Content Creation

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! 

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.

 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! 

I’m in desperate need of a new portable charger for long days of getting content on the go. Any recommendations? I am looking for one that is compact. Also, any other social media/content creation tools that you find to be a “must”? Always curious to see what fellow social media professionals are using to improve or make capture content easier.

Since before I joined my org in 2020, my company has heavily emphasized used of a branded hashtag for employees who share about work on their social channels. Our hashtag is #iwork4UWCU.Is this an outdated practice? Do any other social managers find it helpful?My thoughts: The branded hashtag is not as helpful to me as a SMM as tagging the company since hashtags don’t always pull into the Inbox in Sprout depending on network and privacy settings. We’re revising our internal social policies and guidelines, and I’d like to drop the branded hashtag but would love to hear from others.

Hi,We recently integrated slack into advocacy so we can broadcast content internally to our employees and for some reason I can’t see all of our slack channels. What am I missing?  

Hi Sprout Social Community,I’m using Sprout Social Standard to schedule Instagram Reels for an e-commerce Shopify store (~1,000 followers), aiming to boost product engagement. Reels post successfully, but analytics show low engagement compared to manual posts. I’ve followed Sprout’s scheduling guide.Setup: Sprout Standard, Shopify, Instagram Business, 3 Reels/week.Steps Tried:Used optimal posting times from Sprout’s analytics. Added hashtags and captions in Compose. Tested video lengths (15-30 seconds).Any tips to improve Reels engagement via Sprout scheduling? Are there specific settings or workflows that enhance performance for e-commerce?Thanks for your insights!

Hello Arb-ers! Happy almost-Friday. My office is in the process of choosing a new email marketing platform. I have experience with MailChimp, but I’m curious about other options. What email marketing platform do you use? What do you like or dislike about it?

How long do you wait to boost an organic post? Do you wait after posting to let organic reach “do its thing” before boosting? Is there a certain amount of time you wait?