Breaking Ground: Sprout updates to get excited about in Q3 2024

The world of social media marketing is in a permanent state of change. One algorithm or another is always in retrograde. The sun rises and falls on emerging networks in a matter of months. One new trend can shift the vibe of an entire industry’s atmosphere.

In a system of very few constants, there is one: For as long as there have been social marketers, there has been a perpetual desire for more time and resources.

Nearly half (48%) of social media marketers feel they sometimes or rarely have enough time to get their work done, according to our Social Media Productivity Report.

This is a challenge Sprout takes to heart, not to mention one that informs our own product roadmap. In our latest installment of Breaking Ground, Sprout’s Q3 2024 Launch Event, we gave a behind-the-scenes look at some of our newest capabilities designed to help social teams work faster and smarter. Because having an impact shouldn’t come at the price of burnout.

Here’s a look at what we covered.

Expedite content creation with Sprout’s partner ecosystem

Social teams’ work is complex and fragmented across not only multiple networks, but multiple martech solutions. Thanks to our robust partner ecosystem, Sprout offers real-time APIs and integrations that connect our platform with some of your favorite tools. Bottom line? Less cumbersome context-switching, faster workflows and easier ways to share social data across your business.

Our Social Media Productivity Report found that content creation is one of social marketers’ most time-consuming tasks each week—it’s also the task customers frequently tell us they’re looking to streamline. With our newest publishing endpoints in our Public API, social teams can instantly send content from project or content management tools to draft posts in Sprout.

In addition to existing integrations Opal and Slate, we are excited to announce a new integration with Optimizely and upcoming integration with Zapier, so you can leverage automation and custom publishing workflows with your tool of choice.

Maximize the power of LinkedIn for your brand

1.5 million pieces of content are shared every minute on LinkedIn. With that level of activity. The platform continues to present brands with new opportunities to connect with job seekers, employees, brand advocates and the media alike.

To make the most of the world’s largest professional network, we’ll be rolling out two LinkedIn releases in the coming months:

• Company DMs—one of our community’s most requested features—are coming to the Smart Inbox and cases. Whether it’s fielding questions from job candidates or engaging with potential corporate partners, social and care teams will soon be able to respond without leaving the comfort of Sprout.

• Additional Owned Mentions capabilities are also coming to Listening, giving social teams a more complete picture of the conversations happening around your brand.

Exceed customer expectations with timely, personalized care

Though AI continues to be a polarizing topic, nearly 75% of consumers agree they would be comfortable with brands using the technology to deliver faster customer service on social, according to a Sprout Q1 2024 Pulse Survey.

This is good news for brands, given that 80% of consumers say they’re using social more now compared to a year ago to get their service needs addressed. With social becoming a key place for customers to sound off, care teams need tools to help them scale and meet customers’ high expectations.

That’s why we’re adding functionality to help care teams take the headache out of triaging and responding to inbound messages. Case auto-assignment* let managers instantly delegate new cases based on individual agent availability and capacity, balancing workloads across the team. Automated rules for cases* empower teams to customize care processes based on their unique needs. Actions can be set up to trigger based on a range of criteria (including case status, team, assignee or tags). For example, if a message comes in with a certain keyword, you can set a rule for that case to be assigned to a specific agent with the most relevant expertise.

Having a unified platform for social media management and customer care is a top priority for global pizza chain Papa Johns. With Sprout, their team has seen a 50% improvement in average social response rate and saved over 830 hours annually. “Our care team can now quickly address customer inquiries and feedback, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty…Response time has been cut in half since switching over to Sprout,” said Josh Martin, Director, Social Media & Brand Engagement.

And speaking of our robust partner ecosystem: Sprout and Salesforce Service Cloud users will soon be able to tap into the power of Agentforce assistant for service,* giving care agents a complete view of a customer with conversational AI.

For example, an agent with an overflowing inbox can prompt Saleforce’s AI Assistant to pull up a contact’s case history. Agentforce would scan the brand’s Service Cloud data to quickly see what that specific customer has reached out about previously, giving the agent all the context they need to respond thoughtfully and resolve the issue.

Act faster with AI-powered social insights

You didn’t think we’d talk about Breaking Ground without mentioning AI, right?

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 95% of business leaders agree companies must rely more heavily on social media data and insights to inform business decisions outside marketing, but 69% report social data is underutilized. Which is why teams need tools that surface the right data in a fast, accessible way.

Our latest AI-powered updates aim to do just that, cutting the time it takes for marketers to find, interpret and act on social data, including:

• Comment Sentiment in Reports—The last few years have proved the inimitable power of the comments section on social. Soon, Premium Analytics customers will be able to track and report on overall comment sentiment across posts, giving teams a clearer sense of what content resonates and how to optimize their strategy accordingly.
• Competitive Conversation Breakdown Widget—Level up your social listening strategy with this new widget, which layers sentiment data alongside the top smart categories, keywords, hashtags, mentions and emojis found in your competitive queries. Leveraging this widget in competitive listening topics helps you keep a pulse on conversations happening in and around your industry.
• Industry Themes—We’re introducing new ways to accelerate social data analysis with industry-specific Listening Themes. Starting with healthcare and higher education, these pre-built Themes will help marketers instantly visualize and investigate social conversations as they relate to relevant categories (for example, admissions, campus safety and alumni in higher education).

Analyze by AI Assist has been a game changer for how I approach content and campaign analysis … What could previously take me hours of manual effort—such as identifying trends, measuring performance and generating insights—can now be done in minutes.

Erica Bufford
Social Listening and Reporting, Tesco

Last (but far from least), our Generate by AI Assist functionality will soon be in beta. When creative burnout strikes, marketers will be able to ask AI Assist for inspiration by reviewing top-performing posts—no prompt required. Whether you need a volume of posts to support your next campaign or need to beat writer’s block for a one-off caption, you can get a jump start with AI-generated—on brand—copy.

Reclaim control of your calendar

Social moves fast. Social marketers shouldn’t be beholden to processes or technology that slows them down. With the right tools, you can dictate the terms of your to-do list and devote more time to work that delights customers and proves social’s business impact.

Learn more about all of the releases—and more—announced at our Breaking Ground Q3 2024 event.

(*Denotes capabilities available in Advanced Plans.)