Sprout Social Asks Brands to #BePresent

Allison Howen
by Allison Howen 06 Mar, 2013

Sprout Social is helping brands better measure and improve their social media engagement with its newest campaign, #BePresent. 

 

The campaign includes a new Engagement Report, which is available for free to all brands at mustbepresent.com. The report from Sprout Social uses proprietary models to identify social messages that likely require a response, as well as measures the brand's responsiveness to those inquiries. The report aims to help brands discover opportunities to better manage workflow, allocate resources and improve engagement metrics. Each report provides a variety of statistics, including response rate, average response times and industry and peer-group benchmarks.

 

"Social media has forever changed the way brands interact with customers and it is not enough to simply push messages out into the world," said Justyn Howard, CEO of Sprout Social. "You have to engage, you have to foster dialogues, and you have to provide exemplary social care. In short, you must #BePresent."

 

The #BePresent initiative offers baseline engagement metrics, encourages social participation and identifies areas for brand improvement. The process is straightforward, brands simply need to visit mustbepresent.com, create a #BePresent account and authorize it with Twitter in order to generate the free report.

 

Once a report is generated, Sprout Social monitors activity in real-time and users can check back to update their report or look to the Sprout Social platform for more in-depth insights. That being said, it is important to note that the Engagement Report does not determine a final "score" or highlight one most important metric, but is instead meant to show relative performance.

 

"To singularly define one metric or create an 'end-all-be-all' score somewhat defeats the purpose of holistic and ongoing engagement," said Howard. "We want brands to know where they currently stand, set goals appropriate for their business, implement a strategy to improve and then continually track progress."

 

Moreover, Sprout Social is also launching a new suite of features in its Social Media Management (SMM) platform to coincide with the #BePresent campaign. New features include detailed engagement reporting, additional analytics over time and multi-profile summation of data and responses. Additionally, engagement metrics and indicators will be present throughout the platform in order to help keep teams aware of their performance in real-time.