Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Sprout Social

Sprout Social

Overview

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…

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Sprout Social effectively addresses social media management and monitoring needs. Users utilize Sprout Social to schedule social media …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 27 features
  • Twitter (57)
    7.7
    77%
  • Content planning and scheduling (57)
    7.2
    72%
  • Real-time tracking (55)
    6.7
    67%
  • Facebook (59)
    6.3
    63%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Pricing

View all pricing

Standard

$199 annual / $249 monthly

Cloud
per user/per month

Professional

$299 annual / $399 monthly

Cloud
per user/per month

Advanced

$399 annual / $499 monthly

Cloud
per user/per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://sproutsocial.com/pricing/

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $249 per month per user
Return to navigation

Product Demos

Sprout Social Review Demo - Is This The Best Social Media Scheduling Tool

YouTube

How To Use Sprout Social - A Walkthrough Demo Of Sprout Social

YouTube

Sprout Social Demo 2023 | Sprout Social Review

YouTube

How to Use Sprout Social's Service Cloud Integration

YouTube
Return to navigation

Features

Listening/monitoring

Using complex keyword searches to surface insights from social media conversations.

7.5
Avg 7.7

Publishing

Scheduling posts to various social media channels and profiles from one interface.

4.9
Avg 8.0

Engagement

Engaging with customers and responding to comments and inquiries via social media channels.

6
Avg 8.1

Marketing

Using the software to increase customer engagement and grow customer base via social media channels.

4.6
Avg 7.9

Channel coverage/integration

Effective integration with social media networks, including the ability to monitor, publish and respond.

7.5
Avg 8.6

Reporting/analytics

5.9
Avg 7.9

Account management

Users can manage access to multiple social media accounts.

7.6
Avg 8.2
Return to navigation

Product Details

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.

Sprout Social Features

Listening/monitoring Features

  • Supported: Boolean keyword searches
  • Supported: Filtering out noise/spam
  • Supported: Sentiment analysis
  • Supported: Broad channel coverage

Publishing Features

  • Supported: Content planning and scheduling
  • Supported: Audience targeting
  • Supported: Content optimization
  • Supported: Workflow management

Engagement Features

  • Supported: Automated routing and prioritization
  • Supported: Customer interaction histories
  • Supported: Bulk actions

Marketing Features

  • Supported: Lead generation
  • Supported: Content marketing

Channel coverage/integration Features

  • Supported: Twitter
  • Supported: Facebook
  • Supported: LinkedIn
  • Supported: Google+
  • Supported: Instagram
  • Supported: Pinterest

Reporting/analytics Features

  • Supported: Campaign success analytics
  • Supported: Real-time tracking
  • Supported: Competitor analysis

Account management Features

  • Supported: Role-based user permissions & privileges
  • Supported: Mobile access

Sprout Social Screenshots

Screenshot of 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.

Sprout Social Videos

Bringing Customer and Business Insights Together with Tableau and Sprout Social
Customer Care with Service Cloud and Sprout Social
Sprout Social Employee Advocacy

Sprout Social Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish

Frequently Asked Questions

Sprout Social starts at $249.

Hootsuite, Khoros Marketing, and Sprinklr Social are common alternatives for Sprout Social.

Reviewers rate Broad channel coverage highest, with a score of 8.5.

The most common users of Sprout Social are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(501)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Sprout Social effectively addresses social media management and monitoring needs. Users utilize Sprout Social to schedule social media posts, pull analytics reports, and monitor social media mentions. According to users who have been using the software for more than 2 years, it has helped them publish content on pages and profiles, schedule posts in different time zones, and monitor their social media effectiveness. The software is highly appreciated for its ability to increase efficiency and productivity in engaging with social media communities and mapping out online strategies.

One of the key use cases of Sprout Social is central monitoring of all social media accounts to ensure consistent branding and communications. Users have found it essential for managing multiple accounts from one platform, allowing them to maintain a unified brand voice across various channels. Additionally, Sprout Social has had a positive impact on marketing efforts by expanding advertising capabilities and enabling simultaneous content publishing.

Another valuable use case of Sprout Social is reporting and monthly metric analysis. Users rely on the software to track content performance, community growth, and overall social media effectiveness. It provides them with comprehensive reports that help in evaluating strategies and making data-driven decisions.

