Publish Content & Measure Success
Sprout Social gives businesses scalability and control over content publishing across all of their social channels. Sprout’s built-in publishing tools make it easy and efficient to create a consistent content experience across profiles, while the Sent Messages Report displays post-specific analytics and data to highlight the impact of published content.
Watch the webinar for this guide.
Topics:
Compose a Message
Manage Content
Feeds
Publishing Settings & Setup
Sent Messages Report
Compose a Message
Click Compose on the top navigation bar to create your message.
Sprout Tip
You can also press N on your keyboard to open the compose window.
Click on the gray bar at the top of the compose window to select the profile(s) to which you would like to publish.
You can also add photos to your post. Simply drag and drop an image over the new message box or click the camera icon in the lower left corner to select a file from your computer.
After adding a URL to your post, click on Shorten Links to shorten the link using Bit.ly. The Sent Messages Report will show click counts for that link to help you track performance.
Sprout Tip
If you’re an agency or large enterprise, you can connect multiple Bit.ly accounts for each client or internal group to support their unique Bit.ly settings and keep reporting separate in Bit.ly. Managers or Account Owners can connect Bit.ly accounts in Settings » Business Settings.
If you are publishing your post to Facebook or LinkedIn and referencing a URL in your content, we will pull in the meta information and images for the URL, which you can edit or delete for your post.
Note: Google+ does not currently allow metadata editing in their API.
If you’re ready to send your message, hit Send to immediately post to selected networks.
Sprout Tip
It’s easy to publish to Sprout from any website—just use Sprout’s Chrome or Firefox Extension to share web pages while browsing the web. Download under Settings » Utilities & Goodies.
Targeting your Content
Sprout makes it easy to target posts when you need to publish your content to a specific audience.
Click the globe icon in the lower left corner of the compose window to select Post Targeting Options.
Read more about targeting your posts.
Publishing Options
Use our publishing features to post, schedule and queue your messages.
Schedule your post for the appropriate date and time based on the nature of the post and when your audience should see the content. The scheduler works best for posts that are date and time sensitive—like events, promotions, new product releases, or holidays.
Select a single day, or multiple days for recurring content, on the calendar and enter the time you’d like the post to publish.
Use the Queue to publish content regularly without scheduling every post. The queue is designed to help your business fill engagement gaps throughout the day with great content like product tips, thought leadership, or industy-related articles. The Sprout Queue can be configured in Settings » Sprout Queue.
If you have enabled Sprout’s ViralPost technology, Sprout will post your message when your audience is most engaged, maximizing the impact of your published content. We constantly analyze your Twitter follower activity by looking at when your most influential followers are most engaged, so that we can deliver your posts at optimal times.
Note: Only Account Owners are able to configure the Sprout Queue and ViralPost. Sprout Queue is available at all plan levels. ViralPost™ is available at the Premium level only.
Click Queue Next to put the post at the top of the queue, or Queue Last to put it at the bottom.
Draft content, then edit and publish later, or save it for peer review or approval.
Sprout Tip
Use a variety of publishing options to create a diverse content experience for your audience.
Send trending content immediately
Schedule time specific promotions or marketing campaigns
Use the Queue or ViralPost to fill engagement gaps with quality content
Automatically post new articles from trusted publishing sources via RSS
Manage Content
Shared Content Calendar
Sprout’s Shared Content Calendar provides a comprehensive view of the upcoming scheduled messages across your social profiles. Your team can review published content for a specific day, make changes to a post or the existing schedule, and add content where needed.
Your team will have visibility into the content schedule for any profile they have access to, regardless of who originally scheduled it or if it was scheduled in a different group.
Scheduled
Click on a day to view or edit scheduled messages. The green dot means that there is content scheduled for that date.
Click on the scheduled content to see message details, including the profile, scheduling team member, and options to Edit, Delete, or Send Message Now.
Sprout Queue
View and edit your queued posts by profile under Publishing » Sprout Queue. Drag and drop, or click the up and down arrows on the lower right hand corner of the post to move it within the queue.
Drafts
Click on Publishing » Drafts to review drafts by profile or author. If you discard a team member’s draft, they’ll receive an email giving them a heads up.
Feeds
Pull in content and messages from your Twitter, LinkedIn personal page, and Feedly accounts. Interact with or share that content as part of your publishing or engagement strategy.
