone number. Most brands post daily or near daily. This tracks our own research on how often to post as well.

For reference, below is a breakdown of the best times to post to Instagram.  “Optimal” engagement is during the mid-to-late morning and early afternoons during the week.

If you’re worried about your posts not getting seen enough, we get it. Consider how features like Stories can get more eyes on your content if it wasn’t seen the first time.

Have a strong brand and Instagram aesthetic

Instagram is home to over 200 million businesses. That’s a lot of competition. To stand out, you need to have a strong, distinguishable brand on the platform.

Maintaining consistency in things like colors, aesthetics and post style can help users remember your brand and recognize your content at a glance. Here’s how Canva does it.

Notice how their story highlights and posts follow a similar, consistent style.

Why does strong branding matter? Because it directly impacts your bottom line. Research from Marq (formerly Lucidchart) shows brand consistency can increase revenue by 10-20%.

Leverage short-form video content

Sprout’s data shows that 66% of consumers want to see more short-form videos from brands. This means Reels should be on your radar.

Reels are fun, snappy and they’re algorithm gold. Think tutorials, product highlights or even quick behind-the-scenes peeks.

And since you only have a few seconds to grab attention, get creative. Use the built-in tools like stickers, cuts, filters, music, voice-overs and transitions to craft trendy, eye-catching Reels.

Cherry on top? These bite-sized videos can easily be cross-promoted on platforms like TikTok, helping you reach new audiences and attract more followers.

Post content that followers actually want to see

Easier said than done, we know.

Filters. Captions. Content types. Post times. That doesn’t even scratch the surface.

There are so many variables to consider, right? It doesn’t help that Instagram’s algorithm is fickle. What works for one brand might not work for the next in terms of format and timing.

For example, some brands swear by Carousels. Others are all-in on Reels. Both approaches can work. You’ll quickly find on Instagram that some content gets more likes than others. This is why testing is so important.

Instagram’s native analytics are surprisingly powerful. That said, investing in Instagram analytics tools will take things to the next level.

For example, Sprout makes it easy to benchmark and analyze Instagram content across accounts. Rather than second-guess what’s working and what’s not, our reporting spells it out for you.

Be confident in your content strategy by analyzing those variables we mentioned earlier.

And if you’re unsure where to start, try analyzing your competitors. A staggering 90% of brands say that social media data helps them keep up with competing social accounts.

You obviously shouldn’t copycat your competitors. That said, you can take notes on what they’re doing or posting that drives engagement.  Sprout’s Instagram Competitors report can provide a breakdown of what’s working in your industry. A little competitive research can go a long way.

Oh, and keep your ear to the ground with new Instagram trends. That way you won’t miss out on platform-wide opportunities to hop on trending content formats.

Go live on Instagram

Host Instagram Live sessions to interact with your audience directly. This helps foster real-time engagement and build a sense of community.

For example, you could host virtual events like product launches, show quick tutorials or simply have candid chats and Q&A sessions. If you’re an e-commerce store, users can even shop your products in real-time.

Plus, you can share these Live streams as stories that last for 24 hours, allowing followers who missed out to catch up later.

3. Engage with your audience and build relationships

When you make your Instagram followers happy, you’ll see the payoff in audience growth. The best Instagram accounts have fans and communities (hint: not just followers).

For many accounts, this means building customer relationships.

Here are some ways to engage with your audience and build relationships.

Create content that highlights your brand’s personality

Content that highlights your personality and the humans behind your brand can help you connect with your audience on a deeper level. This includes:

• Inspirational content
• Humorous content
• Re-sharing UGC with unique captions
• Storytelling posts
• Behind-the-scenes photos and videos
• Posts that raise awareness for social causes

Also, make sure your content aligns with your brand voice and values. Avoid coming across as needy, solely sales-driven or robotic at all costs.

Make meaningful conversation with your audience

Food for thought: 60% of marketers use Instagram as a service channel.

The platform is perfect for going back and forth with followers. Likewise, many popular Instagram post ideas center around asking questions and engaging in a dialogue for a reason.

Off-the-cuff questions, shipping concerns or praise for products are all fair game from followers. Check out how Cometeer responds to all of the above on their Instagram posts:

Being supportive and responding promptly shows people that you care. This also applies to any brand mentions or direct messages (DMs) you get.

You’d be surprised at how your Instagram followers increase once you start acting more personable. Our Index research shows that 89% of consumers will buy from a brand after following them on social media. Every interaction counts.

Again, try to respond to as many questions, messages, mentions or comments as possible. Doing so could make or break someone becoming a long-term follower or a customer.

Engage with customers and brand advocates

Figuring out how to get more Instagram followers means engaging your audience.

And one of the best ways to do that is through responding to and republishing their posts.

Enter the power of user-generated content. UGC campaigns build social proof by showing followers you’re invested in them. For example, Drunk Elephant regularly regrams their followers’ posts. They gather content with their #BareWithUs and #DrunkBreak hashtags.