Moreover, Sprout Social helps users aggregate social issues, track responses, and ensure a clear voice from brands. It simplifies the process of categorizing interactions, engaging with customers, and responding to comments and direct messages. By streamlining these tasks, it saves users significant time when it comes to social media scheduling and analytics.

Users recommend Sprout Social for small businesses and non-profit organizations due to its ease of setup and robust reporting capabilities. It serves as a valuable tool for managing different strategies and campaigns by offering features like scheduling social media content, monitoring social feeds, and creating reports for all clients.

Sprout Social also caters to digital marketing agencies by providing centralized management of client's social media accounts, gathering analytics, and offering reporting tools. Its detailed analysis across all social channels makes it a preferred choice for agencies looking to track social progress and provide comprehensive reports to clients.

With its versatility, Sprout Social is used by universities as well to manage social media accounts for announcements, news, public relations, and marketing purposes.

Overall, Sprout Social proves to be an essential tool in managing social media by catering to a wide range of use cases. From scheduling content and engaging with customers to monitoring analytics and generating reports, this software simplifies the complex landscape of social media management.

Users commonly make the following recommendations based on their experience with the software:

  1. Integrate with Asana: Users suggest integrating the software with Asana to streamline workflow and enhance task management capabilities.

  2. Spend time exploring functions: Reviewers advise investing time in exploring and familiarizing oneself with the various functions of the software to fully understand its capabilities.

  3. Choose a company that treats customers well and aligns with goals: Users recommend selecting a software company that provides both a powerful tool and prioritizes customer satisfaction. They suggest finding a company that aligns with business goals and offers reliable support and service.

These recommendations emphasize the potential benefits of integration, the importance of understanding the software's functions, and considering customer-centricity when choosing a software provider.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 49)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This is our main option to integrate with one tool all our Social Media profiles of customers who didn't have an option to manage their social media. Many were using native platforms to schedule, publish or control them. That´s why it's very important to have a tool for the content team to deploy best practices.
  • Reports
  • Publishing
  • Support Social Media Platforms
  • Technical Support
  • Easy to use
  • Custom Reports
  • Social Listening
  • Competitors Benchmark
If you have more than three social network profiles and you want an easy solution to plan your content, publish and measure your results, this is one of the best platforms you could contract with a good price and nice features. It0s a very powerful tool to manage your social media profiles.
Jesse Sumrak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Sprout Social to manage our social media programs at SendGrid, giving us a single platform to schedule and publish content, respond to comments and direct messages, and review our analytics and performance. We also used it as an image repository to store files relevant to posting on our social accounts.
  • Easy to Navigate User Interface.
  • Simple User-Friendly Publishing Calendar.
  • Robust (and Downloadable) Analytics and Reports.
  • Pricing Is a Bit Expensive.
  • Support Can Sometimes Take a While to Respond.
  • Lacks Native Support for Every Social Network.
Sprout Social is appropriate for small-to-midsized businesses (as long as they can afford it). While teams can use Sprout Social together to collaborate and manage their social media platforms, we found it best to be used by a single manager or a handful of other team members. Expanding beyond that can get a bit messy.
Bill Braun | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Primarily, we use Sprout to aggregate social media mentions for easier interaction and categorization across five social channels. We also use Sprout to engage in competitive audits, segmented by vertical. Generally speaking, it significantly speeds up the interaction and categorization process - a big advantage given the number of users that interact with our brand.
  • Aggregating mentions
  • Quickly assessing the competitive landscape by channel
  • Excellent and highly responsive customer service department
  • Doesn't combine competitor reports cross-platform.
  • Limited YouTube data available
  • Advanced Analytics option will likely double your investment
  • UGC data (in the Smart Inbox) is limited to the first picture in the post.
Well suited to a group engaging in "surface area" social interaction. Good for identifying who is interacting with you and engaging them. An easy method of in-depth analysis is where Sprout could stand to improve a bit.
Jenna Carpentier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is being used by the communications department--particularly our two Digital Communications Specialist staff members, which includes me. We use it to schedule social media posts, pull analytics reports, and monitor social media mentions. We use this tool on a daily basis and find that it addresses our social media needs for the most part.
  • Analytics Reporting - Sprout Social does a nice job at providing robust analytics across all social media platforms. We use this to monitor our social media performance over a specified time period, including number of posts, increase in followers, and changes in engagements and link clinks.
  • Social Media Scheduling - Sprout Social is good for scheduling social media posts in advance. With the version we use, it also shows us what time we should schedule our posts based on the past performance of our previous posts.
  • Social Media Monitoring - Sprout Social does a good job at monitoring social media mentions and searching for posts containing certain specified keywords.
  • Sprout Social has room to improve with Instagram posting and media monitoring. It can be difficult to schedule Instagram posts in advance. However, this is something that every social media scheduling tool has issues with because it's a setting on Instagram's end that causes the problems.
  • We have noticed that some of our LinkedIn photos post strangely. They end up being a smaller, scaled down version of the image. If we go to LinkedIn and post the same exact photo directly, we do not have this problem.
  • Sprout Social could have more robust media monitoring for all of the platforms (with the exception of Twitter). Right now, mentions and keyword searches seem to mainly only bring up Twitter posts. I would like to see Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Instagram more involved with this.
Sprout Social is well suited for scheduling social media posts in advance and tracking how various posts perform across the various platforms. It is great for pulling reports and analytics data to help us track what kinds of posts perform the best, along with how our overall social media strategy is performing, including an increase in followers.

