Advice & Best Practices

Hi friends! I am a community manager at a full-service marketing agency. We have a variety of different types of clients, most of which I handle outgoing engagement for. I wanted to poll the experts and see what types of tools people are using to track their work? Right now, I’m mostly documenting things in trackers in Google Sheets, and I’m thinking there has to be a better way to do this! A few performance-based KPIs I have are tied to engagement/impressions and I would love to have the most accurate data to report. Any other recommendations are helpful, thanks! 

Does anyone have any content calendar templates outside of sprout social they like using? We currently use one note for our content calendar. 

Hello! I’m looking for tools to resize a video from a regular YouTube video to an Instagram, either square or reel size. Do you have any ideas?I saw https://www.veed.io/ any other you may know? thanks!Virginia 

Hi fellow social pals! I’m really curious how different orgs and companies handle UTM usage and reporting on organic social.I just started at a new company in July and they create manual UTMs for each individual social post by region. It’s super time-consuming and I don’t know where the data actually “lives.” My personal philosophy is that is always makes sense to create a UTM for paid social, but doesn’t really make much difference in organic. Would love to hear different use cases!

Does anyone have info on if Meta will be reinstating allowing business accounts to use licensed audio? There was this nice honeymoon period where we could use any song available on Spotify only to have it removed again. Was wondering if others experienced this & what you’re doing about it! 

Does anyone know if there’s a way to view the demographics of people engaging with your posts on LinkedIn (not just overall audience demographics)? I’m especially interested in seeing how many of those engaging are our company’s employees, as well as where other viewers are coming from and what types of roles they have.

I’m running into the issue of GA4 tracking leads from states/locations that aren’t anywhere near where we’re targeting on Meta. I’ve even checked where Meta is getting impressions and it’s only the states/locations were targeting so I’m not sure how this keeps happening. The ads are a special category so there’s only so much I can do to ensure we’re getting the right people but my client is frustrated that so many paid social leads are unusable due to being out of area. I let them know that it’s a possibility that people are using VPNs and that could be why we’re getting leads not within our target locations. Is anyone else experiencing this issue or know what else I can be doing to limit this?? I don’t have audience expansion on either. 

Has anyone else experienced that in Meta Business Suite reach is now views for organic insights? It totally killed our engagement rate! Is there a way to get it back? Reach used to pop up where views is for me.  

LinkedIn has really been pushing video, but we’re not seeing any success with ours. We’ve tried a few different types and different speakers, and none have gotten over 200 views (for comparison we see more like 1,000 on other platforms). Given how successful our other types of posts are, I’m hesitant to use the posting space for videos that don’t perform.Anyone else not seeing success with video? If you are seeing success, what’s working for your brand? 

We are currently discussing how to archive our digital content for historical preservation. Obviously in the paper age, our Library & Archives team would receive paper copies to include in historical records, and they still do.  Today we also have digital content in which we’ve made historical announcements and they’d like to preserve the post and the comments associated with it. One simple example, we acquired a historical property and the announcement on Facebook garnered over 1,000 comments. Our Archives team wants to add this to our collection. Is anyone else discussing this? We’re beginning to explore what types of Reports we can create and how we can use tagging to assist. 

Hi! Which tool do you use to see impressions, engagements, etc., broken down by country? For example, I need to see how many views I get each month from our audience in Germany.

I’ve been asked to pull following data from LinkedIn, not Industry or Profession information, just numbers going back to the creation of that company page. I was not working at this current company when it was created and as people have come and gone, any data pulled during that time is gone. Has anyone had luck reaching out to LinkedIn customer services to make this kind of request? I’m aware they only allow retrieving data from the last 365 days, hoping someone has been successful in gathering number following with a request beyond that limitation .

Each time I review a social listening report, the “Last 7 or 28 days” option sticks to the last time I viewed the report (i.e., if I have 'Last 7 Days' selected today, when I check the report tomorrow, it should automatically include the previous 7 days. Right now, it won't include yesterday.)Am I missing something or is this a bug?

Is there a way to track a hashtag on LinkedIn- inside of sprout? The Smart Inbox only grabs mentions and replies on posts. I figure there has to be a way, but with all the dumb API restrictions, there might not be. We want to then set up a rule to send me an email for negative sentiment around that hashtag. We had an ex-employee go on a lovely rant, not tag us, but use a common hashtag.  Thanks! 

