Social media is like a 24/7 town hall where news spreads, crises unfold, and important questions emerge in real time. This is a direct message to residents and voters who expect you to be proactive and ready to tackle the issues that matter most to them.
It is no longer unusual for public sector accounts to go viral. However, managing a government agency’s social media presence comes with a unique set of challenges. Complex platform security and governance requirements. Staff who balance multiple responsibilities beyond socializing. Evolving strategies can change overnight.
Choosing the right social media tools for government and other public sector organizations is the key to proactively reaching and engaging the public, saving your team valuable time, increasing internal visibility, and ultimately is a non-negotiable part of improving service to the community. Use the standards shared in this article to help your team maximize the power of social.
4 things to keep in mind when evaluating social media tools for government agencies
Investing in an intuitive social media management platform is a critical step in building strong relationships with voters. However, many agencies only use native tools to manage their accounts, leaving valuable insights and connection opportunities untapped. According to ArchiveSocial, less than half of public sector organizations use software to manage or execute their social media strategy. The report also found that agencies’ inability to centrally manage their entire presence is the fastest-growing hindrance to social success.
However, not all social media management platforms are created equal. When evaluating social tools to help your agency generate social buzz, look for the following:
1. Give your team back time
Like many industries, managing social media for government can be a 40-hour or more per week job, especially when employees juggle other areas such as communications, PR, digital marketing, and content. Not only does this put teams at risk for burnout, but it also prevents agencies from maximizing their social presence and building stronger relationships with citizens and communities.
A centralized platform like Sprout Social speeds up social content distribution so your team can focus on engaging with voters and refining your creative strategy. In a recent Total Economy Impactâ„¢ study commissioned by Forrester Consulting, Sprout’s tools helped a composite organization representing interviewed customers save $973,000 in social media team productivity and efficiency over three years. However, in the third year, they saw a 55% increase.
Here are some highlights of Sprout that can help your team collaborate more effectively.
- Shared calendar: Plan your strategy and maintain monitoring from a central hub instead of in different apps or spreadsheets. Organize posts across your profile, networks, and campaigns with a visual calendar to support your long-term strategy. For example, you can plan your posts for upcoming weeks and months so that your content aligns with your priority community events.
- Publication and schedule: Increase collaboration and improve productivity among your staff with campaign planning tools, automated workflows, and scheduling and monitoring tools. Automatically publish content when it’s most likely to reach voters and receive real-time engagement updates.
- Message approval workflow: Internal and external approver features ensure your content is always approved and compliant with agency communication guidelines, all within the Sprout platform.
2. You can control crisis management yourself.
Whether it’s an important community event, a security emergency, or anything else, crises are an inevitable part of government social media efforts. Teams need to be able to quickly pivot publishing, respond to spikes in incoming messages, and be proactive to prevent the spread of misinformation.
Stay on top of trends in social media conversations in your district to prevent small risks from turning into large-scale crises. When evaluating the social media tools your government uses, look for a powerful social listening and audience engagement solution that does the heavy lifting for you.
With the Sprout platform, you can stop the crisis from progressing. We offer a suite of tools designed to perfect your crisis response strategy, from easily monitoring incoming messages to focusing on important conversations happening online.
- Pause all content: When faced with a crisis, this feature allows you to pause all outgoing messages with one click, saving time and ensuring your entire team is on the same page.
- Message spike alert: A sudden increase in message volume may indicate an impending crisis. These alerts automatically send email or mobile push notifications when incoming messages exceed his hourly average, eliminating the need for your team to manually monitor his inbox 24/7. there is no.
- Social listening: Sprout’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology helps you gain critical information about key celebrities, trending misinformation, and voter concerns. The platform helps you sift through millions of social media data points in seconds, accessing actionable findings, and sharing them with the leaders and government figures you work with.
