Connect & Discuss

Happy New Year, and welcome to The Arboretum! 🎉We’re thrilled to kick off 2025 with amazing new members like you—and to celebrate, we’re hosting a special New Year Giveaway! 🌟 How to Enter: Introduce yourself to the community and share:Your name, your role, and what brought you to social media. Your favorite platform and why you love it. A campaign you’ve worked on or admired.💡 Bonus Points: Share your top social media tip or a trend you’re keeping an eye on!Prizes: Two lucky participants will win exclusive Arboretum swag. Think cozy, creative, and perfect for your work-from-home vibe!Deadline: Join

It seems like all the extra things Sprout does are always geared at an American audience. All the webinars you do are during times that are after the workday finishes in Europe. This means that none of your European customers can join live and benefit from asking questions, connecting with people in the comments and etc. In addition, this year’s Giveaway Extravaganza emails were sent at 4:30pm in the UK, which would be 5:30 or even 6:30pm in Europe. By the time we’ve seen the email the next day, the competition of the day is already closed. So again, we can’t participate. I also assume you’re not shipping prizes internationally, so we wouldn’t be able to claim anything even if we do win. In which case you could at least exclude us from emails that aren’t relevant. It genuinely feels like we’re missing out on so much and are overlooked as a customer group.  

Hi fellow social media friends :) My name is Lindsey Weitz, and I am a social media manager for an Automotive Group in Upstate NY. I am a Virginia Tech alum (Go Hokies), but I’ve lived in the Upstate NY area my whole life. Outside of work I love to watch football (Go Giants), watch Formula 1, cook, do anything in the art realm, and travel! My position is brand new within the auto group, and I’m starting from zero when it comes to building their social strategy. I create all the content myself, so I’m always working in Adobe. One of my professional goals for next year is to get better at After Effects. So, if any of you are also social media managers in the automotive industry, I’d love to connect and hear more about how you’ve crafted your strategy! 

Social media naturally comes with its share of challenges and I’ve had plenty of venting moments with my team, but when I think back on the year, there are so many wins to celebrate! We’ve already surpassed all of our social media goals and KPIs for the year. I was able to double our goal for number of reels posted, and I created a TikTok channel from the ground up this year. One of my favorite wins: I had a couple instances this year of posting reels highlighting local businesses (I do destination marketing), and then hearing from business owners that they saw an influx of business after the reel was posted. I can look at analytics all day, but none of it is quite as motivating as knowing my work has real impact on my community! It’s so easy to get sucked into the day-to-day frustrations, so rounding up our EOY reports and stats and looking back on the year is a really needed opportunity to look at the bigger picture and see how much my and my team’s hard work has pai

💪🏻 A couple weeks back, I finally figured out a to-do list system that works for me, which is a really big win! (I change my system every couple of years depending on the circumstances - if I don’t have a working system, my life literally spirals out of control 😂) 👎🏻 Our parent company decided that we should all share a Canva account, so I had to transfer everything (uploads, designs) from my current into the new account - which was an absolute nightmare. You can’t “bulk download” or “bulk transfer” anything in Canva - whatever you do, it has to be done individually.First, I had to download every single upload (500+) from my account to upload them again in the new account. That completely messed up the order of the material in the new uploads folder. I had already gotten so used to that specific order. 😅Then I had to share every individual existing design with my new account via email and open the link I was sent in my email program in an incognito tab (b

Over the course of 2024, I’ve used the time to learn AI prompt engineering using online courses, eBooks, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. I feel it’s critical to know how to optimally leverage the technology rather than be overwhelmed by it.As the quote goes, "You will not be replaced by AI, but by someone using AI," Laurence Liew, director for AI Innovation at AI Singapore. So, I’ll be someone who is able to use AI when and how I want to in the course of my work. Keeping with the curve, if not ahead of it, feels like a win!

