We’re thrilled to announce the new Sprout Social Insights — an online resource for small business owners, marketers, and others looking to learn about reaching audiences and customers with new social media tools like Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.

You’ll find three kinds of articles at Sprout Social Insights: day-to-day news coverage of new developments and changes in social web tools that you can use to reach customers, guides to the basics and best approaches for those tools, and first-hand accounts of how businesses from neighborhood bakeries to internationally regarded brands have built better relationships with customers, clients, and fans.

We believe that just as technologies like texting and Facebook have changed the ways people live their personal lives, those same new things are altering the ways businesses have to make money and attract customers. We want to give you the knowledge you need to make your business, career, or projects grow.

We know it’s challenging to keep up with it all. It changes quickly, and existing blogs on the subject are aimed at obsessive enthusiasts, not regular people who are just trying to make sure they keep up so they can make a living and build stronger social relationships.

That’s why Sprout Social has built a team of expert writers who use real-world examples and clear language instead of navel-gazing and hype to make sure nobody gets left behind. If you have any ideas about how we can do it better, please connect with us on Twitter, contact us on Facebook, or leave a comment below to let us know. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

What Is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social began as a social media management tool for businesses and brands. It helps you schedule your Twitter and Facebook posts and monitor your Foursquare and Gowalla checkins. It also provides analytics data that helps you determine the best ways to leverage those tools for success.

Now that tool is seeing rapid growth and significant acclaim. It’s used by small businesses all around the world, as well as large, national, and international brands. If you’d like to give it a shot, we offer a free trial.

Now Sprout Social is much more. Sprout Social Insights is just one of several new resources from Sprout Social to help new media professionals and small business owners get the most out of technology as a driver of revenue, customer loyalty, stronger partnerships, great hires, and other positive outcomes.

Our Editorial Ethics: Focus Only On Your Success

We’re committed to providing you news coverage and features that help you discover the best social media tools and strategies for engaging customers and increasing revenue, not selling our product. Our editorial content is written with only one goal: providing you the best information about how to navigate the new social web.

We believe that serving you objective coverage demonstrates our commitment to your success, so you’ll know to expect the same from the other services we offer. That’s all there is to it.

How to Use the Site

At the top-right corner of our website’s home page you’ll see two drop-down selection menus that allow you to choose what content you want to see. All of our content is targeted at a specific audience — for now, small businesses or brands — and most of it covers certain topics like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

You can view everything for everyone, or you can narrow your browsing to just posts for Brands about Foursquare, for example. This will change the articles that appear in the top slider — the big graphical menu that shows five critical posts on any topic for any audience.

It will also change what appears in the chronology of recent articles below; that lists and summarizes articles from the newest to the oldest. If you have any questions about other features of the site, let us know and we’ll help you out.

Oh, and thanks for reading; we promise we’ll make it worth your while.