Advice & Best Practices

Looking to get some industry insight from our invaluable Sprout Social Community for a Sprout customer. This customer works in the news/media space and has seen their journalist's Twitter followers decline in the last couple of months. We attribute some of this to Twitter bot clean up, but they are also curious if other news/media customers have seen something similar. They are also seeing a decline in potential Twitter impressions and are curious what other people in their space are experiencing.As a result of all of this, they are also looking for any tips specific to the news and media industry for growing followings on Instagram or Facebook - which, they say, has historically been difficult. Any recent news/media trends would be so appreciated!

We’re having major issues connecting to our clients’ business managers this past month. I’m not sure what the issue is, but we cannot get a couple of accounts to connect after going through all the steps we normally go through. AND when we tried a workaround so that I could connect my account directly instead of our manager account, I didn’t come up as someone who he could connect to neither with my name or email. Is anyone else having these troubles and how are you handling this? 

For my clients I normally schedule content on Facebook about a 1 - 1.5 weeks in advance and with the scheduled posts instead of boosting them I turn them into ads since we are trying to get engagement & eyeballs on my client’s Facebook page. Last week I tried using my scheduled posts in business suite as an “Existing Post” option, but they wouldn’t show up. I tried even using the Post ID given in business suite but it kept coming up as non-existent. I was able to speak on the phone with my marketing manager pro at Facebook, and they told me that they are no longer allowing you to use scheduled posts for an ad and that they have to be active on the page in order to be able to use them. Does anyone know when this was announced or when they made this change? Have you had a similar experience? I just feel like Facebook didn’t give any sort of heads up about this change and it’s making my job a little harder since I manage about 5 different Facebook Pages who all run ads for every po

Ran into a super weird problem and wondering if it’s happened to anyone else.Currently running a Facebook ad for a client. I went to check in this morning to see how it’s performing and noticed that it’s completely missing from the Campaign tab. After momentarily freaking out, I check the Ad Sets tab and my audience is still there - I check the Ads tab and both of my ad creatives are still there as well. Additionally, I filtered ad performance to yesterday and today and the ad is still active and delivering. When I inspect the ad, I can still see the campaign level, and then my ad sets/ads beneath it.It seems like somehow only the campaign portion of the ad completely disappeared from the campaign tab. Has this happened to anyone else? I’ve reached out to Facebook support but to the surprise of literally nobody they gave me information that wasn’t relevant or what I was asking at all and then acted like they solved the issue and ended the chat.To potentially pai

Hi All - I work for a global company and have recently come across a “Facebook Market Page” for a country that I want removed. I have been researching for hours but have come up with nothing! Does anyone know how to permanently delete a Facebook market Page? TIA!!

I’ve been battling an issue where each side says is on the other’s and curious if anyone else experiencing? My calendar view is showing that I posted on one profile on LinkedIn 76 times last week… not true!When I click through… it shows a current publishing timebut these aren’t coming from organic… they’re old (12-24 months ago) campaigns that our paid team swears are turned off. Whatever Sprout is grabbing, it’s clogging up my calendar views and muddling up my metrics. Would love any help on ideas to test out in an effort to resolve. 

Hey everyone! I send weekly reports to department heads over at my company that include the following…News page likesGrowthImpressionsTop performing posts w/ metricsscreenshots of those postsIn that report, I also include our weekly e-mail stats + website metrics from GA.I’m basically assembling this report in another document because I find the reports on Sprout aren’t easy for someone who doesn’t know much about marketing to read and understand.Does anyone have advice on the best template/format to use? Thank you!

Hi all!Facebook randomly unpublished our Business page and suspended our ad account over the weekend for “continued Community Standards violations.” The thing is, we have never gotten a notice or review of any violations, and our Page Quality says “Good News, no violations to show.” We are a fintech/insurance broker, so our content is nothing particularly controversial either.It is adversely affecting advertising, as they won’t run ads without the page being republished. I have reached out to support through the Business Center via chat and phone and have been stuck in a “we’ll investigate” status for 3+ days.Has anyone experienced this? Why was your page affected? What did you do to remedy?

Can I track instagram storys for tags? Our business has requirements for influencers how often they need to tag us but some of them only do in instagram stories. Is it still possible to keep track of these kind of mentions?

Are any organizations out there exploring Hive Social as an alternative to Twitter?

