LiftMetrix (discontinued) vs. Sprout Social

The free trial is a good option for start-up businesses or nonprofits. You are limited to 3 accounts and 5 scheduled posts, but you can save drafts ahead, then schedule after some are posted. The paid version is nice but higher price point for start-ups. I can't remember if the insights are useful.

IMO it's best for an organization that has a lot of different people working on social media. They could be in different departments or just different members of the same team responsible for different types of posts (corporate, e-commerce, branding, etc.). I don't think it's as vital for a one-person team working solely within the Meta platform, for instance, especially if they're less concerned with detailed analytics.

Incentivized

• Custom filter comparisons
• organic vs paid insights
• easy to digest suggestions moving forward

Incentivized

• 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 tagging feature could be improved. It currently does not map well to Hootsuite Enterprise's publishing dashboard and requires manually mapping on the back end to connect the two systems.
• We pay separately for Hootsuite Ads. Hootsuite Impact could better integrate with the Ads platform to get a holistic view of paid and free campaigns.
• There are a lot of different sections in the platform--for recommendations, insights, dashboards, etc. You can also search things by saving filtered searches and applying those filters to other areas of the platform. How these things work together isn't always clear or intuitive.

Incentivized

• 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

I like Sprout for our needs and I like that it is easy to use. We want something better than HootSuite but don't need a high-level fancy program. The only think I don't like is customer service (except for chat).

Incentivized

Sprout Social's ease of use and navigation throughout the technology are relatively easy to figure out and teach. We also had a representative thoroughly walk us through the features and functionality to set us up for success in using the platform. I didn’t give it a ten because there were times when the navigation didn’t make sense, but once you figured out the quirks, it didn’t cause any trouble.

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.

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely responsive. They're also always looking for suggestions on how they can make the product better and will actually take your ideas to their team to see if they're worth implementing. I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved by them in a timely manner.

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.

Hootsuite Impact is far easy to use, both in setup and in pulling reports, than Adobe Social was for us. The visualizations make data far easier to read, and being able to quickly filter through mentions has helped us to be more nimble when pulling reports.

Incentivized

We are constantly exploring our options and looking for the most cutting-edge products that suit our needs as a business. Sprout ticked the boxes for what we needed when it was time for a change. Both are powerful tools, and you can only see by doing.

Incentivized

• The time savings for posting has positive ROI by adding leverage.
• They send emails offering a free upgrade trial but didn't say it was only for first-time users. When I tried that, they charged me for the whole year. Luckily they did refund the cost ($588) and moved back to the free version. That was a shock to see on my card.
• This was a helpful step for my business.

• 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