Item: Sprout Social
Rating: 9
Author: Shonda Ranson

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social

Pros and Cons

Pros

Integrates well with major social media channels twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ to post consistent messaging across channels.
Great metrics to help understand who is following on what channel and how well a message does in that channel.
Only aggregate that gets some data from Google+.
Very easy to learn, program for delivery delays and to integrate into messaging strategy.
Smart Inbox is great for seeing responses quickly and being able to respond to them in with a single contact point.
Great for team work and managing team messaging strategy, workflow and tasks in digital communications.

Cons

You shouldn't have to pay $20 more a month just to get Google Analytics integration when you can get Google Analytics for free.
Metrics can be skewed if your organization is required to be 8-5, Monday-Friday – especially in the response time. Should be a way to adjust for operational hours.
LinkedIn only grabs my personal account and not our City page, so while it works with LinkedIn, it isn't very helpful for the organization.
Would like to see more for Google+ data.

Return on Investment

Positive impact – Great way to keep track of ROI with easy metrics that even non-tech and non-marketing people understand when you present it to them.
Positive impact – Great tool for planning messaging strategy by getting the right content to the right audience on the right medium.
Positive impact – Has helped justify the importance of time spent on digital communications to organizational administrators.

5 - Communications division is responsible for all of the internal and external communications for our municipality. Sprout Social is a integral part of the digital communications strategy to reach external stakeholders.

Likelihood to Recommend

I recommend this product to colleagues and even bring printouts of the reports to demonstrate not only the social media reach that I've built, but the metrics presented by the tool on job interviews. When considering if the product is right for your organization, think about how easy it is to get the metrics for your key channels. Can you tell when your messages are successful? not successful? and why? Metrics are an essential component of a strong messaging strategy. If you just guess and cast a wide net, you're not only wasting your time, but you're likely turning some of your followers off. Sprout Social lets you see who is interacting with your messages on what channels and in what way.

Using Sprout Social

Likelihood to Renew

For clear, general-audience-friendly metrics and team monitoring of your social media communications, this is the best aggregate product that I have seen and used for the cost. I liked it so much after the introductory trial that I decided to use this product and pay for the subscription out of my own pocket as a personal investment for my organization. So, while the Standard $40/month doesn't have everything, the items that are missing, I can get for free – just not in the same suite. For example, Google Analytics are free, just not integrated in Sprout Social; and the optimum timing add-on can be done at a much lower cost using tweriod and buffer. When renewal comes around, the choice will be purely around my budget.

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Seeded in Metrics, Sprout Social Grows Your Strategic Marketing

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