Sprout Social Advertising

This is just a quick update about a couple of recent product enhancements we’ve made to our Engage Platform. For those of you who are using the platform to build applications, the first one will be of particular interest because it saves you the trouble of building your own color palette tools. And the second enhancement will be of use to anyone building applications or ads because it improves how our RSS component works. Here are the details:

The New Color Picker Component

This new component makes it super easy to place a color picker element into your applications. Before, you could create a color picker with our other tools and components, but by componentizing the palette we’ve saved you the trouble of building one from scratch. And because we’ve included many controls, you can customize it to match your creative. In the example below, we’re using the picker in “spectrum” mode so you see the entire color range–but there are many color sets to choose from between grayscale and full spectrum. You can also show color chips, change the shape of each chip, adjust spacing between chips, add outlines for each chip, and more. Here’s what the color picker looks like in the interface:

We recently used the new color picker in our Rock The Space II campaign for Toyota (which is running on MySpace). And here’s what the color picker looks like inside that application:

RSS Component Enhancements

We’ve also included some improvements to our RSS component, making it easier to format your RSS feeds to match your overall creative. RSS feeds are tricky because it’s often important to adjust image sizes, content format, spacing, and margins–and now you can reformat the RSS feeds with even more controls than before. The upgrades focus on including thumbnails and adjusting margins and spacing. Here’s a short video tour of the enhancements: