As Florence explains, “Social is a non-negotiable part of driving brand awareness and building connections with patients, physicians and community members. But it can be a challenge for the marketing teams on the digital front lines to overcome the concerns of security and privacy teams—especially at the intersection of HIPAA and social media.”

Many organizations report HIPAA compliance measures inhibit their strategy, as some of the most engaging healthcare content they create features innovative studies, patient testimonials and medical breakthroughs, which require lengthy approval processes and careful execution. In this guide, we’re breaking down what you need to know to remain HIPAA compliant on social media, and sharing examples of healthcare brands who shine on social—despite regulatory limitations.

Please note: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice. Please review our full disclaimer before reading any further.

HIPAA’s impact on your social media content

HIPAA privacy laws protect sensitive patient information from being disclosed publicly, including on social media. The HIPAA Privacy Rule expressly protects patient health information as it relates to how the data is shared, including in marketing and advertising efforts.

Sensitive protected health information (PHI) includes data about a patient’s past, present or future medical conditions, provision of healthcare to the individual and past, present or future healthcare payments. Given social media platforms gather user information, track behavior and have license to use your visual assets, it’s easy to see why these regulations exist.

In the age of sharing patient before and after photos, testimonials and other sensitive information, healthcare providers should exercise extreme caution when crafting social media content. HIPAA regulations also mandate healthcare companies carefully manage customer interactions on social media—which includes preventing patients from sharing PHI, and deleting it if they do. Failing to comply with HIPAA regulations is costly—both financially and to your brand’s reputation.

However, as Katherine Van Allen, Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, points out, the benefits of social outweigh the risks. “Social media should be part of healthcare organizations’ strategy. The people you need to reach are on social—whether it’s prospective patients or employees. Without a social presence, you aren’t a part of vital conversations happening about your system. From discourse about a team member or location, clerical mistakes and legal actions, or rapidly spreading misinformation about a disease or treatment plan. Tuning into social media listening will help you pinpoint key areas of opportunity.”

How to create brand guidelines to support HIPAA and social media

Though you should always consult your legal counsel and compliance team regarding HIPAA compliance on social media, here are general best practices to follow as you create your brand guidelines.

Craft policies and train your team

Start by consulting with your legal and compliance teams, and make them a key partner in validating the legality of your strategy, campaigns and content. Work with them to develop a social media compliance protocol, which should include instructions for corresponding with people via social media.

Familiarize your team with this protocol by co-creating HIPAA compliance training programs that feature social media education. In your training, highlight proper usage of customer data on social media and common HIPAA violations.

Follow de-identification best practices

When crafting new social media content, remove all PHI from your posts. PHI includes health information used alongside the following identifiers:

• Names (first, middle and last)
• Geographical indicators smaller than a state
• All elements of a date (except year)
• Phone and fax numbers
• Email addresses
• Social security numbers
• Medical record, health plan beneficiary and account numbers
• Certificate or license numbers
• Vehicle identifiers
• Device attributes
• URLs and IP addresses associated with patients
• Biometric identifiers
• Photographs of full faces and other unique physical identifiers
• Any other numbers or codes that could identify an individual

For more context, while a patient’s name paired with their vital signs is considered PHI, their vital signs alone are not.

Monitor for HIPAA violations

Even if you take every precaution to limit the use of PHI in your content, patients can still put your compliance at risk by sharing personal information themselves. Prevent this by adding disclaimers to your direct message interactions and brand profiles. Ask patients to refrain from sharing any PHI and inform them where they should route inquiries.

If a patient should mention or DM you and compromise PHI, delete the message immediately, and route them to a more appropriate channel. Florence advises, “Even if you add a disclaimer to your profile or DMs, some patients will still seek out medical advice. To combat this, some organizations use chatbots and triaging tools to automatically alert them of potential PHI, and respond to or delete sensitive content.”

By using a tool like Sprout Social’s Saved Replies, you can use pre-written replies to quickly respond to customers and redirect the conversation to a secure channel. You can also use Sprout’s chatbot builder to automatically reroute social users to an email address or other secure channel for healthcare-related conversations.

With Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can use tagging and filtering to flag messages that contain PHI, and build workflows that delete those messages.

Build a process for patient approvals

There might be some cases where patients (or their families) are interested in sharing their stories with your audience, like this adorable Halloween TikTok from Cleveland Clinic’s NICU.

Have a streamlined and clearly documented process in place for gaining written consent and HIPAA authorization to disclose PHI from a patient before sharing those stories, photographs and/or videos.

Stay up to date on legislative changes

Make it a regular practice to stay up to date on legislative changes at the federal and state levels. Regularly review resources like the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website. You can also follow the HHS and National Law Review on social for real-time updates, including case rulings regarding HIPAA data breaches.

Looking for more resources? We put together a HIPAA compliance on social cheat sheet that can help you remain compliant, while executing an effective and creative social strategy.

Common HIPAA violations and social media’s role

While HIPAA compliance on social is complex, the monetary, reputational and, most importantly, patient well-being risks are too steep to get it wrong. Here are the most common HIPAA violations you should avoid.

Hiding patient details in plain sight

Even if you don’t explicitly include faces, names, dates or other obvious identifiers, some situational details can reveal a patient’s personal information. Both Florence and Van Allen advise close review of photography and videos before posting. Ensure there is no protected information in the background of your media.

Van Allen warns, “Something that seems as innocuous as a photo of a staff room can be a violation. Someone could zoom in on a patient’s chart sitting on the table, and be able to identify their name or other PHI.”

Validating health information

“A lot of patients message healthcare brands thinking their message will reach their doctors—which means they include sensitive PHI in their outreach,” Florence says. As we mentioned in the previous section, it’s critical to delete any PHI, even when the patient provides it unprompted.

But one critical nuance many organizations miss is that you should also refrain from validating PHI. For example, if a patient comments on your post and reveals they have an illness, you should not acknowledge that illness in your response. It could be a HIPAA violation. Here are a few example scenarios:

Example patient message: @Hospital, I have recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and I was wondering which of your doctors specializes in diabetes care?

Not HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we know navigating a new diabetes diagnosis can be challenging, and we’re here to help. Call Dr. Smith’s office directly to schedule a consultation.

HIPAA compliant: @Patient, we have deleted your comment to protect your privacy. Please call or reach out to our team via email for help.

Limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel

By limiting training to corporate channels and paid personnel, healthcare organizations create knowledge gaps that can cause major fall-out. For example, an excited intern could post a selfie with a patient. Or a residency student could accidentally reveal PHI in a funny TikTok.

Healthcare organizations should remember that HIPAA applies to everyone under the control of a covered entity—including volunteers, students and unpaid personnel. It also encapsulates social profiles beyond the corporate account, including the personal accounts of staff members.

What HIPAA means for your social media vendors

HIPAA compliance and security should be top of mind when selecting software vendors and tools. During your platform evaluations, expect your security and privacy teams to be vigilant about the ways data is used when it’s integrated into larger tech stacks.

Find a management solution with permission levels and message approval functionality to ensure only responsible parties can post. Ensure that cybersecurity measures are in place to protect PHI on electronic devices such as encryption or firewalls.

Take it a step further and find a social media management solution that is willing to sign a business associate agreement (BAA)—a legally binding contract that specifies each party’s responsibilities when it comes to PHI and HIPAA compliance. As Florence details, “You should work with a partner like Sprout Social that can sign a BAA, and take on the risks and responsibilities with you.”

Healthcare brands to learn from

These four healthcare organizations demonstrate that having an active social media presence is still possible and important, even in regulated industries.

Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic, the top-ranked hospital in the nation, uses social media to build their employer brand. Like when they reshared a post from a Transplant Chair who celebrated a successful month. Notice how the post doesn’t reveal any sensitive patient information, but instead focuses on the accomplishments and high caliber of the transplant team.

Mayo Clinic also shares profiles of their volunteers, physicians and other personnel to further humanize their company, like this heartwarming video about a Holocaust survivor-turned-volunteer.

The hospital system supplements these posts with general health and lifestyle tips to inspire their followers, and promote well-being, like in this carousel about the benefits of daily movement.

Cleveland Clinic

Cleveland Clinic, a leading academic medical center, stays on the pulse of trending healthcare conversations and uses their expertise to keep their community informed of new public health reports.

Like in this Reel where they investigate the benefits of the latest social media health craze, cold plunging or cold showering. The post breaks down how to reap the rewards of the trend, while staying safe and healthy.

The medical center also shares top-of-mind public health reports produced by their organization. They typically briefly summarize the key findings of the report, while including the link so people can read more, like they did in this post.

Boston Children’s Hospital

Boston Children’s Hospital is home to the largest hospital-based pediatric research program in the world. The organization uses their social channels to highlight groundbreaking research (and the researchers behind it) like they did in this post about a top clinical geneticist advancing children’s health outcomes.

They also feature the patients who benefit from their state-of-the-art treatments by interviewing their families, like in this feature on Facebook about the power of genetic testing for children with epilepsy.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield is a trusted health insurance plan provider. On social, they share meaningful statistics about the value they offer their members, including this post about the return on investment employers gain from investing in workplace addiction recovery and support.

They also share awards and accreditations that demonstrate their commitment to member care and excellence, like this post about their recognition by NCQA.

As a popular insurance plan provider, they receive a lot of inquiries about member policy details on social. Their care team illustrates how to route conversations from public forums to more appropriate, secure private channels, like in this reply where they ask a member to email their help center.

Navigate HIPAA and social media with confidence

HIPAA compliance on social media is a multi-step, ongoing process that involves closely aligning with your legal and security teams, and developing interdepartmental education. By following key best practices that protect patient data and your organization’s brand health, you will be equipped to navigate complex HIPAA protocols and develop your social presence with confidence.

Next steps: Now that you’ve read this article, put a meeting with your legal and security teams on the calendar to start planning your org-wide education efforts, and brush up on healthcare social media benchmarks to better understand social’s role in your community engagement toolkit.

Disclaimer

The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute formal legal advice; all information, content, points and materials are for general informational purposes. Information on this website may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. Incorporation of any guidelines provided in this article does not guarantee that your legal risk is reduced. Readers of this article should contact their legal team or attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular legal matter and should refrain from acting on the basis of information on this article without first seeking independent legal advice. Use of, and access to, this article or any of the links or resources contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the reader, user or browser and any contributors or contributing law firms. The views expressed by any contributors to this article are their own and do not reflect the views of Sprout Social. All liability with respect to actions taken or not taken based on the contents of this article are hereby expressly disclaimed.

The post A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

One of those new opportunities is social commerce, or the ability to promote and sell products on social media. With millions of people logging onto social media apps each and every day, it presented the ideal outlet for growing a business.

Throughout this article, we’re going to touch more on what social media ecommerce is, benefits of using this ecommerce channel and how your brand can create its own social media ecommerce strategy.

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• What is social media ecommerce?
• Benefits of social ecommerce
• 3 Examples of social media ecommerce
• How to create a social media ecommerce strategy
• Create your own social media ecommerce strategy today

What is social media ecommerce?

Social media ecommerce is the practice of marketing an ecommerce business using social media through generating brand awareness, increasing online recognition, growing a customer base and even increasing sales.

We mentioned social commerce, which is a facet of social ecommerce — the act of selling products on social media. There’s another facet called mobile commerce, which is the act of selling products on mobile devices (think: dedicated apps, mobile browser transactions, etc.).

Social media ecommerce comes into play often as 99% of all social media users access the apps from their mobile devices.

Benefits of social ecommerce

For direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands that exist solely online and retailers shifting to an online-first presence, you need all the tools in your arsenal to push sales on your website. You can’t rely on foot traffic so social media replaces this tactic.

Social media ecommerce brings in new customers and provides you with a ready-made online platform — but those aren’t the only benefits.

Expand your reach and generate brand awareness

There are nearly 5 billion social media users worldwide. And while not every single one of those 5 billion will be your target customer, social media gives a massive opportunity for those who are to discover your business. When you post on your social profiles, you’re giving users a chance to find your brand, follow your accounts and potentially share your products with others they know.

Engage your target audience

Through both organic and paid social means, you can create content directly for your target audience to reach and engage those most interested in what you’re selling. Create social media posts that elicit some kind of response from your audience, such as a comment, message, like or share. Always interact with comments in order to facilitate conversations amongst your target customers.

Drive additional traffic and revenue to your business

And finally, drive traffic to your website—and even better, drive sales. Promote your products. Showcase how they can be used and what pain points they solve. Make your audience want to purchase your product—then make it easy for them to do so.

3 Examples of social media ecommerce

Curious what social media ecommerce looks like in action? Let’s take a look at three of the top B2C social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.

1. Solo Stove

Solo Stove sells portable, smokeless fire pits, and it uses social media to help promote its products, mostly through video.

Here’s an example of one of these videos.

What makes this video stand out is the fact that it’s promoting a major sale. Both text overlay on the video and the video’s caption share details about a promotion: customers can get bonus items after spending at least $200 (more or less the price of a new Solo Stove, anyway).

Videos like this do a great job of drumming up new business and leading interested parties to your website. Solo Stove could even have taken this a step further and set up its Facebook Shop so viewers could immediately make a purchase directly from the social media platform.

2. WallyGrow

WallyGrow is a company that sells wall-hanging planters online and on social media. It uses Instagram as a place to promote its products—and even has an Instagram Shop set up for social commerce.

However, one great tactic the brand uses on its Instagram is a plethora of giveaways. Not only does WallyGrow share stunning photos of its products in action, but they’re always giving away planters as well, like we see below.

As an up-and-coming brand, regularly hosting giveaways is a great way to let potential customers test out your product. If they love it, they’re likely to buy more as well as tell their friends and family about it.

3. Spikeball

Spikeball is a company with a fun, easy-to-play outdoor game. And it has a great presence on TikTok to promote its game. It also has its own TikTok Shop set up—though the brand doesn’t always tag its products in its video content.

One of its recent videos promotes a fun idea for playing its game—at night with glow gear on.

Because Spikeball is an active game, using video to promote the product is a smart tactic. Showcasing people having fun while playing is the perfect way to inspire potential customers to want in on the action.

How to create a social media ecommerce strategy

Curious how to start promoting your own business and products on social media? Let’s walk you through our six-step strategy.

1. Set up social ecommerce channels

Shopping within a network is easier than ever on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. Use these platforms’ features to make shopping and product discoverability on social media a seamless experience for your customers.

Instagram and Facebook share the same backend operation for shopping, called the Meta Commerce Manager. After loading in your product catalog or linking your website’s ecommerce platform (such as Shopify and WooCommerce), you’ll be able to start tagging products on your posts.

When products are shown on Instagram posts, they can be tagged, allowing customers to view purchase details with a tap. Clicking on the tagged product will lead you to the product’s website page for you to purchase. The browser pops up within Instagram so when you close out or finish your purchase, you can go right back to browsing.

TikTok also allows you to create your own shop and is a great place to promote your products. And while Pinterest removed its in-app shopping features, it remains a place where people research products, so your ecommerce store will also want to have a presence there.

2. Find your authentic voice & be unique

Five years ago, DTC brands in the furniture retail segment were few and far between. Now, there are dozens of mid-century furniture manufacturers alone vying for your social attention. The same story has been repeated with DTC brands specializing in dozens of different market segments. How do you set yourself apart when the field is so crowded?

One way to do this is to find a brand voice that is authentic to your company. Paired with brand visuals, this is one of the first steps to getting noticed. Next, identify what makes you unique and different from others in your field. It could be your company’s story, a specialization or even your customer service.

Research has found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. If all of your products are similar to your competitors’, then providing excellent social customer service can set you apart from the pack.

3. Use organic and paid strategies

On social media, a combination of organic and paid strategies is usually the preferred way to go. Paid social media can help you reach an even wider audience—but your organic content is what’s going to keep them coming back.

Here are a few tactics your ecommerce business can use to combine these two powerful strategies.

Organic social media strategies for ecommerce

• Presence of and use of product reviews on your social media accounts
• Adding relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your brand
• Personalized interaction with customers on your accounts and theirs
• Providing excellent social customer care
• Using user-generated content to further your social proof
• Use social listening to improve your product and discover new customers

Paid social media strategies for ecommerce

• Paid advertisements and post boosts
• Using lookalike audiences and website visitors to supplement your advertising
• Running influencer marketing campaigns
• Creating a brand ambassador program
• Forming brand partnerships
• Creating a referral or affiliate program
• Running advertisements and boosts of any of the organic strategies mentioned above

4. Use social proof

Word-of-mouth and reviews are still tried-and-true tactics for encouraging purchases, and are great examples of social proof. Social proof is a concept in psychology that declares consumers are more likely to buy from companies they see other happy consumers using.

So things like customer reviews, user-generated content and influencer marketing helps in gathering social proof to share with your audience.

For networks like Facebook that allow reviews as a feature, it makes business sense to allow your customers to leave reviews. Ask for more reviews from your customers on a continuing basis and you’ll be supplemented with social proof. Reviews are even better when they’re managed and responded to from the brand.

Another way of boosting your social proof is to use an influencer marketing strategy. Pair Eyewear does a great job of influencer marketing all over TikTok, and using those influencer videos for both paid and organic content (shoutout to our last point here).

