Item: Sprout Social
Rating: 10
Author: Tanner Walters

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our social expert uses Sprout as a strategic listening tool to pull insights like share of voice, sentiment analysis, and trend info which informs a lot of our social content and new business strategy. My direct involvement has been scheduling social content for client approval.

Pros and Cons

Pretty intuitive to use. I've had to take over scheduling when my colleagues are out and there's a very small learning curve in terms of accomplishing basic tasks like scheduling tweets.
I like being able to customize workflows that work for our clients. We can schedule content as "waiting for approval" before they are scheduled so clients can weigh in before anything goes live.
The insights I've seen have been helpful and informative in guiding our content and justifying our social strategies to clients and internal stakeholders.

Still room for improvement in terms of API functionality with different social platforms, though I've seen growth made. Some small details are not as seamless. For example, if I want to tag someone on LinkedIn before scheduling, I have to do that after the post has been published within LinkedIn itself (not sure if this has changed).

Return on Investment

We've reshaped our agency's internal social strategy on Twitter thanks to analyses from Sprout Social, and we got buy-in from leaders thanks to these insights.
We're able to speak very confidently about client recommendations when pitching social in new business meetings thanks to these insights.
We have simplified the workflows and made an easy process for scheduling social content internally and for clients.

Key Insights

Do you think Sprout Social delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Sprout Social's feature set?

Yes

Did Sprout Social live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Sprout Social go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Sprout Social again?

Yes

Usability

The platform is pretty intuitive for the most part. However, certain exceptions and nuances that exist across social platforms (i.e. posting restrictions on certain sites) give this a slight learning curve and can be frustrating. However, once you get the hang of the platform it's pretty painless and easy to use.

Support Rating

I have not used the support features myself for Sprout Social but I know our team has a good relationship with our rep, who seems very responsive.

Likelihood to Recommend

On a basic level, Sprout is great as an organizational and scheduling tool for businesses with accounts across multiple social platforms. Even better, it's great as a listening tool so companies can be more strategic about what they're posting. While I haven't had as direct experience actually pulling insights myself, the information I've seen gleaned from the platform has been really helpful.

Really Powerful Insights

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Sprout Social