How to Use Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of my favorite tools for social media management. This platform was created with entrepreneurs and small business owners in mind to help them streamline their social media marketing efforts and grow their businesses. That being said, Sprout Social is powerful enough to handle full-service and enterprise corporations, as well!

Sprout Social allows you to connect all of your individual social media profiles into one CRM. This lets you manage everything that social media marketing entails – content creation, post scheduling, publishing, reporting, and analytics – all from one place.

Sprout Social currently allows you to integrate the following platforms:

• Facebook

• Instagram

• Google+

• LinkedIn

• Pinterest

Now, let’s go through the different features of Sprout Social and how to use them to support your brand.

Sprout Social’s Key Features

The main goal of Sprout Social is to help you easily manage your business’ social media profiles so you can see which marketing efforts are effective and which ones need to be tweaked. 

Smart Inbox

The Smart Inbox shows all of the messages you’ve received from followers on every account you’ve connected. This can save a ton of time since you don’t have to open each individual app to respond to messages!

You can tag and filter messages, monitor them for keywords and hashtags, and more.

Automation

Automation tools are excellent for those who want their business to run without them. As a business owner, you’ve already got a ton on your plate! Use Sprout Social’s automation tools so you can have a few less things to worry about.

• Bot Builder. Create chatbots to automatically respond to messages on Facebook and Twitter.

• Sprout Queue and ViralPost. These are automated scheduling tools that will post when your audience is the most engaged. They work together to schedule posts and analyze performance.

Team Collaboration Tools

There are tools on Sprout Social that allow you to share insights with your team so everyone can do their assigned job. Everyone who is given access will get live updates on who is doing what, so two people don’t ever work on the same task simultaneously.

You will also be able to see who’s replied to a message, flagged a message, or marked one as complete.

Publishing Tools

The Compose tab allows you to publish posts to any or all of your connected accounts. You can also schedule posts, add things to a publishing queue, edit queued content, manage and approve content that your team has drafted, and more.

Sprout Social also has a Publishing Calendar that allows you to see all of your upcoming posts in one window. You will be able to view post titles, images, and video thumbnails.

Reporting & Analytics

Reporting and Analytics are the bread and butter of social media management. These will let you know how well your profiles are performing so you can adjust things if necessary and target your efforts. 

The Reporting Suite includes:

• Engagement Report

• Sent Messages Report

• Twitter Trends Report

• Facebook Competitors

• Instagram Profiles Report

• & more!

How to Use Sprout Social

Okay, now that you know what Sprout Social has to offer, let’s talk about how to put it all together. 

Dashboard

When you first log onto Sprout Social, you will see your Dashboard. This is a snapshot of your networks, profile, and the team you’ve connected to help you manage everything. There are links to Sprout Social’s key features, webinars, mobile apps, and contact information.

You will also see:

• Open tasks

• Open approvals

• Scheduled posts

• Queued posts

• Published posts

• Daily engagements

• Help center

Settings

The settings allow you to access your personal, business, profile, admin, and feature-specific settings.

Here, you can:

Connect a new profile

Invite users and assign groups, profiles, and permissions

Download Sprout’s mobile app and browser extension

Learn keyboard shortcuts to make management even faster 

Configure personal and business settings

Messages

Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox allows you to take action on your messages to help keep them well managed and organized. 

Some actions include

• Reply

• Task

• Tag

• Like

• Retweet

• Advanced retweet

• Report as spam

• Email message

• Save message

• Translate

• Hide on Facebook

• Block user

• Follow

• Delete

Contact View

This is where you can view your unique network for each individual profile you’ve connected or all of them at once.

Tasks

On Sprout Social, Tasks are things that need your attention. They could be general tasks, sales leads, or support issues. 

You can organize tasks as open, closed, and assigned so you know which ones are being worked on, which have been resolved, and which need to be worked on.

Feeds

You can interact with your Tweets and followers on Twitter with Sprout Social’s Feedly app. This is super convenient, especially for those who use Twitter as their primary platform because you don’t have to go back and forth between Twitter and Sprout Social all day!

Publishing

The Publishing tab has lots of great tools to help you manage your content.

• Content calendar

• Queued content that is to be shared on certain days at certain times

• Drafted content that isn’t scheduled or queued

• Automatically publish content on an RSS feed

• Approve or reject submissions

• View rejected submissions

• Store images

• View Instagram posts that have been shared or get push notifications for publishing

Compose

This is where you can draft, schedule, queue, or publish posts from all of your connected profiles.

• Apply audience targeting

• Upload media

• Assign a post approver

• Add tags

• Queue posts

• Schedule posts

• Save post to drafts

Reports

There are reports that Sprout Social has created to let you view things like Impressions, Engagements, and Link Clicks. You can also create custom reports using Sprout Social’s existing data and report modules so you can see the information that’s most important to you.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot that goes into social media management. Many people feel overwhelmed by the thought of it because they think they have to be flipping through all of their apps all day long, which is just too time-consuming. I completely agree with them, and that’s why I swear by Sprout Social! It allows me to be in five places at once!

Have any questions about Sprout Social? I’d be happy to help! Feel free to send me a message at any time.

*Screenshots of platform UX courtesy of Sprout Social*