Item: Sprout Social
Rating: 9
Author: Meagan McKinnon

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Sprout to get notified of, review, and reply to mentions/posts/DMs to our 2 business pages. The reporting in Sprout is used to set and measure goals/SLAs. This is all handled by our Customer Experience Team, although our marketing team does use Sprout as well to track engagement sometimes (this part I'm not familiar with the details). Using Sprout allows us to aggregate all social issues into one place and track who responds with what answer, timeliness of responses and ensure a clear voice coming from our brands

Pros and Cons

Avoid collision: when you have more than one person watching/managing your social channels it's important to maintain a consistent voice in all posts/DMs and Sprout makes it easy to see if a colleague is already handling a particular issue so you can move onto the next.
Reporting: out of the box there's some really nice reports that show what day/time social channels are most popular for your brand and how many mentions/posts you've responded to.
Ingestion: get a constant stream of all your @mentions, DMs, wall posts, retweets, and hashtags— even keywords, and misspellings! Sprout ingests all of it in one place.

Clarity/UX: Sprout is pretty robust but that seems to create an issue for the UX in that the people in my org that use it are always asking "where can I find ___" and "how did you get to that screen?"
Granular reports: I would prefer is Sprout utilized a heat map (columns=days of the week, rows=hours of the day_ to highlight at-a-glance our busiest times for social channels.

Users and Roles

Customer Support, Engagement, Recovery, Marketing and Promos

Return on Investment

Finally able to track response times and volume, which has allowed us to be accountable to execs & board members and also set incentive goals.
One place for everyone to converge, maintaining a brand voice.

Alternatives Considered

Hootsuite

We found that Sprout had everything we wanted and at a good price, so we didn't really compare. We just knew that Hootsuite was not at all what we needed in anyway shape or form.

Other Software Used

Solvvy, monday.com

Likelihood to Recommend

Our team manages multiple profiles on multiple social platforms, so Sprout was a gamechanger for us. We don't have a "community manager" at our company either so when you think about a village/team of people handling social responses and engagement, everyone needs to be able to converge in one place, see historical activity and replies, and be able to maintain that brand voice. If you only have one simple profile to worry about or you don't care much for reporting/analytics, you likely don't need Sprout.

Usability

Using the tool in an everyday sense is great. Biggest struggle is managing your own users and profiles that are linked to the account.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Feel confident using Familiar	Difficult to use Cumbersome

Easy Tasks

Responding to reviews, mentions, retweets, wall posts—basically any kind of social engagement.

Difficult Tasks

Managing your own account setup like integrating profiles and even managing users and user permissions within Sprout itself (very cumbersome UX).

Great Solution for Teams!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social