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Marie Obsuna, (​@mobsuna), Digital Marketing Manager at Bell Bank, kept seeing other banks post the same kind of content: straightforwardly educational, blandly informational, safely on-brand. Bell Bank had tried this approach too. The problem was that it didn't work. The bank had a genuinely loyal following, especially in its home market of North Dakota, but no clear way to prove to leadership what was actually driving that loyalty versus what just looked like standard industry practice.Using Tagging and Reporting in Sprout Social, Marie's team categorized content by theme and format across channels, then let the performance data override prior assumptions about what a successful bank's online content should look like. As the team implemented the data-informed content strategy, total engagement rate across all channels rose 40% year over year, while overall reach declined as they focused more squarely on their target audience. Letting the data override the standard industry playbookTh

During Indiana University's game against Penn State, wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. hauled in a game-winning catch with 36 seconds left on the clock. Minutes later, a message landed in IU's inbox: a husband and wife, both IU alumni, sharing that her water broke the exact moment the catch happened.Jill Trimbach (​@JillTrimbach) Executive Director of Social Media at Indiana University, and her team didn't just post the message and move on. They kept in touch with the family, asked how mom and baby were doing and, with permission, shared the story with fans. A producer from College GameDay noticed the post and later interviewed the family alongside players Fernando Mendoza and Omar Cooper Jr., weaving their reactions together in a segment that aired nationally.That single exchange captures what Jill's team was really managing during IU's historic playoff run: not just a football story, but thousands of individual moments of connection, arriving faster than any team could have anticipated.T

We walked into Cannes Lions this year with 280+ creator relationships already built — sourced, qualified and managed using Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social, the exact same product we sell to brands to develop and execute their own influencer programs. Cannes turned out to be the midpoint, not the finish line: what we learned there became the model for scalable creator engagement within our own strategy, an approach that now runs year-round.A model that breaks the moldAny brand chasing creator attention is balancing two finite resources, time and money, and a transaction-driven approach concentrates both on one or two creators and a handful of posts. Cannes is a single event with hundreds of activation opportunities, so we needed hundreds of creators—not just the two or three we’d be able to activate through high-touch outreach. Instead, we split our effort across three tiers: 1)a small group producing authority content tied to our own social intelligence work, 2)a mid-size group s

An operator looking at one restaurant's follower count has no way to tell a content problem from a platform problem. A slow month just reads as failure. The social team at Lettuce Entertain You closed that gap by benchmarking follower growth across every location in Sprout Social.Corporate Social Media Manager Abbie Judge (​@abbie.judge) Divisional Director of Marketing Brittany Saito (​@brittany.saito) and Divisional Senior Marketing Manager Tess Conforti (​@tess.conforti) run social for a Chicago-based, family-owned group of more than 85 restaurants, plus the Windy City Smokeout, Chicago’s biggest country music and BBQ festival. Every quarter they walk individual operators and executive leadership through what social did for the business, and the benchmark is what keeps that conversation honest.Fair goals need a rangeWith the whole spread visible, an operator can see whether they're performing above average for a brand their size, or whether everyone dipped that quarter on an algorit

Hannah Orrell (​@hannah.orrell), Senior Digital Marketing Specialist at AMN Healthcare, was up against a recruiting challenge familiar to anyone seeking new employees in an industry driven by trust: nurses and allied health professionals typically don't respond to job postings, they engage with peers when considering new roles. To reach healthcare workers and engage them to consider open positions with the organization amid a crowded, competitive market, AMN Healthcare needed to find the right voices in the community and understand which stories actually moved people to apply for open roles.Using Influencer Marketing by Sprout Social, Hannah's team turned influencer marketing from a brand-awareness tactic into a measurable recruitment channel that now shapes which creators the company invests in company-wide. One influencer video targeted at bringing in new healthcare staff alone generated 20 leads with no paid promotion behind it. Turning creators into market intelligenceThe shift sta