CHICAGO—Sprout Social, a leader in social media management and engagement for businesses, today announces the kickoff of #BePresent—a new initiative to help brands better measure and improve social media engagement. At the heart of the campaign is a new Engagement Report, which all brands are invited to generate and download for free at mustbepresent.com.

“Social media has forever changed the way brands interact with customers and it is not enough to simply push messages out into the world,” says Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social. “You have to engage, you have to foster dialogues, and you have to provide exemplary social care. In short, you must #BePresent.”

The free Engagement Report uses proprietary models to identify messages likely needing a response and measures the brand’s responsiveness to those inquiries. The report will help brands find opportunities to better manage workflow, allocate resources and improve engagement. Each report provides a number of relevant statistics including:

  • Response rate
  • Average response times
  • Industry and peer-group benchmarks

“Brands, and the industry as a whole, traditionally struggle to accurately measure social responsiveness,” notes Howard. “As an industry leader, it is our responsibility to advance the social measurement conversation and bring new capabilities to market.”

The #BePresent mission is to bring baseline engagement metrics to the table, encourage social participation and identify areas for brand improvement. The process is simple:

  1. Visit mustbepresent.com
  2. Create a #BePresent account & authorize with Twitter
  3. Generate your free Engagement Report

Once a report is generated, Sprout monitors activity in real-time and users can check back as often as they wish to update their report or look to the Sprout Social platform for more in-depth reporting. It is important to note the Engagement Report does not determine a final “score” or highlight one most important metric, but is meant to show relative performance.

“To singularly define one metric or create an ‘end-all-be-all’ score somewhat defeats the purpose of holistic and ongoing engagement,” adds Howard. “We want brands to know where they currently stand, set goals appropriate for their business, implement a strategy to improve and then continually track progress.”

Sprout is also launching a new suite of features in their Social Media Management (SMM) platform to coincide with this initiative. Sprout customers will benefit from detailed engagement reporting, additional analytics over time and multi-profile summation of data and responses. Engagement metrics and indicators will be present throughout the platform to keep teams apprised of their performance in real-time.

Read the Engagement Report Fact Sheet for additional information and an explanation of full report details.

Sprout Social logo, product and Engagement Report images available upon request.

About Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides social media engagement, publishing and analytic tools for top global brands including AMD, McDonald’s, Pepsi, UPS and Yammer. A powerful platform for social business, Sprout enables brands to more effectively manage social channels and provide an exceptional customer experience. Headquartered in Chicago, Sprout is a Twitter Certified Product and a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer.