Alicia Johnston from Sprout Social on social media trends and producing the Sprout Social Index
Show Notes:
Download the Sprout Social Index: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/data/index/
Try the #DataDance: https://twitter.com/SproutSocial/status/1257404796753137664
Social media ROI app: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-roi/
Brian Bosché:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the creativeBTS Podcast. This is Brian Bosché, and today I am so excited to introduce Alicia Johnston, the Senior Manager of Content Communications at Sprout Social. Alicia, thank you so much for coming on.
Alicia Johnston:
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk with you.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. If you want to just kick off, you've been at Sprout Social for what? The last five years, as they've gone from pretty high growth startup, to now a full public company IPOing in 2019. Yeah, give us a little background on your role and your background.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, sure. As you mentioned, I'm the Senior Manager of Content and Comms. What that means is that I lead our content team. Over my five years here, I've been in a variety of content and communications roles. I led PR for a while, internal communications, and content was always a piece of those. We just weren't calling it its own separate thing at the time. I got to Sprout when it was about 150 people. A lot smaller than we are now. We have over 600. In case you're not familiar, Sprout makes social media software for businesses. We're a software company and we help businesses of all sizes with software that helps manage their social publishing, community management, reporting, analytics, and then also deeper social listening to really understand the large scale conversations on social.
Alicia Johnston:
I came to that from a very different world, which was nonprofits. That was where I started my career. I was doing AmeriCorps for two years at a small nonprofit in Illinois. While I did that, I got interested in food blogging, which was like its own journey into small business marketing, so SEO, social strategy, parlaying that into some freelance work for other nonprofits and small businesses, a job in nonprofit marketing, and then that was the leap to Sprout. A lot of similarities actually, I think from nonprofit to high growth startups, so scrappiness, being as resourceful as you can be and being creative. Sprout has really been a great place to tackle all of those things.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah, we talked about this before we started recording, but my first job out of college, I was using Sprout Social to manage our company's social media efforts. That was 2013, 2012, and it has grown so much since then. You've added so many different features and solutions. You bought a company and Simply Measured. What has it been like starting at 150 and having the marketing team evolve from that stage all the way up through IPO and now public company?
Alicia Johnston:
It's been incredible. I think honestly, sometimes they take it for granted, but when I started, everyone did a little bit of everything, which was really fun and really spoke to my interests, but as we've grown, we've built out a team that's really specialized. Also, not just the marketing team, but the brand creative team. It's amazing now to be able to have conversations and know that we have someone who wholly owns all of our paid social strategy, and any question I have she answer. But any project we're working on, our UX team can inform it with research. It's just a much more, I think, mature marketing and creative organization.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, there've been moments where I was like, oh, Sprout's getting so big. How is it going to feel? Are we going to lose our culture? But none of that has really been true. I think it's only grown in a positive way.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. How was the content team structured within the marketing organization?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, so the content team is within what we call the buzz team. That's our content and communications team.
Brian Bosché:
Nice.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, formerly, content and comms, informally, buzz. The content team is within that org, and there's four of us. We have one person who's actually more focused on the communication side. So, employer brand, and PR, and internal support. Then two content folks, one strategist and one specialist who work on creating our strategy, a lot of our larger projects like this index campaign, and a lot of our content for like more PR support and awareness and acquisition.
Brian Bosché:
Okay. Great. How has that evolved since you joined? The growth of marketing teams is really interesting as you try to scale. How does that trend been like?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, so content at Sprout has had a lot of formats because we also have an amazing SEO team, which is responsible for a ton of our content. I guess, to give you like a little bit of a pullback, so we have our teams, which is like the traditional marketing org chart hierarchy, but we also have squads. We have four squads where everyone on that squad is from different teams and they're aligned to a common goal. The squads are awareness and perception, new business, product marketing and customer marketing, and content is spread across awareness and perception and then new business. That structure has worked really well for us to grow. Before content, there was a separate content team that I actually wasn't on for a while that did a ton of work across all of marketing.
Alicia Johnston:
But I think that once we implemented the squads, it really helped us make sure that the content we were producing was actually aligned always to a very specific goal and that we knew that other teams, that the teams we were creating it with would have the capacity to promote it and distribute it in the right way. Yeah, it's been very cool.
