Sprout Social Reviews

Sprout Social – management for social media platforms

Sprout Social is one of the best social media marketing tools to publish your social media content effortlessly. The cloud-based software is perfect for those businesses who want their social media software to serve as a strategic aid and a suite of tools. Additionally, medium and big businesses with a multi-user social media team would benefit more from Sprout Social.

Moreover,  it has the best combination of social media management and analytics to suit the needs of both small and large businesses. In addition, the software integrates well with any social network you use.

Sprout Social is a complete social media software that covers everything from reporting to publishing to social listening. It has an intuitive interface. It provides collaboration tools, and there is also a thirty-day free trial. Furthermore, this social media management has advanced features like chatbot creation, team workflow tools, and insightful reporting templates. The subscription packages for Sprout Social are quite expensive, but they are worth it. The Standard package cost 99 dollars.

How to use Sprout Social?

Before you can use Sprout Social, you must create an account and enter your Sprout Social login details. Sprout Social is a social media marketing tool that focuses on aiding entrepreneurs, small, medium, big, and growing businesses, full-service, enterprise corporations, and niche agencies. Furthermore, the app helps them to integrate and partner with various social media platforms.

Sprout Social enables individuals or business owners to create social media posts on different platforms. The tool can also handle everything related to social media marketing, content curation, analytics, scheduling, reporting, and publishing.

Sprout Social Detailed Features

To gain a better understanding of a platform, it’s essential to explore its various features. Below, you’ll find a list of key features that Sprout Social has to offer:

New Features

Sprout Social has integrated advanced AI tools that provide sentiment analysis and trend identification. These insights help users understand the emotional tone of social conversations, enabling more informed decisions on content strategy and customer engagement.

The platform now supports more sophisticated automation workflows, allowing users to automate repetitive tasks, schedule posts across multiple platforms, and optimize posting times based on audience activity. This reduces manual effort and enhances efficiency.

Improved social listening capabilities allow users to monitor brand mentions, track competitor activity, and follow industry trends in real time. This feature helps in crafting more targeted content and staying ahead of market changes.

Sprout Social has enhanced its collaboration tools, offering features like task assignments, approval workflows, and internal communication channels. This is particularly useful for larger teams managing multiple accounts, ensuring streamlined workflows and accountability.

The platform offers more robust analytics, including new customizable reports that provide deeper insights into audience demographics, content performance, and engagement metrics. These visual reports are crucial for data-driven decision-making and optimizing social media strategies.

The updated content calendar now provides a more user-friendly interface for planning, scheduling, and monitoring social media content. It includes drag-and-drop functionality, integrated post previews, and collaborative planning features, allowing teams to manage their social content more effectively.

Sprout Social continues to expand its integrations with popular tools like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and HubSpot, enhancing its utility as a central hub for marketing activities. The platform also offers 24/7 customer support, ensuring users can access assistance whenever needed.

The Smart Inbox feature helps you track and engage with messages across LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, all in a central place with a unified social inbox.

Its brand keywords feature helps execute real-time brand monitoring with keyword, hashtag, and location searches across Twitter in the Smart Inbox.

The contact views feature helps you gain access to shared customer records, conversation history, and customizable contact views across networks every time you reply.

It has a conversation history feature helps you view an entire conversation history in different profiles and networks for crucial context and helpful reference.

To stay focused, the message completion feature helps mark messages complete and hide completed items from view in the Smart Inbox.

The comment moderation feature helps you to track and engage with comments on all of your owned social media profiles like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

The message tagging feature helps keep your inbox organized and reports on activity by creating and applying custom tags to inbound social messages.

The helpdesk integration feature helps integrate your Zendesk account to create, track and manage support issues from social to the helpdesk.

The collaborative content calendar feature helps you to view and manage social posts across multiple profiles, networks, and campaign tags, all in a central place.

Security Features

Sprout Social prioritizes security, ensuring user data and accounts are always protected. The platform employs industry-standard encryption to safeguard sensitive information in transit and at rest. Additionally, Sprout Social offers features like two-factor authentication (2FA) to add an extra layer of protection against unauthorized access.