View your Twitter Feeds by profile. Click on a specific profile to choose a list. ClickEdit to modify the list settings. View your feed by message Timeline or Members.
Click Connect LinkedIn to connect your personal LinkedIn profile, adding your content feed.
RSS Reader
Connect your Feedly account to display articles from your favorite content sources. Click Expand to read the full article or Share to compose a new message and post the article to your social profiles as part of your comprehensive publishing strategy.
Note: Configure your feeds directly in Feedly to display them in the RSS Reader.
Publishing Settings & Set Up
Our Bit.lyintegration supports custom link shortening settings. Connect your Bit.ly account under Settings » Business Settings. You can use a different Bit.ly account for each of your groups.
Note: Account Owners and Managers can connect Bit.ly accounts.
- Use the Post via RSS feature to automatically publish new content to your Twitter audience from trusted publishing sources that have an RSS feed. You can include prefix text (ex: Check out this new article!) When the automatic tweet is sent, it will include a link to the article, your prefix text, and the title of the article.
Set up to five RSS feeds per group to automatically publish content to your Twitter profiles every one, four, 12, or 24 hours. Sprout will post any new content from that source for the selected time frame. For example, If you’ve chosen for us to check the feed every 12 hours for new articles and there have been 4 new articles published on that feed in the last 12 hours, we will only send the most recent article.
Note: This feature is only available for Twitter. You can only set up a website’s RSS feed once per group so you cannot set it up to post to 2 separate Twitter profiles in the same group.
Sent Messages Report
Use the Sent Messages reports to analyze published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. The Sent Messages reports are available for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
Choose the network type and profiles you’d like to include in the report from the right sidebar. Depending on the network, choose the type of messages you’d like to include in the report as well.
Customize the report date range from the calendar icon at the top right of the report.
Click on an individual message to view post specific metrics related to the content performance. Take advantage of the ? icon on the right panel for our terminology definitions.
View which messages performed best with your audience by clicking to sort by metric. For example, you can sort by Clicks, Responses, and Reach within the Twitter Sent Messages Report. If you are looking for a specific message, sort by Date Sent.
Sprout Tip
Look for posts that perform well with your audience and analyze the message content, profile, and time of post. Incorporate message best practices into your social publishing strategy based on which posts resonate the most with your audience.
Clicks: The number of people that clicked on a URL in your message. These clicks can be tracked if you included your own bit.ly link or links that were shortened with Sprout Social’s link shortener. We cannot track links that were shortened with tools other than Bit.ly.
Responses: The number of Replies and Retweets to this message.
Reach: The total number of people that potentially saw your post. If your message is retweeted by any of your followers, their respective followers would be counted in this post’s reach metrics.
The Retweeted by section shows who retweeted your content in order of profiles with the highest to lowest followers. Click the contact’s handle to check out their Contact View and potentially interact with that audience member.
Additional Post Options: Easily resend or remove the post by clicking either Send Message Again or Remove from Twitter.
Many of the Facebook metrics for the Sent Messages report mention the concept of a Story. Stories are created when users like your Page, post to your Page’s Wall, like, comment on or share one of your Page posts, RSVP to one of your events, mention your Page, tag your Page or check in at your business place.
Click the sent message to view detailed post analytics.
Clicks: The number of people who clicked anywhere in your post without generating a story (includes playing a video, viewing a photo, or opening a web link).
Reach: The number of unique people who saw any content about that post. This will include both fans and non fans.
Engaged: The number of people who clicked anywhere in your post without generating a story plus the number of unique people who created a story about your Page post.
Talking About This: The number of people who have created a story from this post.
Likes: The number of people who liked this post.
Comments: The number of people that commented on your post.
Shares: The number of people that shared the post.
Negative Feedback: A combination of hides, hide all, and report spam actions.
Engagement: Engagement is a ratio of engaged users to reach. For example, a post with 4 engaged users and 100 reach should yield a 4% engagement score.
Additional Post Options: Easily resend or remove the post by clicking either Send Message Again or Remove from Facebook. Click Boost Post to go to Facebook.com to see the options to promote your post.
Note: All Facebook data is provided by Facebook Insights.
Google+
Sort to view this report by:
+1’s: The number of people who +1’d this post.
Comments: The number of people who have commented on this post.
Reshares: The number of people who have reshared this post.
Additional Post Options: Easily resend the post by clicking Send Message Again.
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