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SproutSocial — Stick to Reporting for a Satisfying Experience
August 13, 2013

SproutSocial — Stick to Reporting for a Satisfying Experience

Lizzie Maldonado | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Premium

Overall Satisfaction

  • SproutSocial provides highly detailed, visual PDF reports that answer all of your key social media analytics questions in one location. For us, this is invaluable as it's the dashboard of choice we use to show progress and results to all clients.
  • Social media scheduling is extremely bulky and time-consuming. Lightweight tools like Buffer for scheduling are much more convenient and efficient, even after the time it takes to switch tools.
  • It is not a one-size-fits-all-dashboard because the interface takes too much time to load most features — the functionality that allows users to find people to follow and connect with is slow and ineffective, and managing any type of back-and-forth communication is very frustrating. You are going to use multiple platforms if you use SproutSocial.
  • Since implementing SproutSocial, we have been able to clearly tie social media initiatives to ROI for our internal marketing efforts as well as for those of our clients. Between measuring all of the social media-specific metrics within SproutSocial, we have supplemented conversion monitoring with Argyle Social to show a clear social media attribution path.
If I found another program that did reporting as well as SproutSocial does, I would swap products (provided the other elements of the tool were more efficient than SproutSocial's).

Product Usage

1 - Social media and marketing.
1 - Social media manager — there is almost no technical know-how required to operate this platform.
  • Social media reporting.
  • Social media scheduling.
  • Social media management.
  • Finding followers on social media.
  • Social media analytics.
  • Social media dashboard.

Evaluation and Selection

We went from using a hodge-podge of services (Twitter.com, TweetDeck, Crowdbooster, HootSuite, etc.) to consolidating all of the reporting features into one dashboard. We only use SproutSocial for reporting.
SHORTLIST:
  • Radian6
  • Act-On
  • Sprout Social
  • Hootsuite Premium
We chose Sprout Social because of a mix of cost and value. The value it provided was exactly what we needed in terms of reporting and overall functionality, whereas other systems were not as cost-effective or did not provide the exact solution for what we were looking for.

Implementation

Extremely easy to set up in-house.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Yes, it's pretty intuitive in terms of what is where and how to use the platform.

Support

The customer service team is the second reason why we are semi-loyal to this platform. The customer service process is painless, effective and flawless in my experience.

Usability

Everything, and I mean everything, about this tool is bulky and slow-loading. Whereas tools like Buffer, ViralHeat and others are lightweight and extremely easy to use, SproutSocial's load-time, margin for 404 errors, and overall UX is lagging behind. One example: Within the "Discovery" tab, following each user recommended to you takes a matter of seconds just to load, after you find the tiny "+1" button to follow that user. It's not an incredibly visually appealing platform either. But the reports are beautiful, easy to produce and highly effective.

Reliability

I have never seen it in maintenance or downtime mode — I am always able to access this product.

Integration

  • Google Analytics
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Argyle Social
Not to date, no.

Vendor Relationship

Absolutely a delight in all aspects of the buying experience. They have that part down to a T.