Advice & Best Practices

Hi everyone! One of the graphic designers I work with on some video projects has got it in his head that the vertical videos he is making should be now 4:5 aspect ratio instead of the normal 9:16 that I have been asking for. We post on LinkedIn (most followers), Facebook/Instagram/Threads, and X. For LinkedIn especially, what has everyone been seeing as best practice/most engaegment? I prefer the 9:16 format where we ensure that the most important visuals are in the ‘safe zone’ of 4:5, but wanted to get some opinions on this to see if maybe I’m totally off base. 

Is there a way to add a collaborator on a Facebook post in Sprout? I don’t see that option but it would be really helpful! 

Hi everyone! I work for a local municipality and help oversee the strategy for 20+ social media accounts across different departments.Each month, I report to our executive team on the previous month’s top‑performing posts. Recently, they’ve asked for more context, specifically average impressions per post, average clicks, average shares, and so on.Here’s where I’m stuck: How do you account for viral or unusually high‑performing posts when reporting through Sprout Social? I know I can exclude posts using tags, but I’m trying to figure out the best way to define what counts as “viral” so I can set a consistent baseline.Our accounts vary a lot, which makes this tricky. For example: In 2026, our Police Department had 16 Facebook posts with 300K+ views and 27 with 200K+ views out of 367 total posts. Meanwhile, our City Hall account only had two posts above 200K views

Hello - just wondering of any of the Sprout team (or anyone else) have any knowledge of impressions data being in the roadmap for Bluesky reporting anytime soon? I realize that it may not be on their list of priorities to make that data available, particularly as there are no ads on the platform, but it’s hard to qualify our Bluesky engagement at the moment without the metric that we need to calculate engagement rate. Thanks!

Hey folks,At Sprout, we’re currently deep in research for our upcoming Social Intelligence Report. We’ve got the quantitative data, but now we’re looking for the "meat" behind the numbers—the real stories from the people building these functions in the trenches.We want to spotlight the mastery within this community. To get the conversation started, we’d love to hear your thoughts on two shifts we’re seeing:The "Boardroom" Translation: What is your go-to strategy for translating social metrics into business outcomes that executives actually care about? The Cross-Functional Mix: In your experience, where does Social Intelligence "live" best? Is it Marketing, Strategy, or a hybrid team we haven't named yet?If you have a hot take or a proven framework, drop a comment below!We’ll be reaching out to a few of you who just get it to dive deeper and help us lead the indust

We launched a new product and there’s been some challenges, so it’s no surprise we’re seeing comments about it on our social media posts (often ones that are unrelated to the product). Usually I have pretty good luck asking them to take the conversation to DM so I can get their email and other private contact info so I can have our customer success team reach out. But recently, people just want to keep complaining in public and try to give me that information on comments.One hypothesis I have is that they don’t know what a DM is, so I’ve changed to saying direct message. But wondering if maybe that’s too confusing. Anyone have experience and thoughts on this? 

I’m getting ready to launch a new employee advocacy program at my company and am looking for inspo. We’ve gone with Sprout’s employee advocacy platform for organizing/tracking, but I’d love to hear your best ideas on what you’ve seen work.Incentives for participating Types of content employees are most likely to share widely What kind of guidelines have you used for employee-suggested content? What else should I be thinking about?

For those of you who have launched an employee advocacy program, can you share some of the successes and struggles you had in getting team members on board? We’d love to start one but resources (platform costs and staffing) are concerns.

Since LinkedIn has brought “impressions” to commenting, it’s made it as clear as ever how much visibility your direct engagement strategy brings. I’d love to be able to quantify that and share the impact with leadership.Is there a way to see this data for comments in Sprout? Or is anyone finding a way to do this? At some point someone shared how to do it from a person page, but I don’t think I’ve seen the same options for a company page. Thanks all!

We all know Instagram is heavily weighting shares, saves, and reposts in the algorithm, and clients are asking us to benchmark performance heading into 2026. Are there any solid studies or updated benchmarks for these metrics specifically? Or how are you thinking about benchmarking shares/saves/reposts in a way that’s actually useful and strategic this year? 

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

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! 

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?