Leveraging the Sprout Social API: A Handbook for Brands and Affiliates

In an environment that operates at the pace of social, brands remain ever-vigilant to keep pace with their audience and competitors. For social teams, it’s an intricate balancing act that requires meticulous attention and flexibility.

From planning posts and interacting with followers to evaluating metrics and keeping abreast of trends, social teams routinely find themselves occupied.

Technical integrations that effortlessly link with your current systems to oversee all your social media activities can be a lifesaver. They empower social teams to handle various tasks at once, allowing them to concentrate on enhancing your brand’s social ROI.

By linking your systems and automating repetitive tasks, technical integrations allow your team to prioritize what truly matters—crafting compelling stories and fostering impactful engagement. This transforms social media management into a seamless operation where everything falls into place with ease.

This article will explore how the Sprout Social API achieves this for your brand. Specifically, discover how our brands and partners utilize our API for publishing and reporting.

Is Sprout Social’s API open?

Indeed, Sprout Social offers an open API. The Sprout Public API lets you extend your external workflows by integrating with our Publishing and Reporting tools.

Card stating Yes, Sprout Social has an open API. The Sprout Public API enables you to extend your external workflows by integrating with our Publishing and Reporting tools.

Optimize your essential content creation processes and channel all your social profile data into your dashboards for centralized, automated reporting. In this way, you can address your unique reporting requirements and incorporate social data into your extensive analytics procedures.

You can effortlessly transfer post drafts, including text, images, videos, carousels, and links, from your existing project management software or content management tools to the Sprout platform. Additionally, plan and schedule the exported content in Sprout without interrupting the project management workflows you’re already engaged in.

Moreover, your dedicated development teams can craft custom integrations with your current project or content management tools whenever necessary.

To utilize the Sprout Public API, your account must have API access authorized by your Sprout account representative. Once your account is set up, you can either create an Account-scoped access token or an OAuth access token (using our OAuth 2.0 provider) to validate your API requests.

Here’s a brief overview of what the Sprout API offers:

  • Owned profile data: Corresponds with the data available in Sprout’s Profile Performance, X Profiles, Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages, Pinterest Profiles, TikTok Profiles, and YouTube Videos Report.
  • Post data: This aligns with Sprout’s Post Performance Report data.
  • Owned demographic data: View the data available in Sprout’s Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Profiles, LinkedIn Pages, and TikTok Profiles Reports.
  • Message data: Achieve detailed information, including metadata, regarding your messages. This encompasses messages received and those replied to from your profiles.
  • Publishing posts: Generate posts within Sprout.
  • Media upload: Upload Media for publishing posts.
  • Direct Tableau Connector: The Tableau Connector utilizes the Sprout API to pull your social data into Tableau. The metrics and data points are gathered directly from those available in the Sprout API, enabling you to analyze Sprout API data directly in Tableau.
  • Listening Topics: Access metrics and messages related to earned media within your Listening Topics.

Discover more details about the Sprout API.

How brands and partners leverage the Sprout Social Publishing API

Our clients and partners employ the Sprout Social Publishing API to enhance their workflow, creating and publishing brand-aligned social content expeditiously and effectively. Here are examples from a few of our integrations, available with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

Slate

The Sprout Social Publishing API integrates with the Slate CRM platform. You can create and publish social content via Sprout while tracking content performance through our Reporting.

Generate content in Slate’s Web Editor and send it directly to Sprout. Social teams can then log into Sprout to review the content before publishing or scheduling it.

This integration also allows you to repurpose your top-performing content from Slate and send it to Sprout for scheduling and publishing across platforms.

After publishing your content, you can monitor the performance of your social content through the Post Performance Report. Customize your reports using Tagging to concentrate on the content you wish to track depending on your goals and objectives.

Learn more about our Slate integration.

Opal

Our Opal integration allows brands to export and schedule branded content into Sprout, simplifying collaboration with larger marketing teams.

This content is delivered seamlessly, ensuring that the content library in the Sprout platform remains updated. Afterward, you can log into Sprout to review the provided content and publish it on your social profiles. You can also schedule the content for publishing in accordance with your campaign calendar. Once published, you’ll receive a live URL on Opal from Sprout.

All content delivered from Opal is added to the Sprout Library. If a piece of content is already in the Sprout repository, our tool will automatically link to the current asset to prevent duplicates. This way, you’re not concerned about unnecessary data cluttering your asset library, ensuring you have the relevant content at your disposal.

In terms of content types, Sprout supports a broad range on Opal, including Facebook posts and videos, Instagram posts, videos, Reels and carousels, TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, X (previously Twitter) posts and videos, along with YouTube videos.

