Advice & Best Practices

I was hired as a Digital Marketing Coordinator many years ago, but that really just meant that I was the one managing social accounts, responding to comments, writing captions, and planning content calendars. I was not a content creator, more of a social strategist. But with how things have shifted I have tried both hiring a social media manager and a content creator and unfortunately neither of them lasted. When hiring for social media roles in 2023 are you seeing a greater trend toward hiring a content creator or someone more strategic? 

Hi there, fellow SMM - I manage social for an SaaS in the risk management space called Riskonnect and we’re wondering what type of out-of-the-box static image posts that are working well for your brand to promote upcoming in-person events and virtual webinar type events. We have no trouble getting engagement on in-person event posts when we’re live at an event, but it’s pretty challenging to get quality engagement on posts leading up to an event (not posting about events is not an option). Thanks in advance for your ideas/suggestions! -Katy 

I’m wondering, is there an average “churn rate” percentage for losing social media followers? I’ve been looking at my company’s social media analytics and one of the goals I want to set for my team is to increase follower retention. But, I’m running into a roadblock finding info on what actual goals and KPIs should be. What defines success? 

Happy Friday, Arb!I’m building our EA program and will begin interviewing our ELT and thought leaders in the next two weeks. Does anyone have a list of questions they’ve asked during these meetings that have proven valuable when working to craft each leader’s narrative and positioning?We want them to be champions of our brand, yes, but also champions of their respective fields and how that ties into our brand.  Thanks!

👋 Hi! I’m Craig, Community Manager with Goosechase. 🪺 We recently launched our very own online community, The Nest, to connect Goosechase creators, share resources, and host events. We currently use the Smart Inbox to find current customers using the app that may benefit from joining the community and sharing a link.🗣️ Does anyone have experience driving new community signups and engagement with social? What tactics have worked for you? What’s the best way to generate a new post in your community?

Gearing up for Q4 and thinking about the training we will put forth to our team. Feel free to answer ANY that apply to you:  What are some aspects you enjoy or look for when shopping with companies online through Social platforms? How do you prefer to interact with companies during the holiday season? Are there any specific elements you appreciate during this festive time? In your experience, what makes you a loyal customer to certain companies far beyond Q4? Are there specific factors that keep you coming back? How important is prompt and personalized customer service to you when engaging with companies online? Do you value proactive assistance from companies, such as proactive outreach about promotions or relevant updates? What channels or methods do you find most convenient for communicating with companies during your shopping experience? During the holiday s

Hi!I oversee social at a large HR Tech company. I lead the strategy for the corporate brand as well as advise our regional marketers and sub-brands on social practices. (There is a more elegant way to explain that - but I am struggling with words at the moment.)We have recently been given the green-light from our social stakeholders to explore TikTok. However, we are very conservative and risk-adverse when it comes to social. As a result, I have been tasked with creating guidelines (dos and do nots) for our social leads looking to use the platform for their regional efforts and/or sub-brand. Has anyone seen or created something like this? I’m not sure where to start.Any advice or suggestions are welcome! 

I’m looking for a visually appealing format to present a social media strategy through , what is everyone using at the moment? Are you making bespoke decks every time? 

Hello Everyone,I helped launch our Employee Advocacy program to our team about a year ago and it’s been doing well. I am currently working on providing a refresher on the platform, including functionality’s some may not have been aware of.I plan to review the various Topic (10) and Tag (17) categories available, but when I view the platform through my ‘Reader’ test account I don’t see Tags available. My Questions:How do you utilize/ categorize Topics and Tags?As an Admin, would you suggest listing all “Tags” I want ‘Readers’ to explore as a Topic?

Hi there, Does anyone know if comments from Youtube ads stream into Sprout’s inbox?

I was wondering if anyone has a source to track updated engagement rate by industry per quarter? I would love to provide an average comparison while reporting our per quarter for perspective. 

