Content Creation

Has anyone experienced positive results cross-posting to different public subreddits not owned by your company? In our experience, the results have been mixed.  There is a historic sensitivity to corporate involvement, where posts referencing our own services have been blocked.  More useful and accepted posts seem to be those that affect the entire industry or user base. 

The past few years, we’ve talked a lot about the value of “touching grass” for mental health and preventing burnout when you work in the social media industry. But we on the Sprout content team also have a theory that touching grass is beneficial for our creativity and work performance.In the age of AI-generated content and brand parity, where do you go to find offline inspiration in a chronically online world? Can you share how something offline inspired a campaign or social post?For a chance to be featured in our upcoming Substack article, share your favorite places for IRL inspiration and examples by this Wednesday, July 8. 

We have worked to build our Employee Advocacy Program with our sales team members over the last year. One of the major limitations and frustrations that I have ran into is that media content cannot share to Facebook personal profiles. I believe this is a Meta API limitation. We ask our team to use personal profiles and not business pages for reporting and potential brand confusion concerns. Has anyone had this similar issue? Have you found any work arounds? Our team leans into Facebook heavily so this is a big concern. What I have discovered is that only link content is available to share via Facebook personal profiles through Advocacy.  Solutions I have thought about that do not work: -Not ideal, but creating a link post and use the image that I would like to use. Advocacy overrides this and uses what is generated through the link.  -Sending photo and video content from Sprout’s calendar to Advocacy. It seems media type posts won’t send to Advocacy and allow them to be shareable to Fa

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? 

Hi everyone! One of the graphic designers I work with on some video projects has got it in his head that the vertical videos he is making should be now 4:5 aspect ratio instead of the normal 9:16 that I have been asking for. We post on LinkedIn (most followers), Facebook/Instagram/Threads, and X. For LinkedIn especially, what has everyone been seeing as best practice/most engaegment? I prefer the 9:16 format where we ensure that the most important visuals are in the ‘safe zone’ of 4:5, but wanted to get some opinions on this to see if maybe I’m totally off base. 

Is there a way to add a collaborator on a Facebook post in Sprout? I don’t see that option but it would be really helpful! 

Hi everyone,We seem to be seeing more and more photos and videos pop up on social media (mostly on Facebook) from patients in our ER. These are concerning for us, but not a HIPPA violation since the posts are from other patients. There are also some scenarios where our providers are shown and it makes them uncomfortable. My question is twofold:Do you have a good listening tool to monitor public posts and groups on Facebook? We seem to have a blindspot in our social monitoring software. How do you all handle posts that come from patients that don’t respect other patient’s privacy, but also don’t necessarily violate Facebook’s community guidelines.Any insight or solutions you have would be much appreciated!

I’m getting ready to launch a new employee advocacy program at my company and am looking for inspo. We’ve gone with Sprout’s employee advocacy platform for organizing/tracking, but I’d love to hear your best ideas on what you’ve seen work.Incentives for participating Types of content employees are most likely to share widely What kind of guidelines have you used for employee-suggested content? What else should I be thinking about?

Does anyone have any content calendar templates outside of sprout social they like using? We currently use one note for our content calendar. 

Hello! I’m looking for tools to resize a video from a regular YouTube video to an Instagram, either square or reel size. Do you have any ideas?I saw https://www.veed.io/ any other you may know? thanks!Virginia 

Does anyone have info on if Meta will be reinstating allowing business accounts to use licensed audio? There was this nice honeymoon period where we could use any song available on Spotify only to have it removed again. Was wondering if others experienced this & what you’re doing about it! 

Is there a way to track a hashtag on LinkedIn- inside of sprout? The Smart Inbox only grabs mentions and replies on posts. I figure there has to be a way, but with all the dumb API restrictions, there might not be. We want to then set up a rule to send me an email for negative sentiment around that hashtag. We had an ex-employee go on a lovely rant, not tag us, but use a common hashtag.  Thanks! 

Hey, y’all!  After hours of researching the best practices to reach non-followers on my restaurant client’s IG account, I keep accumulating the same 8-10 “Best Practices” on every website. I thought I would put it out here and see if any of you have cracked the secret that nobody is talking about to reaching non-followers? 

