Social scheduling with tagging
Table of Contents
You can discover rich data when adding internal tags to your posts on social. Leverage label tags to get deeper insight or use campaign tags to measure stickiness of your campaigns. Employing tags for campaign and content tracking can better inform your social strategy and make ROI easier to understand.
Internal tags are different from hashtags. Internal tags in Sprout help you organize your posts, track content performance and help to create deeper levels of data in your Reporting suite; whereas hashtags are great to ensure your posts show up for users searching for relevant conversations on social.
Let’s dive into two scenarios where tags really shine when scheduling your content on social:
Tags vs. campaigns
Before you start applying campaign tags to your content it's important to understand the difference in tag types.
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Sprout Tags include Standard tags and Campaigns.
- Standard Tags - universal tags to organize, filter and report on your content. Tag posts and Inbox messages for more in-depth content analysis.
- Campaigns - a specialized tag to monitor and report on your social marketing campaigns. Tag posts, Calendar notes, Inbox messages and track activity in the Campaign Planner.
Tagging campaigns
Set up your tags
Permissions
Before creating tags, confirm you have the correct permissions:
Navigate to Account and Settings > Settings.
Under Personal Settings, scroll to Personal Permissions and look for Manage Tags under Company Permissions.
Action |
Permission required |
Plan |
|---|---|---|
Access the Tag Management page |
Manage Tags |
Professional+ |
Create, edit, archive or delete tags |
Manage Tags |
Professional+ |
Access and manage Tag Collections |
Manage Tag Collections |
Advanced+ |
If you don't see these permissions, contact your Account Owner to have them enabled.
Create a tag
Navigate to Account and Settings > Settings.
Click Tag Management under Global Features.
Click Add Tag in the top-right corner.
Enter a Tag Name.
(Advanced plan only) Select the Collection where the tag should live (e.g., Campaigns, Tags, or a custom collection you've created).
Choose the Groups where this tag should be available. You can select multiple groups — they'll appear as horizontal pills.
Click Create Tag.
Tip: You can have up to 10,000 active and archived tags per account.
Organize tags with Tag Collections (Advanced plan)
Tag Collections let you group tags by theme — such as campaign type, product line, or region — so they're easier to find when tagging content or filtering reports.
Sprout provides three default collections:
Campaigns — All active Campaign tags
Tags — All active Label tags
Archived — All archived tags
You can create additional collections to match your business needs.
To create a Tag Collection:
Navigate to Account and Settings > Settings > Tag Management.
Click Add Collection.
Enter a descriptive name (e.g., "Product Lines" or "Customer Support").
Click Create Collection. It will appear in the left-hand panel.
To move existing tags into a Collection:
In the left panel, select the collection containing the tags you want to move (unorganized tags live in the Tags collection by default).
Select the tag(s) you want to move.
Click Move in the upper-right corner.
Choose the destination Collection from the dropdown.
Click Move Tag.
Note: Tag Collections are visible to everyone in your organization. Deleting a Collection also deletes all tags inside it.
Assign tags to posts
You can tag posts two ways:
In Compose — Click the tag icon when drafting a post. Select from your Collections or search by tag name. Each post can have one Campaign tag and multiple Label tags.
In the Smart Inbox — Click the tag icon on any message to apply tags after the fact.
When applying tags, you'll see your Collections listed. Click into a Collection to browse its tags, or type a tag name to search across all Collections.
Automate tagging (Advanced plan)
If you want to skip manual tagging, you can set up Automated Rules to auto-tag published posts based on criteria you define. This works for all posts ingested by Sprout — whether sent via Sprout, natively, or from another app.
To set this up, navigate to Account and Settings > Automated Rules.
This draft covers the key changes: updated nav path (Tag Management instead of Tags), the Collection selection step during tag creation, explicit permissions table, and the Tag Collections workflow for Advanced users. I kept it modular so each section can be updated independently as features evolve.
Create campaigns
After you verify you’ve got tagging permissions in Sprout, you can create social campaigns with a specific Campaign tag from the Campaign Planner in Publishing. Navigate to Publishing > Active Campaigns, and then click Create Campaign.
Alternatively, as you’re creating posts you can create a campaign tag directly from the Compose window, provided you already have an existing Campaign. When you create posts in Compose, you can into the Sprout Tags dropdown, enter a Campaign tag and then click Create a new campaign.
Add the appropriate Campaign tags to each outgoing post in Compose
Whenever you or your team creates posts in Compose, you can add the appropriate campaign tag to the message before sending or scheduling it.
Review all the tagged messages in the Publishing Calendar
After all of your campaign posts are crafted, tagged and scheduled, navigate to your Publishing Calendar. At a glance, you can see from your month or week view how many posts are scheduled for each campaign. Make sure you’ve got a good balance across networks and campaigns.
Tagging content types
Let’s say you work at Sprout Coffee Co. as the social media marketer and you want to know which types of media your audience interacts with most, so you can decide what kinds of assets you need to ask your design team for.
Specifically, you want to know if images or videos perform better on your Facebook profile.
Create tags specific to the content types you want to track
After you verify that you have tagging permissions in Sprout Social and navigate to Settings. Click Tags under Global Features. From here you can create a video tag and an image tag.
Add the appropriate tags to each outgoing message in Compose
Whenever you or your team schedules posts to Facebook, you can add the video or image tag, depending on the media you’re sharing. As your team starts tagging your outgoing posts, you realize that some posts with media also contain a link. You think this might provide another data point to better understand audience engagement. You create a tag on-the-fly called ‘links.’
Monitoring Results in the Tag Performance Report
You can track the performance of your tagged content and campaigns using the Tag Performance Report. In particular, this report can help you compare how certain tags and campaigns performed against others. A full overview of this report can be found in this article: How do I use the Tag Performance Report?
For instance, utilizing this report at the end of a campaign cycle can help you identify which campaigns had the most impressions, engagements, etc and compare the strategies you used for each campaign to influence your social strategy moving forward.
To utilize this option, navigate to the Tag Performance Report and select the corresponding tags from the filter bar. You can start analyzing metrics like impressions, trends and top posts. You can even see the content that had the most engagement.
For users on the Advanced Plan: you ave the option to schedule this report to arrive weekly or monthly via email, so you never miss an update!
Analyze your content using the Post Performance Report
Note: Adding Tags as a filter in the Post Performance Report is only available if you're on the Professional or Advanced Plans and you have Premium Analytics.
For Premium Analytics users, you also have the option to dive into your Post Performance Report to track the performance of tagged posts. Navigate to the Reports tab > Cross Network Reports > Post Performance. Select your Facebook profile, and then select your tags from the filter bar.
The Post Performance Report shows key performance metrics, including the overall impressions and engagements for each post. Now you can see which content type resonates most with your audience and include more of that content type into your strategy.
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