One of my recent wins I wanted to share was a collaboration post we did on Instagram with another account, and it has been gaining a lot of traction. Our follower growth has significantly increased, and the engagement on the post itself is constantly growing. I’m glad to see that this collab has been successful for us, and I am excited to do more in 2025 😊 Has anyone else done any collaboration posts that benefited their pages?

It’s officially grind time to start working on our year-end recap for both our social channels and team reports. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been refining what I want the “End of Year Recap” to look like on social, and I’ve had some mild success with it.I use the Reports tab in Sprout to find and highlight the top posts from the year. Since we’re a healthcare organization, most of these are patient stories, which is great because it allows us to give them some well-deserved recognition again. Specifically on LinkedIn, I’ll reshare the top-performing blogs, noting that they are our most viewed posts of the year, and it usually gets decent engagement.I’m curious—what does your brand or company do, if anything, to recap the previous year? I’d love to hear your ideas and brainstorm together!

LOL, I’m kind of joking with the title, but sometimes it’s a nice break when all of Meta goes down! Unless you desperately needed something to go out, then it’s a big dislike. 

ChatGPT helps me with a lot of things every day, so I asked it: “based on what you know about me, what do I like about social media?” And she nailed it! Based on what I know about you, one thing I think you like about social media is its ability to build authentic connections through storytelling and personality. You seem to enjoy blending creativity (like humor, emojis, and visuals) with meaningful messaging that resonates with both audiences and brand values. Social media, for you, seems to be a space where you can celebrate team wins, share clever takes on trends, and highlight the human side of businesses—whether it's through employee stories, event highlights, or showcasing volunteer efforts. It’s about making content relatable, impactful, and engaging. Let me know if I’m on the right track!

Who else is endlessly frustrated with reach on Instagram? Or changes to Meta platforms that nobody wants?Mosseri talked last week about wanting to boost small creators, but doesn’t address the problems we’ve been dealing with for years. And this Meta AI is nothing but annoying. Some days I wish I could leave IG altogether, if I’m being honest. 

We’ve had a ton of success posting Carousels (Document posts) on LinkedIn this year. The engagement is off the carts - typically about 3-4X the engagement we’d see from an image post, and even higher than a video post (most of our image posts perform better than our video posts on LI). Plus, they’re a great format to share more complex/in-depth messaging. 

Hey Arbors,Here’s a WIN!  We recently upgraded to paid Canva at work (I went 2.5 years on the free plan.  NOW being able to resize my creative to other social channel sizes is a HUGE WIN for me.  What an incredible time saver.Here’s a CHALLENGE. - Meta’s dashboard is a nightmare at times to figure out.  So, I recently had them shut me down.  I applied twice with challenges.  The 2nd time, they lifted the restriction and said it was a mistake made by their technology.  But, when I go to Ads Manager I have 2 big notifications on the page saying my account is suspended.  It says go to “Business Support Home” for more info.  When I go there, it has the message, “We removed your restriction because we made a mistake.  I am able to run campaigns from Facebook Business Suite, but I can’t do anything in Ads Manager.  I sent support screenshots asking why I have two different, contradictory messages (about 3 weeks ago) and have heard nothing back.Did I mention I don’t lik

A la South Park Step 1. Collect underpants.Step 2. ?Step 3. PROFITI’m seeing AI become the go to for people who want something done on social (or really anywhere that’s not their realm of expertise)  and when there’s push back on how it’ll take longer, or a certain skill set or resources, it’s “to the GPT!” as if you don’t have to do the thinking to have GPT deliver the results.  Really having people understand Gen AI, it’s capabilities and limits will be the best thing for everyone. But we’re still in an era of it’s a magic wand just wave it and everything you need appears. A win is that I am almost done planning 2025 and very very excited about the aligned and well paced direction! 

