Engagor (discontinued) vs. Sprout Social

Engagor is a very powerful tool for customer care purposes to be able to engage in real-time with your customers. If there are a lot of messages coming in during important peaks throughout, we can easily answer them every 30 seconds.
Engagor isn’t that fit to use for publishing. We mostly use Engagor to reply to messages in real-time. However, for scheduling posts in Engagor, we publish and schedule on the native platform instead.

Sprout Social is a great tool with a strong onboarding process. It helps streamline a lot of tasks as a social media platform and has a lot of capabilities, especially with reporting (tags/campaigns, profile-level & posts), social listening, and community management via the social inbox. Its pricing can be high, especially for small organizations/nonprofits.

Incentivized

• Real-time mention tracking is a must these days. Quick responsiveness is critical on many social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
• Fast and helpful support via Engagor chat and messages helps a LOT! I think the longest wait time was about 40 seconds for me. My workflow never gets disrupted because of idle sessions.
• Automations can help you a lot. Automated "recipes" are great tools for decreasing your agents' workload, and there are many customizable settings for them.

• For each account, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them to go live simultaneously.
• Employee Advocacy via Sprout Social has integrated AI assistance for captions. Usually I would generate one suggested caption for employees to use/stem from when re-sharing to their socials. But now, EA message ideas display in random orders to better promote the full range of content.
• Sprout Social has made the option to gamify the sharing concept quite easily with Employee Advocacy. Using the Leaderboard feature, employees can earn points in Employee Advocacy. Customized point values ensure you know how to climb the Leaderboard and start some friendly competition.

Incentivized

• The UX is pretty clunky. Engagor only loads about 10 mentions per page, so if my team is behind on tagging/mention resolution by a couple of days, for a global brand that can mean an extra week of work. Would be much easier if the user could choose how many mentions show up on their screen.
• Over the year we have had issues with Engagor's glitches. For example, the user has the capability to publish to a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) through Engagor as the brand. For a couple of the brands we work on, Engagor would show the update as published as one brand, but would actually publish as another. As an agency that handles social media content/community management for several very large brands, we cannot afford to have accidental status updates despite the author's efforts. This happened several times over the course of our experience with Engagor, to a point that we had to forego this feature for those brands and publish natively through the platform.
• It has definitely skewed reporting numbers more than once -- for a set time period (i.e. 30 days, our typical monthly reporting period), the stats for a platform will appear very different from how they display on the native platform itself. For example, on occasion Engagor would load numbers from a Facebook fan count during a 30-day period that did not at all match up with the numbers Facebook showed me. This also applies to the number of overall mentions of a brand/account.
• There is no immediately clear "undo" feature when resolving a mention. There have been times I have bulk-tagged a set of mentions, set all as resolved and then realized that I had made an error, without a very clear way to revert that action.
• Double mentions have shown up, skewing numbers and sentiment/tagging analytics.
• The insights/reporting section could definitely be a little more clear in how it explains metrics (or why the user should care to report these metrics). While we have an analyst on our team who is happy to explain these terms, I can see how some of them would not be intuitive at all to a user who doesn't live and breathe social media analytics. Also, the line graphs can be very difficult to read and parse. If the user downloads a line graph to their desktop from Engagor, it doesn't necessarily show all of the information you need, making it necessary to screengrab rather than downloading a higher-quality visual.

• Social media platforms don't always play nice with Sprout so it will always be a challenge to get all integrations to work properly.
• Sprout Social is a growing organization and they are acquiring new technologies, which can be good. However, they often spend time in meetings upselling new services. I like to learn about enhancements and opportunities but prefer to focus on my investments first.

Incentivized

Both the tool and the support that we receive from the customer service department and the customer success manager makes me likely to renew the use of Engagor.

Sprout Social is the best platform out there for social-media management, and now that I have all my clients using Sprout Social, it would be sort of silly for me to walk away format at this juncture. The only cloud on the horizon would be if Salesforce bought it (as has been rumored) and put it inside its walled garden.

Incentivized

It's a largely very easy to understand, use and build around platform, with a lot of use in our particular industry, making onboarding for new hires significantly easier. While some features and functions are hidden away or harder to find and understand, for the most part, Sprout Social remains one of the best tools on the market for its use case.

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

The chat and online resources are great. The managers are too. They go through account reps pretty fast. Also, not a lot of onboarding once a product or service is sold. The ticket request system is terrible, they have too many people switching off roles, they take a long time to get back to you and don't plan on anything being fixed over a weekend - even if you have a problem. Their customer service via tickets is the worst.

Incentivized

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

Sprout Social is good for smaller accounts with limited traffic. Some insights available but often questionable data. Only picks up direct interaction (i.e. doesn't monitor likes or favourites). Sysomos was used for a while, but spent ages defining search times still producing questionable data. Did not properly monitor Facebook interaction and often did not pick up from that platform at all. Customer service only operated in US time (we are UK) which proved increasingly problematic

We ultimately selected Sprout Social because the social media team we were partnering with used the platform and insisted we use the same technology to avoid gaps in team functionality. Compared to Hootsuite, it’s the same but has more available functions. Compared to HubSpot Marketing Hub, it provides a more thorough capability for a fraction of the price. Compared to GaggleAMP, the social advocacy is similar, but Sprout is a more robust solution.

Incentivized

• Better customer service.
• Better detection of potential crisis on social media which leads to avoiding the crisis or better managing it.

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized