How Honda shifted social into a strategic asset

American Honda is built on a global culture of engineering, innovation and continuous mobility. “The Power of Dreams” isn’t just a company slogan, it’s the standard for continuous improvement across every product Honda produces—from motorcycles to jets—and it demands excellence from every facet of the business.

When it came to social media, American Honda needed more than just a publishing tool. Tasked with transforming the company’s digital presence, Allie Coulter, Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead, sought a partner to help establish social as the primary engine of two-way dialogue between the brand and its customers. To overhaul the existing social content engine, Coulter and her team needed to do more than routine maintenance. They needed a partner to help lay the foundation for social engagement to become a core strategic asset, driving the company’s future.

A stalled social practice required a bold shift

Coulter was tasked with ensuring American Honda’s social practice measured up to the lofty standards of a global leader—a high-stakes mandate for a brand that prides itself on continually redefining automobile industry standards.

The social media team was trapped by a previous platform that was clunky, outdated and required ongoing manual maintenance. Honda’s four-person team needed technology that allowed them to prioritize customer conversations over technical troubleshooting. Meanwhile, the number of those customer conversations on social media was growing quickly. These began to pick up speed during the pandemic, when customer communication relied primarily on social media. The existing technology simply couldn’t keep up with the demand of so many messages, and forced the team into survival mode with a critical consequence: Community management was deprioritized entirely.

The existing relationship fractured further when vendor support failed alongside the technology shortcomings. Coulter’s team struggled with a lack of vendor responsiveness, putting in repetitive customer service tickets and not getting responses back. For a team tasked with moving at the speed of social, the lack of support was a breaking point.

“If we don’t have vendors that are able to support us at the speed that we need, that’s hard,” Coulter explains. It was clear: If Honda was going to iterate and innovate, its technology stack had to change as well.

Grabbing the keys to true partnership with Sprout Social

Coulter sought a solution that was intuitive, ready to go out of the box and being fed by ongoing innovative updates and feature releases. The decision to switch was strongly influenced by organic peer feedback that consistently praised Sprout’s ease of use and superior customer service. Once implemented, the entire Enterprise Social Media team, including Senior Social Strategist Heather Epstein, were able to shift their focus to being purely customer-centric. The unified nature of the Sprout products allowed Honda to coordinate multi-platform publishing alongside on-brand customer community building and responsive care, and proved indispensable.

“Most of our team is in Sprout every single day, whether it’s clearing queues and responding to key customer questions or scheduling content and pulling metrics. Sprout is there for whatever we need,” shares Epstein.

The Sprout platform’s intelligent queue management and Tagging created fast, measurable relief for the small team. This shift from time-consuming triage to decisive action was monumental. Epstein details the shift in daily operations: “We reduced [inbox management] from about five hours a day to two hours a day, and are still able to answer all of our critical customer questions.”

Co-creating the future of social

What truly solidified Sprout as a partner was the dedicated, two-way relationship that mirrored Honda’s commitment to its own customers—and the strategic dialogue that became Sprout’s greatest differentiator. Sprout didn’t just hand over a tool. The product team listened to feedback and worked alongside Honda to build a solution tailored to their complex business needs.

This partnership was proven when Sprout approached Honda about the opportunities of engaging in influencer marketing. Although Honda initially declined to proceed with Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, their team sat down with Sprout’s engineers and walked them through Honda’s robust, in-house influencer vetting protocol. Sprout took these notes seriously, and incorporated elements of Honda’s unique process directly into the updated Influencer Marketing product.

This collaborative effort led Honda to adopt Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, centralizing all of their social media efforts in one cohesive platform. The result: an ecosystem that simplifies and accelerates Honda’s ability to evaluate major partners, including Olympic athletes, alongside its social community management and customer support programs.

The fact that the Sprout team listened and really understood our process, which then helped influence certain integrations and enhancements to the tool—that’s a game changer. That’s truly a partner listening to their customers.

Allie Coulter
Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead

This spirit of collaboration was evident during implementation. As Epstein confirms, “When it came to our influencer marketing tool, that was something newer to our team … the Sprout representatives were really helpful in onboarding us. We had someone walking us through each step of the process, making sure that it was a seamless transition for us.”

Accelerating audience engagement and strategic impact

The shift to Sprout immediately restored Honda’s ability to connect with its customers. In the first year, Honda achieved a massive 251% increase in community engagement. In year two, with the foundation set, the team leveraged Sprout’s automations and filters to move their focus beyond the growing volume of conversations.

By prioritizing high-value engagements like shares, comments and direct messages, the team was able to decrease time spent in the Smart Inbox by up to 40%, freeing up 40 hours a month for valuable content strategy work and proactive data analysis. This focus on engagements also resulted in an impressive 91% high-quality engagement action rate for the Honda brand, significantly outperforming the 75% industry standard.

Social becomes a powerhouse data source

With its core functions running efficiently on Sprout, the social team leveraged Sprout Social Listening capabilities to elevate its role in the organization to strategic business partnership. The team began proactively sharing social trends and insights with internal stakeholders from R&D to marketing about customer sentiment on innovative products like electric vehicles.

This proactivity in connecting social data to business strategy has propelled social media marketing from an afterthought to a core data source. Today, American Honda relies on its mature social practice as a key driver in major business initiatives, including its proud partnership as a founding partner of the 2028 Olympics—fondly known as “LA28”—and Team USA.

We’re really grateful for the hard work that Sprout put into changing and refreshing our technology stack with us. Our relationship has really paved the way for us to operate in a better, more efficient way.

Allie Coulter
Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead

Put the pedal down on your own social authority

Honda proved that making social a strategic business asset starts with finding a true technology partner who understands and supports your needs. By leveraging Sprout’s intuitive platform and dedication to customer conversations, the team eliminated operational bottlenecks and secured social’s role as an essential data source—defining what best-in-class social execution looks like for a global leader.

Accelerate your own business through social with a platform that delivers instant efficiency and acts as a true innovation partner. Request your free Sprout Social demo today.