Q4 2026 Breaking Ground recap: Your 2027 head start

Every quarter, Sprout hosts Breaking Ground, a virtual innovation event on what’s new in our product and industry from real social media experts. To close out 2026, we walked through how to set up your 2027 strategy for success in three steps:

1. Analyze your social data to get actionable insights, faster
2. Contextualize those insights with what’s happening in the wider market
3. Act on your insights by reaching your audience on more networks, with less manual work

With each step, we dug into the Sprout capabilities that gave teams an edge this year and the newest releases that will help set-up your 2027 strategy.

Here are the highlights from the 30-minute session. You’ll find the full replay at the bottom if you’d rather watch the team walk through it.

Analyze your social data for actionable insights

Start by asking more of your social data. Most teams are sitting on masses of data, but aren’t getting much out of it. The goal isn’t more numbers, it’s understanding what they’re telling you, so you know what to do next. Here’s how you can get there faster.

Trellis enhancements 

Ask Trellis, your AI teammate, a question in plain language and get themes, trends and recommended next steps, with examples to back them up. Start broad with something like: “What drove the most engagement this year?” Then keep going: “What’s worth doubling down on? What could we try next?” Trellis builds on each answer, so you can keep asking until you know the best next move.

And with new platform-wide search, you can look up your tags, labels, users and profiles in one place. Just ask what you want to know, and Trellis pulls in the right data behind the scenes.

New in tags

Tags are the unsung hero of analysis, and they’re easier to manage now. AI-recommended tags help you get started, required tags help make sure nothing is missed and you can nest tags up to seven levels deep. The more specific your tagging, the more precisely you can slice your data.

Insights on your schedule

Once your tags are set, Trellis Studio helps you build on your analysis over time. Pick a skill, like sentiment trends and spikes, and set it to run on a schedule that works for you. You’ll get a notification when it’s done and can jump into a conversation with Trellis about what it found.

Need more Trellis? We have new credit options available, including Trellis Plus: Shared Credits, which gives your team a single account-level pool so usage can flex across teammates instead of being capped per person.

Contextualize those insights with market behaviors

Next, zoom out to the wider market. Your channels show you what people are saying to you. The wider market shows you what’s being said about your brand and industry, which helps you make sense of the bigger picture. Here’s how to go even deeper.

Listening Topic Highlights

A good place to start is knowing if anything important is happening that you need to be aware of. Listening Topic Highlights (now live) answers that for you. Every day, it checks your Listening topics, flags meaningful shifts and explains what changed and why it matters, right on your Sprout dashboard.

No need to scan charts or piece the story together yourself. Follow up with Trellis or jump straight to the posts behind the shift.

NewsWhip AI Sentiment Analysis

Once you know what’s happening, the next question is what it means for your brand. That’s what NewsWhip AI Sentiment Analysis (launched at Breaking Ground) is built to answer.

It reads news and web coverage in the context of your brand, so you can see how a story lands for your brand, track the key messages you care about and give leadership a clear answer to “What does this coverage mean for us?”

Act on your insights

Finally, put your insights to work. Customers don’t stay in one place, so your workflows shouldn’t either. Here’s how you can show up in more places, right where the conversation is happening.

Added networks in Publishing

Publishing wherever your audiences are engaging is one way to put your insights to work. This year, Sprout extended publishing to Snapchat and Reddit, so you can reach those audiences from the workflows you already use.

YouTube Posts

Coming in Q4 2026: YouTube Posts. Soon you’ll be able to publish and manage YouTube Posts directly within your existing Sprout workflow, so you can spark more engagement and reach new audiences on YouTube.

Influencer Marketing AI Campaigns

Acting on your insights shouldn’t get stuck in setup and spreadsheets. Coming soon, Campaigns in Sprout Social Influencer Marketing are getting a full glow-up. Upload your brief, then let AI set up your campaign, find matching creators and help draft outreach. Your creators land in one customizable table with AI columns that summarize the latest, so you can act on updates instead of digging for them.

Note: This section contains forward-looking statements, including expectations, projections and guidance. Actual results may differ materially due to risks and uncertainties.

Please see the “Forward-Looking Statements” section in our latest earnings release and the “Risk Factors” in our most recent Form 10-K/10-Q for additional information.

Enter the Chat with Indiana University and Bell Bank

We heard from two social leaders who sit in your shoes: Jill Trimbach of Indiana University, and Marie Obsuna of Bell Bank. They reflected on 2026 and how they’re thinking about 2027.

Specifically, Trimbach and Obsuna talked through the workflows their teams can’t live without, how they’re set up to act when something unexpected takes off and the one change they’d make now to be ahead of the game in January.

Want to hear even more from their teams? Check out their recent case studies:

• How Indiana University turned audience connection into a championship-worthy social playbook
• How Bell Bank got off the endless treadmill of publishing and grew engagement rate 40%

Your 2027 starter checklist

We closed the session with a few simple things you can do now to get a head start on 2027, so you’re ready to go!

Start with tags

If you haven’t set up tags yet, AI-recommended tags make it easy to begin. If you have, now’s a good time to see where you can get more precise.

Open Trellis Chat

Ask a question you’re curious about, then layer in what you know about your brand and industry. Not sure where to start? Try our AI Prompt Library.

Try out a Trellis Skill

Pick a skill and set it to run on a cadence that matches your reporting needs and workflows.

BONUS: Check out our Social intelligence course

Want to start the new year extra ready? Our course walks through the key strategies we covered in more detail.

Watch the replay

That’s a wrap on this quarter’s updates. To see it all in action, including a live demo and insights from our customers, watch the full 30-minute Breaking Ground Q4 replay.