Community Manager Tools

Tracking everything in Google Sheets works at first but it can get hard to scale. Many community managers use social media management tools with built in analytics to save time. These tools help track engagement impressions and responses more accurately. Some also connect data to simple dashboards for reporting. Finding one central tool usually makes the workflow much easier.

Definitely agree with ​@James Walker here!

What platforms are you trying to track specifically? Is it a slack space, facebook group, etc.? I think this will help narrow down some tooling available. 

​@James Walker yeah totally! that’s why I’m looking to hear from others about tools they use to optimize tracking in this type of role. my agency uses Sprout (obviously) but that can only communicate so much, do you have any recommendations of tools you use?

​@Maxpete I am mostly looking to find a more efficient way to track Linkedin engagements, but also I’m interested in finding methods of creating or generating a report that will share the # of outgoing comments made (like my original work) and # of replies made to community members (so DMs + comments). Sprout is great for being able to download a CSV and show which platforms are performing best and some outgoing engagement that is done within the platform, but there is a lot of proactive outgoing engagement that I’m doing outside of Sprout that I’m trying to find a way to keep track of and report effectively. 

​@bri.hoomes thanks for the added context here! Tagging in some Linkedin folks in the community to weigh in on what they use

​@kflewellen ​@kate.meyers emery and ​@verena5569 

Thanks for the tag @maxpete!

LinkedIn is a tough one because their metrics aren’t always the strongest through the platform.

We also do a lot of community engagement, and the way we handle it is by tracking in Sprout Social using tags. At the end of every day, I’ll go through the Smart Inbox, toggle on completed and sent messages, and then retroactively tag anything that I commented on through the platform. This catches most of the missed outgoing posts. It’s not necessarily quicker up front, but it saves times when doing analytics. It won’t give you better outgoing analytics to show the real impact of comments, but it helps with volume. It’d be so nice if their API extended to those types of metrics. 

This is so helpful, ​@kate.meyers emery! do you have any tips/ideas for tracking outgoing engagement that happens outside of Sprout? I do a lot of engagement on IG or TikTok outside of Sprout on my own device.

I would love to share your ideas with the Sprout team to get your workflows supported in the platform.

Here’s the link to share your product feedback with our team. Selfishly, I’d also love to see more community management features in Sprout too. :)

Sadly, I haven’t found a good way to do this that actually shares analytics in a way you can easily see everything. Most platforms let you see comments in one place (ex. IG is "Your Activity" in profile > "Interactions" > "Comments"), but you’d need to write them down to track them.