Sprout Social could be better at providing more data for Instagram and make it easier to schedule Instagram posts, even though this is something that stems from the settings on Instagram's side of things.
Adrienne Hardin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sprout Social is being used by one person within our organization's Communications department. I implemented Sprout hoping to streamline our social media efforts and manage all of our organization's social media platforms from one place. I currently have two Facebook accounts, one Twitter account, one Instagram account, one LinkedIn company profile, and a Google Analytics account connected to Sprout.
  • The social listening capabilities do a great job of providing me with information I need from our target audiences.
  • Customer service is readily available, thorough, and considerate. When I call them with questions, I’ve gotten live people EVERY time, which is rare in the social media realm.
  • The option to shorten links and add photos directly in tweet drafts has helped not only workflow, but it also helps maintain a seamless aesthetic on our Twitter profile.
  • The ability to export calendars into PDFs and send them to campus partners has made workflow for campaigns so much better. I no longer have giant spreadsheets full of posts to send off to other departments for approval.
  • The dashboard is simple and easy to navigate.
  • Sprout calculates impressions and engagements differently than Facebook and Twitter do natively, so I’m unable to rely solely on the reports pulled from the platform.
  • Sprout’s Instagram integration didn’t suit our needs. Our audiences respond best to posts in real time, so there isn’t opportunity to schedule Instagram posts in advance. With recent privacy changes, I’m not able to like or comment on Instagram posts from Sprout either, so I’ve moved back to using Instagram natively.
  • The integration with LinkedIn company pages is weak; links don’t format correctly, so it’s easier to post natively.
  • Approvals and task assignments aren’t available with the entry-level subscription, and the cost of upgrading is similar to what I could get for a more robust tool like Falcon.
I would wholeheartedly recommend Sprout for basic social media management. Twitter scheduling, social listening capabilities, and being able to export calendars of scheduled posts are all features that have saved me time and allowed me to focus more on strategic efforts. But, if you depend on accurate data reporting, or are looking for something that integrates well with the rest of a team's workflow, Sprout (at least at the premium level) probably isn't the best choice.
June 14, 2021

