Item: Sprout Social
Rating: 9
Author: Jenna Carpentier

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sprout Social is being used by the communications department--particularly our two Digital Communications Specialist staff members, which includes me. We use it to schedule social media posts, pull analytics reports, and monitor social media mentions. We use this tool on a daily basis and find that it addresses our social media needs for the most part.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Analytics Reporting - Sprout Social does a nice job at providing robust analytics across all social media platforms. We use this to monitor our social media performance over a specified time period, including number of posts, increase in followers, and changes in engagements and link clinks.
Social Media Scheduling - Sprout Social is good for scheduling social media posts in advance. With the version we use, it also shows us what time we should schedule our posts based on the past performance of our previous posts.
Social Media Monitoring - Sprout Social does a good job at monitoring social media mentions and searching for posts containing certain specified keywords.

Cons

Sprout Social has room to improve with Instagram posting and media monitoring. It can be difficult to schedule Instagram posts in advance. However, this is something that every social media scheduling tool has issues with because it's a setting on Instagram's end that causes the problems.
We have noticed that some of our LinkedIn photos post strangely. They end up being a smaller, scaled down version of the image. If we go to LinkedIn and post the same exact photo directly, we do not have this problem.
Sprout Social could have more robust media monitoring for all of the platforms (with the exception of Twitter). Right now, mentions and keyword searches seem to mainly only bring up Twitter posts. I would like to see Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Instagram more involved with this.

Users and Roles

2 - There are two of us in our organization who use Sprout Social on a daily basis. We are both Digital Communications Specialists and use it mainly for scheduling social media posts and monitoring media mentions. On occasion, the Marketing Strategist will also use it to pull reports and look at data.

Return on Investment

Sprout Social is a reasonably priced software that provides the appropriate level of abilities for our organization.
Sprout Social makes posting and pulling cross-platform analytics data easier and more time-efficient for us.
Overall, Sprout Social has had a positive impact on ROI and our overall business objectives.

Alternatives Considered

Hootsuite

We have used Hootsuite in the past and we prefer Sprout Social because it's easier to use, more intuitive and visually appealing, provides more robust analytics, and is better organized so we can find things more easily.

Other Software Used

Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform, Higher Logic, Episerver CMS

Likelihood to Recommend

Sprout Social is well suited for scheduling social media posts in advance and tracking how various posts perform across the various platforms. It is great for pulling reports and analytics data to help us track what kinds of posts perform the best, along with how our overall social media strategy is performing, including an increase in followers.

Sprout Social could be better at providing more data for Instagram and make it easier to schedule Instagram posts, even though this is something that stems from the settings on Instagram's side of things.

Sprout Social Feature Ratings

Comments

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Sprout Social - Good Value for our Organization

Software Version