I noticed one of my competitors, Blxstrap, is using Sprout to handle their updates and social engagement. Their setup looks pretty smooth, which got me thinking.For those of you running smaller teams — is Sprout worth it at that stage? Any recommendations on which features or plans are actually useful early on, and what to avoid overpaying for?Would love to hear your thoughts before I pull the trigger.

So we all know mascots are huge in North American HE, giving lots of content opportunities for organic social. But how about in the UK?Here at Newcastle we’ve tried on and off to make our mascot Percy the Lion a “thing” on our channels but have struggled with consistency (getting someone to wear the suit is a tough sell sometimes).Are there any other UK/European unis here that have had mascot success on social?Here’s a “study with me” video we made with our Mascot pre-covid for reference  

 I’m struggling to create a LinkedIn reshare in Employee Advocacy that shows up like a normal reshare rather than a link to the LinkedIn post I’m hoping to have employees reshare (screenshot of the result I’m getting that I don’t want). Am I doing something wrong, or is this not an option? I also had been thinking there was an option to like/comment rather than only reshares - was this something I imagined? I’m not seeing an easy way to set it up, if so.  

Hey everyone 👋I’d love to hear how you all approach this: When you’re collaborating with another company (not necessarily an influencer) on a joint social post, how do you navigate the differences between brand and style guidelines?For example—our brand has its own voice, design system, and accessibility standards, but a collaborator may have very different colors, tone, or visual rules they want to use. We want the post to feel cohesive and on-brand for both of us, but sometimes it feels like trying to merge two very different identities.Do you: Create a hybrid style that pulls from both brands? Use neutral/shared design elements instead of trying to merge everything? Have formal agreements or is it more case-by-case? Curious what strategies, guidelines, or even compromises have worked for you.

Over the summer, our nonprofit decided to start experimenting with LinkedIn newsletters. 3 months, 7 editions, 8.6K followers, and 18K views later, here is what we learned from the process.First off, if you haven't seen Candid's LinkedIn newsletters, they are basically a roundup of articles and resources. The goal is to share things folks may have missed, since we do a lot of long-form content.Now to the lessons learned.1. It's a great place to reuse content. To make these newsletters, we used AI to rewrite the blurbs we already had for our existing articles, and then had a human edit them into our Candid style. Easy peasy.2. It's a fantastic way to get links in. Every time we released a LinkedIn newsletter we saw a 200% increase in clicks from LinkedIn to our website. Yay!3. We can share niche content, without it getting too niche. One of our challenges is that we speak to a broad community (nonprofits) who are super diverse in their needs and causes (ex. from animal shelters to food

Is there any way to add instagram-based audio when drafting a story or feedpost in Sprout? Is this a feature that is even possible? 🤓

Hi everyone, I’m looking to connect with some folks who have run amazing and successful fundraising campaigns on social media. Know anyone? Are you that someone? Would love to chat about what made it successful! If you don’t work at a nonprofit, do you remember a social media campaign that inspired you to donate? 

It would be very helpful to have an option to share a live link to a singular post. Right now, I believe the only option is to share a whole calendar of posts filtered by tags. Often, we need to get pre-approvals for posts from various departments or partners, separate from our approval workflows. Having the ability to generate a link to a singular post for people outside of our approval workflows to review would be great.

Does anyone have any examples of Instagram reel pricing? We are looking into adding this service, where we don’t hire our full production video vendor but someone from the agency goes and films on their phone and then we edit at the agency versus outsourcing to a full video production vendor. Thank you for any insights. 

Hello Everyone!I’m the SMM for my company (3-months in), and we want to consolidate our employee advocacy platform (currently sociabble) w/our social management (sprout). I’m doing research for our stakeholders and I’m looking for recommendations, advice, or experience in this area, particularly if you’ve used Sprout Advocacy or Oktopost.I’m still somewhat new to this, so I appreciate any insight. :)

Hey all,  I was wondering what your strategies and best practices are for posting in another language. Our organization posts in English and Spanish (because I as the social media manager can write and speak in Spanish, not because it's a standard). But since Facebook and IG will auto-translate the captions a lot of the time, I'm wondering if I need to actually post in both languages? I'd love to know what your experiences and processes are when posting the same content in different languages!