A Useful Tool!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is a social media management and optimization platform for brands and agencies of all sizes. The platform gives you a single hub for social media publishing, analytics and engagement across all of your social profiles. Sprout Social takes the guesswork out of scheduling social. The ability to schedule weeks at a time and have them available to clients for review and approval is a godsend! Sprout Social is a tool that saves me a TON of time. Also, their customer service is EXTREMELY responsive, which is always nice.
  • Schedule Instagram posts AND stories.
  • Monitor engagement.
  • Collaborate with your team and clients.
  • You cannot post giphs.
  • You cannot post multiple photos on Instagram automatically, it must be done manually.
  • Sometimes posts will fail to upload and there is no explanation why.
If you are looking for a platform to schedule, monitor, and report on your social strategy Sprout Social is the perfect tool. It's extremely collaborative and user-friendly. Set up a run through of the platform for your team with a Sprout Social rep. They are incredibly knowledgeable and will teach you everything you need to know. 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.
Peter Slayton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For the last two years, Sprout Social has been used mostly by me in my department. I have the Advanced plan. On my recommendation, one other department opened their own account and started using it a year ago with a Professional plan. Sprout Social has helped us put all our social media management in one place. Scheduling, community management and analysis all work together now, across all platforms, from a single dashboard. It has saved us time and increased efficiency and productivity as we engage with our social media community and map out our online strategy.
  • Scheduling: you can see it all in one place, and schedule on all platforms from one place.
  • Analytics: even without the Advanced Analytics add-on, this is one of the best tools I've used. My reports are detailed and specific, covering the essentials. And they are easy to create and customize.
  • Smart Inbox: This feature is a lifesaver. You never miss a comment or conversation on any of your social platforms. Ever. The Smart Inbox catches them all and organizes them in one place within seconds. And you can directly respond to comments and messages right there. No need to visit the platform. Do it all from Sprout Social.
  • RSS Feed: need to keep track of what your organization or others publishes so that you can find it and schedule posts to your social channels? This feature is perfect for that. I never miss an article our magazines put out or forget to share them online.
  • Tagging is your best friend when it comes to Analytics. If you develop a standard tagging protocol for each post that goes out, you can get amazingly granular in your campaign analysis.
  • Some of the limits of APIs can make some things clunky. For example, when scheduling a post, Facebook's API doesn't allow any prepopulated text in the scheduler. So If I want to share a link to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I have to add a couple extra steps in my workflow.
  • If you don't have the volume of content or community engagement, this tool is expensive. Sprout Social isn't a "starting" service. It's the service for robust social media management.
  • When clicking the "send to compose" from the RSS Feed feature, it automatically copies the link and first sentence or two of the post to the clipboard. However, I NEVER use that as the text I put with a social post. And in most cases, I've read through the article in the feed reader and copied the text I want to use. The auto-copy feature overwrites my text. So I have to open up the article in a separate tab, go back to the Sprout Social tab, open up the compose window, go back to the tab, copy the actual quote or section I want to use to tease the article, go back to the Sprout tab and copy it, then schedule it out. It doesn't seem like much, but when you are scheduling a dozen or more articles at once to your calendar, this process can add a lot of time and extra clicks. Which means more opportunities for user error! Sprout Social didn't use to do this. An update in the last year suddenly added this "feature"...
  • The reports Sprout Social offers are great. However, there are very limited customization options. I often end up with PDFs that are longer than necessary because of the way the export feature creates page breaks and leaves space. And there's no way to resize or edit them. Additional customization would be very helpful. And I have a feeling that might be in the Advanced Analytics paid add-on... :-D
Sprout Social is a supremely excellent tool for community management. With the Smart Inbox, you never miss a comment or interaction and it's easy to reply and engage in the conversation. With the Advanced plan, you can even have saved replies when you need to provide a standard answer to very common questions. If you have a live event or a post that is really blowing up with comments, the Smart Inbox helps you keep track of it all and respond in a timely manner. I'm trying to think of scenarios where I would respond with, "Oh, you don't want to use Sprout for that." But none are coming to mind as I write this. Perhaps that's because in the last two years I've shaped my workflow so much around what it DOES do, that I simply don't do the things it doesn't do. I'll have to think more on this one.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social allows us to neatly create and schedule a high volume of social posts/content for a large and growing list of clients. It is primarily used in our social media department. A handful of dedicated staff interact with and manage Sprout Social, collaborating and sharing duties in getting content up on multiple social platforms on a daily basis.
  • Save time
  • Save money
  • Make our jobs easier
  • Help avoid mistakes
  • Help improve visibility and scope of live projects
  • Interface could use a light update
  • Rarely, multiple users accessing the same account may have issues
  • Support is great most of the time with very few longer response times
We have a high volume of automotive clients and Sprout Social specifically allows our vast team of social professionals to collaborate, edit, post, or delete at a fast pace while avoiding the pitfalls of teams working in different silos and not having great visibility to what others are doing. Sprout Social allows teams temporarily stepping in to help out to quickly see what's going on for a specific client and make educated and correct decisions, avoiding any downtime or mistakes of not being familiar with that particular client's account.
Sarah Carrig (Iddings) | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I did the full trial period of Sprout Social while helping my company find social media management options. It was for use by the marketing department to handle a large volume of local-level social media pages.
  • GREAT stats/metrics reporting.
  • Easy social scheduling.
  • Convenient social listening tool built in.
  • Can handle many pages and mediums with ease and simplicity.
  • It would be nice if it were a company subscription rather than priced per user.
Sprout Social is a wonderful platform for companies or agencies looking to manage multiple social media pages and platforms at once. It is fantastic at providing detailed post and page statistics in an easily readable fashion - it makes providing reports to superiors simple! The social listening tool is very convenient for finding spaces where you can join in the conversation. It is best used by an organization where only a few users are in the platform. If you have hundreds of local pages all run by different individuals, it can get incredibly expensive due to the charge per user for the platform.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sprout Social to schedule posts, tap into listening insights, and generate monthly reports for our leadership team. Additionally, Sprout is used daily for our unified inbox, which means that our social team has one place to go for checking messages/comments across all social platforms. Currently we set up reports to listen for keywords and important topics as a way to generate content ideas.
  • I love the support I receive from Sprout and the focus on learning to improve.
  • I love the ability to work with team members to approve content and also provide feedback before the content is pushed live.
  • Scheduling is a breeze, thanks to the ability to duplicate and customize for each platform.
  • There are a few API-restrictions, such as Facebook event co-host invitations or Instagram DMs that don't come through to our Sprout inbox. Fortunately, Instagram DMs are on their roadmap and will soon come through.
  • The cost for premium analytics is a little steep. The capabilities are amazing, but the cost makes it difficult for social media managers to commit.
  • In order to utilize all that Sprout has to offer, you have to dive into their learning portal.
Sprout is perfectly suited for social media professionals who manage a team and want a support system built into their platform. I've used Sprout as a team of one, and felt completely supported. Their chat function is perfect for getting quick answers to questions that arise. I currently use Sprout as a manager with a team of three people, and it's been wonderful to have internal dialogue with team members, collaborate on responses, and also get an overall view of the team's efficiency.