Hello friends! As Threads is ramping up, I’m working on a strategic plan to keep momentum going on our account. One of our goals this year (and ongoing) is to engage more with a younger audience to increase brand awareness. The only thing that’s really seemed to work for us is my being unhinged on Threads. The only posts that get literally any engagement are those that have nothing to do with our brand / usual content. So my Threads slide on my 2025 social media strategy pitch deck that I have to present to our exec team literally says “shit posting = not shit engagement” 😅 

Here’s my tiny little social media hill that I’ll die on. I think all social media management tools should have a minimum of two users provided in a plan. Since social media doesn’t take weekends off, many teams have a weekend and/or night person to manage social media so one person doesn’t have to be on call 24/7. It’s the only healthy way to do it! So every tool should have two users given by default or they shouldn’t prohibit the sharing of one account. I’d even be happy if they increased the price and included two seats. Charging double for a second seat just encourages leadership to stick to the idea that social media management is a one person job. There, that’s my end of year dislike! 

We have not lost a lot of our following on X but our posts don’t get a lot of impressions. We just recently tried posting our hyperlinks as replies instead of in the initial post to see if that helps as we have heard that links in original posts get down regulated in the algorithm. Has anyone else tried the links in the reply and have been successful? Or tried and haven’t been successful?Do you have other suggestions on how to get more impressions on X? 

This year has been full of big wins, with one of the highlights being the redesign of our analytics reports. As a one-person social team, I typically take the lead on everything social-related, and one of my first tasks was to develop an analytics report. What we had before were just a few slides showing the growth of each channel.Over time, I’ve refined the report—adding and removing certain metrics—and I’m finally at a version I’m really proud of. I’m happy to share it with anyone, including senior leadership (I even presented it to the CEO earlier this year)!On the flip side, one challenge I’ve faced is managing other users in our Sprout account. I often find myself going in to correct errors or mistakes in the posts they create. It sometimes feels like it would be faster to just do it myself rather than reviewing everything they do. To be fair, I’m the one who trained them, so maybe I need to improve my training approach 😅 Does anyone else experience

I like having someone to bounce ideas off of. I can be a smidge snarky, so it’s good to have someone to help me make sure I’m staying on brand with my responses! I know some people don’t have that here in Social, so I’m extra grateful for it!

Our team is celebrating our community being included in the latest Michelin Green Guide for Detroit! We were awarded a three star “do not miss” rating, and individually, most institutions were awarded two star rating on their own. *Cries of happiness* And yes, we used Sprout to post all about it this morning. 💃As many of you know, Marketing/Communications is often everyone’s scapegoat for organizational failures (real or perceived) so it’s been hard to properly get excited about this achievement.It’s incredible for the city and greater metro area but it feels some people just *assumed* it was a given. My Director created two separate extensive visit experiences for their writers and so many hours went into coordination, communications, meetings, and more to get to this point! Our small team of three is split between two institutions of this community and we handle PR, Email, Websites, Social, Advertising, and more.Cheers to all the small and mighty teams

One thing that I’ve really liked seeing this year is our team experimenting with more meme-like interactive posts. We’ve done a “tag yourself” style carousel with humorous costumes related to our industry and a funny bingo card for a national event related to our work. They both went over really well and I’m excited to hopefully see more these posts in the coming year. Anyone else have any similar posts that have engaged with their audience well?

Hello everyone! Wanted to share some insights on my role. Some Wins / PositivesI have an incredible team who creates social media content for 4 different properties. It’s a crazy amount of posts.We recently upped our game on TikTok and have gotten multiple videos to reach over 30K views.  ChallengesTrying to determine our KPIs and how heavily we should focus on revenue vs other metricsWe probably have a unique challenge vs. most - we have too much content. Prioritization can be a challenge.  What are your challenges that you are facing?

We launched our TikTok channel a month ago (11/11) and have grown to almost 2K followers! Now, we’re watching to see if it will get banned next month. LOL

Every December I check multiple websites to help me brainstorm content ideas for the following year, like fun holidays related to my industry. Is there a particular website/source that you’ve found helpful to plan content?