It’s been just over one year since Salesforce announced an end-of-life date for Marketing Cloud’s Social Studio, the solution to create, schedule, and monitor your social media efforts.
With customers having used Social Studio for a decade plus (Radian6 was acquired in 2011), an alternative needed to swoop in to save the day. With almost the same breath, Salesforce announced their promising global partnership with Sprout Social, an industry-leading suite to manage your brand’s social media presence, including engagement, publishing & scheduling, analytics, listening, and advocacy.
One would have speculated that Sprout Social is the front-running replacement. Since Sprout Social and Salesforce announced their global partnership, Sprout onboarded more than 250 previous Social Studio customers to its social media suite in 2022, with 175 new companies in the fourth quarter alone!
We first put the spotlight onto Sprout Social around half a year ago. The key updates were that it was becoming more tightly integrated with Marketing Cloud (including “Intelligence”, formerly known as Datorama) and Service Cloud.
Aside from servicing an increasing number of former Social Studio customers, what else has developed since?
This is a guide that has been in the works for some time, having kept in contact with the Sprout team as their partnership with Salesforce blooms. We’ll recap the Marketing Cloud Intelligence and Service Cloud integration (with additional insight), before covering what’s new in the past half a year. We’ll also mention where the Sprout and Pardot (Account Engagement) integration is, followed by what to expect during a migration from Social Studio to Sprout. Finally, there’s fantastic insight from my conversation with Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout, including his fascinating background, why social identity mapping is ‘a different beast’, and more.
Sprout + Marketing Cloud Intelligence (Recap)
Above: Marketing Cloud Intelligence, Salesforce’s marketing analytics solution (formerly Datorama) integrates into Sprout’s platform to bring social data and insights into overall marketing dashboards.
It’s worth noting that the Salesforce product team built this particular marketing analytics (Datorama) integration to Sprout for feeding in post-level data, tagging, and more.
Sprout + Service Cloud (Recap)
Above: The Service Cloud and Sprout integration ensures Salesforce customers can manage all of their social customer care requests directly from within Service Cloud while creating a holistic view of customer interactions.
In the wake of Social Studio’s scheduled retirement, the Service Cloud product team was doing the same exercise as the Marketing Cloud team – however, had a more acute challenge. Omnichannel is a huge driver of modern customer care, and social media plays a huge part.
This is a deeper integration, and as you can see from the image above, Sprout is iframed inside the Service Cloud console, to serve agents a feed of messages from multiple social networks. The intention is that agents living inside the console don’t need to switch applications.
As agents respond to customers, and launch cases, this social customer interaction is connected to a Contact record in Salesforce. By updating the Case record, information flows into the rest of Salesforce, so that even if other team members don’t have full access to Sprout, they will benefit from that information that the agent is logging.
Sprout + Slack Integration
With Sprout’s Slack integration, you can stay up-to-date on your Sprout approval and task workflows in real-time. Customize the notifications you want to receive in Slack, create multiple channels to stay organized and never miss a beat when responding to your inbound messages.
The connection is based on incoming webhooks which are easy to set up. You can then set notifications preferences in the interface shown below:
Sprout + ChatGPT
We’ve all heard about ChatGPT and the extensive use cases that it can deliver to marketers and Salesforce professionals (plus, the news around Einstein GPT received plenty of interest).
Sprout is innovating in quickstep to leverage Chat OpenAI’s GPT model and advanced AI across their platform to bolster listening, publishing, customer care, and advocacy. This combines the power of Sprout’s proprietary machine learning (ML) and deep automation capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT model.
- Optimal Send Times, Smart Categories, and sophisticated social customer care routing and workflow functionality.
- Advanced sentiment analysis and natural language processing to help customers further deploy social at scale.
- Smart Query Suggestions, is currently in beta and will be widely available soon. It elevates Sprout’s Listening solution with GPT-powered query keyword recommendations to capture the most comprehensive insights.
- Additional upcoming AI and automation capabilities will minimize manual care tasks, provide targeted, high-quality copy suggestions to prioritize high-impact creative and strategic work, and unlock nuanced understanding of social conversation.
The result? These build on Sprout’s strengths in user-centric design so you can work smarter, unlock creativity, and exponentially increase social media’s business impact.
Sprout’s Sentiment Analysis
To kick off 2023, Sprout Social acquired Repustate, an innovative sentiment analysis and natural language processing company. The OpenAI innovations, mentioned above, will complement the integration of Repustate-based capabilities as core machine learning fabric.
