How brands and partners use the Sprout Social API

In a world that moves at the speed of social, brands are constantly on their toes to keep up with customers and the competition. For social teams, it’s a juggling act that demands attention to detail and adaptability.

From scheduling posts and engaging with audiences to analyzing metrics and staying on top of trends, social teams always have their hands full.

Technical integrations that seamlessly connect with your existing stack to manage all your social media operations can save the day. They provide social teams with the ability to manage multiple workloads simultaneously, so they can focus on optimizing your brand’s social ROI.

By connecting your systems and automating routine tasks, technical integration makes it easier for your team to focus on what really matters—creating powerful narratives and driving meaningful engagement. Thus, turning social media management into a well-oiled machine where everything clicks into place effortlessly.

In this article, you’ll read how the Sprout Social API does just this for your brand. In particular, find out how our brands and partners use our API for publishing and reporting.

Does Sprout Social have an open API?

Yes, Sprout Social has an open API. The Sprout Public API enables you to extend your external workflows by integrating with our Publishing and Reporting tools.

Streamline your critical content creation workflows and funnel all your social profile data into your dashboards for centralized, automated reporting. This way, you’re able to meet your unique reporting needs and integrate social data into your broader analytics processes.

You can easily export post drafts, including text, images, videos, carousels and links, from your current project management software or content management tools to the Sprout platform. Also, plan and schedule the exported content in Sprout without disrupting the project management workflows you’re already working on.

Plus, your dedicated development teams can build custom integrations with your existing project/content management tools as and when you require them.

To access the Sprout Public API, your account must be authorized for API-use by your Sprout account representative. Once your account is provisioned, you can either ​​create an Account-scoped access token or an OAuth access token (using our OAuth 2.0 provider) to authenticate API requests.

Here’s a quick look at what the Sprout API includes:

• Owned profile data: Matches the data available in Sprout’s Profile Performance, X Profiles, Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages, Pinterest Profiles, TikTok Profiles and YouTube Videos Report.
• Post data: This matches Sprout’s Post Performance Report data.
• Owned demographic data: View the data available in Sprout’s Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages and TikTok Profiles Reports.
• Message data: Get detailed information, including metadata, about your messages. This includes messages received by and replied to from your profiles.
• Publishing posts: Create posts within Sprout.
• Media upload: Upload Media for use with publishing posts.
• Direct Tableau Connector: The Tableau Connector uses the Sprout API to pull your social data into Tableau. The metrics and data points are collected directly from those available in the Sprout API. This enables you to easily analyze Sprout API data directly in Tableau.
• Listening Topics: Retrieve earned media-related metrics and messages found within your Listening Topics.

Find out more details about the Sprout API.

How brands and partners use the Sprout Social Publishing API

Our customers and partners use the Sprout Social Publishing API to streamline their workflow, creating and publishing on-brand social content faster and more efficiently. Here are use cases from a few of our integrations, which are available with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

Slate

The Sprout Social Publishing API integrates with the Slate CRM platform. You can craft and publish social content via Sprout, plus track content performance through our Reporting.

Create content in Slate’s Web Editor and send it directly to Sprout. Social teams can then log into Sprout to check the content before publishing or scheduling it.

The integration also enables you to reuse your top-performing content from Slate and send it to Sprout to schedule and publish across networks.

Once your content is published, you can track the performance of your social content through the Post Performance Report. Customize your reports by using Tagging to focus on the content you want to track based on your goals and objectives.

More about our Slate integration.

Opal

Our Opal integration enables brands to export and schedule branded content into Sprout, making it easy to collaborate with broader marketing teams.

This content is delivered seamlessly, so the content library in the Sprout platform is always updated. You can then log into Sprout to review the delivered content and publish it on your social profiles. You can also schedule the delivered content for publishing based on your campaign calendar. Once the post is published, you’ll receive a live URL on Opal from Sprout.

All the content that’s delivered from Opal is ​​added to the Sprout Library. If a piece of content is already in the Sprout repository, our tool will automatically link to the existing asset to avoid duplicates. This way you’re not worried about unnecessary data clogging up your asset library and have the relevant content you need at your fingertips.