Brian Bosché:
I've heard this from other guests, is having these tiger teams, these squads. There are people that have their typical position, which they own, but then they are also part of another team. There's not people that are dedicated purely to those squads. Correct? It's kind of on top of their role?
Alicia Johnston:
The squads are like a core thing. I'm always on the awareness and perception squad and I also sit on the new business squad. One of my team members is always on new business and one is on awareness and perception. Those are all the time, and that's how we plan. We plan in two week sprints with those groups, but we also have tiger teams. For example, when the coven pandemic started, we quickly spun up a tiger team that was, I think social PR content, sales enablement, product marketing, a group to really rally and get together on what would be the most valuable content, sales decks, research, etc, that we could provide.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. You have the typical hierarchy, then you have squads where you're able to attack specific solutions or specific over longer term focuses of the business. Then when specific things come up, recent news, events, you can spin up the tiger teams to attack those as a more, I guess, time bound time.
Alicia Johnston:
Yes, exactly.
Brian Bosché:
It's amazing to me that teams have to do that, but it makes so much sense when you actually pull everyone together to take on those different initiatives because otherwise, it seems like everyone's just in different silos.
Alicia Johnston:
It's interesting. I think that we've taken a lot of that model from the engineering and product organization. It's helped us like align our own work as a marketing team but also aligned to how other departments within the business work.
Brian Bosché:
Do you pull those other departments into these different squads or target team?
Alicia Johnston:
Not usually, but there are really close connections depending on the squad. Obviously product marketing is hand in hand with product as well as sales enablement. The tiger teams are more where like marketing and sales would come together, sales and solutions engineering, to understand what are customers saying, what customers need, how can marketing support that, how can we share things you might not be doing with our product that you could, that would help you. That's how they come together.
Brian Bosché:
Great. Just take a step back a little bit more now. Sprout Social: Social Media Management, it's grown a lot since I first started using it and continued to, so what is really the mission or the brand or what are you really trying to communicate to the outside world about Sprout Social?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. I think at its core we want to create social business software for organizations of all sizes that can help them become better marketers and create better connections with their customers. We're not just here to serve one segment of the industry. We have customers from agencies, to solo entrepreneurs, or mom and pop shops, all the way up to global enterprises that are working across continents. The idea is that Sprout should be something that is so easy to use and easy to implement that you can implement it no matter what your business looks like and get extremely valuable insights, efficiencies, and all that stuff to help improve your team and your work.
Brian Bosché:
How does the content strategy fit within that? How do you view content to actually go after that mission and brand?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. I think content is one of our greatest tools to do that. Obviously I'm biased.
Brian Bosché:
Just a little bit. That's all right.
Alicia Johnston:
But I would say, when we think about content, if we want to be helping marketers create real connection, how can they do that through social, and what unique tools do we have to help them do that? I think our tools are like the research we have, our customer data and what we hear from our customers, the case studies that we learn about and create with our customers. Those are all ways that we can help other brands see themselves and see opportunities and what's been successful on social. Our content is really designed to showcase best practices, best in class brands and some of like the best creativity that we see in our industry.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. What attracted me to make me excited for this chat is the Sprout Social Index, which is the leading report that your team puts out every year. What are some other examples of different types of content that you put out throughout the year, how you feature your different customers or use cases?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. We do a lot of case studies throughout the year. One that I was really ... this is me geeking out about social, but one that I was really excited about was Indiana University and hearing about how their team has used social to help centralize different departments, and they've used Sprout to bring them together, but they're doing everything that we would recommend in terms of best practices in the industry, so using social to make a business case for more staff, like they got video interns because they were able to show the efficacy of their social video. I think case studies are a good one. We use data both from our listening tool and just industry data, like consumer surveys and things like that to shape a lot of our content.
Alicia Johnston:
We've worked on a couple of things recently that haven't published yet, but they're fueled by listening data around trends we're seeing right now. You'll see that I think throughout our blog, it's like best times to post, how COVID has changed social media engagement, and really trying to help people stay at the forefront of what's going on.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Your technology makes it not easy, because it's never easy to pull that data, but your specialty is literally pulling that data for customers, and you get to use that yourself to create compelling content that really only Sprout Social can pull. You're one of the few companies in the world that can actually give that to different customers.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, exactly. It's nice to have something like that where we're like, what is the unique angle on this story? How can we make it interesting to marketers, and what can we add to the conversation? We're not just piling on a conversation that's already valuable and helpful. We are contributing in a meaningful way.
