How to Use Social Data Like a Pro: 40 Strategies for Smarter Marketing
High impact social data can create company-wide value—and marketing leaders know it.
According to Sprout Social’s 2025 Impact of Social Media Marketing Report, digital marketing teams are most likely to use social data to inform their decisions. But leaders say they want teams like customer experience and success, customer care and support and business development to use social insights to drive their decisions, too.
But turning that aspiration into impact takes more than strong reporting—it takes a clear, scalable approach to sharing social insights across teams. From informing product roadmaps to driving revenue, social data can influence big decisions.
To help you get there, we’ve rounded up 40 high-impact ways to use social data—pulled from proven strategies and forward-thinking social teams.
Understand your audience
1. Conduct a social media audit
Before you can truly understand your audience, you need to understand your own performance. A social media audit helps you establish a baseline, so you can identify what’s working, what’s not and where the biggest opportunities lie.
Review your engagement and publishing metrics, audience demographics (if available), referral traffic, content mix and platform performance. Look for patterns in how your audience interacts with your content and how that’s evolved over time.
Need help getting started? Download our free social media audit template.
2. Track your follower growth
Follower growth isn’t the sole indicator of success, but tracking how and when your audience grows can offer valuable context. Instead of focusing on total followers, zero in on growth rate and timing—especially during campaigns, product launches or high-visibility moments.
Use data visualization tools to surface spikes in interest and understand which tactics are driving discovery. Over time, this helps you refine what attracts new followers and replicate those results more consistently.
3. Tune into consumer trends with social listening
As platforms limit access to traditional demographic data, understanding your audience now hinges on what they care about—not just who they are. That’s where social listening comes in.
With a listening tool like Sprout Social, you can track trending topics, hashtags, keywords and brand mentions across networks to understand what’s capturing your audience’s attention in real time. This kind of insight helps you align your content with the questions they’re asking, the influencers they trust and the cultural moments they’re engaging with.
4. Evaluate where your audience is spending their time on social and why
Each social platform serves a different purpose for your audience. Use your engagement and performance data to learn where your audience is most active, and just as importantly, what they’re looking for on each channel.
For example, your audience may seek inspiration on Instagram, use LinkedIn for thought leadership and turn to TikTok for quick tips. When you understand the why behind their platform behavior, you can tailor your content more effectively—and allocate resources where they’ll make the biggest impact.
Age can also play a role here. Sprout’s 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report can help you understand which networks are most relevant across generational cohorts, so you can balance behavioral insights with audience preferences in your strategy.
Download the 2024 Social Media Content Strategy Report
5. Cater to your audience’s interests
Top-performing posts are packed with clues about what your audience wants. Use post-level insights and trend analysis to spot content patterns that resonate, whether that’s how-to videos, behind-the-scenes stories or industry hot takes.
Let this data guide your strategy. If product how-tos consistently earn the most clicks or comments, that’s a signal to scale up that content type. When you focus on what your audience is showing interest in, you naturally improve engagement, relevance and reach.
Look beyond your owned dataSocial platforms are treasure troves of audience insights, and many share them openly. Tap into resources from networks like TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube to uncover broader consumer trends and industry benchmarks.
Use this data to supplement your own analytics and refine your strategy. Paired with what you’re learning from your owned channels and social listening, these platform-specific insights give you a 360-degree view of your audience.
Use social data to experiment
7. Optimize your publishing cadence with data
The 2025 Content Benchmarks Report found that brands published an average of 9.5 social posts per day across networks in 2024—a slight dip from 2023. This signals a shift toward quality over quantity, as more brands create space to develop content that feels original and human.
According to the 2025 Sprout Social Index™, social users consider both the originality of your content and how you engage with your audience before deciding to follow. Growth and retention aren’t about posting constantly—they’re about showing up with purpose.
If you’re unsure whether increasing or decreasing your cadence will help performance, test it. Adjust your publishing volume for a week, then compare results against your average benchmarks.
Track engagement, impressions and link clicks to identify what cadence works best. Sprout’s ViralPost® can help by using AI to determine optimal posting times based on your audience’s behavior—or start with our guide to the best times to post on social media.
8. Use testing to inform your creative strategy
Stop relying on gut instinct to determine what content performs best. Let the data guide you. Whether you’re comparing still images vs. video, short-form vs. long-form captions or different CTAs, testing creative variables gives you clarity on what resonates.
Use Sprout’s Tag Report to organize your test content and analyze performance across key metrics like impressions, engagements and clicks—broken down by platform and content type.
This type of social data gives you the clarity and confidence to double down on what’s working, refine your content strategy and push back on creative requests that don’t align with audience expectations or platform best practices.
9. Refine your brand voice based on audience response
Your brand’s tone and voice shape how people perceive and connect with you. Social data can help you fine-tune your copy strategy based on real audience behavior.
