Sprout Social vs. uberVu (discontinued)

Sprout [Social] is great for small businesses, small agencies and those who need a platform but don't want to spend a fortune. If you need multiple user log-in's, the cost will add up. This is great to share a log-in for different people to use or add one or two users

Incentivized

I liked uberVU a lot, and thought I was lucky to have found them (they actually responded to my tweet when I was vendor-searching, which was good to know as they were doing just what we were planning to use the software for). They are relatively small, which allows to have a great personal relationship and we felt very valued as a client. They provided great value - some of their competitors allow for more features (which explains their higher price), but there was no way to opt out of the unnecessary features to lower the price - uberVU didn't have any of that, it was just what we needed and in our price range

• The Landscape system that Sprout Social offers allows me to modify all the images that I want to publish on my social networks. This service allows me to modify the size of the image, add filters, modify the colors and much more, it is a very important tool to be able to have a better presentation of the images that we use in our publications on social networks.
• It offers me a perfect statistical system where I can consult all kinds of movements that have occurred in all my social networks, I can see statistics individually or generally. The statistics allow me to see group reports, participation, information on audience movement on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and also allow me to view the activity that has occurred in my account.
• Sprout Social allows me to view a record in real time that shows me all the movements that my social networks are having by my employees. As Director of the Marketing Sector, this is a very important role, as I can know what actions my employees are taking to improve marketing with social networks.

Incentivized

• Easy to see what people are saying on social media about clients.
• Creates reports that can be limited to certain time frames.
• Able to see the reach of users so you can breakdown by influencers.

• I'd love to see more robust tag reporting capabilities, but they mentioned that this is something in the pipeline for improvement.
• I wish it was easier to batch content and shift it to approval or draft mode. Sometimes clients can change their mind and moving through each post individually can be a bit time consuming. This is a very minor thing.
• I'd love to see more customization options come to its reporting feature so we can insert graphics. Currently it supports the insertion of text only.

Incentivized

• I honestly didn't have any issues with them. Being able to set the real-time alerts as "every 15 minutes" took some figuring out to do, and we were still in the trial mode while we did that - it wasn't particularly intuitive for other users, but once we walked them through, everything worked well.

While I am currently no longer working with the company in which I was employed and utilized Sprout Social, I do know that the company is still utilizing Sprout Social on a daily basis and I do not foresee a time when the subscription would be cancelled.

Incentivized

I find it a great tool in the digital strategy world to see what people are saying across social platforms. It's much more efficient that doing a search on the platform itself and provides a lot of information extremely quickly

Sprout Social is extremely user-friendly. The publishing feature is easy to use, and provides previews of what your content will look like once posted. I also love the calendar view where you can view all posts you have scheduled for the month. The collaborative nature of the platform makes working directly in Sprout Social with clients a breeze, and we are seeing our content get approved much faster.

Incentivized

All the users found the product intuitive and easy to use.

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.

A couple of times it was a little slow, but this didn't result in any negative impact for us. There was no downtime as I could recall or notice.

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

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely prompt and always helpful. Not only do they provide quick and useful service, but the representatives follow up multiple times to ensure that the issue is fully address and/or completely resolved. The overall experience is exemplary; very few other companies provide comparable service.

Incentivized

Every time we needed help, the support was great. We had no issues, mostly needed usability walkthroughs and had questions about features.

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

I got the training while I was evaluating and in the trial period. Then I trained the others myself

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.

Not applicable since it is SAAS - all we needed was to sign up, which was easy

I used Buffer previous to Sprout Social for two years. It was a good solution as we were getting a handle on scheduling content. It was the first real tool we had for this. But we outgrew it and they began removing features that were critical to our workflow, such as the RSS Feed. While their 50% off policy for non-profits was very helpful, once we started adding up the cost to use features like Replies and Analytics, we discovered that our needs were simply too robust for Buffer to handle. Sprout Social was the solution suggested by all our peers and we've been very happy with it ever since.

Incentivized

Radian6 and Brandwatch were on the short list. We picked uberVU for its combination of price and features. It did not have extra features we didn't need, they were customizable and flexible enough to meet all of our needs

• Sprout has given insights to lead our creative refreshes every quarter. As we have a healthy budget on paid social, it is crucial to understand the type of creative that works best.
• Sprout has the ability to send notifications based on certain types of messages received. This is crucial for social media teams who don't have 24/7 coverage but need to be notified of urgent matters.
• Sprout has saved me hours of time as I no longer pull analytics natively from each social platform. The generated reports give me a look at all of the platforms and can be customized.

Incentivized

• Easier to handle crisis.
• Ability to find out statistics to quantify and qualify what you're doing for customers.