5. Use social listening

Social listening can benefit all departments of your company. But for sales specifically, you can use social listening to identify gaps in your competitor’s strategy and see what your industry’s customers are talking about. These discussions can lead to new products, strategies and better customer service.

For an online-only company, social listening is imperative because you rely more on interactions and online activity to guide your strategies. Which leads us to setting yourself apart from others in an increasingly crowded social space.

6. Use analytics to guide your ecommerce sales

We mentioned social listening before but there are additional analytics you can take advantage of when approaching social selling. Using social media data to inform your sales plans on an ongoing basis will only help your ROI.

From social media analytics, you can find a multitude of ecommerce-related data:

• Website clicks
• Profile visits
• Social shares from your website
• Mentions from customers
• Ad offers and click throughs
• Mentions of new products or campaigns

Some analytics, like Instagram impressions from the Explore page, are part of an organic ecommerce social strategy. Others, like website clicks or social-only offers, are more specific analytics that can help define your social ROI.

Create your social media ecommerce strategy today

There are many tactics an ecommerce or DTC company can use on social media. But what most would agree with is that a social media presence is necessary to elevate your marketing. Social media helps your customers discover your brand, look at reviews, receive referrals from trusted sources and shop.

To make sure you have all the right tools in your arsenal, give Sprout Social a test drive. Access tools that can help you monitor your online presence, market to the right audience and keep an eye on your social media analytics.

The post How to use social media ecommerce effectively in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Ohio State employs thousands of faculty members and staff, and boasts an alumni family that is more than 600,000 strong. Ohio State Buckeyes football, basketball and other athletics programs have a vast legion of followers. And that doesn’t even count the future students and community members across the globe who take an interest in Ohio State’s achievements, activities and research.

Engaging effectively with these diverse audiences across seven social media platforms is a tall task that requires exceptional strategic thinking, planning and creativity—plus the right technology. And according to Dani Dean, Associate Director of Social Media, since her team developed their audience-centric social media strategy and started using Sprout Social, they have excelled in their efforts to make Ohio State one of the highest-performing universities on social.

With Sprout, it’s easy to bring data-driven insights into our team and measure the impact of our efforts. Those insights help us shape and optimize our social strategies for Ohio State, contributing to our tremendous growth in engagement and brand awareness.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Measuring the impact of every piece of content with insights from Sprout

Dean said her team adopted Sprout’s social media management platform and other technology tools to help realize their goals to make Ohio State a leader among its peer set and one of the top 10 schools nationwide for social media performance. They needed intuitive systems that would allow them to analyze their audiences with precision and develop a data-driven strategy for social content and engagement.

In FY23, those investments helped Ohio State’s social media team see its most successful and productive year in the history of the university’s presence on social media. Dean and her team published more than 2,000 posts and led multiple paid and organic social campaigns that generated 140 million impressions and 11 million engagements—a 45% increase from the previous year.

During that same period, Ohio State saw a 155% net growth in followers across all platforms, and its social media audience grew to 2.2 million.

Dean said Sprout’s Reports and Listening features have been especially valuable in helping Ohio State’s content hit the mark with various audiences. “Sprout’s reporting tool is personally my favorite feature,” she said. “I’m an analytics nerd, but I also have a creative background. Sprout’s reporting lets me pair data insights with the creative side of my work. I can create a wide variety of customized reports, from Competitor and Tag reports to reports on the performance of video and other content.”

With social listening in Sprout, Ohio State can be more effective at rooting its content and messaging in what audiences are already saying. Dean said Sprout helps Ohio State be more proactive in communicating issues of interest to its audiences and be more responsive in engaging with people reacting to those topics.

Sprout’s features are super customizable. We love that Sprout lets us build so many reporting and tagging structures to support our specific goals, rather than making us fit our goals into a particular structure.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Ohio State’s leadership is often interested in reviewing listening reports following university announcements and other news, which are a snap for Dean’s team to generate. “Sprout has made the whole listening process so much more efficient,” she said. “Before we started using the platform, we had to build old-school queries to pull the data, and it was a painstaking process that took several hours.”

Dean said she also creates quarterly impact reports that she shares with various stakeholders, including Ohio State’s senior leadership and the board of directors. Sprout’s reports are also vital for helping her team track their three core key performance indicators (KPIs)—awareness, engagement and traffic.

“On the surface, these KPIs may seem broad, but we associate at least one of these goals with every piece of content we post,” she explained. Dean added that her team continues developing custom tags in Sprout to test, optimize and track their KPIs.

Hitting on just the right style and tone—with help from Sprout

Listening with Sprout allows Dean and her team to surface trends and themes likely to resonate with Ohio State’s different audiences. The insights they collect from listening help them customize “customer journeys,” according to Dean, with content most relevant to each audience at various points throughout the year.

Ohio State’s social media practitioners also use Sprout’s tagging and reporting features to test-drive new content formats, from writing style to video editing. Two major channels of focus for testing content are TikTok and Instagram, according to Dean, because that’s where her team can “push the boundaries with creativity and have fun.”

On TikTok, for example, communication is focused primarily toward future Ohio State students—a high school-age audience. “They want to feel a connection with our brand, so we have to make sure we don’t get too niche or ‘inside-jokey’ with our content, or it could fall flat,” Dean said.

Sprout has made such a difference in how we use data to drive our decision-making and measure our impact—it has changed our approach to content development. The social team collaborates with the multimedia and content teams and we use these insights to focus on ongoing improvement. When we create content, we think about channel and audience first.

Dani Dean
Associate Director, Social Media

Dean and her team—including a social media senior associate, a social media production associate, a social media manager of enterprise leadership, and a few student interns—create almost all the content Ohio State uses across its primary social media channels. It’s a collaborative environment with no shortage of work to do.

“Everything we create needs to be tailored for each platform and each audience,” said Dean, whose role includes overseeing the creative direction for Ohio State’s social content. “But Sprout helps us make the best use of our time, resources and creativity because we can dig into the data and understand what’s working well and where with our different audiences.”

Customization is critical for making a lasting connection with audiences on social—and for Ohio State, that connection can literally last a lifetime. “If we want to continue growing and building upon Ohio State’s brand image and create full-circle moments with our audiences, we have to push ourselves. We need to foster connections, and social is a powerful tool to do that.”

In addition to the 45% increase in social media engagements for Ohio State in FY23, Dean said video views have grown by an impressive 300%. “These results show that our emphasis on the quality of audience-centric content versus the quantity of content we produce is a successful strategy for driving engagement and reach with Ohio State’s audiences,” she said, adding that her team intends to “continue pushing the boundaries of innovation in the social media space” using their refreshed strategy informed by insights from Sprout.

To learn how Sprout Social can help your organization engage more effectively with diverse audiences and increase the impact of your social content on every channel, request your free demo today.

The post Ohio State’s social media engagement and rankings soar with help from Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media has democratized access to medical information and empowered patients to take charge of their health. But it also has negative consequences. Like increasing the spread of misinformation and excluding healthcare workers from vital conversations with their patients. It has pushed some hospital systems, professional societies and pharmaceutical companies into an unflattering limelight, as patient and provider criticisms go viral. Risks like this have caused healthcare organizations to recoil, and grow cautious of being present on social channels.

The reality is that the future of the healthcare industry will be a hybrid of online and offline experiences. People will use social media networks to look up health information, find care providers, search for employment and receive updates from their healthcare team and hospital systems. They expect you to show up on social—and social data can provide value for your company, too.

By using social listening tools, you can keep an eye on trending conversations in your community, stay ahead of crises and receive real-time patient feedback that helps you improve your care. Keep reading for examples of social listening for healthcare in action.

The benefits of social listening in healthcare

The sheer volume of social content published hourly makes it tough for healthcare companies to find their patients, providers and community members. Social listening enables you to cut through the noise, hone in on relevant conversations and share valuable timely insights with your leadership team.

Here are specific ways teams can use listening to monitor and analyze audience conversations in an efficient, centralized manner, featuring advice from Sprout Social experts.

Proactive crisis management

The best things a social team can do when it comes to responding to an impending crisis are: already have a crisis plan in place and catch minor crises before they spiral out of control. According to Jill Florence, Director of Enterprise Sales at Sprout Social, “Unfortunately, PR crises are common for healthcare systems and other healthcare organizations. Many have gone through a challenging event themselves, or have seen it happen to other companies and they’re afraid of it happening to them. Whether it’s a patient who had a negative experience, a violent threat or mishandling patient data, leaders want to know about it in real-time.”

Of course, crises can be external, too. Katherine Van Allen, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, adds, “Healthcare organizations can also use listening to pay attention to government decisions, relevant current events and specific bills and or lobbying conversations that will impact care units beyond the marketing team.”

