Listen to your audience with Sprout Social
October 17, 2019

Listen to your audience with Sprout Social

Todd Terwillegar, Content Marketing Certified | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Other

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social

Sprout Social is being used by multiple departments, both marketing and support. Marketing is lead and supports issues with Support through Sprout. We use it for social listening for issues and customer praise, to engage with customers, to promote our blog and products. It addresses brand awareness, social promotion, and lead generation with our Blog.
  • Social Listening - It's great to see real time what people are saying about us and to us on the channels.
  • Responding directly within Sprout - It's great to be able to talk directly back on tweets or posts from within Sprout rather than having to go find the tweet and respond natively, saving time on my end.
  • Promotion - It's also great to have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram all in one place, making social promotion much easier too. You can also bulk schedule.
  • Listening is in chronological order, which is great for support requests real time, but it would be great to listen to specific keywords.
  • It would be great to be able to log specific feedback directly into Salesforce instead of copying and pasting feedback in from support issues.
5 - Marketing and Support are both represented as business functions. Marketing uses it for social promotion and social listening, while support uses it for customer issue listening and coordinates with marketing to respond to customer issues in real time. This is where integration between Sprout and Salesforce would be handy.
  • Social Listening - It has had a positive impact as we know what our customers are saying and can respond to situations before they spiral out of control and have negative brand consequences. We also can turn situations around quickly. This has saved many customers from leaving or spreading negative brand imagery.
  • Lead Gen - Sprout has provided a few leads directly, but many indirectly through pageviews from organic promotion to our Blog and generating many new subscribers, that eventually could become leads or customers. We have grown our subscribers by 3x since having Sprout on board.
  • ROI - It's hard to tie an actual number to Sprout but dozens of customers have been saved and innumerable amounts of brand image damage avoided, which amounts to thousands of dollars.
Sprout is better for social listening and responding to issues, where Hootsuite is better for collaboration with team members on tasks. Hootsuite is also better for scheduling out bulk content. I was not part of the selection process for Sprout Social but was brought on board and trained to use it upon onboarding. It is a great tool especially for monitoring customer issues.
Sprout is great for marketing departments looking to watch their brand and promote their blog. It's especially good for single person posting. I don't see it working well for larger teams and collaborating real time as there isn't a great way to see who is tackling what. You can assign tasks or grab them but it would be great to see who is clicking what or a chat feature perhaps?

The dashboard could also use some help to show more about the brand, perhaps specific keywords we watch. Or trends across social platforms that we might care about.

Sprout Social Feature Ratings

Filtering out noise/spam
5
Broad channel coverage
8
Content planning and scheduling
8
Audience targeting
Not Rated
Content optimization
8
Workflow management
6
Automated routing and prioritization
7
Bulk actions
6
Lead generation
7
Content marketing
10
Twitter
9
Facebook
8
LinkedIn
8
Google+
Not Rated
Instagram
6
Campaign success analytics
Not Rated
Real-time tracking
10
Role-based user permissions & privileges
8
Mobile access
9