Hey, y’all!  After hours of researching the best practices to reach non-followers on my restaurant client’s IG account, I keep accumulating the same 8-10 “Best Practices” on every website. I thought I would put it out here and see if any of you have cracked the secret that nobody is talking about to reaching non-followers? 

I noticed one of my competitors, Blxstrap, is using Sprout to handle their updates and social engagement. Their setup looks pretty smooth, which got me thinking.For those of you running smaller teams — is Sprout worth it at that stage? Any recommendations on which features or plans are actually useful early on, and what to avoid overpaying for?Would love to hear your thoughts before I pull the trigger.

I’d love a feature where we can see all of the posts we’re tagged/mentioned in across all platforms under one tab so we don’t have to go to the individual channels anymore!

 I’m struggling to create a LinkedIn reshare in Employee Advocacy that shows up like a normal reshare rather than a link to the LinkedIn post I’m hoping to have employees reshare (screenshot of the result I’m getting that I don’t want). Am I doing something wrong, or is this not an option? I also had been thinking there was an option to like/comment rather than only reshares - was this something I imagined? I’m not seeing an easy way to set it up, if so.  

Hey everyone 👋I’d love to hear how you all approach this: When you’re collaborating with another company (not necessarily an influencer) on a joint social post, how do you navigate the differences between brand and style guidelines?For example—our brand has its own voice, design system, and accessibility standards, but a collaborator may have very different colors, tone, or visual rules they want to use. We want the post to feel cohesive and on-brand for both of us, but sometimes it feels like trying to merge two very different identities.Do you: Create a hybrid style that pulls from both brands? Use neutral/shared design elements instead of trying to merge everything? Have formal agreements or is it more case-by-case? Curious what strategies, guidelines, or even compromises have worked for you.

Hi Social Care Champions! I see so many great tips here, and I want to add something about Case Management. We offer social care as a service at B Squared Media (8 years and running with this service!). I CANNOT EXPRESS how much of a GAME CHANGER Case Management is for all things social care. WOW! Our clients are SO impressed.Escalations are much more seamless to handle … automatic case creation is **chef’s kiss** … TAGGING IS LIFE! I’ll stop gushing now. But seriously, if you’re doing any sort of customer care/customer service/social selling - YOU NEED THIS. 💚

Over the summer, our nonprofit decided to start experimenting with LinkedIn newsletters. 3 months, 7 editions, 8.6K followers, and 18K views later, here is what we learned from the process.First off, if you haven't seen Candid's LinkedIn newsletters, they are basically a roundup of articles and resources. The goal is to share things folks may have missed, since we do a lot of long-form content.Now to the lessons learned.1. It's a great place to reuse content. To make these newsletters, we used AI to rewrite the blurbs we already had for our existing articles, and then had a human edit them into our Candid style. Easy peasy.2. It's a fantastic way to get links in. Every time we released a LinkedIn newsletter we saw a 200% increase in clicks from LinkedIn to our website. Yay!3. We can share niche content, withou

Is there any way to add instagram-based audio when drafting a story or feedpost in Sprout? Is this a feature that is even possible? 🤓

LinkedIn announced it will be partnering with several third-party platforms to provide more detailed post analytics so users don’t have to check LinkedIn natively. Sprout is not currently listed, but is that in the works? This would be a great asset to be able to access directly in Sprout.Social Media TodayLinkedIn Post Announcement 

Hi everyone, I’m looking to connect with some folks who have run amazing and successful fundraising campaigns on social media. Know anyone? Are you that someone? Would love to chat about what made it successful! If you don’t work at a nonprofit, do you remember a social media campaign that inspired you to donate? 

I am running a test to see if posts perform better when the link is in the comments vs. in the caption. I’m wondering if anyone can help answer a question I have.From what I’ve found online, LinkedIn doesn’t track clicks on links that are in the comments, only links that are in the captions. However, I’ve noticed that on posts where the link is in the comments, LinkedIn is showing clicks in its native tracking section, and the number is inordinately high compared to posts where the link is in the caption. Can anyone explain this? Is it tracking clicks on the image that was included in the post? And if that’s the case, when the link is in the caption, how do I know it’s tracking clicks on the link and not clicks on the image? (my images are not clickable)Examples: