Sprout Social vs. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

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

It's a good fit for our recruiters because they are always looking for good info about our organization to share. It's a small but engaged group that takes advantage of having a niche topic and team. It also works well for huge company news, such as winning an award. Items that all employees know about and a large percentage of them are excited about perform best. Niche topics that are only relevant to one or a few small teams don't perform as well because employees not involved in that work are less likely to share.

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

• Scheduling out content / shares for the week
• Providing a quick glance leaderboard of top content shares across departments
• Easy to learn and leverage user interface (UI)

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

• Sprout to Bambu integration is not what was depicted in trial and is not used because of this
• Missing functionality: LinkedIn tagging
• Missing functionality: posting videos
• Missing functionality: posting something without a link. Example: picture from an event or community outreach

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

The program has given some early wins, and there are very active employees who have truly integrated sharing from Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social into their regular social media activity. It would be a huge lift to migrate people to a different platform. While we'd love to grow our program, there's already enough value to justify keeping an employee advocacy program.

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

It's fairly user friendly when it's working correctly. There are more instances of bugs and glitches compared to other tools, including Sprout Social's primary platform. There's also an exception for Facebook personal profiles where that is more clunky to share on compared to LinkedIn, X or even Facebook Business Pages. I'd also like more customization around photo formats/sizes and email templates. Despite those negatives, the end user can share quickly and easily, which is vital to sustaining user participation. Facebook can be clunky, but most of our employees share on LinkedIn, which is quick, easy and smooth.

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.

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

It was similar in that it helped us push prewritten messages out to our team, but the UX/UI was far more dated and not as intuitive. It's mobile app also wasn't very useful; made it difficult to edit messages and would constantly need you to log back in. The two things GaggleAMP had over Bambu however was more comprehensive analytics and the ability to automatically push out social posts

Incentivized

• 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

• Positive returns -- sharing our brand and enabling our employees to share and tell their stories, ultimately helping them reach their own goals.

Incentivized