Analyzing Content Performance with Trellis in Sprout Social | Sprout Bites

Hi, I'm Tazi, and in this Sprout Bites video, I'm excited to showcase Trellis and how you can leverage this AI teammate to find strategic insights that move the needle for your business. I'm a social media manager at the large national pet supply company Snout, Paws & Tails. I'm responsible for creating our publishing calendar and reporting on performance. Lately, we've had a dip in engagement, and my director's been applying pressure for us to get our numbers up in order to drive more impressions and social traffic.

I want to understand what's working, what's not, and, most importantly, the why. This will help me better understand our audience, how to optimize for them, and make sure the content I put together is set up for success. I'm going to show you how you can use Trellis to do just that.

Trellis lives on the left-hand navigation. I'm going to select the little purple Trellis icon, and it will open the Trellis chat. You'll see a few different choices — I can either select from existing prompts or ask any question to Trellis. Trellis will look at my data across Publishing, the Smart Inbox, Reporting, and Social Listening, if it's on your plan, to best answer your questions and give you actionable insights.

Since I'm trying to understand past performance, I'm going to select the prompt How did our top-performing posts compare to our lowest-performing? Trellis is going to show me my top five performing and five lowest performing posts, sorted by engagement rate. If you have another metric you'd like to sort by, you can always ask Trellis to change it.

This view is helpful for understanding the spread of engagement rate, but I want to get more into the why. I'm going to ask Trellis, "What about these posts are people responding positively or negatively to?" Trellis shares an analysis of why the top posts worked and why some of the lower posts didn't. The winning factor for the high-engagement post was a low-friction poll. Our lower-performing content was highly curated. Trellis also gives some content suggestions — more easy-answer interactions, like a binary poll, and for lower-performing posts, turning product spotlights into UGC.

Now, this is helpful, but I want to get some general guidelines from Trellis about these content trends that I can keep in mind when I go into my brainstorming session. So I'm going to ask Trellis to recap our chat. Trellis gives me the TL;DR and some next steps: interactive content, since our customers like lower-friction interactions, opportunities to talk about and showcase our pets, and high-emotion, high-quality visuals that don't look like an ad.

Trellis can help me identify content performance trends, insights, and guidelines for optimizing content. Content like high-spend, highly curated ads doesn't land with our audience — authenticity, and the opportunity for audiences to share about their pets, is the winning strategy. These insights were crucial. I could have gone into brainstorm mode and ended up with high-spend, highly curated ad videos as output. But thanks to a few conversations with Trellis, I better understand my audience, what they like and dislike, and how I can continue to drive higher performance on social.