By including Sprout Social tools like Listening Spike Alerts in your crisis plan, you will be alerted to shifts in conversations around topics like your hospitals, facilities or supply chain, plus trending news. These alerts will help your team stay on top of current events, and be the first to know if a crisis is about to unfold. As Florence explains, “You don’t want to be in a situation where the CEO is the one informing you about a situation, and you’re just reacting. Getting listening alerts right away is critical to proactively managing crises, and leading the charge at your organization.”

Real-time patient and clinician feedback

While receiving feedback from patients and clinicians on social might seem daunting, it’s the best way to source unfiltered intel. By intercepting this feedback, the social team accesses voice of customer knowledge that can help improve multiple aspects of your organization.

With social listening insights on hand, it’s possible to understand the needs, opinions and feelings of patients, physicians and community members. And understanding them translates to better content, care, and recruitment and retention strategies. As Van Allen puts it, “The [healthcare organizations] who use social listening make more informed decisions about their content strategy.”

By making brand health a part of your listening strategy, you can consistently monitor audience sentiment on social. A platform like Sprout enables you to visualize overall sentiment trends and zero-in on key audience pain points. With this presentation-ready business intelligence, you’re empowered to share audience feedback—like how patients feel about your current wait times and the care they receive, to how physicians would describe your culture—with the rest of your organization.

“Comparative” intelligence

In the healthcare industry, it’s common to consider other healthcare systems and companies “comparators” rather than competitors. While you might not consider other organizations your direct competition, you can still use them as a barometer to measure your performance—from patient care and satisfaction to talent recruitment and culture.

Van Allen describes, “Use listening to understand your share of voice and how people are talking about comparators. Ask yourself: What kinds of specialties, hiring conversations and patient feedback are they getting? How does that compare to us?”

This is especially helpful amid an industry-wide staffing shortage and quickly evolving patient expectations. “The hiring landscape is so competitive that customers need to understand why other companies are being chosen over them,” says Florence. Social listening delivers key learnings that can help you reach (and exceed) care benchmarks on social and beyond, and rethink how your company approaches hiring and workplace culture overall.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis report aggregates social data from your comparators, including impressions, engagements, sentiment and overall share of voice. You can dig deeper into specific audience feedback in the Conversation and Messages tabs.

5 examples of social listening for healthcare in action

We researched examples of ways real healthcare companies use social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement, while balancing growing needs around hiring and patient care standards. Here’s what we found:

1. Guide expansion

As hospital systems and other healthcare organizations expand, real-time audience feedback gleaned from social listening empowers marketing teams to provide a strategic vision.

Florence cites a specific example of a hospital system she worked with that used customer feedback from social listening to guide expansion. “They were completely maxed out. They didn’t have large enough facilities or enough clinicians to accommodate their community, and they felt the backlash on social. Customers complained about long wait times, poor physician care and overall bad experiences. As their company increased capacity, the social team was on the front lines. They managed customer pain points and kept decision makers abreast, while using that feedback to influence expansion in a way that maintained positive brand reputation long-term.”

2. Provide audiences with relevant content

Social listening insights give you a window into issues that matter to your patients, community members and physicians, and enable you to craft an audience-centric content strategy.

Van Allen describes how organizations can use listening to adapt their messaging to meet the needs of their audience. “We see healthcare organizations use social listening to research trending conversations and industry topics, and use that intel to inform their content strategy. For example, a hospital system could create a Listening topic about going “back to school” and surface that parents within their community want more tips to prepare for cold, flu and RSV season.”

3. Route audience intel to the right department

At some healthcare organizations, multiple social marketing teams work together—each representing a different department (e.g., cardiology, dermatology, oncology, etc.). Using a robust and intuitive platform like Sprout makes it possible for these teams to share social listening insights with one another, and facilitate stronger communication and cross-team collaboration.

Florence adds, “Using Sprout’s custom Listening reports lets healthcare marketers generate and share insights with other functions.” By creating department-specific Listening topics, social marketers at healthcare organizations—like hospital systems—can find the specific insights they need to reach their unique goals, like increasing cardiology patient satisfaction. Sprout’s centralized platform houses all of this data in one place, making it possible for marketing teams to work in harmony.

4. Track awareness campaigns

Healthcare organizations can use social listening to gauge how effective promotional campaigns for emerging research and timely initiatives are.

For example, a medical society specializing in cardiology ran a major awareness campaign centered around American Heart Month. To measure the performance and impact of their work, they created a listening query around their organization name and the branded campaign hashtag. By analyzing this Listening data, they were able to identify key strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, resulting in valuable strategy refinements for upcoming initiatives.

You can also use listening data to find advocates who were vocal during a past campaign, and tap them for future partnerships.

5. Increase share of voice

Listening is a valuable tool for healthcare organizations who want to improve their credibility and rise up to the level of other comparators.

In one instance, a children’s hospital looking to raise its national ranking through strategic media opportunities created a competitive listening topic to track its share of voice against higher-ranking hospitals. While analyzing the Listening data, they identified opportunities for submission-based awards and event sponsorships that might help bolster their reputation. They also established new competitive benchmarks for engagements and impressions.

In healthcare, you hope that people never need certain services (especially emergency/urgent care). But you do want to be top of mind, in the moment, when they do.

Social listening shows your audience you care

Your audience expects healthcare brands like yours to be present on social media. Despite its reputational and compliance risks, social offers a wide variety of insights that enable you to manage crises effectively, gather real-time patient and provider feedback, and stay on par with your comparators.

Finding value in social as a healthcare organization requires tools that capture actionable insights and mine value from social to drive exceptional patient and provider experiences.

Want to start turning social data into elevated patient care? Request a demo of Sprout Social’s Listening solution today.

The post The power of social listening for healthcare organizations appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s no longer an anomaly to see public sector accounts going viral. But managing the social media presence of a government agency comes with a unique set of challenges. Complex platform security and governance requirements. Staff who balance multiple responsibilities beyond social. Ever-evolving strategies that can shift overnight.

Choosing the right social media tools for government agencies and other public sector organizations is a non-negotiable part of proactively reaching and engaging your citizens, saving your team valuable time, creating internal visibility and, ultimately, serving your community better. Use the criteria shared in this article to help your team harness the full power of social.

4 things to look for when evaluating social media tools for government entities

Investing in an intuitive social media management platform is an essential step toward building a strong relationship with your constituents. Yet, many agencies only use native tools to manage their accounts—leaving valuable insights and opportunities to connect untapped. Less than half of public sector entities use software to manage or execute their social media strategy, according to ArchiveSocial. The report also revealed agencies not being able to centrally manage their entire presence is the fastest-growing detriment to success on social.

Yet, not all social media management platforms are created equal. When evaluating social tools to help your agency make waves on social, look for one that:

1. Gives your team time back

Like in many industries, managing government social media is more than a 40 hour per week job, especially when staff members juggle other disciplines like communications, PR, digital marketing, content and more. This not only puts teams at risk of burnout, but prevents agencies from maximizing their presence on social and forming stronger relationships with their citizens and communities.

By using a centralized platform like Sprout Social, you’re enabled to make quick work of delivering social content, so your team can focus on engaging your constituents and refining your creative strategy. A recently commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Sprout’s tools helped a composite organization representative of interviewed customers drive $973,000 in social media team productivity and efficiency savings over three years, and a 55% increase in year 3.

Here a few Sprout highlights that help teams collaborate more effectively:

• Shared calendar: Plan your strategy and maintain oversight from a central hub rather than disparate apps or spreadsheets. Organize posts across profiles, networks and campaigns using a visualized calendar to support a long-term strategy. For example, you can map out your posts for the upcoming week and month to assure your content lines up with priority community events.
• Publishing and scheduling: Boost collaboration between staff and increase productivity with campaign planning tools, automated workflows, and scheduling and monitoring tools. Automatically publish your content at the times most likely to reach constituents and receive real-time engagement updates.
• Message Approval Workflows: With internal and external approver features, ensure content is always approved and compliant with your agency’s communication guidelines—all within the Sprout platform.

2. Puts you in control of crisis management

Whether it’s important local events, public safety emergencies or otherwise, crises are an unavoidable part of government social media efforts. Teams need to be able to pivot their publishing quickly, respond to a surge in inbound messages and be proactive to avoid misinformation from spreading.

Stay on the pulse of social media conversations trending in your constituency to prevent minor risks from spiraling into large-scale crises. When evaluating social media tools for government use, look for powerful social listening and audience engagement solutions that do the heavy lifting for you.

The Sprout platform enables you to stop a crisis in its tracks. We offer a suite of tools designed to help you perfect your crisis response strategy—from easily monitoring your incoming messages to zeroing in on key conversations happening online.