Brian Bosché:
You have what? 23,000 customers, over 23,000, I mean there's ...
Alicia Johnston:
No, I think it's more than 20,000.
Brian Bosché:
It's many data points and so many customers we can pull from. When we were at slope at a startup, it's like, okay, cool, we have 100 customers. What are the unique insights that we can pull from it? It's amazing to have that pool of customers and unique insights you can pull from.
Alicia Johnston:
Yes, and it's so helpful too because I think our team is amazing, but we can't think of everything. Our customers bring such great, smart and strategic ideas. When we can learn about those from our customer success team and our sales team, it's so valuable for our content.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Well, I talked to Andrew Grinaker from Tableau. They have a community dashboard. So they spun up this amazing campaign around the COVID-19 dashboard that other teams can use and template. That came from the community. Someone in their community created that dashboard and they were like, whoa, People are latching onto this. How do we make this something that everyone can take advantage of? So yes, I think the best source of content can often be your own customers, which is amazing when you actually have them.
Brian Bosché:
To dive into the index a little bit more, give me a quick pitch on the Sprout Social Index. Because you tweet about it every year. You've joked to yourself about, you all want to hear more about the index, but yeah, give us the quick pitch on it.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. The Index is a state of the industry report on social, and we bring together insights from consumer and marketer surveys, so to really understand how people are behaving on social, how their perspective on social is evolving and how marketers can be more successful. We bring all that data together with our own internal data as well as some best practices and our stances. We bring that together into one whopper of a report, but is our annual piece. It's had a lot of forms since we started it in 2013, but now it's like a once a year event that we look forward to.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. It's like the Superbowl. You got the Roman numerals on it, it's like XVI.
Alicia Johnston:
You said it. I didn't.
Brian Bosché:
So how did it start? It sounded like 2013, so before you started, but what really prompted the annual report? I've seen, don't call it a white paper. I think people hate white papers webinars, the boring B2B terms. I love the index and the branding that way. But what really started and what has kept it going for the last seven years?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. In 2013, it was actually my manager who started it, who's currently our VP of content and comms and it was meant to provide data to help both our customers and prospects and people in our industry better understand, in particular social engagement and things like average response rates, average response times. We're always asked for industry benchmarks, so that was like a big piece of the actual index portion from the beginning. It's always been kind of an awareness play for us, so being able to provide media with unique data and having something to really stand out. Originally, I think it was quarterly, we had a different theme every quarter, and that continued for a few years while I was at Sprout. Then in 2018, we made an annual report and have really ... we've seen a lot of value in having one big piece that we can break off and continue as a campaign through the whole year.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I wanted to dive into that because you have an amazing section on all the indexes, but it seems like you've structured the other content pieces as the insights or the hub and spoke model a little bit where you build off it. Talk a little bit about how you do break this apart for the rest of the year and why you only have one report, but you can do so much content from it.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the beauty and having one report is making sure that everyone is aligned to the same goal. The top goal of index is to ... it's thought leadership, but it's also to drive new leads for the business, but from there, each of our squads has something different that they'd like to do with the report. So, we don't want to get in the way of that. We just want to enable it with that core piece of content. I think it's become more and more apparent to us over the years that if we're going to put all this time and all this effort into something, we have to be able to get value out of it through the entire year, so we really, like everything from social, social content and social campaigns.