Sprout + Tableau Integration
Tableau is known as the leading business intelligence platform (which Salesforce paid $15.7B to acquire). This is the world of mining, calculating, and aggregating data (that’s the science), before visualizing and presenting it in eye-catching and insightful ways (that’s the art).
Being able to see the story that data is telling us, you are enabled to make proactive, data-driven decisions. Incorporating social data from Sprout Social into Tableau is a powerful combination.
- Robust social data across brand performance, audience insights, campaign effectiveness, and industry trends.
- Create custom dashboards with the exact metrics and visuals you need.
“In order to build proactive, industry-leading brands, organizations need a 360-degree view of their customers and their performance. With Sprout’s integration, this now includes social data. Together, we are providing decision makers with a unified source of truth that allows them to more easily leverage powerful social data and insights to build their strategy. In an increasingly crowded and constantly changing market, this is how customers can compete to win.”
– Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social
Sprout + Pardot (Account Engagement)
Following the previous coverage about Sprout on The DRIP, we were asked multiple times about whether Sprout and Pardot (now known as Account Engagement) is one union on the roadmap.
“While an integration with Pardot is not in our immediate pipeline, we are continuing to work closely with the Salesforce team to bring the most valuable integrations and features to our shared customers.”
– Sprout Social
Why did this duo receive so much attention? Pardot (Account Engagement) has its own social media posting functionality which has been there since it was acquired – to my knowledge, one of the features that hasn’t been changed since.
Speaking from personal experience, the social posting functionality is basic, leaving much to be desired. Some customers opt to invest in Social Studio and connect it with Pardot (Account Engagement, but this is perhaps not the speediest connection when having to run through two connectors (like jumping through ‘two hoops’).
There are two broad drivers at play here.
- Pardot (Account Engagement) is used not only for B2B marketing, but also for B2C.
- Social media marketing has become increasingly acceptable/prevalent as a legitimate channel for B2B sales, marketing, and service.
All that’s left for me to say here is ‘watch this space’.
Social Studio → Sprout Migration
When Sprout heard from Salesforce that Social Studio was going to sunset, they wanted to work with Salesforce to take the opportunity ‘by the horns’.
As we heard in the introduction, Sprout onboarded more than 250 previous Social Studio customers to its social media suite in 2022, with 175 new companies in the fourth quarter alone.
The Sprout team gives credit to their partnership with Salesforce for helping these results along. Migration resources were created in tandem with the Salesforce product teams, who in turn, have become experts in Sprout. Plus, Sprout’s services team know Social Studio inside and out – they know how to ‘speak the language of Social Studio’, how it’s set up, and how it maps directly to Sprout.
The aim is for Social Studio customers to have a ‘soft landing’ – to expect not just the same functionality, but more functionality with a promising roadmap. And the biggest benefit is that Sprout ‘writes’ to the native Social Studio objects. This means that Sprout hooks straight in rather than having to inject a different infrastructure, and what customers have already done doesn’t have to be thrown away.
Insights from the President of Sprout Social
Back in September 2022, right on the heels of Dreamforce, I spoke with Ryan Barretto, President of Sprout Social. Here are the key takeaways from our insightful and enjoyable conversation.
Background
What struck me initially about Ryan, is the career path he’s been on.
We mentioned that there’s nothing confirmed for an integration between Sprout and Pardot (Account Engagement). While this isn’t speculation, there’s an interesting connection…
Ryan spent 10 years at Salesforce. Partway through his time at Salesforce, he moved into the role to head up Global Sales for Pardot (reporting to the original founder, Adam Blitzer).
He reminisced about being involved in meetings as Marketing Cloud was in its infancy. We’re talking pre-ExactTarget (the acquisition that made up the bulk of Marketing Cloud). Radian6 was acquired around 2010, which eventually became Social Studio.
That was the spark that ignited his interest as he was inspired by the amount of opportunity there was when social media is paired with CRM.
Early Players
Wind back to 10+ years ago, and social media wasn’t taken as seriously as it is now. With an inkling of a trend, the largest technology firms rushed to buy into social media and listening platforms. Take Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe – all giants who invested into social platforms between 2010-2012.
