Shifting strategies: What you can learn from a network-specific social program

As 2022 comes to a close, we’re looking back on our own year in social at Sprout. Like most social media teams, we’re taking stock of what went well with our social media marketing and what we can improve on as we enter 2023.

At Sprout, this year looked a little different since we debuted a new network-specific social media strategy at the beginning of the year. We learned a lot from taking a new approach and hopefully, you can learn from our strategic wins–and mistakes.

Setting expectations

As we surveyed the social landscape, we classified networks into two different categories–engagement and awareness. As for our internal team model, we divided our social team’s responsibilities to align with these types of networks. This allowed each team member to create platform-specific content that fit exactly what users were looking for.

What is an awareness network?

Awareness networks, like TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, are where people go for inspiration. We used these networks to share insights and new perspectives with our audience. Ultimately, posts to these networks aimed to inspire creativity about the possibilities of social–and establish Sprout as a go-to resource for that inspiration.

Awareness content is more about what you’re posting than how people interact with it. We still wanted people to like and share the content we were creating, but the main goal was to increase awareness of Sprout.

What is an engagement network?

Simply put, engagement networks are shareable. These networks, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, are primed for community-building posts. Whether you’re encouraging users to share content with their personal audiences or creating space for dialogue in the comments, engagement networks are all about building conversations.

2022 Wrapped: SMM Edition@Spotify: Your publishing playlist@Grammarly: Most frequently used words@SlackHQ: Top reacjis to campaign pitches@canva: How many _final_final_ForRealFinals you created

What ones would you add? 👀

— Sprout Social (@SproutSocial) November 30, 2022