Alicia Johnston:
We did a video series built off it last year called Always On, which was ... I thought it was kind of cool because each episode was based on a top challenge that we heard about from social media managers and the index. On the customer side, we've worked with sales enablement to create decks that reps can use and they can learn about the data to speak to customers about it. Yeah, so it's really creating all of those assets is really important part of why we do this. Our team kind of drives the report, but we have so many efforts going on around it.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Selfishly, when I was reading through it, I was like, oh, I could turn this into like a thousand different tweets. There are so many data points, there are so many insights from it. What I'm so impressed with it is, is it walks the line between being very accessible in the design and how you present the information, but there's ... you mentioned you do a lot of things based on data. There's so much good data in there and so much assessment. I'm really glad that you're able to repurpose that into everything else. I think you're right. When you have all of these different teams instead of okay, this is your quarter and your turn and then this quarter will do it and it's your turn, centralizing everything and then being able to break it up, seems like a good way to kind of bring all the key stakeholders together as well.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. It's been an evolution too, because when we started, it was more of a PR piece and the goal was to get more industry coverage and to get it out to as many people as possible, which is still absolutely a huge part of it. But I think that a learning for me in my five years, which has been a lot of growth at Sprout is that, of course you want people bought in from the very beginning and that's when they're going to have their most creative, interesting ideas for how they could use this content. Making sure that the whole team is on board, like from the get go is so key to making sure that it's a really valuable and creative campaign.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Going into the team a little bit more, how many people work on this? Who works on this? What's the timeline? These are massive things. Give us a sense of what it takes to actually pull something like this off.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. The total timeline, I think we kicked this off with an email like, time to start thinking about the index in January, so mid to late January. That's when the content team really starts ideation. So we get together with a couple of folks from communications and creative to sort of brainstorm like what are we seeing, what's interesting, what should we dig into this year?
Brian Bosché:
That's like survey questions going to ask? So you try to find the different trends or places you want to target. Okay. Got it.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. Then there are some things that are like evergreen that we want to look at every year, but this is where we can really dig into like, are people using TikTok as much as people would like them to?
Brian Bosché:
They're not. Spoiler alert. Facebook still dominates. I wanted some more TikTok in there.
Alicia Johnston:
Yep. There are questions like that that are at the forefront of every marketer's mind and social, so it's really important that we capture those and make sure they're a part of shaping the data. That's how it starts, is with the content team. Our content strategists really leads the development of those surveys and pulling out the key themes from the data, developing the story of the report. Then, once we get a little bit farther on, our creative team takes over on planning the visual identity. That's the kind of create a visual identity for the report, but also for the entire campaign. When that set, it makes it so much easier for anyone from the creative team to contribute to visual design videos, motion graphics, etc., but the total team is more than 30 people, so who touch it in some way? So it isn't ...
Brian Bosché:
It's a gigantic campaign that you build lots of different pieces of content across, which makes sense.
Alicia Johnston:
Exactly. Yeah, so it's everybody from the demand gen team, paid an organic social, sales enablement, PR, customer marketing. Everyone's involved
Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I Googled Sprout Social Index and you're running Google ads on it. You're actually creating some demand gen around it. It touches so many parts where people think, oh, it's a white paper, but you can use this quote if you want it for your team. It's the Super Bowl of reports.
Alicia Johnston:
I will use that. Thank you.
Brian Bosché:
The Roman numerals definitely got me. I was like, whoa, index XVI. You can put a trailer around that. Yeah, it's much bigger than people realize when you put these gigantic reports together, and you have 30 people, what, four months, five months?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, about four months. I think we finished the report a few weeks ... including the PDF and a landing page and everything is all set, like several weeks before we actually launched to give time for all of the additional distribution assets but yeah, it's like I think a little under four months
Brian Bosché:
You create a tiger team for it, or is it everyone just know this is the report so it's just kind of part of their normal daily process?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. It's not a tiger team, but for these types of huge projects, we consider them within marketing like our top projects for the quarter, for the quarter or half of year, and so everyone knows they're coming and everyone who will be involved can prioritize their time accordingly. Then we set up like a shared project channel in Slack so that's where everyone can collaborate from the very beginning stages through to like launch day updates.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. Yeah, give us a better sense of the tech stack. So you're communicating through Slack, are you doing things through Google docs? Are you doing Survey Monkey? What are the different tools you're using actually to pull this project together?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, so Google suite is like where all begins because that's kind of the writing and the ideation where we start working with the team. Then, for the survey we do use SurveyMonkey, and we build it out, and then-
Brian Bosché:
I nailed both right away.
Alicia Johnston:
They're the big guy, right? We've used other providers, but we found SurveyMonkey is just the easiest to work with. Then we work with like a panel company to do actually fielding the research and they're called Lucid, so I think they're in San Francisco as well. Then ...