Back then, however, thoughts were that social, and how it was going to be used by businesses, wasn’t being capitalized on. The use cases just weren’t there. How could social media be a serious channel for businesses to interact with their customers? Social media was sitting quietly as a feature within these behemoth CRMs.
By 2016, the enterprise social application market was crowded, without a clear leader.
Marketing Automation Takeover
[My opinion] As is the way with some technologies, when absorbed into large organizations, development can begin to slow down. Large organizations have to juggle competing priorities and technology dependencies across their entire product portfolio. Smaller, independent companies can move faster.
Where did this place Social Studio? Ryan made an excellent point about the sequence of events as marketing automation technology was evolving rapidly during the past decade.
Having observed first hand, for over a decade, Ryan believes that it was the proliferation of email marketing tools, and subsequently marketing automation tools, that took over. The big players all acquired into the marketing automation space, for example, Salesforce bought ExactTarget (+ Pardot) in 2013, which attracted heavy investment because this is where customer maturity and greater chance of adoption were identified.
At the time, marketing automation was much further ahead than social as, by its nature, marketing automation is based on an easier unique identifier to work with – email address – which is much easier to integrate into CRM.
Social, therefore, was a different ‘beast’, requiring a separate codebase to be able to manage interactions.
Social, therefore, was a different ‘beast’, requiring a separate codebase to be able to manage interactions.
Yet, the world evolved – more social networks sprung up, more use cases, which drove demand for robust social media management. Start-ups who had been building for social, and perfecting identity mapping (i.e. matching social accounts to records), were at an advantage.
Social Profiles Are Messy
There’s no denying that without a straightforward unique identifier (like email address in email marketing) matching someone’s social media accounts to a record in CRM is still not an exact science. For one, social profiles are very different across networks.
However, the market leaders in the space have made leaps in building platforms that help to realize the ‘360 degree view of the customer’ vision, with social included.
With Sprout, identity mapping is happening within the integration. As we saw in the Service Cloud recap earlier, when a customer is making a service request through social media, the agent has the ability to link the customer profile and the interaction to a Case and Contact record. It’s the interaction between the customer and the agent, and the association the agent makes, that drives the connection – platforms like Sprout make the data feed more accessible, and have optimized the user experience to make this easier.
What Are the Standout Analytics in Sprout?
Sprout has invested heavily in social listening and analytics (that’s cited as their differentiator against competitors). Here’s the key points:
- Report builders: Sprout wanted to make sure reports were powerful, scalable, and easy to use. Just like Salesforce’s approach to building reports, you can build reports in Sprout with clicks.
- Schedule reports: Set reports to run periodically, and have them sent to key people around the organization. They can understand insights regardless of whether they are Sprout users (without having to log in or know how to use it).
- Networks integrated: All data from the networks your brand has a presence on is brought into one place, so you can determine the best cross-network approach in your next social strategy iteration.
- Reports that get traction: One report that customers gravitate towards is the paid versus organic performance. While it’s always been important to keep a pulse on this spending split, there’s increasing scrutiny upon marketing budgets.
Final Thoughts
It’s apparent that marketing and service are two teams that benefit from social media listening and the insights this gives. This is why Sprout’s focus has been on improving the user experience for these two teams, while acknowledging their different needs.
With omnichannel service such a key driver of Service Cloud, making the user experience easy for agents to map message feeds from social accounts to their records in your CRM brings you closer to the ‘360 degree view of the customer’ vision.
Having said that as a service benefit, these teams are not the only ones who do. By updating records – whether that be Cases, Contacts, Leads – information flows into the rest of Salesforce, so that other team members can benefit from the information also.
When a new partnership is formed in the Salesforce ecosystem, I love to dig into the details (after all, that’s my job!). There’s a lot going for Sprout, and I’m confident in advocating for their product and team.
However, there are others out there doing a more quantitative analysis, and returning impressive figures. A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact study revealed that Sprout’s customers reported a 233% ROI and net present value (NPV) of $1.3 million over three years.
The numbers speak for themselves, but to bring this back to how it can help you. Social Studio was serving many customers, however, there were features on customers’ wishlists that weren’t feasible. That’s where independent platforms, like Sprout, gained attention. You may have had a wishlist for Social Studio – well, it’s likely that Sprout has already delivered it, or it’s on their extensive roadmap.
While there are people in the community who have worked with Social Studio (even pre-acquisition) who are sad to see it go, all that’s left for me to say here is ‘onwards and upwards’.