Sprout Social vs. Union Metrics (discontinued)

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

It's well suited for monitoring brand mentions and estimating the impact of unfortunate situations on Twitter.

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

• Quickly build a snapshot report based on keywords or hashtags.
• Ability to consistently monitor brand mentions over time.
• Various output options available including PDF or XLS files.

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

• Monitoring mentions beyond Twitter.
• Many issues are due to APIs, but in some cases there are restrictions on the number of terms you can track.
• Ability to set standard/saved terms (e.g. brand name) when building new trackers to save time.

Incentivized

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.

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

Tweetreach is very affordable and quite flexible for what you pay for. We use it regularly as it is able to capture data not available in some of the most expensive tools we have access to.

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

• Ability to provide quick reports to senior executives in an easy to read format.
• Great way to track who is talking about your brand and their overall influence on Twitter.
• Very affordable product, and useful for any size business.

Incentivized