For businesses managing multiple accounts, user permissions can be precisely controlled, allowing administrators to grant access based on roles and responsibilities. Regular security audits and compliance with global standards further demonstrate Sprout Social’s commitment to maintaining a secure environment for all users.

By providing a robust security framework, Sprout Social ensures businesses can confidently manage their social media activities without worrying about potential security breaches.

Solutions Offered by Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides various solutions tailored to various social media needs, making it easier for businesses to manage their online presence and engage with their audience effectively.

Social Media Management

This solution simplifies managing multiple social media accounts by centralizing all activities in one dashboard. Users can schedule posts, monitor engagement, and respond to messages from a single interface across platforms. This keeps the workflow organized and reduces the time spent switching between accounts.

Social Listening

With social listening, businesses can track brand mentions, industry trends, and customer sentiment in real time. This feature allows companies to understand their audience better, respond to feedback quickly, and stay ahead of emerging trends. It’s a powerful tool for adjusting strategies based on what people are actually talking about online.

Analytics and Reporting

Sprout Social’s analytics tools provide detailed reports on social media performance. These insights cover metrics like engagement rates, audience growth, and content effectiveness, helping businesses see what’s working and where improvements are needed. The visual reports make it easy to communicate results to stakeholders.

Customer Care

The platform includes tools designed specifically for customer service teams, enabling them to manage customer inquiries and support requests efficiently. With a unified inbox for all social channels, customer service representatives can respond faster and more effectively, enhancing the overall customer experience.

Collaboration and Team Management

Sprout Social is built with teams in mind, offering features like task assignments, approval workflows, and team performance tracking. This is especially useful for businesses where multiple team members contribute to social media management, ensuring that everyone stays on the same page and workflows are smooth.

Paid Social

The platform also supports paid social media campaigns, providing tools to manage, monitor, and analyze paid ads across different networks. This integration helps businesses maintain a consistent strategy across both organic and paid social efforts, maximizing their overall impact.

Each of these solutions is designed to work together, offering a cohesive toolset for managing every aspect of social media from a single, user-friendly platform. Whether a business wants to improve its social presence, engage more deeply with customers, or streamline internal workflows, Sprout Social offers tools that make social media management more efficient and effective.

Sprout Social User Experience

Sprout Social offers an intuitive and efficient user experience, making it easy for teams to manage social media. The platform’s clean, organized layout ensures that even first-time users can quickly find their way around. The dashboard provides a clear overview of all social media activity, with handy navigation to access features like scheduling, reporting, and social listening.

The drag-and-drop content calendar makes planning posts straightforward, while the unified inbox centralizes all messages, simplifying engagement. Customizable views and filter options allow users to tailor their workspace to match their workflow, making daily tasks more streamlined. Additionally, Sprout Social’s mobile app extends the same functionality on the go, which is ideal for teams needing to stay connected wherever they are.

Feedback from users often highlights how Sprout Social balances robust functionality with ease of use, providing both power and simplicity in a single platform. This approach allows teams of all sizes and expertise levels to manage social media effectively without feeling overwhelmed by complexity.

For those seeking more in-depth insights, the platform offers plenty of training materials and a responsive support team to assist whenever needed, ensuring a smooth experience from day one.

Use Cases and Industries

Sprout Social is highly versatile, catering to a wide range of industries and business needs. Here’s how different sectors are leveraging the platform:

Travel and Hospitality

Travel and hospitality brands use Sprout Social to enhance customer engagement and streamline social media management. The platform allows companies to act as social concierges, proactively engaging with guests from booking to post-stay follow-ups. Features like social listening help brands monitor guest sentiment and identify opportunities to surprise and delight customers, driving loyalty and positive reviews. For example, Loews Hotels utilizes Sprout Social to personalize customer care by responding promptly to guest inquiries and curating unique guest experiences based on social interactions.