Test variables like short vs. long captions, casual vs. formal tone, or emoji use vs. plain text. Use the results to identify patterns and make data-backed decisions that strengthen your brand’s personality on social.
10. Know when to pivot your strategy
Social testing can validate assumptions, but it can also show where you’re wasting time and resources. For example, if high-production videos or polished product shots consistently underperform, that’s a signal to rethink where your time and budget are going.
Use your performance data to flag low-impact formats or channels, then shift your resources toward the content and tactics that actually move the needle.
Collect social media data as you connect with consumers
11. Ask your audience directly
If you’re unsure what your audience wants to see more of, or you’re trying to evaluate customer experience, sometimes the best approach is the simplest: just ask.
Whether you’re trying to spark ideas, gauge sentiment or co-create content, questions are a low-effort, high-return way to invite your audience into the conversation and make them feel seen.
12. Use polls and quizzes to gather quick insights
Social polls and quizzes offer a fast, engaging way to collect structured data from your audience.
Polls help you crowdsource preferences and opinions, while quizzes can surface gaps in knowledge or awareness about your brand or offerings. Both formats show your community that their input matters—and provide data points you can use to inform future content, messaging and product decisions.
13. Measure sentiment in real time
Audience sentiment is constantly shifting, and tracking it manually can feel like chasing a moving target.
With Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Listening tools, you can monitor sentiment across comments, messages and brand mentions at scale. Whether you’re launching a campaign or responding to a crisis, sentiment analysis helps you adjust messaging quickly and proactively manage brand reputation.
14. Benchmark your performance against competitors
Social data doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Benchmarking your performance against industry peers or key competitors helps you identify strengths, surface opportunities, and calibrate your goals.
With Sprout’s Competitor Reports and Listening tools, you can track share of voice, engagement trends and content strategies—so you’re never making decisions in isolation.
15. Use Listening data to understand brand health at a deeper level
When it comes to brand health, metrics like shares or likes only scratch the surface. To truly understand how people feel about your brand, you need a way to analyze the broader, unfiltered conversation happening across social—even when you’re not tagged directly.
Social listening tools like Sprout help you go beyond general sentiment scores by segmenting conversations into key themes, whether that’s product categories, service experiences or campaign narratives. This level of granularity allows you to pinpoint what’s driving positive sentiment, and where frustrations or confusion may be building.
For example, if you’re seeing a surge in brand mentions, listening data can help you identify why—whether it’s tied to a recent campaign, a product update or even a viral moment. You can compare how different parts of your offering are being talked about and uncover emerging trends in real time, without needing to sift through every single post manually.
Elevate your campaigns with social data
16. Use Tagging for more granular campaign insights
The Atlanta Hawks use social data to make smarter decisions about what content to prioritize and amplify. Using Sprout’s tagging capabilities, their team tracks content performance by type, theme and campaign, giving them a clearer picture of what drives engagement and brand value.
“We also create campaign ID tags for any larger marketing campaigns,” says Katie DuPre’, Social Strategy Manager at the Hawks. “For example, when we were at All-Star Weekend, all live content coverage got a specific tag. After the event concluded, we were able to go back and recap the success of our event coverage.”
By organizing and analyzing campaign data at this level of granularity, the Hawks can confidently identify which content strategies are worth replicating or promoting across upcoming campaigns. Whether it’s a standout video theme or a high-performing in-game moment, these insights help guide future content investments, ensuring their strategy stays aligned with audience preferences.
17. Establish benchmarks and set social campaign goals
Before you launch a campaign, social data can help you establish performance benchmarks and set goals that are both realistic and aligned with your broader marketing objectives.
Start by reviewing past content and campaign performance to understand your baseline. Look for patterns in engagement, reach, clicks or conversions across similar campaigns, content types or platforms. From there, set SMART goals—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound—that tie directly to your business outcomes.
For example, instead of aiming to “increase engagement,” you might set a goal to “increase saves and shares on Instagram Reels by 20% over the next quarter.” If you’re running paid campaigns, consider benchmarks like cost per click (CPC), conversion rate or branded search lift.
If you don’t have access to clean historical data—or you’re just getting started—industry resources like Sprout’s 2025 Content Benchmarks Report can help you establish a starting point. These benchmarks give you platform-specific performance data by industry, so you can set goals that are grounded in real-world averages rather than guesswork.
18. Get more from your campaign reporting with UTMs
UTMs may seem like a small detail, but they can have a big impact on your reporting. By consistently tagging your social campaign links, you’ll be able to trace exactly how your content influences traffic, conversions and behavior on your website.
When it comes time to report on campaign performance, UTMs give you the clarity to answer key questions like: Which channels are driving the most engaged traffic? Which posts are converting? Which creative themes are most effective?
That added layer of visibility helps prove social media’s value, so you can make the case for what’s working (and what to invest in next).