But don’t just wait for UGC to happen — spark it yourself! Encourage your customers to create content by giving them a reason to share.

For example, you could run a Reels contest where followers show off your product in action. Winners could get free merch and a feature on your page.

4. Utilize tags and hashtags

Location tags and hashtags are powerful tools on Instagram. They can help your target audience discover your posts (and profile) faster.

Here’s how to utilize tags to grow your following.

Find hashtags where your followers hang out

Instagram hashtags have been a staple of the platform, like, forever.

That said, they don’t hold as much weight as they used to.

Dumping hashtags into your posts isn’t going to get you any new followers. Especially when there’s so much noise on the platform.

Be proactive by focusing on industry-specific hashtags relevant to your customers. For example, Lashify regularly posts content to the #LashEducation hashtag. Tags are less general and competitive than #beauty. Becoming more visible within these types of tags is meaningful for brands in the right niche.

Understanding how your hashtags perform on Instagram is critical. With Sprout Social’s hashtag analytics tools, you have direct access to in-depth performance and usage data. Figuring out which hashtags to use is just a few taps away.

Use geo-tagging to attract local followers

Instagram brought back location stories last year. But now, users can find them on a map. This feature helps people search for top posts and stories in specific locations, such as a coffee shop or a shopping mall.

And how do you get your content to show up on the map? By tagging the location, of course. Geo-tagging your posts and stories makes your content visible to people in the vicinity or users checking out the place where your photo or video was taken.

Wondering how to tag the location in your Instagram story? Simply use the location sticker and type in the location you want to tag.

5. Collaborate with influencers and other brands

If you want more Instagram followers, consider teaming up with others. Collaborations open doors to new audiences and help you build trust quickly.

Below are two ways to expand your reach with partnerships.

Find and work with influencers in your niche

Influencers have a loyal network of followers who trust their word.

Collaborating with influencers in your niche, especially those with small but highly engaged followings, can amplify your brand’s reach and build credibility.

That said, finding the right influencers to work with can be challenging. There are millions of creators on Instagram, and not everyone aligns with your brand or has an authentic following (hint: they might be bots).

Good news: Tagger by Sprout Social makes this task easy for you. Use smart filters to sort through vetted influencers that match your brand.

You can also check out our free influencer database by industry full of insights to help you plan your next influencer marketing campaign.

Partner with brands that are similar to yours

Strategic brand partnerships can significantly boost your Instagram reach and engagement.

It also gives your content a fresh perspective, making the entire experience fun for everyone involved, including your audience.

Think about what your customers like beyond your products to guide your partnerships. Look for brands that fit those interests but don’t compete directly with you.

Ubereats, for example, partnered up with Blueland (a sustainable home essentials brand) to let people buy the eco-friendly company’s products directly from the Ubereats app.

They created this Instagram Reel as part of their campaign.

When you reach out to potential partners, focus on mutual benefits. Suggest ideas that would help both brands grow.

Ideally, you should start small, like co-hosting an Instagram Live or sharing each other’s content. As you see results, you can build bigger campaigns together (like Ubereats did above).

How to get more Instagram followers (the wrong way!)

Disclaimer: Sprout Social does not endorse purchasing Instagram followers. We don’t recommend services that sell followings or “Likes.”

As the social space becomes more crowded and competitive, brands are willing to take risks for the sake of instant results.

We’ll say it again: brands shouldn’t buy Instagram followers. Nobody should!

Why you shouldn’t buy followers on Instagram

Here are some reasons why buying followers to grow your account is a serious mistake.

Your real followers know what fake followers look like

Social consumers are getting savvier. Privacy concerns and social scammers have made people hyper-aware of weird activity. In short, people today are spam-detectors.

A sudden follower spike is a red flag. Not to mention having bots stink up your account with endless spam followers. This all damages your reputation and keeps you from growing an authentic Instagram following.

Fake followers bring nothing to the table

You’re probably worried about your Instagram metrics and understandably so.

That said, your follower count doesn’t mean much if your “followers” don’t drive engagement. You might look “bigger” at a glance but who cares? Consider how your engagement rate on the platform will suffer if your follower count is inflated.

If nothing else, buying Instagram followers violates TOS

No surprises here.

Consider how Meta has taken direct action against buying engagement in the past. They’ve gone as far as to shut down companies that sell likes. That’s because this practice violates the platform’s terms of service.

How are you growing your Instagram following?

Listen: getting more followers on Instagram isn’t going to happen by accident.

And despite what you might have heard, there’s no silver bullet solution for making it happen.

The strategies above can help you build the foundation for an organic following that actually engages with you. Putting these tips into action is so much easier with a powerful publishing and analytics tool like Sprout.

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The post How to get more followers on Instagram: 5 strategies to grow your audience appeared first on Sprout Social.