Computer and Software

For tech companies, Sprout Social provides tools to manage complex social media strategies across multiple platforms. These companies can use Sprout’s analytics to track product feedback, monitor industry trends, and engage with a tech-savvy audience. Software companies can deliver swift, efficient support and build stronger relationships with their user base by managing customer queries and support through a unified inbox.

Retail

Retailers leverage Sprout Social to drive sales and engage customers through a mix of social media strategies. The platform helps retail brands maintain a consistent presence across channels, manage social commerce, and respond promptly to customer inquiries. Sprout’s tools enable retailers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns, optimize content strategies, and connect directly with their audience to build long-term loyalty. Retail brands like Casio use Sprout to streamline social media management, improve response times, and drive customer satisfaction.

Higher Education

Educational institutions use Sprout Social to engage with students, alumni, and staff across various social media platforms. The platform’s tools help universities and colleges manage multiple accounts, create content that resonates with diverse audiences, and track engagement metrics to measure the impact of their social campaigns. Purdue University, for instance, increased its social media engagement significantly by utilizing Sprout’s comprehensive suite of tools.

By tailoring its features to the specific needs of these and other industries, Sprout Social helps organizations of all kinds harness the power of social media to achieve their goals. Whether you’re looking to increase customer engagement, improve brand awareness, or manage your social media presence more effectively, Sprout Social offers a solution to meet your needs.

Alternatives to Sprout Social 

Sprout Social is not the only social media management tool you can use as an individual or a business owner. There are other Sprout Social competitors that you can consider, especially if Sprout Social pricing is too expensive for you to handle.

Below are some of Sprout Social’s alternatives:

eClincher

They are pretty new in the social media marketing space. The software has a suite of reporting, monitoring, and publishing tools. Pocket integration is one of the exciting features that eClincher has–with this feature. With it, you can share saved content from your Pocket account directly to social media.

However, you cannot collaborate on social media tasks using eClincher. You cannot assign social media messages as tasks so that you would have no other option but to collaborate on the app through email or Slack.

You may find navigating eClincher’s User Interface hard, so you may need to read through its support documents carefully. However, you will get accustomed to it if you keep using it. It is suitable for medium-sized agencies and has a 49-dollar monthly plan, a 99-dollar monthly plan, and a 199 monthly plan. Furthermore, all these plans have a fourteen-day free trial.

SocialOomph

This software has a free trial. The app is mostly channeled towards Twitter, with some amazing features that other software doesn’t have. For instance, email-to-tweet, DM purging, and bulk tweet deleting.

This social media management tool integrates with other networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest but has limited support. SocialOomph is suitable for those who need Twitter growth hacks and don’t mind using other networks to handle Instagram, Facebook, and others.

It has a free plan, but the paid plans cost 6.97 dollars monthly and 17.97 dollars monthly, respectively. Social media managers should focus on Twitter.

MeetEdgar

This tool is basically for social media scheduling. It doesn’t have reporting or monitoring tools. It doesn’t support direct scheduling to Instagram, so you must finalize all posts through its mobile application.

On MeetEdgar, you cannot make multiple user accounts. So, you must share the same MeetEdgar login with your team, exposing you to security risks. In addition, MeetEdgar will automatically schedule your posts to ensure that you don’t post too much from one category. It costs 49 dollars monthly and has a thirty-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like the platform. This tool is great for freelance social media managers.

Oktopost

They are quite new to the social media marketing tools space. It provides a suite of scheduling, reporting, and monitoring tools to offer your clients various services. They didn’t provide details about their pricing on their website, so you will need to call their support to find out their pricing. It is best for small agencies.

CoSchedule

It has a full-fledged marketing suite. It integrates with many famous social networks and has support for blogs, email marketing platforms, and other marketing essentials.

CoSchedule is as expensive as Sprout Social, so it will be best to look for something cheaper if you have a large team. It has a paid plan for 80 dollars monthly, another for 400 dollars monthly, and another for 1,400 dollars monthly. All these plans have a 14-day free trial. It is great for small marketing teams and enterprises.

Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are part of the best social media management tools. Let’s compare these powerful tools below based on company overview, dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities.

Company overview

Sprout Social was founded in 2010 to help customers and business owners to communicate easily.  Some of the well-known customers of Sprout Social are Evernote, Ticketmaster, and Subaru.

Hootsuite was founded in 2008. Their primary aim is to aid businesses in managing their social media accounts in a central place. Some of Hootsuite’s popular customers include GE, SXSW, MailChimp, and Marketo.

Feed dashboards

A good social media management software will gather posts from different networks. The way the software shows this information has a great impact on usability. Both Sprout Social and Hootsuite gather posts in a feed, but how each displays the feed is entirely different.

Hootsuite allows users to create adjacent feeds in one dashboard and customize the type of information that every feed shows. That means you can create a feed for each of your social accounts and create more specific filters on each. For instance, posts from incoming tweets or Facebook.

Hootsuite dashboard

After creating your feeds, you can communicate with the content shown in everyone directly from Hootsuite, which makes answering questions and comments in different networks easy.

Sprout Social doesn’t use the multi-columnar technique but gathers posts into a single feed. You can go ahead to customize the information in the feed by checking and unchecking filters, and you can also move to a network-specific view with a single click. One beautiful feature of the Feeds in Sprout Social is that you can also include RSS feeds to aid with sourcing content to share.

Sprout Social dashboard

Sprout Social allows you to communicate with and reply to messages directly from your feed. It also monitors the messages that have been replied to and marks them with a green icon to prevent different users from replying to the same message. This feature enables seamless collaboration among team members.

Publishing and scheduling

Regarding publishing, Buffer, and Sprout Social let you compose a message, select the account it comes from, add images, shorten links, and select a target audience from the main feed dashboard.

Also, they both have a draft function that allows you to save posts that are not ready for publication and go back to them later. Hootsuite allows you to schedule up to fifty posts at once by uploading a CSV file using the bulk schedule tool.

Sprout Social provides certain additional features in terms of publishing–it has an audience discovery function that highlights people or accounts you should follow and spam or bot accounts you could unfollow. This feature will help you find essential influencers. Sprout Social also displays a short history of your conversation with someone on Twitter if you are about to reply to their messages. In addition, it extracts information from its social CRM functionality.

For scheduling, Sprout Social and Hootsuite have a content calendar that will help you schedule posts. You can also automate your posts and select the suitable times for you. Furthermore, they both have a proprietary algorithm that will suggest the times you should post to get more engagement from your audience.

Collaboration

For social media software, collaboration involves publishing approval rules and permission settings.

Hootsuite permits you to choose for either of the three roles: super admin, admin, and default. For example, if you want to be in charge of the employee Hootsuite accounts, you can apply one of the three permission settings to the whole team. Another collaboration feature in Hootsuite is the ability to assign social media replies to team members. It helps to prevent instances where a customer receives multiple replies.

Sprout Social permissions are set based on a user’s role and multi-step publishing approval. Users can tag any post in the feed as a task and assign it to a team member. Tasks are in three forms: support, sales lead, and general. You can monitor open and completed tasks at the Task tab. To ensure two people respond to the same post in the feed view, Sprout Social will indicate when another user replies.

Reporting

Hootsuite’s overview report separates your social media accounts into 4 views: metrics, engagement, followers, and posts. It gives you a large view of the performance of your social channels.

Also, Hootsuite allows you to create custom reports to export to CSV, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF files. Furthermore, Hootsuite sends a time optimization chart to its users. This chart shows the days and times that your posts get the most engagement. It optimizes your post times to attract more traffic. The ROI report shows the impact your social media campaigns have on leads and sales.

With Sprout Social, you can get engagement on a single platform or compare how your posts are doing in different social media accounts. In addition, competitor reports show you new opportunities for engagement by comparing your social media accounts with theirs. The filters and queries also allow you to develop your custom reports to compare your fall social campaign against the revenue numbers for that period.