If you don't have a mindset of learning to develop, Sprout may not be for you. It has a lot of offerings, but if you don't utilize their templates to generate reports or upload assets as "saved responses," then you aren't getting the bang for your buck.
Tanner Walters | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our social expert uses Sprout as a strategic listening tool to pull insights like share of voice, sentiment analysis, and trend info which informs a lot of our social content and new business strategy. My direct involvement has been scheduling social content for client approval.
  • Pretty intuitive to use. I've had to take over scheduling when my colleagues are out and there's a very small learning curve in terms of accomplishing basic tasks like scheduling tweets.
  • I like being able to customize workflows that work for our clients. We can schedule content as "waiting for approval" before they are scheduled so clients can weigh in before anything goes live.
  • The insights I've seen have been helpful and informative in guiding our content and justifying our social strategies to clients and internal stakeholders.
  • Still room for improvement in terms of API functionality with different social platforms, though I've seen growth made. Some small details are not as seamless. For example, if I want to tag someone on LinkedIn before scheduling, I have to do that after the post has been published within LinkedIn itself (not sure if this has changed).
On a basic level, Sprout is great as an organizational and scheduling tool for businesses with accounts across multiple social platforms. Even better, it's great as a listening tool so companies can be more strategic about what they're posting. While I haven't had as direct experience actually pulling insights myself, the information I've seen gleaned from the platform has been really helpful.
Esmeralda López | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are a global company with a single global account on LinkedIn and Facebook, with different strategies and commercial focuses per region. So, currently, we have different users with each of one creating their own messages and content for their countries and languages with their own strategies and sometimes particular campaigns. How do we manage this? With Sprout Social. It's great that Sprout Social provides, among others, basic functionalities related to the posting calendar, tools to get performance reports, and management by region or user. It provides also a lot of resources to manage dashboards, reports, and social media listening not only for our brand but also for competitors in a collaborative way.
  • Possibility to see content by applying several filters: draft, need approval, platform, accounts, tags, campaigns, etc.
  • Different types of reports
  • Manage messages, open and assign tasks
  • The functions for social listening are not included with the standard license
  • We can't get reports by country or region
  • I think the interface is less friendly than other platforms I have seen
This platform is appropriate for companies that have different channels or accounts on social media. It is not the best option if your interest is in social media listening. For that purpose there are specific platforms or social media platforms with more functionalities for that.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I work on creating and posting social content for clients, and a few of them have opted to use Sprout Social to manage their social accounts. They wanted a platform that would include multi-functionality and serve as their overarching content hub. We gave them the options for a few different platforms, and quite a few tapped Sprout Social to be the center of all things social.
  • Schedule, post and monitor social feeds.
  • Ability to track, analyze and post from a greater number of accounts. Other platforms I use only have Facebook and Twitter integration. Sprout Social has the ability to host more than that (Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.).
  • Great, simple and easy to use interface. I use a few different social platforms for clients, and I love how clean and uncomplicated Sprout Social is. Many of its competitors are not as
  • Data reporting and analysis.
  • Overall, more capabilities than other social platforms (chatbot creation, private messaging, Facebook page management and so on).
  • I think the task manager option has a lot of great potential, but as it is now, my team and I don't have much use for it. I'd like to see that a bit more built out as an additional project management tool.
Sprout Social is the perfect one-stop platform for all things social. If you're looking for high-level social management for a variety of social channels (not just Facebook or Twitter), or just in-depth analytics and capabilities for Facebook and Twitter, then this is the platform you should be using. Sprout Social has a smart, intuitive design that is easy to use (which is my big gripe with other platforms such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, which have a lot more going on in their interfaces). That said, if you are a smaller firm, or have less or smaller social needs, I might scale back to a smaller social software with less functionality.
