14 Sprout Social features you might not know about

Sprout Social features are designed to help you move at the speed of social. We release over a hundred updates per year that span across publishing, engagement, analytics, social listening and customer care. That’s a lot of social media tools at our customers’ disposal.

Of course, there are a few fan favorites. The Smart Inbox, Approval Workflows, Tagging and more all get a lot of love on social and on review sites like G2, but there are some lesser known Sprout features that deserve some hype as well.

In this article, we’re highlighting Sprout Social features you might not know about. These tools simplify workflows, empowering teams to do more on social, with ease.

• Sprout Social publishing features
• Sprout Social engagement features
• Sprout Social reporting features
• Sprout Social Listening features

What does Sprout Social do?

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that unlocks the full potential of social for every area of your organization. Our features span the full spectrum of social media management, including publishing, engagement, customer care, reporting, analytics, social listening and employee advocacy.

On top of that, Sprout integrates with the tools you love, including (but not limited to) Salesforce Service Cloud, Google Analytics and Tableau. These social media management integrations break down internal silos, delivering critical insights that unite teams around one core audience.

Sprout Social publishing features

You can find everything you need to develop and manage a consistent posting cadence across all major platforms in the Publishing Section of Sprout Social. If you want to level up your publishing workflow, try these must-know Sprout Social features.

1. Draft engaging post copy in seconds with AI Assist

According to the 2024 Content Benchmarks Report, brands published an average of 10 social posts per day across all networks. Industries like retail, media and sports frequently surpass this number, reaching up to 43 posts per day.

That’s thousands of posts brands need to publish each year—way too much work for social media managers juggling strategy, reporting, influencer marketing and more. That’s where AI Assist comes in.

AI Assist offers generative AI-powered copywriting support directly within the Compose Window—Sprout’s tool for creating and scheduling new social posts.

Even if you don’t use the suggested post copy word-for-word, it can still provide much-needed inspiration that will help you break through writer’s block. You can also use it to adjust the tone of your original copy to be more friendly, confident or professional.

2. Share critical context with Calendar Notes

Picture this: You know a major promotion or event is coming, but you haven’t received the details needed to craft the perfect post. Now, your publishing calendar has several blank spots you know you’re holding for the promotion—but no one else does.

Calendar Notes democratize that information by acting as a placeholder in your Publishing Calendar. This prevents your colleagues from scheduling additional content because they see a gap in your publishing queue. It also gives business leaders a more accurate view of your publishing cadence.

You can use Calendar Notes to share ideas with your team, or to share reminders to amplify content from influencers and business partners.

3. Schedule directly from your browser with the Sprout browser extension

If you rely on curating industry-specific news to boost thought leadership on your brand’s social accounts, you need to use the Sprout Social browser extension.

This tool brings the Compose Window with you as you browse the web for relevant articles to share. When you find something that would appeal to or intrigue your audience, simply click on the extension to add it to your Sprout Queue.

4. Drive Instagram traffic with SproutLink

Link in bio tools empower marketers to promote as many links as their strategy demands on Instagram, but there are trade-offs. For example, jumping between a social media management tool, a link in bio tool and Instagram to make sure everything is consistent can quickly become a tedious task.

That’s why we created SproutLink. SproutLink consolidates your Instagram publishing workflow by creating posts, managing and reporting on associated links all within Sprout Social. SproutLink creates a clickable version of your Instagram grid that gives your audience more content choices and ways to explore your brand.

5. Keep content production on track with External Approvals

Sprout’s Message Approval workflow is a game-changer for social media teams navigating multi-step content review processes. But did you know it’s not limited to individuals with seats in Sprout?

Brands using the Sprout Social Advanced Plan can add external approvers simply by adding the individual’s email address to their Message Approval workflow. Once the user verifies their email address, they can review assigned posts, provide feedback and give their stamp of approval.

Plus, Sprout will send external approvers automated reminder emails leading up to their deadline if an approval hasn’t come through yet. This not only saves time and effort, but it alleviates the common pain point of remembering to follow up.

Sprout Social engagement features

On social media, engagement is everything. We’re not talking about your engagement KPIs—although those are important, too. We’re talking about the ways you connect and build relationships with your target audience.

These Sprout Social features will help you wow them every time.

6. Elevate customer care experiences with AI Assist

Our team often gets asked about how to train customer service agents for social customer care. We have quite a few resources on the topic (including this social media customer service training deck), but if you want to make friendly, on-brand customer service your brand’s standard, you need to try Enhance by AI Assist.

Enhance by AI Assist eliminates guesswork for your agents. It recommends alternative replies that enhance tone of voice and elaborate on responses. This reduces agents’ overall social media response time, resulting in better, faster customer care experiences.

7. Use search operators to optimize Brand Keywords

Some people will talk about your brand on social without ever tagging your accounts directly. The Brand Keywords tool helps ensure you don’t miss these engagement opportunities by pulling specific keyword mentions from X (formerly known as Twitter) directly into your Smart Inbox.