3. Support stronger and more meaningful citizen participation
Your core mission is to serve your community. This includes serving our community on their channel of choice: social media. This requires understanding their preferences, concerns, and communication needs, and being honest when they contact you. Increase citizen engagement with social media tools that provide your team with valuable information about your audience and allow for quick and proactive communication.
Sprout’s platform allows you to save your team time while exceeding your constituents’ expectations and delivering a more customized experience on social media. A study by Total Economy Impactâ„¢ found that a customer service specialist at a complex organization saved the equivalent of $142,000 in time over three years by using Sprout to respond to incoming messages and inquiries.
These Sprout tools are designed to help you foster connections with your public.
- Smart inbox: By consolidating your social channels into one stream, you can monitor incoming messages, foster conversations, and respond quickly to your audience. By tagging and filtering your messages, you can prioritize what’s most important and find unique engagement opportunities. Built-in collision detection notifications enable seamless collaboration so you can see who replied to your messages and avoid duplicating work.
- Brand keyword: People often talk about your agency on social without tagging you directly. If you’re not actively searching for these messages, you might miss important conversations. Branded keywords are custom Twitter searches that always run and show results in your Smart Inbox, so you can see and respond to these relevant posts as easily as you would any other message. You can even set up alerts based on priority or critical keywords, so you’re always one step ahead.
- Custom VIP list: You can add VIP labels next to the avatars of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn users who send you messages in your Smart Inbox. This feature helps you track communications with key figures in your district, such as reporters, elected officials, and business leaders.
- listening: Sprout’s social listening solutions not only help with crisis management, but also help you stay informed of relevant trending conversations and influential community leaders. This tool collects honest feedback about your agency’s performance on social and other areas. Armed with these insights, you can create more meaningful content and elevate your learning to decision makers.
4. Reshaping perceptions of what’s possible with social
In the public sector, social remains largely misunderstood. Many continue to hold the deep-seated belief that it does more harm than good, while others see it as a wasteland of misinformation. The right tools can help communications teams quantify the impact of social efforts and change the way agency stakeholders (even those who may not be social savvy) view social media.
A social media management platform makes it easy to create clear reports that show how your social strategy reflects your agency’s goals. For example, Sprout’s analytics tools eliminate time-consuming manual data collection processes and provide automated, presentation-ready reports. A Total Economy Impactâ„¢ study found that Sprout eliminated 75% of manual data aggregation to create monthly reports, resulting in savings of $39,000 over three years for him.
Sprout allows you to automatically generate:
- Tag report: Access an overview of incoming and outgoing tagged messages to easily analyze campaign effectiveness, volume, and performance patterns.
- Post performance report: Analyze cross-channel performance at the post level to understand what messages and formats resonate with voters and why.
- Profile performance report: Access a high-level overview of performance across all connected profiles to quickly assess social growth and how it correlates with key initiatives.
5. Internal compliance support
Compared to other industries, government agencies must balance their social media strategies and workflows with numerous compliance requirements.
For example, a 2014 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) bulletin requires federal agencies to follow several best practices for managing social media records. While the definition of what constitutes a “record” may vary between agencies, social media posts that convey policy information or open-ended prompts for user engagement all qualify as records that must be properly archived. There is likely to be. A 2023 NARA audit of 10 government agencies found that most agencies lacked the tools and staff to handle social media record-keeping.
Government agencies can leverage Sprout’s Inbox Export to quickly export posts, messages, and reviews from Smart Inbox to CSV files, and leverage customer audit trails to export countless user and admin actions. These exports provide clear documentation of detailed metadata, including message type and timestamp, his 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 workflow
When evaluating social media management software for government agencies, don’t be afraid to ask, in the words of JFK, what the tool can do for you. With the right social media management platform, you can do your best work more efficiently, proactively contain crises, have more time for citizen engagement, and confidently demonstrate the value of social in government. I can.
For a more comprehensive look at the value social media provides, download The Total Economy Impactâ„¢ from Sprout Social research and learn how Sprout achieved a 233% return on investment over three years .