Sprout Social

Comments: For the most part gives us an all-in-one social media management and creation tool. Perfect for collaboration and the structure of permissions and approvals helps on a team level.

Pros: Allows us to collaborate across our team with members in different locations. Love the notifications and ability to respond directly to social posts within the app. The ability to email posts to certain non-users helps, and being able to tag content types makes organization easy. The including reporting is robust and provides enough information across multiple platforms to make good decisions. The single inbox is ideal and is the reason we continue to use the platform. It's great to know if something was handled and by which user and the sense of accomplishment is there once you clear your inbox.

Cons: The listening tools are a separate cost and for our brands becomes too expensive to commit to. Which it had more feature built in like other platforms to scour and collect keyword mentions across other platforms (not just social).

Comments: People seek out social media software primarily for automation. But that doesn't solve the workflow and analytics issues that social media and community managers face. Sprout enables us to load content and art into the automation platform as drafts, submit for approval and then automate posting. We also need a competitive edge as an agency, and using this software with the ability to provide more robust analytics than what is provided in the native platforms is a huge win. The biggest improvement we've seen to social media tools in general came from the launch of the social listening tool. However, the pricing model is hindering us from being able to use it. Big bummer. And it can be fixed. We hope you will consider applying the agency model pricing structure that exists for all other functionalities to this particular function. It's essential for us to be able to incorporate it into our new biz process and the current cost structure is preventing us from doing so. Please help!

Pros: The agency model sold us. Big win to invite larger groups rather than paying by the "seat" as previous models and other services demand. The approval process and analytics go beyond what is available in the native platforms which is essential for business use. The social listening is what we've been waiting for--and will be instrumental in our relationship moving forward. With that said, there is a caveat, listed below.

Cons: The social listening is amazing. However, the sales model is seriously flawed. Our clients will not pay every month for each social listener. Moreover, our agency needs to use this as a way to earn new business. We have many pitches in process at any time and it's not feasible for us to pay every month per listener. As such, this amazing service is not available to us on the scale it needs to be. Please come up with a better pricing model so we can use and sell this service. As it stands now, only the really big agencies will be able to afford it. You need the mid-sized agencies like us (about 50 employees). Just like the agency model sold us by not having to pay by the seat, we can't pay per listener. If you made that available to us, say 3 listeners per client in our agency model, that would be a win. It would limit the number so you could up-sell in those cases where big companies want to listen for a lot of different indicators, but it wouldn't prohibit the broader use of the tool for the masses--which will drive significant growth. Additionally, this is a huge differentiator for your business. If you make it out of reach for most clients, you loose your edge. Help us. Help yourselves. Give us this tool! And give it to us in a way that our clients will pay for it.

Pros: Great user interface (I like it much better than Hootsuite's interface). Customer service is superb! Anytime I had any issues with using SproutSocial, their customer service was a chat or email away. Their customer service seems like a very small team of people, but they are very quick to respond and get to a solution. I've used SproutSocial for several different companies, both large and small, and it works great for managing it all. Analytical reports are clean and better than the ones in Hootsuite. My favorite features are the reports, social listing tools (You can see who's interacting with your company or specific keywords you set up) and being able to 'check off' messages or notifications that you have seen or responded to already. In HootSuite, you cannot do this and sometimes messages can be missed. Another favorite feature in the reporting is being able to compare your company page with competitors and see how you stack up agains the competition. Following/unfollowing accounts on Twitter is another great and useful feature.

Cons: There are a couple social networks that cannot be integrated with SproutSocial, and therefore I have to resort to also using Hootsuite. Things like LinkedIn Showcase Pages, Youtube, Vimeo, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups to name a few cannot be scheduled or automated. SproutSocial covers the larger social media pages you need to manage like Facebook pages and Twitter. Because it cannot schedule at all social networks, I have to do most of my scheduling in Hootsuite.

Comments: I discovered Sprout Social through a Facebook ad. Before deciding to take the trial, I read some of the reviews here and on Capterra and my expectations soared and became somewhat unrealistic to be honest. The pricing threw me off because $99 monthly seemed kind of steep given the features. Nevertheless, I had nothing to lose by trying it out so I decided to signup for a trial. I’ve used/currently use Hootsuite, Buffer, Swift Social, Kontentino, and many other social media managers, so I had a lot to compare Sprout social with. Sprout social is easy to use, the layout is fairly simple and uncomplicated, the dashboard is somewhat of a mix between Social pilot and Kontentino, so are the features. My favorite features are the Smart inbox and the Sprout queue. The social queue is similar to Hootsuite Auto schedule function. The RSS function in the feeds tab is also really nice as I was able to connect it to my Feedly account. A major use of this is the post via RSS function, which I used to auto tweet blog posts from influencer blogs in my niche. The Asset Library is also an amazing feature as it is a great way to store images for future use. The discovery tab shows suggestions on accounts to follow and unfollow, people who have conversed with, and people who mentioned you in a post. Sprout social is a great social media manager, however, It doesn’t seem all that superior to Hootsuite or Swift social. Considering the cost, I expected more out of it. Which I’m aware is rather ridiculous. I will say this though, the “Reports” function offers a variety of important stats such as: Group reports, Twitter profiles [For tracking profile performance to determine the impact of twitter content], Twitter comparison, Twitter listening, Facebook page report, Facebook competitors, Engagement reports, Team reports, Task performance, Trends, Instagram profile analysis, LinkedIn page, Tag report, Google analytics and Sent messages. To me, Sprout Social’s unique feature is its analytics function. No other SM manager, except perhaps SMHack, has such powerful and detailed social media analytics.

Pros: The Digital Asset Library
The Analytics feature
The RSS feature can serve as a social media content generation tool.
Easy UI

Cons: The pricing is rather steep. There are other SM managers with more powerful features which could prove to be a better substitute to Sprout Social. MavSocial has a better Asset Library feature, SMHack provides just as detailed analytics, Swift social has powerful RSS feature, and Hootsuite is cheaper, has an automatic scheduling function, as well as one of the easiest SM Managers to use due to the numerous tutorials online and it's inbuilt mini-tutorial.

Comments: Using Sprout along side another platform for a different client (their choice) the overall functionality of Sprout is really clear! It is much faster and user friendly.

Pros: Sprout is great for interactions. Having over 1000 pages to look after means we need to be able to access specific pages quickly, and view messages for just the one page in a set profile group - this is really easy with Sprout! In terms of quality reviewing responses from a management point of view, it is great - you can see full threads and who did what. For reporting, you can tailor reports for each clients needs. After using an alternative platform, Sprout is MUCH faster all round - finding interactions and, general interaction in terms of loading and sending messages. In regards to task management, it is really good at making sure that you keep on top of things, as you can add an internal note which is front facing when you click into your tasks. The updates are also handy, as you can now select oldest to newest or newest to oldest - when there is a large number of incoming interactions it means there are less loading issues.

Cons: Sometimes there are bugs, which can cause functionality issues (but this does happen with all software). Because we are a UK company, and Sprout's support team are in the US it does mean that we have to wait until the afternoon on our time for any additional information - although you are able to log the error you are experiencing.