Sprout Social customers can now manage their Google+ presence on the Sprout platform and also take advantage of unique Google+ product features such as advanced targeting with circles.

Usability is always top of mind for us, so we worked with Google to bring high-quality integrations into the platform across varying features and functionality. We want Sprout’s support of Google+ Pages to make your life easier and help you more effectively manage your social efforts.

Current Capabilities with Google+

The features launched with today’s integration enable customers to use many of the familiar Sprout features. Here’s a highlight of what you can accomplish to better engage with your Google+ audiences:

Publishing capabilities include:

• Post publicly or select one or more circles to target your audience in a way that suits your communication style.
• Get ahead of upcoming content with Sprout’s publishing tools; you can publish, schedule, and queue your content to Google+.

Monitoring capabilities include:

• Take advantage of Sprout’s unified Smart Inbox to monitor the activity on your Google+ posts.
• Easily manage content creation by using drafts to either save a message for completion later or send for approval by another member of your team.

Collaboration capabilities include:

• Collaborate with your team by using tasks to route messages to the appropriate team members.
• See the activity on your Google+ posts threaded in with your overall social workflow.

Initial Analytics capabilities include:

• Get a snapshot of how you’re doing by viewing Google+ metrics on your Sprout Dashboard.

Full mobile support on iOS

• On the go? No problem! Sprout also has full iOS support for Google+. It’s easy to access and manage Google+ from your browser, iPhone and iPad devices!

Best of all, our new Google+ pages integration is available for all Sprout plans. Enjoy!

Ongoing Innovation

At Sprout, we continually listen to our customers and always want to provide the most innovative, useful social business tools. Today’s Google+ launch is a huge step and we’ll continue to work with Google to provide you with additional capabilities. Stay tuned in the weeks and months ahead – we’ll provide updates on new features as they are available!

Today, we are pleased to announce a brand new report in Sprout Social — the Team Report. If you are currently taking advantage of our collaboration features such as tasking and collaborative publishing, you’re going to get a ton of value out of this report.

Sprout now delivers publishing, responses and task metrics at the individual user / team member level. These new metrics allow you to see each user’s activity which will help you make better decisions about managing your front line social team. 

Here is a closer look inside the new Team Report…

New Publishing Metrics

The publishing section surfaces active team members that are posting messages and replying in your group. You’ll also get a snapshot of each team member’s ‘daily average of messages sent’. Inactive users are not shown on the report.

New Task Data

The Task section of the Team Report shows the number of items assigned and completed by team member and surfaces other performance metrics generated during the lifecycle of a task.

The Team Report is for Sprout Deluxe and Premium plans, however, all Standard plans will get a free 30 day preview, starting today! The report is live and available to the owner of the account, as well as admins. If you want to adjust who can view the report, adjust the visibility controls in Sprout’s settings.

We hope this new angle of social reporting is as insightful to you as it is us here at Sprout. Follow us on Twitter to stay current on all of our product updates. We’re working on a lot of exciting things and we can’t wait to share more with you. Stay tuned.

– Team Sprout

Today, we added a nifty little shortcut that allows you to switch to a Direct Message (DM) when you are replying to a Tweet. Here at Sprout, we understand that not everything should be discussed in public and that’s exactly why we are introducing this feature.

Here’s how it works. When you are replying to an @mention we’ll verify if that account is following you back and give you a chance to convert to a Direct Message. Simply click on the title bar and you’ll be responding privately.

Note for Premium Customers: With this update, replies to public messages using the DM feature will be counted toward your response metrics (response time, completion) in the Engagement report. It is a best practice to be sure all replies are sent via Sprout to be counted properly. Some 3rd party systems will not attribute a reply to the original message and can skew your results.

‘Switch to DM’ for mobile will be available on the next release of our mobile apps. Stay tuned for updates.

We hope this addition helps your daily engagement workflow and allows your team to Be Present, whether it’s on or off the public record. 

– Team Sprout

Engage Your Audience Like Never Before

Sprout Social is excited to announce our new Engagement Report, designed to help you understand, measure and improve your social media responsiveness.  These metrics will help you find opportunities to better manage workflow and allocate proper resources for unrivaled social care.  This feature is included in our Premium Plan but is available on all plans for a limited time.

The advanced metrics provided by the Engagement Report result in cutting-edge insights.  You’ll be able to:

Gauge Your Responsiveness
Sprout’s new Response Rate metric shows how well you’re responding to messages likely in need of response.

Track Response Times
Identify gaps in coverage and build an army of customer service heroes with our new ‘Average Response Time’ metric.

Data Visualization & Insight
Expose trends in engagement by day & time and see how you stack up against similar profiles.

Along with the Engagement Report, Sprout is introducing the Reponse Rate indicator to the Smart Inbox.  This provides a quick and easy way to keep a pulse on your performance in real-time while in your daily workflow.

Finally, get a peek into your past week’s or month’s performance with your response rate metrics conveniently placed on your dashboard.

