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Sprout Social

Score8.5 out of 10

621 Reviews and Ratings

What is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social provides social media management, marketing, customer care, data and intelligence, and employee advocacy solutions for brands and agencies, including Ticketmaster, Chipotle, Grubhub, Subaru, and Zendesk. Sprout’s platform is used to simplify social publishing, engagement, reviews, analytics and listening for customers. Sprout also provides customer success and technical support, to deliver consistent value to all users. Any organization, regardless of size or industry, receives dedicated onboarding and quick implementation to realize value faster and minimize business disruption. Sprout invites potential customer to try a free 30-day trial at sproutsocial.com.

Media

Sprout’s social media publishing tools, used to schedule and post messages to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn simultaneously from a single Compose window.

Top Performing Features

  • Content planning and scheduling

    Users can easily plan content and schedule posts to various social media channels and profiles from one interface.

    Category average: 9.1

  • Twitter

    The software allows users to monitor, publish and respond via Twitter.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Facebook

    The software allows users to monitor, publish and respond via Facebook.

    Category average: 8.8

Areas for Improvement

  • Filtering out noise/spam

    Users can filter out irrelevant search results through excluded keyword terms and other measures.

    Category average: 7.4

  • Lead generation

    Users can discover and engage with new prospects, based on certain parameters.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Paid media management

    Users can manage and optimize paid social media posts across different channels.

    Category average: 7.2

Easy to Use Easy to Understand Easy to Train

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sprout Social is used for: social media scheduling, social media listening (to an extent), replying to social media direct messages, and social media reporting.

Sprout Social solves the problems of having a lot of tools all wrapped up into one program. I'm able to easily navigate one platform to complete multiple activities rather than having to subscribe to 10 different companies. I am the primary user of this platform, and it is a necessity in my day-to-day operations.

I have used Sprout Social at a previous company and this current one, and I've been a user for nearly 7 years.

Pros

  • Social Scheduling: Sprout Social makes it easier than any platform I've used to schedule posts with each, and to batch-schedule the same post to run on multiple dates. The scheduling platform is intuitive and easy to understand.
  • Social Reporting: With just a few clicks of the button, you can easily export reports that are easy for both social media experts and complete novices to understand. I like how you can get a report within 60 seconds or so if needed.
  • Customer Service/Help: Whenever I've had a question, both my Sprout Social rep and the Help Center have been extremely easy to contact and quick to reply. Problems are solved very fast and it's made easy to understand.

Cons

  • Social Listening: I've used several platforms for Social Listening in the past, and this is one of the only areas where I feel Sprout Social could use some improvement. They do have added listening features for a fairly high cost compared to other platforms, but I don't believe they currently offer real-time updates when your company is mentioned. Rather just a once-daily report.
  • Add-Ons: It seems like everything is an add-on in Sprout Social, which can be frustrating. Every time I speak with my rep, the call is 30-45 minutes of trying to be sold additional add-ons (for additional costs of course).

Return on Investment

  • Sprout Social has significantly reduced the time I spend managing multiple channels as a one‑person team, allowing me to focus more on strategy and content quality.
  • Its streamlined workflows and scheduling tools have accelerated our turnaround time for campaigns, helping us meet business objectives faster with limited resources.
  • Centralized reporting has cut down the hours needed for monthly analytics, freeing up valuable time to support broader marketing initiatives.

Return on Investment

Sprout Social has absolutely helped my organization measure and improve the ROI of my social efforts.

First of all, the reporting feature makes it easy to see which posts are succeeding, and which could use some work, allowing me to optimize for future posting. I can quickly report on KPIs to measure post performance and identify areas for improvement.

Overall, this can help me to improve the quality, the scheduling, and the overall ROI of future posts.

Secondly, the sentiment analysis can help me see if sentiment is improving overall as a result of our social posts.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Meltwater

Sprout Social makes publishing and reporting easy

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Sprout Social to keep track of different social media campaigns, competitor analysis, and reporting metrics.

Pros

  • Tagging social posts to specific campaigns
  • Viewing what competitors are doing
  • Detailed KPIs compared to any customized dates

Cons

  • More insights such as what algorithms we would fall into
  • Being able to tag a post to different campaigns
  • Tracking more audience behaviors

Return on Investment

  • Seeing our metrics from last year and setting it as a goal to beat for this year
  • Increased efficiency by all the team being able to see our social media calendar
  • We are able to see what organic posts are performing best in order to boost and make paid ads based on this information

Return on Investment

Yes, Sprout Social has helped us measure our metrics efficiently by month and year, which has led to us setting goals from these previous numbers.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Hootsuite

Other Software Used

Applause, Google Ad Manager, Stripo

A well-oiled machine

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Sprout Social for advanced scheduling of social media content as well as for reporting out data to our board of directors. We are closely monitoring and utilizing Sprout Social daily to keep a pulse of our brand image, content performance and overall health of our organization in the social space.

Pros

  • Content Scheduling
  • Campaign Planning
  • Performance reporting

Cons

  • Collaboration tools for Facebook
  • Google Analytics integration
  • Bring back the Canva integration!

Return on Investment

  • Increase in engagement rate with an average of 9%
  • Long-term social media content planning - we are planning content 18 months in advance in some cases
  • Massive time savings and valuable for staff use

Return on Investment

We are able to pull reporting to review tag performance and adjust our social strategy as needed. We also are able to pull valuable comprehensive data across platforms to share with our board of directors to showcase the value and impact of our social media strategy.

Usability

Other Software Used

Canva, Adobe Creative Cloud for Enterprise

The best is right here

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We love using Sprout Social for our social media posting needs. It is a perfect tool that lets us schedule a whole month as well as post on a daily basis. It perfectly integrates with our needs onsite and at our corporate office. We are so grateful that KETTLER Management has given us this great resource for posting.

Pros

  • scheduling posts for the month
  • using AI for better wording
  • adding images is super easy

Cons

  • I cannot put many words at all
  • The images get sideways a lot
  • I find it hard to tag any one but that might be a me issue

Return on Investment

  • I believe the impact is great for sure
  • We can see exactly the views
  • We can see exactly the interaction

Return on Investment

Our social media needs are met with Sprout however we would still like to have a lot more followers

Usability

Other Software Used

Yardi Voyager, 1CRM

Easy to use

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Sprout Social for posting on multiple social channels at once. It eliminates the need to log in to each platform individually and also allows me to schedule the posts. I use it for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Threads. I also appreciate that I can edit each platform's post individually to meet each post's character limits.

Pros

  • Scheduling posts - including choosing the right time for each day
  • Tailoring each post to each platform without rewriting it
  • Adding links and uploading photos

Cons

  • Facebook limits certain things like posting into groups

Return on Investment

  • The time savings is the biggest plus here.
  • I wish we could add one additional seat without it costing more

Return on Investment

We don't see social as a money generator or lead source so we don't expect an ROI with social platforms. It's more for brand awareness and Sprout Social does help us with that.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Meltwater

Other Software Used

Workshop, HubSpot CRM, Adobe Express