Sprout New Ideas + Strategies with Sprout Social
December 20, 2018
Sprout New Ideas + Strategies with Sprout Social
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Standard
Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social
We used Sprout Social to begin experimenting with social media management tools as we scaled our voice on multiple social platforms. It was utilized by the market department (a small one - usage was mainly by 2 users, max). Usually in tandem, as we explored the product. It allowed us to get ahead of ourselves in terms of planning and scheduling so we were able to develop a social plan in real-time, as we explored a tool that is meant to allow us to do just that. As a small team, we were short on hands, literally, and ideas, so having the ability to schedule across platforms, as well as utilize hashtag trend tools to generate ideas was very helpful.
- Quick ramp up (very user-friendly)
- Powerful reporting and trend identification tools
- Location-based hashtag searches
- Brand monitoring
- The cost was too high for us - I couldn't sell it to the CEO to build into our marketing budget
- Missing Pinterest and YouTube integration at the time, so this limited us in terms of visually sharing different forms of media across all of our social channels
- No LinkedIn Group publishing ability - this was big for us as we had at least two active LI Groups at the time that we wanted to nurture and grow.
- Dashboard didn't show everything all in one place, and I liked that about Hootsuite's social media management tool. Having the ability to see our entire digital, social footprint in one place was helpful to us at our early stage.
2 - One was the director of marketing and the other was the marketing associate/junior marketing generalist on the team.
- Allowed us to concurrently build a system where we could plan for the future and forward-looking content, events, and other publishing opportunities
- Enabled us to audit the "marketplace" so to speak and seek out ideas based on trends and real-time analytics
- Allowed us to develop a new workflow strain based on permission levels and internal SS workflow
Sprout Social's hashtag trend identification and analysis capabilities, overall real-time analytics, and simple ramp-up were the major draws of the product for our team. By comparison, Hootsuite's column-oriented dashboard is the most customizable and optimal for seeing "the full picture". CoSchedule is similar to Sprout in many ways, although I preferred Sprout Social's analytics capabilities above all. Buffer's overall user interface was not as clean or user-friendly. As an FYI, I have also used Loomly, Social Pilot - all social media management tools that were not listed in the above drop down!