Spread the Love

If you know any friends or colleagues who haven’t yet experienced the beauty of Sprout, share it on Twitter and give them the opportunity to generate a FREE Engagement Report at MustBePresent.com.

Keep an eye out for more announcements from the Sprout Social team and, as always, contact us for questions or assistance.  Thanks for using Sprout!

- Team Sprout

We have added a new option for Facebook photo uploads through Sprout Social. You can now post photos directly to your Facebook Timeline album.

This is a subtle change that gets us one step closer to matching the native Facebook functionality. Selecting Facebook Timeline will store images in the generic Facebook Timeline album that is already used when attaching an image as a Facebook post. Account owners can go to “Business Settings” and select “Facebook Timeline” to use this album for all of your Facebook profiles.

Selecting “Sprout Social Photos” will still post the image on your Timeline, but will also store them in a dedicated photo album titled “Sprout Social Photos.” You can rename this album by visiting Facebook.

We understand that it is the little things that make a big difference. Thanks for the feedback.

We’re happy to announce that drafting and approval have been added to Sprout’s publishing tools. All customers will have access to these new features in the Web App today, with the mobile apps to follow shortly.

Starting today, you’ll see a ‘Draft’ button on Sprout’s compose window, as well as a new section under Publishing called ‘Drafts’, where you can choose to edit, Queue, Schedule or Send messages that have been drafted. 

One of the major benefits of this feature is that Drafts are shared with your team (just like Scheduled and Queued messages). This means that you can save messages for a manager or peer to review and approve, or reject with a note. The Drafts feature is available for ALL plans. 

Whether you want to jot down a quick idea for a post, or save content for your team to review, the Drafts feature in the Sprout Social is here to help you capture your thoughts, and to help you keep your publishing calendar stocked with great content.

Drafts will be available on our mobile apps as soon as the app update is processed. Follow us on Twitter and we’ll let you know as soon as the update is in the App Store. We hope you enjoy this addition, and we hope you continue to enjoy using Sprout for all of your social media efforts!

– the Sprout Social team

Sprout is pleased to announce the release of our iPad app. We appreciate all of the customer requests and we hope you enjoy.

Whether you’re at a conference, commuting, or in a coffee shop, the power of Sprout Social on your iPad will allow you to:

•  Publish, schedule & queue messages
•  Assign & manage tasks with team members
•  Customize your Smart Inbox and feeds
•  Create new keyword and contact searches
•  View entire history of customer interactions

We expect the iPad to be a major extension of our platform. We are extremely excited about this release, as well as the future updates that are already in the works.

Download Sprout Social for iOS in the App Store.

Sprout Social customers with Facebook Pages may now receive and reply to private messages and have conversations with their Facebook fans, one-on-one, off the public record. In order to take advantage of this feature, Facebook page admins may need to re-authenticate to give Sprout access to this additional permission.

Some quick benefits to using this feature:

• No more switching back and forth from Facebook and Sprout to find your social messages. All messages (public and private) appear in your Smart Inbox where you can respond/assign/email/translate/archive, the way the Sprout gods intended.

• Assign Private Message as a Task – Like any other message in Sprout, you can assign private messages as tasks with your Team and make sure everything gets a response. This is great for customers that have a high volume of incoming messages to manage.

Hey, there it is! Enjoy.

– Team Sprout

Sprout Social is proud to announce our new helpdesk integration with UserVoice. This addition allows Sprout Social customers to easily turn an incoming message into a UserVoice helpdesk ticket.

Sprout Social’s helpdesk integrations let your social media team to focus on everything social, by easily creating a helpdesk ticket from within Sprout. Internal comments sent from Sprout Social will go to the UserVoice ticket and any responses will be displayed in the Sprout Social task view. This allows your social team and support team to work seamlessly together without having to both use two systems.

We are very excited to launch this helpdesk integration with UserVoice!

- Sprout Social Team

Last week, we brought you enhancements to the Sprout Social ‘reply’ box and we’ve been flattered with the incredibly positive responses. With that said, we’ve continued down the path of enhancing your engagement tools and we’re proud to present a few more things that will elevate the user experience for customers currently taking advantage of our Team features.

Collision Detection

Starting today, team members will be informed when somebody else on the team is in the process of responding to a message. For example, when team member ‘A’ is replying to a message, team member B will get a live notice when attempting to reply to the same message so that efforts do not overlap or collide. You get all of the same functionality while assigning tasks as well! See screenshots below for examples.

These live notices will help teams of all sizes stay aware of each other’s duties and effortlessly keep the entire team tuned in and productive. 

Online Status

Some of you may have noticed the ‘online status’ indicator that is presented next to each team member when assigning a task. We’ve been running it for a few weeks now and wanted to mention it while we are on the topic of real-time collaboration. If you haven’t noticed it you should definitely check it out by hitting the push-pin icon on any message in Sprout.

We’re thrilled to release the first few real-time collaboration features and you can expect to see some related enhancements soon. Stay tuned!

– Sprout Social Team