19. Evaluate the success of your campaign hashtags
Hashtags can be a powerful tool for rallying audiences around your campaign. But to understand their true impact, you need to track performance.
Take Spotify Wrapped, for example. Every year, fans flood social with personal listening stats using hashtags like #SpotifyWrapped, creating a surge in organic reach, brand love and user-generated content. By analyzing hashtag performance—volume, reach, sentiment and engagement—Spotify can measure the full scope of campaign impact and fan participation.
20. Use social data to find the right influencer partners
Choosing the right influencer isn’t just about reach—it’s about relevance. Social data helps you go deeper, analyzing audience demographics, content themes and past performance to find creators who align with your brand values and resonate with your target audience.
Sprout Social Influencer Marketing includes a Brand Fit Score, a proprietary metric designed to answer one key question: Is this the right creator to drive your brand’s goals?
Expand your influence to other departments
22. Show how social drives site growth
Pair native social metrics like reach and impressions with website analytics to demonstrate how your content attracts new users. Whether you’re using GA4, Bitly or a CRM integration, tracking social-driven traffic helps you quantify awareness, acquisition and engagement—and clearly show marketing leadership the role social plays in growing your audience.
22. Bring customer feedback to product and CX teams
Social is often where customers first share their opinions—good, bad or brilliant. Use those insights to help product and CX teams stay connected to real-time customer needs.
With tagging in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can track the volume of specific types of feedback. For example, if you’re seeing repeated requests for a discontinued product, tagging those messages helps quantify demand. That way, you can advocate for changes backed by data rather than anecdotes.
23. Support sales and promotional campaigns with social insights
Social isn’t just for discovery. It’s where buying decisions are made. In fact, consumers say they search for new products and services on social media when they need to make a purchase within the next month, ASAP or in the next 3–6 months.
That level of intent makes social commerce a key revenue driver. Share performance data on shoppable content—like product tags, storefront traffic or in-app conversions—to highlight how social provides a direct path to purchase. These insights help your sales and ecommerce teams understand what drives action, not just awareness.
24. Help sales teams prioritize the right platforms
Not all social channels drive the same results. And your sales team shouldn’t treat them like they do. Use UTM tracking and referral data to identify where your audience is most engaged and where conversions are actually happening.
These insights can help your sales team focus their social selling efforts on the platforms that matter most, whether that’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or somewhere else entirely. It’s a simple way to align efforts, reduce wasted time and drive more meaningful buyer interactions.
25. Use social sentiment to guide accountability practices
When your brand makes public commitments—whether around DEI, sustainability or social impact—people turn to social to see if you’re walking the talk. According to our Q2 2025 Pulse Survey, the biggest group of social media users (41%) said they’re most likely to call a brand out for doing something unethical than for any other reason.
Monitor inbound messages, comments and sentiment to understand how your audience is responding. Use that data to track progress over time, report on perception and advocate for continued transparency. Social gives you a real-time pulse on whether your values are landing—and where you may need to communicate more clearly or take further action.
26. Extend your reach with employee advocacy
Your colleagues can be one of your brand’s strongest distribution channels. With a well-run employee advocacy program, you can empower teams to amplify content, engage their networks and contribute to meaningful brand reach—especially in markets or circles your brand account might not organically reach.
Sprout’s advocacy tool makes it easy to share curated content, track performance by network or individual and report back on the real impact of employee amplification.
27. Inform design and creative decisions with data
Creative teams do their best work when insights guide the process. By bringing performance data to designers, you can help them understand what’s resonating across platforms and tailor content to meet both audience expectations and brand goals.
Whether it’s format, tone or visual identity, these insights ensure your creative aligns with how and where people are engaging with your brand.
28. Use social insights to influence the full marketing mix
Social performance data can benefit your entire marketing org. Just ask the team at River Island.
They use Sprout’s Tag Report to uncover which creative assets resonate most—and those insights now shape email, website and influencer strategies.
“The use of influencer or UGC imagery across our email marketing and site has increased. The images and the data that informed that decision come directly from social. Because we’ve been able to show how content performs, dig up key insights and prove real social value, now, for the first time, we’re starting to work as a full 360 platform.”
– Chloe Bebbington, Social Media Marketing Manager, River Island
Learn more about how River Island uses Sprout to optimize their content and social strategies.
Strengthen brand trust through data-driven care and reputation management
29. Monitor and manage brand reviews
Online reviews are a rich source of qualitative insight. Whether posted on social platforms or third-party sites, they reveal what’s resonating—or falling short—for your customers. Social teams are often the first to spot trends across reviews and can use that feedback to inform other teams.
By tagging review themes in Sprout or setting up Listening Topics to track emerging sentiment, you can identify patterns worth elevating to product, operations or customer experience teams. This ensures the voice of the customer drives meaningful change across the business.