• Pause All Content: In the face of a crisis, this feature enables you to pause all outgoing messages with one click—which saves you time and ensures your entire team is on the same page.
• Message Spike Alerts: If your message volume spikes, that could be indicative of a looming crisis. These alerts automatically send email or mobile push notifications when incoming messages exceed your hourly average, so your team doesn’t have to manually monitor your inbox 24/7.
• Social Listening: Sprout’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology can help you gain critical intel about key public figures, trending misinformation and constituent concerns. The platform sifts through millions of social media data points in seconds, helping you access and share actionable findings with leadership and prominent government figures you work with.

3. Supports stronger, more meaningful citizen engagement

Your core mission is to serve your community—which includes serving them on their channel of choice: social media. To do so, you need to understand their preferences, concerns and communication needs, and be responsive and authentic when they reach out to you. Strengthen your citizen engagement by using social media tools that provide your team with valuable intelligence about your audience, and empower swift, proactive communication.

With Sprout’s platform, you can exceed your constituents’ expectations and deliver more tailored experiences on social media—while saving your team time. According to the Total Economic Impact™ study, for the composite organization, customer service specialists saved time equal to $142,000 over three years by using Sprout to respond to incoming me​​ssages and inquiries.

These Sprout tools are designed to help you foster connections with your citizens:

• Smart Inbox: Unify your social channels into a single stream so you’re empowered to monitor incoming messages, cultivate conversations and respond to your audience quickly. By tagging and filtering messages, you can prioritize what’s most important and discover unique engagement opportunities. Built-in collision detection notifications make for seamless collaboration, so you can see who has replied to a message and prevent duplicative work

• Brand Keywords: Often, people talk about your agency on social without tagging you directly. If you aren’t actively searching for these messages, you may miss important conversations. Brand Keywords are custom Twitter searches that constantly run and display results in your Smart Inbox, so you can see and respond to these highly relevant posts as easily as any other message. You can also set up alerts based on high priority or crisis keywords, so you’re always one step ahead.
• Custom VIP lists: Within the Smart Inbox, you can add the VIP label next to the avatar of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn users who messaged you. This feature helps you track correspondences with key players in your constituency, like reporters, elected officials and business leaders.
• Listening: In addition to helping you manage a crisis, Sprout’s social listening solution helps you keep up with relevant trending conversations and influential community leaders. The tools gather honest feedback about your agency’s performance on social and beyond. With these insights, you will be empowered to produce more meaningful content and ladder-up your learnings to decision makers.

4. Reshapes perception of what social can do

In the public sector, social is still largely misunderstood. Many hold onto the lingering belief that it does more harm than good, while others see it as a wild west of misinformation. The right tool will help your communications team quantify the impact of your social efforts and change the way your agency’s stakeholders see social media (even if they aren’t social savvy).

Using a social media management platform makes it easy to create clear reports that demonstrate how your social strategy translates to agency goals. For example, with Sprout’s Analytics tools, you can eliminate the time-consuming manual data collection processes in favor of automated, presentation-ready reports. The Total Economic Impact™ study found that Sprout eliminated manual data aggregation to prepare monthly reports by 75%, resulting in $39,000 in savings over three years.

By using Sprout, you can automatically generate:

• Tag Reports: Access an overview of your inbound and outbound tagged messages to easily analyze campaign effectiveness, volume and performance patterns.
• Post Performance Reports: Analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what messaging and formats resonate with your constituents and why.
• Profile Performance Reports: Access a high-level overview of performance across all connected profiles to quickly evaluate social growth, and how that growth correlates with key initiatives.

5. Supports internal compliance

Compared to other industries, government entities have to balance their social media strategies and workflows against a host of compliance requirements.

For example, a 2014 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) bulletin mandated that federal agencies follow several best practices for managing social media records. Though the definition of what constitutes a “record” can vary by agency, social media posts that communicate policy information or even open-ended prompts that invite user engagement may all constitute records that must be archived properly. A 2023 NARA audit of 10 agencies found that most lack the tools and staff to handle social media record retention.

Government organizations can leverage Sprout’s inbox export to quickly export posts, messages and reviews from the Smart Inbox into a CSV file, and our customer audit trail to export a myriad of user and admin actions. These exports provide clear documentation of granular metadata, including message type and timestamps, the Sprout user who sent or edited each message, and permalinks to the message on the original network. 

Find the right social media tools for your agency’s workflow

When evaluating social media management software for your government agency, to paraphrase JFK, don’t hesitate to ask what the tools will do for you. With the right social media management platform, you can do your best work more efficiently, proactively curb crises, create more time for citizen engagement and confidently demonstrate the value of social at your agency.

For a more comprehensive look at the value social media provides, download The Total Economic Impact™ of Sprout Social study, and learn how Sprout delivered a 233% return on investment over three years.

The post Social media tools for government: What your team needs for success appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media engagement is an essential piece of the Dreamforce experience and integral to Salesforce’s customer relationships year-round. So, in 2022, Salesforce made the enterprise-wide transition to a new social media management platform. The move to Sprout Social has paid off, according to Mikaely Quaranta, Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy, for the customer relationship management (CRM) software company.

“Sprout is such an intuitive platform,” Quaranta said. “Our social media practitioners were excited to jump onto Sprout and start using the Reports and Listening features right away. We were also confident going into Dreamforce because we knew that Sprout’s automation and workflow features would allow us to move at the speed of social during our biggest event of the year.”

Tracking trends and securing real-time approvals on the go

Marissa Kraines, Vice President and Global Head of Social Media at Salesforce, said social media plays an integral role in helping the company build excitement for Dreamforce.

“We want to bring the magic and conversation of Dreamforce to all our audiences on social media,” she explained. “First, we’re looking for ways to amplify the in-person experience through content and interactions across our social media channels. Second, we’re determining how to translate the nuances of the on-site event to the virtual and on-demand experiences.”

With Sprout, Kraines and her team can easily track mentions from conference attendees and other interested parties, including the media, as well as keep tabs on announcements happening online and offline during the event.

Social listening is especially important during events like Dreamforce. Sprout allows us to understand when our audience is online, when they want us to engage with them and how we can assist them throughout their conference experience. Sprout also helps us stay on top of trends and be more strategic with our planning.

Mikaely Quaranta
Senior Manager, Social Media Strategy

Sprout’s mobile app also quickly emerged as a crucial time-saving tool for the social team, according to Kraines. She said it helps them to get approvals from stakeholders for content and messaging “in real time—easily and concisely,” whether they’re running around at events or on the Salesforce campus.

Forging and fortifying one-to-one relationships with Salesforce’s greatest champions

Sprout’s reporting helps Salesforce stay close to what drives their audience engagement. “It’s so important to measure engagement to ensure we continue creating content our audience loves,” said Max Benesi, Salesforce’s Associate Manager, Social Media and Community. “With Sprout, we can do that quickly—reporting out at any time so we always know where things stand.”

Through social listening, analytics and other features in the Sprout platform, like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, Saleforce’s social media team is learning even more about the Trailblazer community, and how to engage with them effectively via the company’s 150+ social channels.

“We’ve learned that the best way to build relationships with our Trailblazers is through one-on-one engagements on social—and Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps us to accomplish that,” said Benesi.

Salesforce’s Trailblazers and other highly engaged social audience members are open to having Benesi and his team test-drive new content with them. “They’re very honest—they will tell us what they like and don’t like,” Benesi said. “We use their feedback to inform our content creation.”

With other social media management platforms that we’ve used, the reporting was not intuitive. We often had to pull reports natively and work with spreadsheets. When our team started using Sprout, all that manual work went away.

Max Benesi
Associate Manager, Social Media and Community

Accelerating speed to insights—and eliminating thousands of hours of manual work

The business intelligence Salesforce gains from using Sprout helps them evolve their marketing strategies far beyond specific events. “We can’t just make decisions on a hunch. We need accurate data to understand where we’re finding success,” said Kraines. “The insights we get from Sprout allow us to have confidence in our decision-making.”

Quaranta underscored further just how game-changing Sprout’s reporting capabilities have been for the social media practitioners at Salesforce. “We saw immediate value following our implementation,” she said. “We’re reporting faster, and in real time, and sharing information continuously with our stakeholders.”

She added, “We’re also moving 10 times faster per day with community management by using Sprout’s automation and workflows. That gives our team more time to focus on strategy and bring our creative vision to life—the things that we do best.”

“When my team is able to automate simple tasks, it enables them to take that bandwidth and focus it toward innovation,” said Kraines. “We’ve saved over 12,000 hours this year by using Sprout, and our team is having a lot more fun with their work.”

Making plans to leverage a 360-degree view of Salesforce’s social media audience

Kraines underscored that while Sprout is a valuable tool for tracking social media around events like Dreamforce, her team uses Sprout’s capabilities to help them deliver on their year-round mission to increase brand awareness. That means helping customers truly understand what the global CRM software and applications provider does, and how it impacts their businesses—as well as their customers.