Brian Bosché:
You get the actual participants for the survey against that whole ... okay. Got it. So you're on biased.
Alicia Johnston:
Yes, and they're wonderful to work with. We give them kind of parameters like we're looking for marketers who have social as part of their jobs and like any criteria around those things, and then they help set up the right people to respond and give us their thoughts. Then from there, let's see, so we build out our timeline in Smartsheet. That's where we get started.
Brian Bosché:
Amazing.
Alicia Johnston:
Yes, it's beautiful. Honestly, I remember back in the olden days when we used to make Gantt charts in spreadsheets, just a regular spreadsheet, and it was so painful. We used Smartsheet to start planning everything out and to really break out every deliverable, see any gaps or overlaps or dependencies. Then once those are pretty set and everyone feels pretty confident in that timeline, that's when we move into JIRA and break out the individual deliverables. Then from there we use tools like Envision and Frame for design and video reviews. We use our Slack channel, and then we just use Meetings especially for larger feedback where we really want to give live input on a concept.
Brian Bosché:
When you're going through these meetings, do you have weekly standups, daily standups? You mentioned you run in sprints. Do you do that for this project as well?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. It fits into our marketing sprints. It's managed like any other day to day work. It's just that we know there's this campaign architecture behind it.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. Okay. What different stakeholders do you bring in at different points in that process? So, VPs, executives coming in at certain checkpoints, how do you make sure that they're bought in from the start and you're not just going into a black box for three months, and like, hey, here it is.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, absolutely. I think, honestly because we've done the index for so long, now there is an understanding and a buy-in at the marketing leadership level that yes, this is valuable, we've seen the results and yes, we're on board for it. Really, we're working with a lot of like people in my role, so manager, senior manager to make sure that their teams have the bandwidth to contribute and to hear how they'd like to shape that. Then, we also try to share back a lot of data, so more, once the report launches, we'll share things like more qualitative anecdotal stuff. Like people's tweets about how excited they are or something like that. But we'll also share wins from conversations with the sales team.
Alicia Johnston:
They'll share, for example, a little screenshot of an email with someone saying that they loved the report. That type of feedback I think sells it for our team because it's like story feedback. It's not just a data point, but we do also have a giant dashboard where we look at all the data points. I think the sharing that with everyone at the leadership level and at the contributor level is a big piece of making sure that everybody is on board throughout the process.
Brian Bosché:
Before we dive into the insights themselves, what is your launch plan for this? Is there a huge launch event? How do you actually plan the rollout for this? Because it's such a massive thing that happens every year. Maybe it's just a tweet, but what is the launch plan for getting this out there?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, it was a little different this year given the remote situation, but we do a lot of hype on social. A lot of our community is familiar with the index, and so our social team works with the creative team. One of the things we actually did, which you might like is A, we use the hashtag data dance to talk about how enthusiastic someone is when they get really awesome data to work with. This year our creative team created like a TikTok style dance tutorial, four moves. Four moves to get you to that pinnacle of data. If you want to try it, we are accepting UGC submissions.
Brian Bosché:
Amazing. Do you have a TikTok account for Sprout Social?
Alicia Johnston:
I think we've reserved it. I don't know if we've gotten too deep into creating our own original content, mostly a lot of research.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. Well, if you need my advance to be your first TikTok video, I'll approve that.
Alicia Johnston:
Okay, amazing. I will pass that back to the team. But yeah, so we really use social and organic specifically for a lot of the hyper on the report. Then, this year, originally we had this live series of events called Sprout Sessions, which we also did last year which is in different cities and it's live presentations and workshops with our customers. Of course, we had to pivot that so we made it a huge digital conference, which was the week following the index launch. Our second session of the day was a deep dive into the data with, I think three or four of our customers and with Katherine, who's the content strategist who really ran this. That was, I think one of our most viewed sessions and people really liked hearing marketers talk through it and react to it.
Brian Bosché:
It's turning this digital static piece of content where it has a lot to dive into and making it more approachable, accessible for the audience by having discussions, letting people chip in. I love following up with an event or the virtual series. I haven't heard that too much.
