Advice & Best Practices

Hi, fellow social media friends,I’m Stevie, the Social Media Director at College Essay Guy. We’ve been posting on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and LinkedIn for a few years now.We’ve been looking into diversifying our content creators because as of right now, only a couple folks are recording video content for our SM platforms. I’m curious: how do you all incentivize your content creators to consistently produce video content? Of course, money is a great motivator, and I pay all my content creators, but I’m curious if there are other incentives you offer to your teams?Excited to hear from you, community!

My Sprout Social webinar last week must have really invigorated me because I spent the weekend refreshing the Accessible Social website. It involved a new font, an updated homepage, a new navigational feature, and added resources. There’s still more I’d like to do, but for now I'm pretty happy with the refresh. I hope everyone else is too.Be sure to check the site out if you want to learn more about accessible best practices for social media and content creation. Feedback is also totally welcome! Blue graphic featuring a pattern of different yellow emoji faces. In the center is the smiling camel mascot for Accessible Social. 

Super curious if anyone is seeing a difference in views for TikToks when they add a location tag?Last week I was uploading for a brand and a popup told me, “Get more views by adding a location to this video”.I was curious if this was true and if anyone is trying this out to bring in more views from a specific region. I could see this being useful in strategies that need to drive store traffic.

Hi! Curious as to what anyone has seen as “industry average” of social media follower growth for a tracking KPI. I know this varies by type of company size. Example, my company is 5,000-10,000 employees. 

Could use some help! Any advice when recruiting or casting vision for non-marketing employees to be involved in social media campaigns or on-camera for videos? How would you motivate employees to be excited to help out?

Let us know want you think on the question below… 

Hello all! I'm always looking for new ways to prove out the value of social and influencer content long term. Both qual and quant that goes beyond all the basic measurements, consumer behavior dives, SOV, etc.I'm currently thinking through measurement methodology for two things 1. that could assess value of eyes on content, with the idea that seeing content will create top of mind recall when someone actually needs the service they saw in content.  And then 2. That could look at the value of content in driving WOMM. Has anyone explore either of the above before? If so, did you find something that worked for your company. I'll definitely keep everyone updated as I work through this. 

For those of you who have launched an employee advocacy program at your company, I’d love to hear success stories or tips on how to drive engagement from departments. 

Vote for which of the following you think has the biggest impact on the success of a social media campaigns in the poll below. Tell us why in the thread below. 

One of the moderators for our organization’s Facebook group told me that they used to have the ability to add hashtags to posts in the group to organize them (e.g., look under a specific hashtag for all posts containing it within a group) but that it no longer works. I’m not well-versed in groups… does anyone know whether this can still be done or what changed?

Social media pros, let's lighten up the feed! And let us know  your thoughts on the below…

Hey everyone, I drive the community management strategy for a big brand and am looking for advice. Historically, we measured the success of our community management program by tracking the volume of interactions (e.g. how many times we respond to consumer comments and posts). This year we have prioritized more proactive interactions (like commenting on a trending TikTok) versus reactive interactions (responding to a tweet that tagged our brand) to help the brand take part in cultural trends, join trending conversations, and overall position the brand as more relatable to build brand affinity. The thing I’m struggling with how to measure the success of this new goal and ultimately, how to communicate that success to key stakeholders. Any recommendations, advice or examples of how your teams have measured the impact of community management are welcome.Cheers,Audrey

I’m looking to find social media gurus who are navigating the world of “vice” commodities such as Alcohol, Cigars (not cigarettes), Cannabis related products or news, etc. What are you doing to have effective strategies that drive conversion and reinforce support from stakeholders when you have to also post content within the community guidelines? I find that many of the proposed social strategies that exist in the mainstream are not spaces that those types of industries can really leverage. For example, we cannot advertise in most cases. Everything must be done organically. Social shopping is out of the question. Limiting Page visibility to 21 and up means that links to your platforms may show a broken link until the user logs into their account. Showing the product or using it can result in flagged or removed content. Community violations can wind up appearing arbitrary with little to no communication. Why did this post get taken down when there are 10 exactly like i

I have a customer who is looking to train their team, mostly sales and individual contributors, on how to use social media for events. If you’re attending a conference, what should you do before the event on social? Like posting that you are attending and following the event hashtag.  What should you do on social during the event? What should you do on social after the event?  What are some best practices you’ve seen?Would love to gather some insights from you all!

We've been posting our Tik Tok's through Sprout vs. natively, and one difference I've noticed is the decline in our views. When we were posting natively, we were able to add as many hashtags as we wanted in the post copy, which I think helped drive our views. Since posting through Sprout, I've noticed there is a character limit on the video description due to an API limitation. Because of this, we haven't been able to add in as many hashtags as before. My guess would be the decline in our views is a result of the lack of hashtags we've been using on our Tik Toks. Any other similar experiences?

Calling all science industry social media managers!What has been your followership goal for overall social media? What’s the average for an industry that is less “social” considering our audiences? I’ve been gaining about 1,000 a month but want some more insight into what is the common industry standard. 

Hello everyone! I wanted to get a quick gut check on sharing UGC Reels. It’s probably no surprise that most of the UGC Reels I find are also ones that use well known, trending music. I’ve searched high and low but cannot find any information online about resharing these and what the protocol is. What’s your process? Reshare? Share only to IG Stories? Pass on by? Any insights would be much appreciated!

Hi everyone!  I’m social media manager at a large tech company (~700 people) and I’ll get social post requests from people in different departments all throughout the company on a consistent basis. So far, I’ve been trying to organize those on a monthly basis with shared Google sheets then adding them to Sprout. I’m wondering if anyone here has been able to find a way to establish a formalized process for gathering these requests/suggestions and fitting them into your social strategy while balancing not always posting everything everyone suggests if it’s not the right fit for your company’s social?  TIA!-Kayla