This week on Sprout Social Insights we tackled guides for Facebook, Twitter, and small business to help you better reach your customers with the social media tools that make a difference.

Check out our articles below to find out more about each one and how they can help you with your social media goals.

And check in every day to Sprout Social Insights for more how to guides and breaking social media news.

8 Killer Android Apps for Enterprise Business

Size does matter in business — and large companies often face unique difficulties as they grow.

How do you keep your client meeting in London up to speed with what happens at the branch office in Chicago? Can a San Francisco developer collaborate easily with an art director in New York? Can a manager still oversee the whole team when half of the members work from home?

The good news is that many technical advances have arrived to smooth out these processes for enterprise businesses. Having the right tools at your disposal will ensure that your whole company runs like clockwork. We’ve already covered some great options for the iPhone; here are a few apps specifically for those of you who are working on Android platforms across your businesses.
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Infographic: How to Determine Facebook and Twitter ROI the Right Way

There’s often a disconnect between social media marketers and the CEOs who manage them when those CEOs come from a traditional sales background. If you’re the social media marketer in that situation (or the CEO, for that matter), you know the question, “How do I measure the ROI?” quite well. We’ve got an infographic that helps answer that question.

We’ve tackled the question of social media ROI before — Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard wrote here at Sprout Insights nearly two years ago that social media ROI didn’t matter (yet), in part because you can’t measure mindshare. Now the tools are more sophisticated, the industry is more mature, and professionals in the space have started to grok the rewards that social media strategies offer companies and brands. [ Read More... ]

Dedicate Milestone Tweets to Promote Your Followers

This week we show you a fun tactic to promote your followers while highlighting your own Twitter activity in the process.

Have you ever seen those tweeters with thousands of followers and thousands of tweets and wondered, “How can I get there?” In most cases, these prolific tweeters got to that level with hard work, consistent tweeting over time, and most importantly — by interacting and sharing with other tweeters.

It’s true — one of the best ways to build your following on Twitter (or anywhere else for that matter) is to promote and talk about others. After all, it’s hard to keep people engaged if you talk about yourself all the time. The old tenet that “it’s better to give than to receive” appears to be proven over and over again by some of the most successful people on Twitter. [ Read More... ]

How and Why to Draft a Privacy Statement for Your Company Blog

We live in a time where transparency in our social interactions is celebrated and encouraged. For example, at Sprout Insights, we’ve shown you how to engage with your customers on Twitter, create a brand presence on Pinterest, and even how to create a company blog to bring more traffic to your website. It’s pretty clear that social media interaction is good for business.

However, the same trend that has led to the viral increase in sharing of information has also made it easier for sensitive information about ourselves, our businesses, and our customers to become public knowledge. Companies like Google and Facebook have come under fire and have even been slapped with lawsuits as a result of sensitive, private information being made available without people’s consent or knowledge.

If you run a company blog, its content is visible to the world. Have you made it clear, both to your writers and to the public, who actually owns that content and who is ultimately responsible for it? Do you store “cookies” when people visit your blog? If your company blog has a commenting system in place, does it collect personal information about your blog visitors? Are commenters aware how their comments might be used, or where their comments might appear?

If you haven’t already drafted a privacy statement for your company blog to address questions like these (and others), this article provides some recommendations as to why and how you need to do this as soon as possible. [ Read More... ]

3 Eco-Friendly Ways to Recycle Your Old Gadgets

From smartphones and tablets to computers and printers, technology has a way of piling up.

With updated models and new features being rolled out every year, your out-of-date technology can quickly become out of control. As a business owner, it’s easy to accumulate a lot of gadgets; however, it’s much harder to get rid of them.

In this article we’ll highlight some of the resources available for people looking to recycle their old gadgets. In some cases, you can even make a pretty penny off of them! [ Read More... ]

Spotlight on Startups: EmergencyLink stores your emergency contacts

At Sprout Insights, we comb the web to bring you the most up-to-date and actionable resources on how to use social media to grow your business.

To that end, we’re pleased to present the Sprout Insights series Spotlight on Startups. We’ll find the most innovative, useful startup companies out there, get the inside track on what they’re doing, and tell you how you can leverage their products and services for your own business.

This week we’re pleased to cast the spotlight on EmergencyLink — a free, emergency response service that stores your vital information and emergency contacts, headquartered in El Segundo, CA. [ Read More... ]

How to Discover Social Media Influencers With Sprout Social

The articles here at Sprout Insights are designed to keep you informed about ways to improve your social media presence. But beyond the blog, our parent company, Sprout Social, has social media management tools that help you track and control that presence.

We’ve covered how to use the Scheduler and the Reports features of Sprout Social; now it’s time to focus on the ability to discover new people to follow on Twitter, especially those who could be valuable to interact with on the social media network. Following influential Twitter accounts is often the first step toward an online relationship that can yield new clients, good reputation, positive word-of-mouth advertising, or important news. Here’s how it works. [ Read More... ]

How Enterprise Social Will Transform Corporate Operations and Culture

Social media platforms are useful tools for brands looking to communicate and develop relationships with their clients. But social media can also have valuable internal applications for companies.

Enterprise social networks are private platforms that are designed to help large businesses improve their operations with faster, smarter communication.

This is not a new idea, but the corporate interest in enterprise social has recently seen rapid growth and is expected to keep growing. A report by the International Data Corporation predicted that revenue from enterprise social would hit about $4.5 billion by 2016, compared with $800 million in 2011. Here’s how it can change your business and culture for the better. [ Read More... ]

Here’s What “Reach” Really Means on Facebook Pages

This week we’ll talk about the definition of Facebook’s “Reach” metric, and what the figure on individual Page updates that says how many people “saw this post” means.

The latter in particular might seem straightforward: It’s how many people saw the post that you published, right? Well, that’s absolutely true, but some folks miss an important detail.

The number represents not just the number of people who’ve seen the post you published, but also the number of people who saw the post if it was republished to them by someone else.

The same is true of the metric called “Reach” in Facebook Insights or in Sprout Social’s own Facebook reports tool. It’s not just the number of people who’ve Liked your Page and thus see your update. Every time someone shares (or in some cases Likes) your content, that content can be seen by their own friends, and the Reach number represents these impressions. [ Read More... ]

[Image credits: Victor1558, Thos Ballantyne, Rob Pongsajapan, Mosman Council, EmergencyLink (FB), Highways Agency]