For some reason, pretty much overnight, our facebook engagement rates dropped dramatically. I haven’t really changed anything specifically but it happened around the same time Meta Business Suite replaced creator studio. Has anyone else experienced this or got any advice? Thanks in advance :)

Community! Let’s talk AI and content creation. Here’s this week’s question:How do you strike a balance between leveraging AI-powered automation in content creation and maintaining the human touch? What aspects of content creation do you think should always remain in the hands of human creators?We want to hear your thoughts in the thread below! 🧵

Hi All, I am just curious about which agencies you work with to help you create blog articles and video content, or if your team does it all. If your team creates all the content, how many people are on your team and how many branches does your financial institution have? What are all the positions on your Marketing team?Sorry for all the questions! We are in the process of evaluating new agencies to work with, or if we should stick with the agencies we already have. We are also in the process of re-organizing our team, and we will be growing after we officially acquire another bank later this year. At that time, we will have 81 branches and around 10 employees on our team. 

When you think of a ‘creator” or “influencer” you probably have some idea in your head of some colorful video with a charismatic human with bright clothing doing something in front of a camera. And even with all that blitz and glitz, these people are quite relatable to their audiences.And that is what brands should channel. As brands, you want your video to look nice, BUT NOT TOO NICE! You want it to be done in an ingenious way, BUT NOT TOO INGENIOUS.Confused yet? Yes, me too. But it’s all about the community. Let’s break it down.1. Each social media platform has its own look and feel (and audiences), just like your brand - It is important that each video is made and then tweaked in a way that it becomes tailored to each specific platform you are posting it at. Creators excel at this. They create a master video and then they use in-app tools depending on the social media platform to rank up points in the ever-changing algorithms.2.

For years now we’ve been tracking impressions, engagements, engagements by type, engagement rate, clicks, and click through rate for our organic content on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.Lately it seems like META is reporting data out differently and so our data tracking is off.  We have more impressions out of the blue and then a giant drop.So what metrics do you think are best to use?

This question came up in a client call today: does it seem that most consumers today passively consume brand content versus engage with content? Meaning, his thesis was most consumers today don’t expend the energy to interact (like, heart, comment, share, send) with brand content on Instagram like they were a year or more ago. My “feel” without having data or research is that most consumers will interact with a brand’s content but the relevancy bar for making an interaction is higher today than it used to be. Does anyone have research data on this? Thanks and have a great weekend.JJK 

Hey everyone!We’ll be launching Advocacy soon and I’m incredibly excited to bring this to our company. One of the ways we plan to use the tool is to position relevant team members as thought leaders in our industry by providing them individualized comms they can more easily and readily share with their networks.As I’m prepping my deck for the C-suite/Exec team, I wanted to see if anyone had any examples or stats of having done this successfully they wouldn’t mind sharing. Redacted info is fine! I don’t need to know names/companies/industries. I just want to be able to provide examples of orgs who have successfully segmented their Ambassadors.

How is everyone managing contact phone numbers and emails across multiple Instagram accounts? I’m consolidating control over at least 6-7 different accounts, possibly more and want to eliminate the need to coordinate getting a security code from random folks whose phones or emails were associated with each account years ago. From what I can gather IG limits the number of accounts that can be associated with a single email address to 5 accounts (but I’ve seen some conflicting info around that as well). So I’m considering the following options: Creating 2-3 IG-specific emails that myself and my team have access to that we can use for all of our different accounts  Creating a Google Voice account or accounts for phone numbers we can use to associate with our different accountsDoes anyone have experience with these approaches or alternatives? It goes without saying that once we settle on an approach everything will have to be clearly documented in our p

I am completely mind blown by the new Generative Fill in Photoshop! I recently watched @jeff.macdonald’s Photoshop Generative AI For Marketers - A Live Workshop on Linkedin and it got me excited about all the capabilities for social media marketers! Here’s something I created for my small business. I took a product photo and made it more robust. So, I’m curious are you using it or considering using it for social?Thread below with your answers or examples of things you’ve created!

Hi all! As you may know, Facebook requires users to use their personal profiles in order to manage, create, and execute tasks within the business manager and business pages. Do you have any recommendations on how businesses/agencies can set up a personal account that can function as a business admin? We often find that our external integrations from Facebook like Sprout and other reporting software need to be connect via personal profiles that are admins in our business manager, however, it would be nice if we had an account (personal profile) that we could use across the business in order to establish those connections.   Please let me know your thoughts and best practices! Thanks in advance :)