Alicia Johnston:
Really? That surprises me because I feel like we're all in that virtual event world now.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. But following up on a major report launch, I guess I just haven't seen it in some of the cases that I've seen, but that's such a good idea, to actually increase engagement, help people process it. Because you can look at the data points, but then how does it apply to you and helps you think about things in different ways?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. Full transparency, it is meant to be a very robust report, so it's also really long. Some of our community just love it and they dive right in, and I'm sure they do read it cover to cover. I know a lot of us online are skimming and so hearing people talk through like, what was your top takeaway, what's one thing you were surprised by? That can really help people pull out the most valuable things for their brand and maybe spark an interest in reading more deeply.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah, I love that idea okay. Now, getting into the insights themselves. You had a few that you wanted to mention, but would love to hear, what is the state of social in 2020? I think you the survey right as COVID was starting, right? So you were able to get some insights from that as well.
Alicia Johnston:
Well, it was right before it really hit the US. I believe the data collection was all in February. It's interesting because it shows us how people's views were already evolving, especially when we compare it to 2019, but I think that honestly, the insights, they're pretty on point with exactly what we're seeing and the changes we've been seeing in how business is operating today.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. It'll be really interesting to see you next year on how ... even during COVID, you can see Twitter engagement seems to be skyrocketing certain weeks, and then people get exhausted and it goes down and then it goes back up. TikTok has been a huge user growth as people get bored in quarantine, but yeah, it's really interesting, the timing. February is right when it started for most people. I know we started working from home at Smartsheet in mid-March, but from what I've read, it sounds pretty consistent. It doesn't change too much. But what were some of your top takeaways from the report?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, so really the top takeaways for me all had the key theme of the importance of social is just growing. For example, one of them was that 89% of people will buy from a brand they follow on social, which it's not surprising and yet, because I think social has historically been looked at as more of an awareness play, I think it's really important for marketers to have this top of mind. That was also substantial growth from that response last year. We're seeing that people are more inclined to buy from the brand they follow. I think that really speaks, especially right now, if I'm gesturing at my window as if you can see that planing to the outside.
Alicia Johnston:
But as we're more physically distanced from each other, it just puts a larger onus on brands to create a really meaningful and valuable social presence that not only will attract their audience, but will also kind of keep the brand top of mind and give people something to look forward to and engage with during this period.
Brian Bosché:
From what I say, it's not just consumer goods, that's what you typically think of. You've analyzed lots of different industries. Do you see that holding true for even B2B software or financial institutions? Is that pretty consistent?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. We didn't ask consumers specifically about by industry for that one, but I would say generally, that's the direction that we've seen. The evolution of business today, I think social plays such a core role in that because people are more connected themselves. We're all walking around with a phone all the time, we're always skimming through Instagram or looking at our Twitter feed. I think that the level of expectation for brands to be more present and to be more connected and more human has just grown.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. One of the things I love about the report is your Sprout stances. So you break up the report where you have the heavy data, but then you'll actually give recommendations or you actually give thought leadership pieces on how you can apply this data to your own business. One of the takeaways that I had was, if you're purchasing from brands you follow on social that you engage with, that means that social is becoming that sales channel, that customer acquisition channel. I think one of my favorite takeaways that you had was social needs to align with the business goals. Social can't be siloed, they can't be operating with their own set of metrics that don't tie to the overall strategy of the organization.
Brian Bosché:
Sprout Social, and you being the expert in this, what have you seen are good ways for those social teams to really set their goals alongside the rest of the business goals and metrics that you're going after? Because social does drive so much of it.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. I think that social teams really need to kind of like pull back from their own strategy for a moment and think about like, okay, what are the marketing team's goals? If they sit within marketing or if they're within operations or customer support, what are our goals operationally or in terms of our service that we provide and the customer experience? That's like a good starting point. It's kind of go from social to department level, and have those conversations, with the person leading the social team with their manager and up the chain to really get a better understanding of business goals. Once you have that understanding, I think that social media managers are just sitting on this wealth of data. It's really a question of like, for every brand, how can you best apply that?
