Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social
I requested Sprout Social for use at my agency based on previous use at a startup. For now only I am using it on one account but other teams have shown interest in acquiring it. It is used primarily for social media scheduling and management, allowing for more flexibility and organization than just using Facebook and Twitter (TweetDeck) natively.
- Drag and drop scheduling. The queue is a great feature allowing you to auto-schedule posts at optimal times, and it's easy to rearrange posts at will.
- Identification: Sprout color codes Twitter accounts according to their followers so you can quickly see message that may have high influence.
- User interface is clean and easy to comprehend, not too busy.
- Price is high, it took a very long time to get approval for my usage. They seem to be leaning toward larger companies and leaving the smaller users behind.
- Customization: There are some tools that are designed for specific use cases (i.e. "tag this message for Sales") My use does not involve sales so I would like to be able to change the label but cannot currently do so.
- "Viralpost" feature isn't well-explained, the times scheduled seem to always be the same so it leaves you to wonder if it's really doing what it says it's doing.
1 - Audience engagement, social media management, content marketing, social listening, content distribution, reporting, etc. Sprout is used by the Audience Engagement Manager as part of a content marketing team that runs blogs and social channels on behalf of a large client. Right now it is only used by one person but this may change in the future.
- Improved efficiency by decreasing time spent on social publishing.
- Nurtured audience engagement with easy influencer identification.
Much better interface and flexibility. Plans include features instead of features being a la carte at additional costs. Sprout team is local to the city I work in so access to support is a benefit. Overall the support and training (including webinars and phone) offerings are proactive and very responsive to customer needs.