You can even use search operators to further refine these keywords. Here’s how they work:

Say you manage social media strategy for Sprout Coffee Co. Online, customers frequently refer to your brand as “Sprout Coffee Inc.” instead of “Sprout Coffee Co.”, resulting in some missed opportunities to engage your fans. To catch these messages going forward, you can use the “OR” search operator while setting up a new Brand Keyword.

Once you add the search operator,  X posts including either keyword will show up in your Smart Inbox in real time.

8. Automatically complete @mentions only comments

While followers tagging their friends in a comment boost your brand’s visibility, these comments can crowd your Inbox. To save time, you can enable Complete @mention Comments in Sprout’s Inbox Settings.

Little tools like these make a big difference when it comes to reducing the amount of noise going on in your social media inbox. Less noise means social customer care agents can stay focused on the messages that matter most.

9. Create custom inbox views based on message sentiment

Sprout’s AI-powered sentiment analysis tools help marketers and customer service agents monitor brand health in both messages and reviews, which improves efficiency and mitigates risk.

Creating a custom inbox view based on negative sentiment will give you a birds-eye view of the less-than-glowing feedback your business has received within a given time period. It’s not always fun to look at, but it’s a crucial way to keep an eye on potential social media crises. If several complaints share similar themes, you can also use this intel to pitch necessary customer experience improvements to the rest of your team.

Sprout Social reporting features

Reporting is often the most important—and most time-consuming—aspect of a social media manager’s job. Consolidating several network-specific metrics into one comprehensive report without a sophisticated reporting tool can take hours, if not days.

Sprout’s reporting and analytics tools are designed to help users tell compelling stories with data. The following Sprout Social features make quantifying the impact of your social media performance easy:

 10. Keep stakeholders informed with scheduled PDF reports

Automating report delivery is an easy way to take a recurring task off your to-do list. With Sprout, you can schedule reports to send to up to 25 people weekly or monthly.

Customers with our Premium Analytics add-on can easily share reports with anyone using direct links, even if they don’t have a Sprout account. These links update automatically, strengthening alignment between teams and internal stakeholders.

11. Get granular insights with Tagging

Tags are a game-changing Sprout feature that helps marketers group and categorize posts for flexible reporting on content by theme, type, campaign—the opportunities really are endless.

For more detailed reporting options, we recommend setting up Tag Collections. These let you organize Tags with similar themes. For example, a retail brand might set up a customer support Tag Collection that groups all of their issue-specific Tags, like “Shipping Delay”, “Damaged Product” and “Negative In-Store Experience”.

You can analyze Collections and drill down into specific Tags within Collections using the Tag Performance Report. This report offers easy-to-follow data visualizations and post-level insights that demystify the performance of tagged posts and messages.

12. Expand your reporting capabilities with My Reports

If you want to truly maximize your social media reporting options, then you need My Reports, available in Sprout’s Premium Analytics tool.

With My Reports, you can build customizable reports complete with multiple tables and dynamic visualizations—like bar and line charts—to compare performance across a number of networks. Filtering options allow teams to go broad to granular in just a few clicks, sorting data by metric, Tag, content type and more.

Once you’ve organized the data to your liking, you can add critical context using annotation widgets that are perfect for executive summaries and miscellaneous notes. All these tools work together to help teams understand social’s impact at a glance, in a format that resonates.

Sprout Social Listening features

Social Listening is a Sprout Social premium solution that allows brands to uncover trends and actionable insights from social. This AI-powered tool scales the process of premium data ingestion, delivering actionable insights needed to guide your future strategy.

Because Listening is a premium add-on, trial accounts don’t have access to the tool. However, you can still see it in action by scheduling a demo. If you do, here are two features to ask about:

13. Reduce unnecessary noise with spam filtration

Spam posts on social media are like taxes or traffic jams—they’re annoying, but inevitable. That’s why it’s important to invest in tools that tune them out.

Sprout Social’s Listening tool has built in filtering technology that excludes common noise categories like sweepstakes, sales listings, coupons and adult content. If your Listening Topic is pulling spam messages that don’t fall into those categories, you can set up custom filtration options using the spam publisher’s location or website information.

These tools increase the accuracy of your listening data, so you’re left with insights driven by real people—not bots. 

14. Enhance social listening queries with help from AI

Sprout’s Social Listening tool uses artificial intelligence to sift through billions of data points to spotlight trends, insights and key learnings essential to your strategy, but that technology isn’t limited to the back end of our system.

Use smart AI technology to maximize the tool’s potential through the following features:

• Queries by AI Assist: Generate keyword suggestions for Listening queries to make your search more precise and comprehensive. You can also use this tool to generate Theme suggestions, which are additional groupings you can apply to your messages within your Listening Topic for deeper insights.
• Summaries by AI Assist: Get the TL;DR on Listening messages with more than 800 characters. The generated summaries will pull the most important information and themes from the post, so you don’t have to leave things up to chance by skimming.

Experience these Sprout Social features firsthand

You can test drive these features for yourself, even if you’re not already a Sprout customer.

Sign up for your free 30-day trial of Sprout Social today. Sprout begins gathering data from your social media accounts as soon as you connect them, so you’ll be able to try all these features (and more!) in less time than it takes to schedule a post.

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