Alicia Johnston:
One thing we talked about before we started recording was that one of the main reasons people will unfollow a brand is poor customer service. Social doesn't always manage that. There are some teams where it's one social media manager handling all of marketing and content publishing, but also customer service, but in a lot of cases, those teams are split, and there may or may not be a tight tie between them. That's a really valuable example where the social media team could say, Hey, people will unfollow our brand if they don't get good customer service. Here's our average response time. Here's our average response rate. Here's our C-SAT score, and here's three ideas for how we could improve the way that we deliver customer service on social.
Alicia Johnston:
That's a great way to bring those insights to a group and really get the conversation started to learn more about what they want and what social can help with in turn.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. You're right. My mind immediately went to, okay, how do we get social to drive more purchases? But you gave a great example in the part of Southwest Airlines where they're not just pushing flights all the time. They are responding to what? Tens of thousands of customer service tweets. Everyone who's like, hey Southwest, my flight's delayed, or everyone sends those tweets out. They built a huge social team just as like a customer support team, but they're just using social as a channel instead of Zendesk or something like that.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. I think that like today in particular, even travel brands, yeah, people might not be traveling as much as they were, but people still do need customer service from those brands to deal with the trips that may have been postponed or the things that they're afraid of or worried about regarding their future travel. I think customer service is just more important than ever.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Okay. Take away number two that you had. Let's hit it.
Alicia Johnston:
Yes. Okay. Takeaway number two was that 79% of people who reach out to a brand on social for customer service expect a response within 24 hours.
Brian Bosché:
A great segue from our discussion.
Alicia Johnston:
But yeah, I thought that was a really important one because customer service is a more instantaneous expectation these days. Knowing that it has so much power to attract and retain customers when they have had a challenging experience, it's more important than ever to be delivering on that at the speed consumers expect.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. For me, if there's negative experiences or negative reviews on Twitter, if I see the brand responding and engaging and listening and solving those problems, it's almost like I have a better view of that company, because every company has customer support issues, but if they're actually responding and using social that way, that gives me a lot more confidence to keep following them, to keep engaging with them, knowing that they're going to listen.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it really, like you said, it builds customer confidence. You know that if you have a problem, they're there. To me, that actually has made a difference in purchasing decisions in the past is like evaluating different providers of the same thing and then seeing that one is responsive on social and the other isn't, done.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. Imagine if customers could see the Zendesk response rates or time to respond. That's basically what you get to see on Twitter, is how fast do they respond? What do they respond with? Are they angry back? Or do they actually like respond to in a thoughtful way? That was a great insight that I saw. Then, for the customer success, are you seeing certain channels? It seems like Twitter naturally is the customer complaining channel where people will tweet at certain brands. Do you see that as pretty consistent across all the different channels?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, I think that it really depends on the industry and on their target audience. I think that folks who are more inclined to go to Facebook and to use Facebook private messages to like run their customer service concerns are different audience than someone who would go to Twitter. I think for every brand, it probably varies a little bit in terms of which channel is the hottest, but it'd be hard to make like a blanket statement about one platform over the others because they all really just depend by brand.
Brian Bosché:
Not too many customer service complaints through TikTok right now, but you've got to keep your eye on it.
Alicia Johnston:
I'm sure when they are delivered, it's going to be really creative, like the pointing to different problems.
Brian Bosché:
Yes, exactly. No, you're right. It'll be a dance that combats your report dance and makes fun of it and you're going to have to respond in some way. Okay. Point number three.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, so last but never least ROI. That's always top of mind. We found that only 23% of social teams are using social data to demonstrate ROI. As I mentioned-
Brian Bosché:
What does that mean exactly?
Alicia Johnston:
What does that mean? Yeah, that's a great question. It's how are you tracking social through the funnel? So, you're not just looking at the metrics that ... you are looking at social metrics, engagements, likes, comments, clicks, etc, but you can also kind of track that down and say, is social driving leads, is social driving visits to our website? If so, what do those visits do, and what do those people do once they get there? And being able to follow social through the entire buyer's journey.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. What is the ROI? If they're trying to get how much investment did we put into these, into our social program? Then what was the revenue we generated from it? Or what are they trying to measure from those activities?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, I would say it, again, depends on the brand. It's hard to give a blanket answer, but I think in our industry, so B2B software, we would be looking at something like website traffic, what referral channels are the most important. That's an indicator that just shows us like the health of that process. We would look at leads driven through social and things like that. I think in other industries, it probably is, if you're selling consumer goods, you can look right at who's purchasing directly from this ad or things like that.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. So industry specific. You go to the key metrics of the business and see how social is funneling into that. How do you measure the actual investment? Are you doing time-tracking or do you see people doing time tracking or just overall budget for a campaign? What is that initial investment that you're trying to return on?