“Salesforce is focused on helping businesses become ‘customer companies,’” said Kraines. “We provide them with a 360-degree view of their customers so they can bring those ‘wow’ moments to life. I believe that social is the bread and butter of delivering that 360-degree view of the customer.”

Looking ahead, Kraines said her team is eager to see what impact Sprout Social’s integration with Salesforce will have on how they craft social strategies and create new campaigns. “Sprout has already made it easier for the Salesforce social team to share insights with our leadership about what our customers are talking about, and what their needs and issues are,” she said. “This information helps to shape our company’s marketing, sales and operational strategies. And now, with Sprout’s integration across our platform, we can bring social insights and data everywhere across Salesforce.”

Kraines said her team is confident that Sprout is the right partner to help support Salesforce’s growing social media practice. “Sprout has great products,” she said. “But more importantly, they’re evolving and scaling along with our team. By partnering with us and listening to our input, Sprout allows us to be at the forefront of social media.”

I recommend Sprout to other social leaders because they have been such an amazing partner. When you’re onboarding a critical component of your Martech stack, it’s so important to have people alongside you who want to see you succeed.

Marissa Kraines
Vice President, Global Head of Social Media

To find out how your social media team can be more productive, free up time for innovation and never miss a moment to engage meaningfully with customers, request your free demo of Sprout Social today.

The post Salesforce’s social media team saves 12,000 hours in first year using Sprout Social appeared first on Sprout Social.

In this session, we will cover:

• How brands can best utilize social media for quick, impactful, omni-present care 
• How to create competitive care strategies using AI to scale efficiency and data analysis 
• How personalization is fueling the future of exceptional care experiences

This session will be led by Sprout Social’s President, Ryan Barretto, and Vice President, Solutions Engineering, Colleen Geiselhart. They will also discuss how Sprout Social’s global partnership and integrations with Salesforce provide a unique perspective on how the world’s leading brands are harnessing the power of social data and insights to build successful Customer 360 strategies.

The post Social Media, AI, and the Future of Omni-Channel Care appeared first on Sprout Social.

NLP powers AI tools through topic clustering and sentiment analysis, enabling marketers to extract brand insights from social listening, reviews, surveys and other customer data for strategic decision-making. These insights give marketers an in-depth view of how to delight audiences and enhance brand loyalty, resulting in repeat business and ultimately, market growth.

Read on to get a better understanding of how NLP works behind the scenes to surface actionable brand insights. Plus, see examples of how brands use NLP to optimize their social data to improve audience engagement and customer experience.

What is natural language processing?

NLP is an AI methodology that combines techniques from machine learning, data science and linguistics to process human language. It is used to derive intelligence from unstructured data for purposes such as customer experience analysis, brand intelligence and social sentiment analysis.

NLP uses rule-based approaches and statistical models to perform complex language-related tasks in various industry applications. Predictive text on your smartphone or email, text summaries from ChatGPT and smart assistants like Alexa are all examples of NLP-powered applications.

Deep learning techniques with multi-layered neural networks (NNs) that enable algorithms to automatically learn complex patterns and representations from large amounts of data have enabled significantly advanced NLP capabilities. This has resulted in powerful intelligent business applications such as real-time machine translations and voice-enabled mobile applications for accessibility.

What are the types of NLP categories?

Using generative AI tools like ChatGPT has become commonplace today. So have business intelligence tools that enable marketers to personalize marketing efforts based on customer sentiment. All these capabilities are powered by different categories of NLP as mentioned below.

Natural language understanding

Natural language understanding (NLU) enables unstructured data to be restructured in a way that enables a machine to understand and analyze it for meaning. Deep learning enables NLU to categorize information at a granular level from terabytes of data to discover key facts and deduce characteristics of entities such as brands, famous people and locations found within the text. Learn how to write AI prompts to support NLU and get best results from AI generative tools.

Natural language generation

Natural language generation (NLG) is a technique that analyzes thousands of documents to produce descriptions, summaries and explanations. It analyzes and generates both audio and text data. The most common application of NLG is machine-generated text for content creation.

NLP in optical character recognition

NLP algorithms detect and process data in scanned documents that have been converted to text by optical character recognition (OCR). This capability is prominently used in financial services for transaction approvals.

How does NLP work?

According to The State of Social Media Report ™ 2023, 96% of leaders believe AI and ML tools significantly improve decision-making processes. NLP is what powers these tools.

To understand how, here is a breakdown of key steps involved in the process.

• Tokenization: Text is broken into smaller units such as words or phrases called tokens.
• Text cleaning and preprocessing: The text is standardized by removing irrelevant details such as special characters, punctuations and upper cases.
• Part-of-Speech (PoS tagging): NLP algorithms identify grammatical parts of speech such as nouns and verbs for each token to understand the syntactic structure of the text.
• Text parsing: The grammatical structure in sentences are analyzed to understand the relationships between words.
• Text classification: Text is classified into various categories using statistical models. Text classification powers various capabilities such as sentiment analysis and spam filtering.

Which are the top NLP techniques?

There are several NLP techniques that enable AI tools and devices to interact with and process human language in meaningful ways. These may include tasks such as analyzing voice of customer (VoC) data to find targeted insights, filtering social listening data to reduce noise or automatic translations of product reviews that help you gain a better understanding of global audiences.

The following techniques are commonly used to accomplish these tasks and more:

Entity recognition

Named entity recognition (NER) identifies and classifies named entities (words or phrases) in text data. These named entities refer to people, brands, locations, dates, quantities and other predefined categories. NER is essential to all types of data analysis for intelligence gathering.

Semantic search

Semantic search enables a computer to contextually interpret the intention of the user without depending on keywords. These algorithms work together with NER, NNs and knowledge graphs to provide remarkably accurate results. Semantic search powers applications such as search engines, smartphones and social intelligence tools like Sprout Social.

Machine learning (ML)

NLP is used to train machine learning algorithms to predict entity labels based on features like word embeddings, part-of-speech tags and contextual information. Neural networks in ML models depend on this labeled data to learn patterns in unstructured text and apply it to new information to continue learning.

Content suggestions

Natural language processing powers content suggestions by enabling ML models to contextually understand and generate human language. NLP uses NLU to analyze and interpret data while NLG generates personalized and relevant content recommendations to users.

A practical example of this NLP application is Sprout’s Suggestions by AI Assist feature. The capability enables social teams to create impactful responses and captions in seconds with AI-suggested copy and adjust response length and tone to best match the situation.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is one of the top NLP techniques used to analyze sentiment expressed in text. AI marketing tools like Sprout use sentiment analysis to power several business applications such as market research, customer feedback analysis and social media monitoring to help brands understand how customers feel about their products, services and brand.

Text summarizations

Text summarization is an advanced NLP technique used to automatically condense information from large documents. NLP algorithms generate summaries by paraphrasing the content so it differs from the original text but contains all essential information. It involves sentence scoring, clustering, and content and sentence position analysis.

Question answering

NLP enables question-answering (QA) models in a computer to understand and respond to questions in natural language using a conversational style. QA systems process data to locate relevant information and provide accurate answers. The most common example of this application is chatbots.

Machine translations

NLP drives automatic machine translations of text or speech data from one language to another. NLP uses many ML tasks such as word embeddings and tokenization to capture the semantic relationships between words and help translation algorithms understand the meaning of words. An example close to home is Sprout’s multilingual sentiment analysis capability that enables customers to get brand insights from social listening in multiple languages.

How brands use NLP in social listening to level up

Social listening provides a wealth of data you can harness to get up close and personal with your target audience. However, qualitative data can be difficult to quantify and discern contextually. NLP overcomes this hurdle by digging into social media conversations and feedback loops to quantify audience opinions and give you data-driven insights that can have a huge impact on your business strategies.

Here are five examples of how brands transformed their brand strategy using NLP-driven insights from social listening data.

Social listening

NLP powers social listening by enabling machine learning algorithms to track and identify key topics defined by marketers based on their goals. Grocery chain Casey’s used this feature in Sprout to capture their audience’s voice and use the insights to create social content that resonated with their diverse community.

As a result, they were able to stay nimble and pivot their content strategy based on real-time trends derived from Sprout. This increased their content performance significantly, which resulted in higher organic reach.

Topic clustering

Topic clustering through NLP aids AI tools in identifying semantically similar words and contextually understanding them so they can be clustered into topics. This capability provides marketers with key insights to influence product strategies and elevate brand satisfaction through AI customer service.

Grammerly used this capability to gain industry and competitive insights from their social listening data. They were able to pull specific customer feedback from the Sprout Smart Inbox to get an in-depth view of their product, brand health and competitors.