Alexis Ramsey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social was used in conjunction with Meltwater this past year. We used Sprout to schedule LinkedIn posts and pull analytics on an ad-hoc basis for client requests. Sprout gave high-level analytics for our social performance, but was not able to be the standalone software for our needs because it wasn't as robust as we had hoped.
  • Sprout Social has a mobile app that is pretty helpful when on the go. It's an easy way to get a snapshot to see if something is working, or if you need to alert a team member to edit/pull a post.
  • Analytics are easy to understand. The report graphics and insights are easy to comprehend and are client ready with little to no added context.
  • Campaign and social tracking setup is easy and does not take long to back load and populate.
  • When acquired in conjunction with other service offerings such as Meltwater's Engage platform, the use and necessity of this tool can get lost.
  • During the purchase of the software(s), it would have been helpful to do a deeper dive into Sprout's capabilities, instead of treating the "on-the-go" software like an after thought.
  • Android capabilities were lacking compared to iOS, so team members struggled to engage and use the software when they needed to.
Sprout Social is incredibly helpful for a social presence that is smaller (under 100K in followers) since you may only have one or two platforms to monitor and engage with. If you are active on three+ platforms, Sprout Social might not provide additional insight that you can easily pull from native analytics. Additionally, given the multiple price points, there is something for everyone, but other software such as Union Metrics might provide more bang for your buck.
Meagan McKinnon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sprout to get notified of, review, and reply to mentions/posts/DMs to our 2 business pages. The reporting in Sprout is used to set and measure goals/SLAs. This is all handled by our Customer Experience Team, although our marketing team does use Sprout as well to track engagement sometimes (this part I'm not familiar with the details). Using Sprout allows us to aggregate all social issues into one place and track who responds with what answer, timeliness of responses and ensure a clear voice coming from our brands
  • Avoid collision: when you have more than one person watching/managing your social channels it's important to maintain a consistent voice in all posts/DMs and Sprout makes it easy to see if a colleague is already handling a particular issue so you can move onto the next.
  • Reporting: out of the box there's some really nice reports that show what day/time social channels are most popular for your brand and how many mentions/posts you've responded to.
  • Ingestion: get a constant stream of all your @mentions, DMs, wall posts, retweets, and hashtags— even keywords, and misspellings! Sprout ingests all of it in one place.
  • Clarity/UX: Sprout is pretty robust but that seems to create an issue for the UX in that the people in my org that use it are always asking "where can I find ___" and "how did you get to that screen?"
  • Granular reports: I would prefer is Sprout utilized a heat map (columns=days of the week, rows=hours of the day_ to highlight at-a-glance our busiest times for social channels.
Our team manages multiple profiles on multiple social platforms, so Sprout was a gamechanger for us. We don't have a "community manager" at our company either so when you think about a village/team of people handling social responses and engagement, everyone needs to be able to converge in one place, see historical activity and replies, and be able to maintain that brand voice. If you only have one simple profile to worry about or you don't care much for reporting/analytics, you likely don't need Sprout.
Todd Terwillegar, Content Marketing Certified | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is being used by multiple departments, both marketing and support. Marketing is lead and supports issues with Support through Sprout. We use it for social listening for issues and customer praise, to engage with customers, to promote our blog and products. It addresses brand awareness, social promotion, and lead generation with our Blog.
  • Social Listening - It's great to see real time what people are saying about us and to us on the channels.
  • Responding directly within Sprout - It's great to be able to talk directly back on tweets or posts from within Sprout rather than having to go find the tweet and respond natively, saving time on my end.
  • Promotion - It's also great to have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram all in one place, making social promotion much easier too. You can also bulk schedule.
  • Listening is in chronological order, which is great for support requests real time, but it would be great to listen to specific keywords.
  • It would be great to be able to log specific feedback directly into Salesforce instead of copying and pasting feedback in from support issues.
Sprout is great for marketing departments looking to watch their brand and promote their blog. It's especially good for single person posting. I don't see it working well for larger teams and collaborating real time as there isn't a great way to see who is tackling what. You can assign tasks or grab them but it would be great to see who is clicking what or a chat feature perhaps?