Hi Sprout Agency Partners! I’m currently working alongside an agency navigating a bizarre Instagram Server Error. Has anyone successfully navigated or resolved Instagram Profile Errors like this? When publishing to Instagram, this profile will have multiple failed posts. Sometimes the post error will respond as a media code error meaning that the media is the wrong specs. But, when we run this through other environments, the media publishes fine and follows all of the spec guides from Sprout and Meta Sometimes Meta flags profiles and posts as spam posts, which Sprout recommends adjusting publishing times when posting. The agency has done this and is still experiencing the same barriers. This is one of those scenarios where Sprout is limited on what we can mitigate as a third party and Meta is blaming the use of third-party publishing for the error on their end. Has anyone been able to get out of this vicious cycle for Instagram?

Hello! My name is Lisa Alberta. I’m the marketing director for a local health club and I’m looking for tips on how to build out our Listening Topics. Hoping to connect with others in the industry that can help with keywords, themes etc.  Right now when we look at the data, there is a lot of “noise” and we’re trying to customize our topic so that we are aware of the conversations going on in our town in and around fitness. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Social media managers (SMMs) play a pivotal role for any modern brand; they are responsible for much of the business’s external communication and engagement with existing and potential customers.When it’s time to hire a social media manager, a solid job description and asking the right questions can help you hire a qualified professional who will take your social strategy to the next level.Get all the questions and answers: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-manager-interview-questions/ 

Hi everyone!I’ve been managing the social accounts of different brands for the last decade, and I’m coming across a situation I’ve never encountered before.TL;DR: our company was merged with another, completely changing our product roadmap, much to the disdain of current users (who the product is no longer geared towards). It has resulted in quite the backlash onto our social channels. Every post is met with comments about how awful our product is, how we don’t listen to the customer base, etc.What are some successful community management tactics you’ve employed when company changes disrupt the community?

Hey Sprout Community! My team has several clients connected to our Sprout and we have recently had issues reconnecting the LinkedIn company pages back to Sprout after the connection expires. We heard through the grapevine that this is due to LinkedIn updating their API to requiring a Super Admin privilege to connect to Sprout. Has anyone else had this problem within the last week or so? 

Hi all - I’m trying to schedule my TikToks and am getting the following error: Uploading a custom thumbnail is not supported by TikTok.” How do I remove the custom thumbnail? I am not intentionally adding it nor need it. I’m uploading my .mov and it’s automatically creating a thumbnail in Publisher. Is there any way around this?  TIA!

Hey SproutSocial Community!I work at a school district and want to have a HS student ‘takeover’ the district’s Instagram account to share ‘a day in the life at from a HS student perspective’.  My question is - has anyone done a Instagram takeover yet through sprout?If so, what recommendations do you have for permissions?  I was thinking I would set him up in Sprout but would give him ‘needs approval’ access for the Instagram account.  That way I don’t share the password, and he still gets access to post, and I get to see it first before it’s LIVE.  Any suggestions? Anything I’m missing?  - Caitlin 

Hi friends! Stephanie from the Sprout team here. 👋🏻I’m reaching out with a question on behalf of one of our customers and hoping the community may have some insight: they work with an agricultural company and are putting together a social strategy for launching a social media presence in LATAM (Mexico, Argentina and Colombia specifically). For this project, we’re looking for recent research on social media usage among farmers, ideally within the LATAM region. We’ve found some decent starting research that’s more generalized around social media platform usage in LATAM, but are curious for more focused research on behavior/usage trends among farming/agriculture so we know where to prioritize our efforts. Appreciate your help in advance!

A handful of months ago, one of our clients ad accounts was disabled for unknown reasons. They took the usual steps to try and get it back up and running without any success. They even had one of their admins setup a new ad account and it worked for a bit to run ads through the new ad account, but that was disabled as well. And finally, we at the agency used one of our employee’s accounts that hadn’t ever been added to the client’s account to setup ads through yet another ad account which was also disabled. All of this to say… it seems that we’ve hit a dead end and need to explore other options.One of our options is to start a new FB page, new IG profile, and new ad account. Curious if anyone here has done this and has any things to think through before doing this? We obviously recognize that we would lose all of our current fans/followers, but right now paid is outweighing organic. 

I have a client who is a dentist's office and they want to know if they have a good customer-to-social media follower ratio. They have 7500 clients and based on their follower count 17.83% of their customer base is following. I can't find any data about the actual number of customers to social media followers ratios. And what is considered a good or bad benchmark? Has anyone heard of this ratio before or have a source or data I could reference. Thank you in advance.

Hi everyone! Recently I’ve been noticing a downturn in impressions across several FB pages I’m an admin for - some more major than others. It seems that Facebook has changed its algorithm again, so I’m wondering if anyone has found success with the new algorithm? Is there a certain post type or types that seems to be performing well?Thank you!