These insights were also used to coach conversations across the social support team for stronger customer service. Plus, they were critical for the broader marketing and product teams to improve the product based on what customers wanted.

Content filtering

Sprout Social’s Tagging feature is another prime example of how NLP enables AI marketing. Tags enable brands to manage tons of social posts and comments by filtering content. They are used to group and categorize social posts and audience messages based on workflows, business objectives and marketing strategies.

Purdue University used the feature to filter their Smart Inbox and apply campaign tags to categorize outgoing posts and messages based on social campaigns. This helped them keep a pulse on campus conversations to maintain brand health and ensure they never missed an opportunity to interact with their audience.

Deriving qualitative metrics

NLP capabilities helped the Atlanta Hawks monitor qualitative metrics from social listening and get a comprehensive view of their campaigns.

The basketball team realized numerical social metrics were not enough to gauge audience behavior and brand sentiment. They wanted a more nuanced understanding of their brand presence to build a more compelling social media strategy. For that, they needed to tap into the conversations happening around their brand.

NLP algorithms within Sprout scanned thousands of social comments and posts related to the Atlanta Hawks simultaneously across social platforms to extract the brand insights they were looking for. These insights enabled them to conduct more strategic A/B testing to compare what content worked best across social platforms. This strategy lead them to increase team productivity, boost audience engagement and grow positive brand sentiment.

Monitor social engagement

NLP helps uncover critical insights from social conversations brands have with customers, as well as chatter around their brand, through conversational AI techniques and sentiment analysis. Goally used this capability to monitor social engagement across their social channels to gain a better understanding of their customers’ complex needs.

Using Sprout’s listening tool, they extracted actionable insights from social conversations across different channels. These insights helped them evolve their social strategy to build greater brand awareness, connect more effectively with their target audience and enhance customer care. The insights also helped them connect with the right influencers who helped drive conversions.

Harness NLP in social listening

In a dynamic digital age where conversations about brands and products unfold in real-time, understanding and engaging with your audience is key to remaining relevant. It’s no longer enough to just have a social presence—you have to actively track and analyze what people are saying about you.

Social listening powered by AI tasks like NLP enables you to analyze thousands of social conversations in seconds to get the business intelligence you need. It gives you tangible, data-driven insights to build a brand strategy that outsmarts competitors, forges a stronger brand identity and builds meaningful audience connections to grow and flourish.

Learn how social media listening can impact your business.

The post A marketer’s guide to natural language processing (NLP) appeared first on Sprout Social.

Because we believe in the power of social media to make nearly anything easier, we will share 15 ways to use social media for education, based on insights shared with us from top institutions.

Benefits of social media in education

Here are our top three benefits of using social media in education:

Benefit 1: Extends learning opportunities

Social media unleashes more learning opportunities. Online classes and remote jobs are the new norm, so teaching students to work from a distance becomes a necessity for digital literacy and preparing them for their careers. Social media platforms support educators in various ways from sharing announcements to holding live lectures.

Benefit 2: Create connections with students and alumni

Social provides a way for institutions to quickly and directly communicate with students, faculty, staff and alumni, fostering connections across various audiences. Social content can attract prospective students, keep parents informed, grow alumni networks, promote on-campus events and more.

Focusing on nurturing community and publishing engaging content can also help increase enrollment. According to our Higher Education Social Media Benchmarks for 2023 report, 41% of school officials can directly attribute increased enrollment to social strategy.

For example, Keele University said their campus photos on Instagram help students solidify their college decision. One student came to the university because she saw their posts on Facebook and it helped confirm her decision, later becoming a digital ambassador for the school.

Benefit 3: Build brand identity

Social supports and amplifies university branding. University marketing teams use social media to maintain a positive brand reputation for their institutions. With the right strategy, colleges and universities can attract more students, increase endowments, promote events or initiatives and improve alumni relations.

Social media in the classroom

From preschool to college, there are so many methods for using social media in the classroom to communicate and educate. Here are seven ways to use social media in the classroom across platforms:

1. Use posts to broadcast updates and alerts

Instructors and colleges can meet students where they are by incorporating social media platforms they’re likely already familiar with like Facebook or X (formerly known as Twitter).

Have students follow a class Facebook Page or join a Facebook Group to view posts about course updates, homework assignments and tests. Universities can have publicly accessible pages dedicated to specific schools or departments that students can see even if they aren’t active on Facebook.

When using social media for education, it’s important to maintain a professional boundary. Email students a direct link to the Facebook Group for access and avoid sending friend requests. Groups are the perfect “home base,” especially for online courses because it makes it easy to connect with students. Similarly, instructors and departments can use Posts on X to keep students informed.

2. Use live streaming for lectures and discussions

Instructors can use Facebook Groups, Instagram Live, YouTube Live or LinkedIn Live to stream lectures and facilitate more accessible learning. If a student can’t come to the lecture hall, they can join online or review later. Adding live captions helps students who may be deaf or hard of hearing, non-native speakers, or learn visually. And platforms like Instagram and YouTube allow live streams to be recorded, providing students with review material for midterms and finals season.

Recorded live streams also widen the institution’s reach and authority by making lectures available to scholars and professors from other colleges, states or countries.

3. Use X for class updates and more

X is a great option for providing quick updates and reminders to students. Teachers can create a single handle per class and reuse it every year, or they can create a new handle each school year. Use X threads to share resources like practice quizzes, interesting perspectives or thought-provoking quotes to foster critical thinking. Hashtags can mark specific discussions or chats with guest speakers.

4. Create a class blog for discussions and cross-channel learning

Blogs are another great outlet for incorporating social media in the classroom. Students can link to the class blog on other social channels. For example, a student might share a photo from their visual essay on LinkedIn to attract the attention of recruiters for job or internships. Using blogs as a semester-long assignment can improve students’ short-form writing and critical thinking.

Don’t feel limited to just an English or writing class; this use of social media in education can be transferred across all subjects. There are also several platforms professors can use to create class blogs, such as Tumblr, Medium or WordPress. The course syllabus, updates and resources can be shared on the blog as well.

5. Use Instagram for digital storytelling

Have students practice storytelling on Instagram by creating class-specific accounts where they can present photos or graphics (and delete them once the course is over, if they so choose). This can work especially well in visual-heavy classes: Have photojournalism students post essays or challenge the social media marketing class to create a faux-brand campaign.

6. Create a class-specific Pinterest board

Educators can use Pinterest to prepare and organize resources, lesson plans and worksheets for their classes in one place. They can also set up Pinterest boards for each of their classes and save pins that are relevant to lessons.

Create boards according to class or subject, and create sub-topic boards for weekly units, projects or worksheets. Pinterest can also be useful for students to curate a digital bibliography for research projects, papers or group assignments. Students can pin websites, books or videos to a board on a single topic and refer back to it when it’s time to write an essay or thesis.

7. Prep for post-graduation and create alumni relationships

LinkedIn can help current students develop networking skills, craft their personal brand and connect with alumni. Flexing these career muscles could help them earn internships, gain mentors and secure job offers before they walk across the stage on graduation day.

Institutions can use LinkedIn for university colleges as well.  For example, a business school may have several private LinkedIn Groups for regional alumni chapters to connect them with students and faculty for internships, fundraising, volunteer opportunities and events.

Encouraging students to post relevant articles, projects and research, internship experiences and other academic accomplishments helps the university develop social proof on the platform. This is also an excellent example of the importance of incorporating advocacy into your social strategy.

Social media for education marketing

Just as there were many ways to use social media in the classroom, there are also many uses for social media in education marketing. Social media marketing can help if you’re looking to reach a larger audience for your college or university. Let’s dive into how social media can empower education marketing.

8. Leverage TikTok creators and influencers for user-generated content

Although many public universities have banned TikTok from campus Wi-fi, some educators and institutions embrace the app to educate and connect with students. Student and teacher influencers can provide user-generated content that satisfies a prospective student’s desire to see authentic content from their peers and future professors.

For example, Chapman University professor @itsmattprince went viral after challenging his class to earn 1 million likes on a TikTok video in exchange for canceling their final:

Fun, yet real-world applications like this illustrate the power of social influence—plus who doesn’t love a canceled final?

9. Include social media links on your school website

In the Higher Education Social Media Benchmarks for 2023 report, we found that 68% of high school students use social channels to research schools. Many parents and prospective students will check a school’s website first if they’re interested, and offering even more ways to follow the school creates a different insight into campus life.

Make it easy for parents and students to find your school’s social media profiles by adding links to the website’s main navigation or creating a social media directory that houses them all in one place.

10. Give a glimpse into student life through photo and video

If you want to attract new students and parents to your school, share photos of campus events to showcase what they could expect. Use short-form video like Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts to help prospective students envision themselves attending college there.