As for content types, Sprout supports a wide variety on Opal. This includes Facebook posts and videos, Instagram posts, videos, Reels and carousels, TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, X (formerly Twitter) posts and videos‌, and YouTube videos.

Optimizely

Sprout integrates with Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to give you seamless workflows for managing social media campaigns. The integration enables large teams to collaborate more effectively by helping them plan their content better and schedule posts for publishing in one single workspace.

Import approved social content, including text, image and videos, to Sprout as post drafts and schedule them across your social networks as needed. Thus, eliminating the need for manual curation and giving time back to social teams so they can focus on the more strategic aspects of their work. Another key integration feature is Task-Based Publishing, which enables marketers to publish posts directly from tasks within the Optimizely CMP.

The Optimizely integration is available with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

How brands and partners use the Sprout Social Reporting API

The Sprout Social Reporting API helps brands select metrics that best match their business goals and prove the impact of their data. Teams can view important insights in presentation-ready reports, which can also be quickly distributed to key stakeholders within the larger organization.

Here’s a walk-through of how brands and partners use some of our integrations.

Tableau

Our Tableau BI Connector helps you combine the power of your social data with all your important data streams.

Brands can connect Sprout into Tableau without additional developer resources and customize data visualization based on your data storytelling requirements. Choose the metrics you want and need per your priorities to understand how your social data fits into your overall business strategy. This helps you get an omni-channel view of your business insights as they funnel through all your key channels.

Connecting to Tableau from your Sprout account is easy. Use your Sprout API token to set up the Tableau Connector and then log into Tableau.

Navigate to Data > New Data Source > Web Data Connector

Once you’re in the Web Data Connector, enter the URL (https://api.sproutsocial.com/tableau), paste your Sprout API token and click Connect.

With this connection in place, your Sprout data will automatically appear in Tableau. ​​Now you can customize your Tableau dashboards to slice and dice your Sprout data as needed.

Datorama

Sprout Premium Analytics users can ​​bring their social marketing analytics into their marketing dashboards in Datorama, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform.

This Sprout Salesforce integration gives you metrics such as post-level data, Sprout Tag and campaign data as well as network metrics that aren’t available in Datorama, such as TikTok. You can also manage all profile permissions and reauthorizations in one place.

To start using the Sprout integration exclusively in Salesforce, use the API key, which you can generate by going into:

Account and settings > Settings > Click API Tokens under Reporting and Listening > Click Sprout’s Analytics API Terms of Service to review the terms > Select Agree, and Submit

 

Once you click Submit, your API key will be generated. Create a name for your Token and click Create Token.

Copy and paste your token in Datorama, and you’re all set.

Chattermill

The Sprout Social API integrates with customer experience (CX) platform, Chattermill, so brands can benefit from Sprout’s comprehensive analytics and reporting.

You can connect all your social media accounts on Sprout via Chattermill to track and measure customer feedback in social mentions. This enables you to have detailed reporting on common customer complaints, trends and spikes in conversations in one central dashboard. Teams get these insights in easy-to-understand reports and can easily share them with leaders and stakeholders to highlight and prove the brand’s social ROI.

Sprout customers can also use the Chattermill integration to analyze brand sentiment in customer feedback on review websites. This helps you understand your customer experience more holistically and draw actionable insights for tangible improvements to products and services.

Track your social ROI to propel your brand forward

Measuring and tracking your social ROI isn’t just about proving the value of your efforts—it’s a strategy that can move your brand forward in the right direction. Through integrations, teams can work smarter, saving time and resources spent on manual tasks or jumping between platforms for activities that have a greater impact.

The Sprout Social API helps you integrate your social data with your CRM and CX tools so you gain the insights you need. This helps you refine your marketing approach, optimize campaigns and make data-driven decisions that help you remain competitive, ever-green brand.

These metrics also give you the ability to allocate resources more effectively, ensuring that every action contributes to your brand’s growth and success.

Explore Sprout’s Premium Social Media and Analytics Reporting to improve your social strategies and prove your impact for sustained long-term success.