The dashboard could also use some help to show more about the brand, perhaps specific keywords we watch. Or trends across social platforms that we might care about.
Nate Casimiro | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is primarily used by my organization to generate reports on our social media progress across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We use it to standardize and measure values including followers, posts, engagements and clicks. We typically measure these month over month and include these numbers in our reports to senior leadership.
  • Measure your own social media data and analytics across most social channels.
  • If you are an agency, you can manage the social media publishing and reporting for other organizations.
  • After publishing ads first party, you can use the Smart Inbox feature to engage with comments on your ads (Facebook and Instagram)
  • Sprout Social can do quite a lot, but you will have to pony up for the higher tiers to access competitive analyses, automation and collaboration features.
  • For rich user-generated content functionality, you may need to double up and seek out an additional platform.
We use it strictly to save time and efficiently create reports and graphs that can be dropped onto slides or in department reports. It's a huge time saver and worht the $40 a month, but also we could populate these manually at zero cost if we wanted to. It comes down to bandwidth and how much time you want to spend on something versus the cost. On an agency level, this would be exponentially helpful, but if you are using the tool for yourself, it may not be necessary.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sprout Social in our marketing dept to manage all of our location pages. It helps consolidate everything into one place so we don't have to switch between social media pages.
  • Scheduling posts.
  • Post approvals.
  • Consolidating pages into one place.
  • You can't get posts approved by multiple people.
Sprout is wonderful for a small staff to manage multiple pages.
October 15, 2019