Highlighting events, sports, extracurriculars and the beauty of campus can make your school stand out from the rest. While school and university websites tend to follow the same mold, social media allows you to be more unique and casual like this Barbenheimer-inspired post from the University of Georgia:

11. Create alumni community groups

Many alumni want to remain involved with their alma mater after graduation. Creating a dedicated community via Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups can increase engagement.

For example, the University of Newcastle has over 148,000 alumni. Their team features current students, staff and alumni to amplify the career opportunities that manifest from being part of their community.

Alumni groups, groups for different graduating classes or departments, and groups for different extracurriculars and organizations allow former and current students to engage and meet others with common interests. Take a look at our alumni engagement best practices guide to learn more ways to keep the school spirit flowing.

12. Incorporate a social media crisis strategy

How would you communicate to the entire campus during an emergency? Whether it’s a fire, tornado or other immediate campus emergency, a social media crisis plan can help institutions proactively prepare. Keep parents and students updated on the situation by sharing information about the crisis and if authorities are involved. Many campuses have automated messaging alerts set up, but using social also enables people to be updated in real time.

Institutions can use social listening, which involves analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand, to aid with public relations crisis management plans. Seneca College leveraged Sprout’s capabilities a few years ago when 12,000 staff members went on strike. Using Brand Keywords and the Smart Inbox, the social media team was able to sort through and respond to a deluge of inbound feedback from concerned students.

13. Use chatbots to support students outside of office hours

In our higher education social media playbook, we talk about the importance of social customer service. Using automated replies or chatbots can help the student body get their questions answered immediately, or at least guide them to a solution faster.

Keele University used chatbots via Sprout’s Bot Builder to respond immediately to common questions about courses and bursary information. In the five months after using chatbots, nearly 500 conversations addressed a variety of topics from housing applications to international student services.

14. Iterate social strategy to create student-centric content

Using social media for education allows educators and marketers to meet students where they are by connecting on channels they use everyday. Social creates an opportunity for institutions to be more even more student-centric. But to keep students engaged, institutions will need to produce content that caters to the wants and needs of their audience(s).

If you want to manage your institution’s social channels successfully, you’ll need to iterate and improve your strategy by reviewing the top and lowest performing content.

Dartmouth College uses Sprout’s Sent Messages report to determine content performance and iterate their overall social strategy as needed. After reviewing which posts performed well, they schedule new posts with similar content to inform their content calendar.

15. Manage your communities all under one roof

Social media empowers universities to bring their various audiences together. Many institutions have an extensive community of prospective and current students, faculty, staff and alumni, but this causes a common pain point: decentralization.

Since colleges and universities have multiple social media accounts, it can be difficult to manage them all seamlessly. However, using a social media management software centralizes multiple networks in one place, so overseeing various accounts becomes more manageable and scalable.

Texas A&M University, one of the largest public universities in the nation, uses social media to connect with these various communities. The university has hundreds of departments, 16 colleges and 19 NCAA sports, so using a social media management tool is essential. Their social team uses Sprout’s publishing suite to discuss strategy, collaborate on content creation and provide feedback to interns all on one platform. In just six months, between August 2020 and January 2021,  Texas A&M earned over 131 million impressions and 8.3 million content engagements across X, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

A tool like Sprout Social can help make social media management a breeze, regardless of whether you’re a solo marketer or a full marketing department. Multiple users can use the Sprout platform to create content with consistent messaging and schedule posts across networks at the best time using our ViralPost® feature.

And the Post Performance report takes the guesswork out of identifying what content resonates because teams can pinpoint top posts and view engagement across channels.

Sprout enables you to monitor and manage multiple accounts across different networks, which is ideal for educational institutions. Each department or teacher at your school might have their own separate social media accounts for specific information, and a social media management tool can help you ensure the right posts are going out on each of these accounts.

And if there is news or content relevant to multiple departments, Sprout enables users to share the same content across multiple profiles with a single click.

Start using social media for education

Using social media for education goes beyond the classroom because it helps educators shape a modern holistic learning experience, build community and establish academic authority.

Take some of these ideas for a test drive, and sign up for a free Sprout Social trial to help you manage it all.

The post 15 ways to use social media for education appeared first on Sprout Social.

Edgio provides powerful solutions across web apps, content delivery and video streaming—servicing approximately 4% of global internet traffic and clients in 38 countries worldwide. While the company isn’t new, its brand name is. Previously known as Limelight Networks, Inc., the business rebranded in June 2022 following its acquisitions of Layer0 and of Yahoo’s Edgecast. What followed was a year of significant change for the company as they pivoted from a CDN vendor to an edge company providing applications and solutions that take advantage of their global edge network.

When Lindsay Moran, Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy, joined Edgio in the summer of 2022, her challenge was to amplify the company’s new brand on social media with a strategy that could deliver results quickly and cost-effectively. Moran led the charge to implement Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform, a decision that not only drove employee engagement, but helped the company generate $126,000+ in earned media value (EMV) in just three months after launching its advocacy program company-wide.

The extra reach from our employees—not paid advertising—is helping us grow our audiences on social. Our earned media value was over $126,000 in the first three months of our program

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Reinvigorating employee advocacy during a time of significant transformation

Before its rebranding, Edgio had tried to launch an employee advocacy program, but it did not gain much traction internally. Moran said she recognized that the time was right to try again after helping Edgio develop a host of new assets, from blogs to web content, to help the business “rebuild” its position as an industry thought leader. Delivering consistent messaging about the company’s products, solutions and brand across social media channels was also a priority.

“Social media is a no-brainer for sharing this quality content,” said Moran. “We have small audiences on our key corporate social media channels, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. But we knew we could amplify our reach by inspiring employees to use their personal networks to help promote our brand.”

Helping employees feel connected to our brand and aware of our news was also a top factor in the decision to reinvigorate employee advocacy at Edgio. “When merging companies and pivoting to new value-added capabilities for our customers, there’s a lot to share,” she said. “Employee advocacy is helping us stay abreast of all the good news and stay focused on the future by inspiring our employees to play a front-line role in telling our brand story.”

Employee advocacy needs to feel natural and authentic. What’s great about Sprout is that we can equip our employees with the content we want them to share, but they still have the opportunity to put their individual spin on it and make it their own.

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Impressive post-launch results that inspired a “happy dance”

To get the new employee advocacy program off to a successful start, Moran said she leaned on the team from Sprout to provide training to a select group of handpicked brand enthusiasts at Edgio who took part in a 30-day pilot program in February 2023. “It was a great experience,” Moran said. “Sprout let us record the pilot training session, and we’ve since turned it into an internal training tool for our new hires.”

She added, “The pilot program helped us to ensure we had plenty of content prepared going into our company-wide rollout of Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform. And through a post-pilot survey, we gathered more valuable insights on how to make our program successful from the outset.”

Edgio officially introduced the new employee advocacy program to its workforce through a monthly sales awareness call and a companywide “EdgeTalks” presentation (Edgio’s version of a TED Talk). Moran said these forums were a vital way to communicate the “why” for the program clearly, and to offer a solid overview of program basics plus “tips and tricks” for users to make the most of employee advocacy.

Moran also emphasized that the “tremendous support” of Edgio’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nancy Maluso, who played no small part in helping to build momentum around the employee advocacy effort. “She continues to promote and encourage the program among our leadership teams,” Moran said.

With Sprout’s Reports, Moran tracks the impact of Edgio’s employee advocacy program and shares the results with employees to help them stay motivated “cheerleaders” for the brand.

There’s been new business activity percolating at Edgio, too, which can be attributed to the company’s use of Employee Advocacy by Sprout. “During a recent team meeting, our sales leader in EMEA told us she’d received a lead from content shared through Advocacy,” said Moran. “I did a happy dance! It’s so exciting that we’re already starting to see fruit from our labor. It validates what we’re trying to do as a company, and why we’re working so hard to promote this program.”

Sprout makes it easy to jumpstart and grow employee advocacy

Moran said the employee advocacy program at Edgio is blooming, and the sales, marketing and customer success teams are particularly active in sharing content. But several product specialists and other subject matter experts have also become frequent users, and Moran said their outreach is particularly valuable for helping Edgio grow its reputation as an innovator.

“The ease of adopting a tool like Sprout helped our team embrace the new employee advocacy program quickly. After just the first month, the adoption rate was 34%,” Moran said. “Today, 20% of employees are active users, sharing content with their audiences more than three times per month, on average. Over time, I’d love to see our adoption rate hit 50%. That’s my aim.”

To learn more about how Employee Advocacy by Sprout can help amplify your brand’s social presence and engage your team—without spending more on paid promotion—request a demo today.

The post Edgio sees $126,000+ in earned media value with Employee Advocacy in just 3 months appeared first on Sprout Social.