Optimizely

Sprout integrates with Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to provide seamless workflows for managing social media campaigns. This integration enables large teams to collaborate more effectively by supporting better content planning and scheduling posts for publishing within a single workspace.

Import approved social content, encompassing text, images, and videos, into Sprout as post drafts and schedule them across your social networks as necessary. This eliminates the need for manual curation, granting time back to social teams to focus on more strategic aspects of their work. Another vital integration feature is Task-Based Publishing, which allows marketers to publish posts directly from tasks within the Optimizely CMP.

The Optimizely integration is accessible with the Sprout Premium Analytics add-on.

How brands and partners utilize the Sprout Social Reporting API

The Sprout Social Reporting API assists brands in selecting metrics that align with their business objectives, demonstrating the impact of their data. Teams can access important insights in presentation-ready reports that can be swiftly distributed to key stakeholders within the organization.

Here’s an overview of how brands and partners utilize some of our integrations.

Tableau

Our Tableau BI Connector helps you merge the power of your social data with all your essential data streams.

Brands can connect Sprout to Tableau without additional developer resources, customizing data visualization according to your data storytelling needs. Select the metrics you want and need according to your priorities to understand how your social data integrates into your overall business strategy. This gives you a comprehensive view of your business insights as they flow through all your key channels.

Connecting to Tableau from your Sprout account is straightforward. Utilize your Sprout API token to set up the Tableau Connector, then log into Tableau.

Navigate to Data > New Data Source > Web Data Connector

The image shows the pop-up screen that requests your Web Data Connector. You'll encounter this after using your Sprout API token to establish the Tableau Connector and then log into Tableau.

Once in the Web Data Connector, input the URL (https://api.sproutsocial.com/tableau), paste your Sprout API token, and click Connect.

The image depicts the pop-up window in the Web Data Connector, where you must enter the URL and paste your Sprout API token to commence your Tableau integration.

With this connection established, your Sprout data will automatically populate in Tableau. Now you can modify your Tableau dashboards to slice and analyze your Sprout data as required.

Sprout data will automatically display in Tableau, which you can customize as needed.

Datorama

Users of Sprout Premium Analytics can bring their social marketing analytics into their marketing dashboards within Datorama, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform.

This Sprout Salesforce integration provides metrics including post-level data, Sprout Tag and campaign statistics, as well as network metrics absent in Datorama, like TikTok. It also enables you to manage all profile permissions and reauthorizations from a single location.

To begin using the Sprout integration exclusively within Salesforce, employ the API key, which you can generate by navigating to:

Account and settings > Settings > Click API Tokens under Reporting and Listening > Click Sprout’s Analytics API Terms of Service to review the terms > Select Agree, and Submit

Sprout's Analytics API Terms of Service for reviewing terms, then Select Agree and Submit to initiate your Datorama Sprout Integration.

 

Upon clicking Submit, your API key will be generated. Craft a name for your Token and click Create Token.

This is the pop-up window for you to designate your Token name. It appears upon clicking Submit on the Terms and Conditions of your Datorama integration, after which you'll obtain your API key.

Copy and paste your token into Datorama, and you’re all set.

Chattermill

The Sprout Social API connects with the customer experience (CX) platform, Chattermill, allowing brands to benefit from Sprout’s extensive analytics and reporting.

Connect all your social media accounts on Sprout through Chattermill to monitor and assess customer feedback in social mentions. This grants you detailed reports on common customer complaints, trends, and spikes in discussions within a unified dashboard. Teams receive these insights in straightforward reports and can easily share them with leaders and stakeholders to highlight and substantiate the brand’s social ROI.

Sprout customers can also utilize the Chattermill integration to evaluate brand sentiment in customer feedback on review platforms. This allows for a more comprehensive understanding of customer experiences and generates actionable insights for tangible enhancements to products and services.

Measure your social ROI to advance your brand

Evaluating and tracking your social ROI transcends merely demonstrating the value of your efforts—it’s a methodology that can propel your brand forward. Through integrations, teams can operate more efficiently, saving time and resources otherwise invested in manual tasks or navigating between platforms for activities that make a more significant impact.

The Sprout Social API allows you to integrate your social data with your CRM and CX tools, gaining the insights you need. This can refine your marketing strategies, optimize campaigns, and facilitate data-driven decisions that ensure you remain a competitive, sustainable brand.

These metrics also empower you to distribute resources more effectively, guaranteeing that every action contributes to your brand’s growth and success.

Explore Sprout’s Premium Social Media and Analytics Reporting to enhance your social strategies and validate your impact for enduring long-term success.

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