Advice & Best Practices

I am certainly glad I keep moderation on in the Facebook groups I moderate. Most of the time the posts are fine but there is often that one zinger that is just terrible. Got one this morning  that would have just devastated some of our parent volunteers!

If you manage a social account for a retail brand with a brick and mortar store (or maybe for a restaurant, bar, or taproom), this is a trick I started using this year!Sometimes people will contact us via DM outside of office hours with a question that could use a faster reply that we’re able to respond with (I’m a social team of one and manage 4 different accounts). I started adding not only these are the hours we’ll reply ASAP during, but also you can call the store if you can’t wait for a reply & the stores’ phone numbers.And during holidays, I change the away messages to reflect that we are closed & will reply ASAP when we reopen the next business day.I’m not sure if anyone actually ends up calling the stores when they get the message, but it at least gives them an immediate reply & an avenue to get a faster answer!What automatic reply tricks have you learned?

Having a consistent brand voice that carries across all aspects of your social media is so important-including how you respond to comments and messages.I work on many different brands (primarily in the home service sector) and would love to develop a more individual voice for each brand. Right now, we are pretty much the same safe, professional voice across each brand, with some slight variances to allow for differences in the target market.So I’m curious how you all go about developing a voice, and for those of you who are allowed to have a little more fun with that voice (i.e., injecting some humor, snark, or sass), how were you able to get upper management on board with this?  

We had a customer service experience earlier this week that made a parent of a prospective parent feel great. The parent posted on LinkedIn about how they loved our admissions tour and the care we put into the experience for their high school sophomore. We saw the post quickly and were able to comment, thanking them for their visit and hoping we move up from #2 on the student’s list to #1. The creator has 50,000 followers on LinkedIn, which didn’t affect our response but was great to see. The post now has over 500 likes, our comment has 40 likes, and we had the comment chain below happen. Proof that speedy replies can really enhance our relationships with our audience! 

The asset library is great for standardizing language and saving you a few steps on customer response! We include things such as language for the billing department or how to find a provider near them.

I work in the healthcare space, so fortunately, we don’t face too many frustrations when it comes to interactions with our brand or products. My focus is mostly on finding meaningful ways to engage appropriately.One tip that always works for me is to personalize every response as much as possible. For example, instead of a generic “We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” try something like, “Hi [Name], thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. I can imagine how frustrating that must be, and I’m here to help!”I’m curious—does anyone here also work in healthcare? How are you creating meaningful engagements on social? I find it challenging due to HIPAA privacy laws, and often, I can’t interact with the positive feedback we receive because of this.

How is everyone dealing with the constant job scams and recruitment fraud? It used to only be on LinkedIn and we could get the scammer’s profile taken down but they are now just using text or apps like Signal or WhatsApp and basically un-reportable. We’ve reported each incident to the FTC and any apps where they took place, we’ve worked to have domains and emails shut down. We’ve got a pinned post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram and we respond to all reports (public and private) with info on recruitment scams, how to report them and where to lean more. We’ve also added a banner that pops up when you visit our career site.  Want to make sure we’re doing all we can to protect our communities, our reputation and our Talent Acquisition team who are constant targets of impersonation, especially as we continue to post legitimate jobs on social etc. 

I work in MedTech, and customer interaction seems to be a completely different situation than in other fields. I just try to be as well-researched as possible before I post something; my audience consists of doctors, so I am constantly nervous about saying the wrong thing 😂

Hi! I’m curious, for those of you that use the scheduling tool in Sprout that recommends the best times to post, have you found it to be accurate? Or do you find you’ve gotten more engagement with times they don’t list?

