Creating and Using Profile Collections | Sprout Bites

Hi, my name is Ian and I'm excited to walk you through profile collections in this Sprout Bites video. If you manage more than a handful of social profiles, this feature is going to save you a ton of time, both when you're publishing content and when you're pulling reports. What exactly are profile collections? Think of them as shortcuts. Instead of hunting through a long list of profiles every time you want to publish or filter a report, you group your profiles together into a collection and then select that collection with a single click. You can organize them however makes sense for your team. Maybe it's by brand, by department, by region, whatever fits your workflow and you can create as many as you need. Once a collection exists, anyone on your team can use it. They don't even need to remember every individual profile name in the collection. They just pick the collection and go. Let me show you how to set one up. First, you'll go down and click settings. From there, look for profile collections under global settings. Now, click add collection. Give it a name. You can also assign an emoji to make it easy to spot at a glance. Profile collection added. Over on the right hand side, you'll see all of your available profiles. Just click on each profile to add it. And you can click only show profiles in this collection so you can remind yourself of what profiles are under that collection. Now, let's see where the time savings really kick in. When you move over to publishing, click on the profile picker at the top and you'll see your profile collection listed right there. Select one and all the profiles in that collection get added to your post picker. No more checking boxes one by one. Pick a collection, write your post and schedule or send. Head over to your publishing calendar and you'll see the same profiles filter at the top and inside that menu there is your profile collection and your calendar view instantly narrows down to just the post scheduled for those profiles in the collection. It's a great way to get a clean focused look at what's going out for a specific brand or region with a high number of social profiles. Same idea in reporting. When you're looking at a report under sources, select a collection and the report filters down to just those profiles. No manual picking needed. One more thing worth mentioning. If you're on our advanced plan, check out the automated rules under global settings. It pairs really well with profile collection because once your profiles are organized, automated rules let you put the workflow around them on autopilot. And so you can always go back to settings and make your way to the profile collection setting page once more and you can manage your collections. This includes being able to edit a collection to add more profiles or edit the name or the icons. You can deactivate a profile collection if you don't need it right now, or you can delete it entirely. If you deactivate a collection, it simply won't show up in Compose, Calendar Reporting, or Automated Rules until you choose to restore it. So, that's profile collections. A simple way to group your profiles, speed up publishing, and make reporting a whole lot easier. Try setting one up next time you're in settings. And once you do, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.