Alicia Johnston:
That's a great question. I think that a lot of it is looking at budget for social specifically, so less at staffing and hours on the brand side. On the agency side, I would expect that you see a lot more of that.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah, much more like that.
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah. I know for us, we don't individually track our hours, hours spent on the index or something like that, but there is such a breadth of data you can get. So understanding what you're putting into it, especially it's, honestly, just most cut and dry to be able to speak to your social budget in terms of like advertising budget or if you work with an agency and maybe like your creative budget or something like that and to translate that into your results.
Brian Bosché:
Got it. Those are the three. Those are some of my top three that I came at as well. The other ones that I latched onto were a lot of the reasons you're unfollowed is out of the social team's control, so what you talked a little bit a little bit about before is, you can't be siloed because if 70% of people unfollow your account because of the product not being up to snuff or because the customer service, separate from your team, is not up to snuff, that makes a big impact. Those numbers really intrigue me. You have the why people follow you, which is entertaining. It provides value, which I see a lot of, but the unfollow reasons really intrigued me.
Brian Bosché:
Then, the channels. We hear so much about TikTok and about YouTube and about these new platforms that are on the rise and how marketing teams need to adapt their strategy and take on the new TikTok campaign or the new .... but Facebook still seems to be dominating. It's still Facebook, Instagram. It's just the same players with video and images. When do you think we're going to see that start going down? I guess my question is, why are they still so dominant?
Alicia Johnston:
Yeah, They've got a lot of runway. I think that's a big part of it. They have these established brands of why as a person you would go to that platform and what you would use it for. I think that also ... a lot of the platforms have done a great job of integrating things that make other parts of our lives more valuable to happen on that social platform. I think when it comes to things like TikTok, this has happened so much in social. I was reflecting on peach, and then there was another one several years back that there was like a hot minute when every marketer was all about it. I think that it's so important to look at those channels and say like, okay, what can I get from this for myself as a social marketer?
Alicia Johnston:
I think TikTok has a lot of creative inspiration and a lot of understanding of gen Z in particular, but is it the right fit for your brand? Maybe not in all cases. Especially, depending on how much you can measure, sometimes it's a harder sell to make a case for something that doesn't have quite as robust analytics, but I think that there's still a lot of value and understanding how they work and understanding what the shift to something like these lip sinking videos, or, how would you describe it? One person creates something and then everyone is riffing and building off it.
Brian Bosché:
Yeah, Or the trends that they create. Yep.
Alicia Johnston:
Exactly. Seeing those like chains of response is really valuable for social media professionals to understand. That's like the process that we would go through when evaluating should our brand or should your brand be on a new channel. Is the right audience there? Is the platform where they're taking the action that we want our audience to be taking with us? Then, what can we learn from it?
Brian Bosché:
Yeah. I think that's always the best practice that I've heard, and this report actually services the data around it, is focus on the channels that matter. If you can't take on a giant TikTok strategy, it might not be worth the time that you put into invest in it, or it just might not be a good fit for your brand right now. It's Sprout Social targeting 17 year olds who are ... school is canceled. But yeah, those data points were really intriguing. Again, Sprout Social Index, if you haven't checked it out yet, listeners, please do. It's incredible. It looks beautiful. Design team, great job at Sprout Social. It's not a boring white paper that just goes through text, but Alicia, I like to end these with your parting shot. It could be about Sprout Social, it could be about the index, Super Bowl. What is your parting shot that you'd like to give the listeners?
Alicia Johnston:
I would say that social is more important than ever, and if you look at it differently, there's so much you can uncover. I would encourage you to ask questions about social, ask questions about the data your brand is seeing, no matter what your jurisdiction is as a marketer, no matter what channels you're on, social has something that you can learn from. I would encourage you to work with your social team to really uncover what that is.
Brian Bosché:
Great. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Alicia. I really appreciate it.
Alicia Johnston:
Thanks so much for having me. This was great.