Sprout helps!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is currently used by our Marketing and Customer Experience departments. Marketing uses it to manage campaigns and also keep a pulse on our competition and industry. The Customer Experience team utilizes it as a way to resolve customer issues and engage with customers who may leave feedback about our organization.
  • Super easy to use
  • Scheduling future campaigns and posts
  • Consolidating all social media accounts in one place
  • Really wish there was an ability to create custom reports
  • Would like to be able to see if another team member is already responding to a customer
  • integration with CRM
It's pretty easy to use and a good starter platform. Feedback I have received from our marketing & PR teams is that they wish there was a little more functionality around campaign development. For our Customer Experience team, it works pretty well and it's nice to have a dashboard that consolidates all social media feeds in one place.
Kelcey Zacarese | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by the full social team here at our Agency. It is used mainly for reporting/monthly metric takeaways rather community management, brand engagement, social listening, or scheduling. It helps us track how well or content is performing month over month, how our community is growing, demographics on our community, and more.
  • A comprehensive overview of content analysis - with the ability to look month by month, week by week, etc.
  • Demographic breakdown in reporting.
  • Paid and organic metrics separated out.
  • Consistent engagement metrics across all social platforms (since they have engagement rate for Instagram and Facebook but not Twitter).
  • A section or tab where you can separate content that is organic and content that is paid.
  • Predictions on reach/growth dependent on your tracked metrics.
Sprout is best when needed for general reporting metrics - especially for brands or agencies who are working with only organic or unpaid content. Since Ads Manager is typically used for all paid reporting, this is either best for organic only reporting, or a comprehensive overview of how your paid + organic content has done.
Sylvia Flores | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Sprout Social for multiple companies and always just within the marketing organization, and of course, on behalf of executive leadership. It's an awesome tool that enables your business to thoughtfully schedule posts for all platforms, monitor comments, collaborate with others on your team with a really solid editorial calendar. It's also super cool that you can schedule Instagram posts and stories! The calendar features rocks.
  • Monitor your audience's comments, an awesome as a customer service tool!
  • You can schedule Instagram posts and stories, which is a big deal for my direct-to-consumer clients who LIVE on Instagram.
  • The calendar and collaboration are really helpful in supporting OMNI-channel marketing efforts.
  • You cannot post gifs which seems ridiculous in this day and age where we do pretty much everything with gifs!
  • System failures: sometime a post will fail, but there is no clear reason as to why it occurred. These should be error-free, unless the Social platform, such as Facebook, for example, is experiencing an outage. Then, there should be a notification in Sprout.
  • You can't tag pages in Facebook posts: for clients looking to tag partners, for example.
  • Drafts don't stick around if you don't schedule them.
  • The price, even for the standard version, can be steep for bootstrapped startups.
Sprout Social is straight forward and intuitive which is great as you don't need to learn a new language to operate it. Like other monitoring tools, you can schedule and monitor your social networks in one place, while collaborating with team members in a single view. It also analyzes your engagement so you can optimize your communications. As a business, you have to have a tool like this. That being said, it's expensive in comparison to say, Hootsuite or Buffer. So, a cash strapped small business is not going to love that $100/mo pricetag for the basics.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Sprout Social for our social media accounts to send out information from a centralized platform. Our social media reports are being generated through Sprout Social. It cuts down on workload. We have more than 20 content creators on the team and it is used across the whole organization.
  • Monthly Reports.
  • Perfect customer service.
  • Scheduling social media posts.
  • Pricey compared to other platforms.
  • There are some capabilities that are hard to find and figure out how to use.
  • The interface is not user-friendly.
For organizations with multiple social media accounts and teams with more than 10 people, it would be a good decision to use Sprout Social. If there are only one or two social media accounts, then Sprout Social might not be the best option based on its price.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Several departments use Sprout Social at my company. My department mainly uses it to understand the marketing tactics that we have implemented for our clients. More than just understanding these tactics, we want to see how these campaigns have done across multiple platforms—whether that be interaction or overall use amongst consumers. We also use it to understand what campaigns we should use next and what our client would like to see in the future.
  • Organized
  • Easy to use
  • Thorough in analysis
  • Expansive
  • I suppose it could be a little more simple to use for those who aren't familiar with platforms like this
We can track campaigns, usage and best practices. This isn't something to just brainstorm ideas off of, it can be used like that to a degree, but it's more to understand how social media campaigns work (and who likes what campaign the best). It's better for understanding demographics and usage.
Alejandro Matheu, MD, MBA, MSc in Digital Marketing | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to manage our social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. It has so many great tools that adapt in a great manner to our needs. This is used by our Marketing department as well as our Outsourced Community Management team.
  • The scheduling tool is super good! It is very easy to use.
  • It has a solution for all sizes of companies.
  • It’s good for monitoring and engaging.
  • I don’t really like the analytics that they have.
  • The insights could be much better. In this scenario, Socialbakers is much better.
It's well suited for medium to large companies. For small companies, it’s a little bit expensive, but if you can afford paying it... it will be very useful.
Jimmy Mack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sprout Social is used to track key social media metrics, monitor social media campaigns, track social media engagement, and provide social media reports to key stakeholders including supervisors, directors, and other executives. Additionally, we used Sprout Social as a way to schedule content and help create a content calendar we could follow.
  • Scheduling content
  • Aggregating analytics from various social media platforms
  • One-click reporting
  • Fairly basic interface
  • Analytics are surface level
  • No social listening
If you have a small social media team and need a way to quickly and easily monitor your owned social media channels, track conversations on your posts and engage with your fans or followers, Sprout works well. It also is an easy way for users to create high-level reports for higher-ups.
Return to navigation