Sprout Social reporting

Sprout Social has a social listening feature as an add-on that tracks mentions of your brand across the web and brings them into a single dashboard for review. With knowledge about your customers’ feelings, you can add, remove or change products or services to satisfy their needs.

Pricing models

Hootsuite has four pricing tiers to help you find the right option for your business. The lowest tier only allows one user and is best for small businesses. The base plan allows you to schedule multiple posts in advance for up to ten accounts, provides access to free app integrations, and has a social inbox to reply to customers. But the basic package caps your post boost spend at five hundred dollars, and you won’t have access to advanced features like customizable reports or a content library. At the top two tiers, you can also access special add-ons, like social listening and ad campaign management.

Sprout Social provides three pricing levels, but instead of adding a specific number of users, they charge per user for each month. In addition, the basic plan provides scheduling for up to five social media accounts with a social CRM and review management to read and respond to customer reviews.

Integrations and extras

In terms of third-party integration, Hootsuite has an edge over Sprout Social. It integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. In addition, they have an app directory with more than 150 native integrations—127 of them are free. As an extra, Hootsuite users can create a landing page and run social contests and giveaways using the Campaigns function.

Sprout Social is compatible with many networks and offers native connectors for TripAdvisor, HubSpot, Feedly, Google Analytics, UserVoice,  and Zendesk.

Sprout Social doesn’t have a lot of integrations, but it has extras, like its social CRM. Moreover, Sprout Social builds a record that stores interaction history and other basic contact information for each account that follows you or that you follow. This detail benefits salespeople–it’s a great way of building marketing and sales alignment.

Conclusion

As for which you should choose, from a design perspective, Sprout Social is simpler to view and use. Hootsuite focuses on function more than form. Hootsuite has an edge in reporting, but Sprout Social provides additional features, like audience discovery and social CRM.

The software you should choose is based on what you want. Both apps are great tools for managing your social media accounts, but the difference is in the more vital capabilities of your organization.

Buffer vs. Sprout Social

Buffer and Sprout Social are both great social media management tools. They are similar and different in several ways. In terms of features, Sprout Social has user-friendly, has effective automation and collaboration, and has a large range of insightful reporting options. While Buffer is simple to use, it has a free account and is best for scheduling and publishing posts.

As for their disadvantages, Sprout Social prices increase as the number of team members increases, it has limited YouTube integration and advanced features are limited to more expensive subscription packages. While Buffer’s cost can increase if you need multiple subscriptions, it doesn’t have live chat or phone support and has fewer social listening capabilities.

Pricing

Regarding pricing, Sprout Social has three subscription packages. The standard package starts at 99 dollars for each user monthly. It will give you complete scheduling management and five social profiles. The Professional package costs 149 dollars for each user per month. It will provide users with help desk integration, competitive reports, and ten social profiles. At the same time, the Advanced package costs 249 dollars for each user per month. It offers users ten social profiles, Twitter surveys, alerts, and an automated chatbot. Buffer also has three different packages. The

The pro package costs 15 dollars per month for each user, one hundred scheduled posts, and eight social profiles. The Premium package costs 65 dollars monthly for two users, two thousand scheduled posts, and eight social profiles. In comparison, the business plan costs 99 dollars per month for six users, and it has the ability to create 2,000 scheduled posts and 25 social profiles.

Customer Support

For support, Sprout Social has a concierge service with professional and advanced tiers and in-platform training. While Buffer has an active support team on social media, it also uses an online knowledge base and email support.

Sprout Social Review Conclusions

Sprout Social is one of the best social media management tools enterprise users use to create and publish social media content on various social media platforms.

The Sprout Social media management tool has an extensive suite of various enterprise-focused tools. For instance, the software’s intelligent social inbox makes collaborating with others on your team simple.

But the main setback that Sprout Social has is the price. It is currently the most expensive social media management tool available. Its lowest package starts at 99 dollars per user each month–that means the price increases as the number of your team members increases. If you cannot afford any of the pricing packages Sprout Social offers, you can try out any Sprout Social alternatives with lower prices with amazing features.

Sprout Social Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)