30. Monitor the impact of internal Glassdoor review campaigns
Many organizations run internal initiatives encouraging employees to leave reviews on Glassdoor, especially after key milestones like onboarding, anniversaries or company events. These efforts are intended to boost visibility and improve ratings, but their effectiveness can be difficult to measure without the right tools.
Sprout’s Glassdoor integration enables marketing and HR teams to monitor changes in review volume and sentiment following those campaigns. By aligning around a shared view of the data, teams can assess what’s working, refine future outreach and ultimately strengthen the company’s employer brand presence.
31. Apply social listening techniques to your employer brand
You’re already using social data to track trends in consumer sentiment. Why not do the same for employee sentiment?
With Sprout Social, you can apply Tags to employee reviews submitted through Glassdoor, then use the Tag Report to analyze patterns, track internal culture themes and identify areas for improvement. These insights can help you evolve your employer branding strategy with the same rigor you apply to external campaigns.
32. Use social data to proactively address FAQs
Customer questions on social are more than just one-off interactions—they’re signals. By tagging inbound messages in Sprout, your team can track recurring themes, identify which questions are trending and determine where confusion or demand is building.
If you notice certain Tags ballooning, use that insight to craft proactive responses, update help center content or build ready-to-go replies for your social team (which can be stored as text resources in Sprout’s Asset Manager). The result? A smarter, more responsive customer care strategy that evolves in real time with your audience’s needs.
33. Measure and improve the efficiency of your social care team
Responsiveness can make or break brand loyalty. Findings from the Sprout Social Index™ show that 73% of social users agree if a brand doesn’t respond on social, they’ll buy from a competitor.
With Social Customer Care by Sprout Social, you can go beyond anecdotal feedback. Use metrics like average first reply time, response rate and resolution time to set internal benchmarks, track team performance and make informed staffing decisions.
Sprout’s Case Management Report and Case Team Activity Report surface actionable insights into care team productivity—empowering you to optimize workflows, coach individual agents and exceed rising customer expectations.
Prove the value of your work with social data
34. Rethink how you measure social ROI
ROI on social doesn’t always follow a straight line. Traditional last-click attribution often overlooks social’s influence across the funnel, from building brand awareness to influencing conversion.
Use Sprout’s cross-channel performance reports to analyze metrics like link clicks, profile traffic and conversions. Combine that with UTM tracking and GA data to complete the attribution picture and connect your social efforts to business outcomes.
35. Integrate social data into your attribution model
To put a definitive dollar value on your efforts, your social data needs to be part of the same conversation as the rest of your marketing channels. Integrating social performance into a broader marketing attribution model helps you connect social interactions to real business outcomes like revenue and pipeline.
Want a shortcut to getting started? Our ROI strategy toolkit walks you through the revenue attribution metrics that matter and shows you what’s possible once you integrate social into your multi-touch attribution model. It’s the roadmap you need to turn social insights into hard numbers and executive-level influence.
H3: 36. Make sure your paid strategy is paying off
When you’re putting budget behind your content, understanding the return is critical. With Sprout’s Cross-Network Paid Performance Report, you can track campaign metrics like cost-per-click, impressions and conversions across networks in one place.
Use that data to assess what’s working, optimize spend in real time and scale what’s driving results.
37. Build a business case to secure executive buy-in
Despite what you may have heard, numbers don’t speak for themselves. They need a storyteller.
To earn more budget, bandwidth or buy-in, you have to connect the dots between your team’s performance and broader business goals. That’s where data storytelling comes in.
By showcasing the impact of our social strategy through clear, compelling reports, we’ve secured additional budget for team growth, expanded our influencer marketing efforts and gained buy-in for Sprout’s first-ever brand activation at Design Miami 2024. These wins wouldn’t be possible without a deep understanding of both our performance data and the art of storytelling.
38. Track team performance and productivity
Social performance isn’t just about your content—it’s also about your team. With Sprout’s Task Performance Report and Inbox Team Report, you can analyze response times, volume handled and completion rates to understand team capacity and identify coaching opportunities.
This visibility helps you resource effectively and create a more agile, efficient team.
39. Focus on rates, not just raw numbers
Big numbers don’t always mean big impact. Metrics like engagement rate, reply rate and audience growth rate give you a clearer sense of how your content is performing relative to your goals.
Sprout calculates these rates automatically, helping you evaluate performance fairly and spot trends you might miss if you only look at absolute values.
40. Build stronger partnerships with stakeholders
When teams across your organization understand the value of social, collaboration becomes second nature. With Sprout’s tagging and reporting tools, Grammarly’s support team is able to turn everyday customer messages into actionable insights that influence product development and improve user experience.
By combining tagging data from Sprout with insights from other platforms, they create reports that are shared regularly with product leaders and company executives. This ongoing feedback loop has helped the social team become a trusted source of user sentiment and product intelligence across the business.