Has anyone ever worked on removing business Facebook pages for a large company with multiple store/service/business locations and centralizing brand presence on the platform to just the national brand page? I have done this previously in past businesses (though we offered the opportunity to move to a different singular platform with organic growth capability), but I have a colleague who is looking to learn if any other businesses have done this to better support their stance to their teams, and their situation is slightly different.They have about 300 Facebook business accounts that have been dormant for a while, so they are considering working with their teams to sunset those pages. Those 300 accounts are only about 30% of the total number of store/service business accounts, and because they are not considering sunsetting all accounts (only those that have remained inactive for long periods of time), they will inevitably be faced with concerns that they should allow the busi

I’m the social media manager for a community bank that spans across Louisiana and Texas. Currently on our Instagram page, we put the majority of our pictures in branded frames. It’s just a kneejerk reaction from when the bank was smaller and needed to boost the brand recognition. Now that we’re a little larger, I’m not so sure it moves the needle at all and just clutters the feed. Does anyone have any insights about the use of branded frames on Instagram and whether or not they are actually helpful?

I’m currently trying to show the importance of consistent branding across social media to others within my organization. Does anyone have any examples of brands they think do a great job at this, does your brand do this well, or do you have any talk tracks or points that could help me emphasize the importance of this to others? 

So, I was checking my Sprout report for our profile like I always do on Monday and noticed that our Facebook followers dropped 1.4k since December 4. Are they having another purge that I missed? Or is this a blip? I have metrics meeting on Wednesday and would rather not be breathing in a paper bag the entire time. 

Hi SMMs! As we get to #2024 wrapped season, I know a lot of us are year end reports and strategies for 2025. My question is, what are you using to create these? So far I have 3 different google docs that are sort of organized chaos of reports and strategies. I was wondering if anyone has found good templates for social media reports, strategies, even camping docs. Thanks! 

I have multiple Facebook groups that I have to post to at least for a few more months until we have a more centralized private method. Anyone have any thoughts on doing this more efficiently? I was so very hopeful that this function would be available on Sprout but it seems Facebook has quashed it for everyone! It is my biggest pain point right now.

How is your team positioning the likely drop in reach/engagements on social media due to the intensity of the election season?

Kia ora (Hello). We are based in the Northland region of Aotearoa (New Zealand). We have a population of about 194,007.I actually have a few questions please:Given our population size, should we use detailed targeting? Meta recommends only using for populations of more than 2 million 😅 Is there a risk of running multiple ads at the same time, targeted at the Northland region? Is it best for us to try customise our target audiences based on our website traffic?Thank you. 

Kia ora from Aotearoa (New Zealand).We are a local government organisation in the Northland region and are of the opinion that our type of messaging/content will not cut through the noise or resonate with our communities during the busy summer periods (December - January) and it’s best we keep our distribution low key. My question is - are we wrong? Our messages are generally shaped around rules and regulations e.g. Check the shipping calendar before heading out on the water, Check it’s safe swim before diving in (water quality), Help protect our environment this summer by XXXX. Any thoughts are much appreciated.

These metrics are a result of auto-posting content across ~560 Facebook Pages, YoY. I understand engagements, impressions, and reactions increased because we included more Facebook Pages in our auto-posting throughout the year, which is why I wanted to pull in the average impressions/post, average reach/post, average engagements/post. I am confused on how average engagement rate per reach would increase despite other averages declining?  What might this mean?

With Google (in theory) phasing out third-party cookies on Chrome next year and the impact this may have on Meta’s pixel - is your organisation looking to set up their Conversions API? Or are the costs for setting up server-side tracking prohibitive for you? Have you read any helpful articles on this topic?

I work in Higher Ed and when I compare last year’s metrics to this year’s it shows that our Engagement per impressions is up, but our overall engagement is down. This is consistent across all our platforms. Why would this be? Thanks!

Can someone share the best process of doing a LIVE on TikTok with 2 influencers? Do I do it with a 3rd party app or do I invite them via TikTok?  Also do I need to have a Business Account?

I’ve noticed a number of leading accounts in my sector (UK - charity) stopping using hashtags on their Instagram posts in recent months. Is this a change other people are seeing too? Are we seeing the role of hashtags changing?