Noted :: Grow Your Social Media With Sprout Social

Admittedly, I’m not a numbers person. Trying to decipher analytics can often be a daunting task especially when it comes to websites and social media. Social Media analytics can also vary depending on the reporting service you’re using or even through an Insights tool that’s directly on the social media site itself.

Of course, the first piece of advice we always give is to set your own goals and measurable objectives for your social media strategy. This truly is the best way to measure how you’re coming along with your plan. However, we know that there are a lot of people out there that are still skeptical of Social Media as a marketing tool and want hard numbers and facts that will help justify the efforts put forth into a social media campaign.

Before I begin talking about the analytics and reporting tool that we’ve been using here at Elements I wanted to note that there are many types of Social Media management tools out there. Each has there own benefits and specialties. Once you assess your specific needs for a social media monitoring and reporting, you’ll be able to narrow down the system that works for you.

With that, I bring you Sprout Social! We’ve found this program works exactly with our needs. It’s primarily focused on analytics and reporting – although it does include monitoring – and works with Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, Linkedin and also has Google Analytics integration. We were drawn to this platform because of its flexibility with the features. It has pricing options for small businesses, large companies and everything in between. We were able to handpick the tools and features that we would need – that type of customization is something that any good social media management tool should have.

We were also initially attracted to this program because of the visuals. As a design firm, visuals are obviously a very important part of our everyday workflow. This program is colorful with large, clear and easy to read graphics. It distills down the most important information into manageable data and also gives you “snapshots” of how each of your platforms are doing in terms of influence, engagement and follower insights.

Here are just few additional highlights to the program that I find are especially appealing:

• The ability to see your top preforming posts;
• Breakdown of your target audience/demographic – how many males, females and what areas they are located;
• Message scheduling – which is great for when you’re out of the office or on holidays. You’re also able to track the peak times to post!;
• PDF reporting – not only can we see these charts and graphs on screen, but we can create reports using them with one-click. You’re also able to customize

I have found a con with one of the platforms it tracks Currently the Linkedin page doesn’t monitor specific company pages. When I tried to link our Elements Linkedin Company page – it only allowed me to link to my personal page for analytics. That aside we’ve been happy with the results we’ve seen from using this tool. We’re interested to hear what types of social media monitoring systems work for you. Have you tried Sprout Social?

~Allyson