Item: Sprout Social
Rating: 9
Author: Sylvia Flores

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Sprout Social for multiple companies and always just within the marketing organization, and of course, on behalf of executive leadership. It's an awesome tool that enables your business to thoughtfully schedule posts for all platforms, monitor comments, collaborate with others on your team with a really solid editorial calendar. It's also super cool that you can schedule Instagram posts and stories! The calendar features rocks.

Pros and Cons

Monitor your audience's comments, an awesome as a customer service tool!
You can schedule Instagram posts and stories, which is a big deal for my direct-to-consumer clients who LIVE on Instagram.
The calendar and collaboration are really helpful in supporting OMNI-channel marketing efforts.

You cannot post gifs which seems ridiculous in this day and age where we do pretty much everything with gifs!
System failures: sometime a post will fail, but there is no clear reason as to why it occurred. These should be error-free, unless the Social platform, such as Facebook, for example, is experiencing an outage. Then, there should be a notification in Sprout.
You can't tag pages in Facebook posts: for clients looking to tag partners, for example.
Drafts don't stick around if you don't schedule them.
The price, even for the standard version, can be steep for bootstrapped startups.

Users and Roles

6 - I have Sprout Social working with three client companies, and all of them are within the marketing organization. From a strategic standpoint, Sprout could be divided into four distinct areas for a company: 1) marketing, extending the brand, 2) individual branding for thought-leadership and executives 3) for customer service and support, and 4) for sales. This is what I am working towards with all of my clients.

Return on Investment

With everything on a single platform, Social Media Marketing teams are more efficient in their tasks.
Due to the analysis that you can perform, you can create amazing reports that showcase to leadership the return-on-brand equity and investment.
It's ridiculously simple to use, so people of all experience levels (including none) will intuitively understand how to use it from day and hour one.

Alternatives Considered

Hootsuite, Zoho Social and Buffer

For my clients who are using Sprout Social over the other available options, it came down to ease of setup and use, the insane quality of customer support, their social reporting, and analysis, influencer identification, social measurement, and engagement, scheduling, and reports! Their reports are visually pleasing for those presentations to leadership, showing what the heck Social Media is actually doing for your return-on-brand investment.

Other Software Used

SEMRush, Accounting by Wave, Google Trends, Buzzsumo, Bitly, Unbounce

Likelihood to Recommend

Sprout Social is straight forward and intuitive which is great as you don't need to learn a new language to operate it. Like other monitoring tools, you can schedule and monitor your social networks in one place, while collaborating with team members in a single view. It also analyzes your engagement so you can optimize your communications. As a business, you have to have a tool like this. That being said, it's expensive in comparison to say, Hootsuite or Buffer. So, a cash strapped small business is not going to love that $100/mo pricetag for the basics.

A Six Year Old Could Use This!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social