No real presentation layer.
November 12, 2012

No real presentation layer.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • Sprout allows us to easily track most of the metrics we care about for weekly presentation to senior management. It does this very well.
  • Sprout doesn’t do everything well. For example, it can’t show the growth of Facebook fans over time (snapshots of stats from the past). It can only show how many fans you have now.
  • The software cannot track blog shares as it doesn’t integrate with WordPress. We use Add this to track how many people share or blog content.
  • It is also unable to track how many people came to the site using the share buttons. Cannot tell whether came to site via a social property. Can’t tell how many people clicked a Twitter link.
  • No real presentation layer. All the data has to be manually exported to Excel to produce a report. I would be nice to have some kind of automated report builder capability.
  • Prefer Hootsuite publishing UI.
  • Now we can track everything which is something we could not do before. We can prove to upper management that we are having an impact increasing impressions. Show what’s trending up. If there is a spike or dip, we explain why. If anything interesting happens, we share with management. The most important things we are able to demonstrate using the tool are:
  • Get more people to know who we are (impressions)
  • Build our image as though leader in space. Metrics around sharing of relevant articles are critical. We want people follow us to find interesting data and to see us as a media company. It’s not just a matter of talking about ourselves all the time.
We are generally very happy. We do review the landscape from time to time, but 90% of the time Sprout can do what other vendors offer. However, we would consider a tool that could also track share button activity and viral lift for which we currently use AddThis.
• Sprout has a tool like HootSuite auto-schedule. I have chosen not to use as I like HootSuite better. I would consider using Hootsuite for everything if I knew it did everything that Sprout does.
• No API so I have to build a manual dashboard in Excel. This is disappointing.

Product Usage

2 - Both users comprise the entire social team.
  • Before we got a tool, there was no reliable way to measure audience size. We had do things like count the number of re-tweets manually. We had no way to track impressions, or mentions or to track how many people clicked a link. Sprout allowed us to track everything and save an enormous amount of time.
  • Bazaarvoice has 3 Twitter accounts, and 1 Facebook account. Sporut Social is used to track a wide range of metrics in Sprout to ensure that marketing strategy is successful:
  • Audience size (# of Twitter followers / conversation rate)
  • Number of Twitter mentions of BV
  • Facebook impressions (# of times a follower sees a BV post)
  • Amplification rate (Twitter re-tweets)
  • Applause (FB likes and shares).
  • We do not use Sprout to measure blog shares or viral lift (# of times our content is shared to a social network compared to # of times content is clicked). Sprout cannot track this, so we use AddThis to track these metrics.
  • Also do not use Sprout for publishing (automated posting to FB and Twitter) because I prefer the Hootsuite publishing user interface. I had used Hootsuite for publishing in the past and really like how easy it is to use. Looks a little better than Sprout.

Evaluation and Selection

Google Analytics

Training

My manager trained me, but I figured it out by myself by just by playing around No formal training required.

Support

• Only called once. They helped solve my problem.

Usability

The software is very intuitive. I’m able to drill down into specific things or get an overview. Nothing difficult to figure out. I only had to call support once, and once they showed me, I understood immediately.

Reliability

• Never had a problem with site being down.