Sprout Social Reviews
& Product DetailsWhat is Sprout Social?
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that enables people to make social media posts across various social media platforms. Sprout Social has the perfect combination of social media management tools and analytics that helps to satisfy the needs of small, medium, and large businesses.
The Sprout social media management software is great for medium and large businesses that need a full suite of features in their social media management tool. It has a chatbot creation feature, a social listening feature, and trend monitoring tools to enable businesses to gain additional competitive advantage.
The major focus of the Sprout Social interface is the Smart Inbox, which gathers incoming messages from all social networks into one feed. There are a lot of other interesting features that this software has. It also has a feature that helps identify new content trends, thus reducing the stress of generating content ideas. To sum up, they help to simplify the complexity of social media.
Found in these Categories
Best For
- StartUps
- Freelancers
- Small Business
- Medium Business
- Large Enterprise
- Non-profit Organization
- Personal
- Cloud, SaaS, Web-Based
- Mobile - Android
- Mobile - iPhone
- Mobile - iPad
- Desktop - Mac
- Desktop - Windows
- Desktop - Linux
- Desktop - Chromebook
- On-Premise - Windows
- On-Premise - Linux
-
Company Name
Sprout Social
-
Located In
United States
-
Website
sproutsocial.com
Starting from:
$249 /month
Pricing Model: Subscription
- Free Trial
- Free Version
Pricing Details:
Sprout Social pricing plans come split according to the size of the company using it, and the social media management need is presumably necessary to run the social media content for a business that size. The software comes with a free trial which enables you to take it for a spin.
- Analytics/Reporting
- Message Scheduling
- Keyword Monitoring
- Ads Management
- Multiple Users
- Automated Publishing
- Post Scheduling
- Mobile App
- Social Media Monitoring
- Bulk Upload
- Customer Engagement
- Calendar
- Collaboration Tools
- Content Management
- Content Suggestions
- Inbox
Sprout Social Featured Comparisons
-
Canva
Online Graphic Design Software
-
HubSpot Service Hub
Help Desk Software
-
Salesforce CRM
CRM Software
-
Shopify
eCommerce Software
-
Slack
Team Collaboration Software
-
WooCommerce
eCommerce Software
-
Zendesk
Help Desk Software
Tell us your opinion about Sprout Social and help others.
Sprout Social – management for social media platforms
Sprout Social is one of the best social media marketing tools you can use 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 that 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.
So, Sprout Social enables individuals or business owners to create social media posts on different social media platforms. In addition, with Sprout Social, they can handle everything that has to do with social media marketing, content curation, analytics, scheduling, reporting and publishing.
Sprout Social Detailed Features
Below are some of the features of Sprout Social:
-
Smart Inbox
It has the Smart Inbox feature that helps you track and engage with messages across LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, all in a central place with a unified social inbox.
-
Brand keywords
Its brand keywords feature helps execute real-time brand monitoring with keyword, hashtag, and location searches across Twitter in the Smart Inbox.
-
Contact views
The contact views feature helps you gain access to shared customer records, conversation history, and customizable contact views across networks every time you reply.
-
Conversation history
It has a conversation history feature that helps you view an entire conversation history in different profiles and networks for crucial context and helpful reference.
-
Message completion
The message completion feature helps mark messages complete and hide completed items from view in the Smart Inbox to stay focused.
-
Comment moderation
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.
-
Message tagging
The message tagging feature helps keep your inbox organized and reports on activity by creating and applying custom tags to inbound social messages.
-
Integrations
The helpdesk integration feature helps integrate your Zendesk account to create, track and manage support issues from social to the helpdesk.
-
Content Calendar
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.
Sprout Social Cost
Sprout social pricing is not so affordable, but it is worth it because of all the features you can explore. In addition, the software has a free trial that lasts for thirty days, and you don’t need to enter your credit card details before using the Sprout Social free trial.
Three subscription levels Sprout Social offers. They include:
The standard package
This package costs $249 per month for each user. This price is not stable. There are a lot of features that are available in this subscription package. Some of them are integration with about five social networks, social content publishing and calendars, and the Smart Inbox option.
The professional package
This package costs $399 per month per user. In addition, it gives you increased customization, access to ten social profiles, and other extra reports.
The advanced package
The cost of this package is $499 per month for each user. With this package, business owners can gain access to Twitter surveys to aid the gathering of Promoter Score data, chatbot creation, and content library.
Larger teams best use Sprout Social because it helps handle content creation needs, automation, and collaboration capabilities. Businesses will need to carry out a cost-benefit analysis before they can sign up.
The Sprout Social nonprofit pricing is given to nonprofits with qualifying 501(c)3 documentation. If you want to know more about the Sprout Social nonprofit pricing, email their sales team.
How much is Sprout Social?
Sprout Social plan begins with the Standard package, at $249 per month.
The professional package costs $399 per month. In comparison, the Advanced level costs $499 per month.
Their prices are quite expensive. However, the features that are available on each package will make social media management easy.
Sprout Social Detailed Integrations
Sprout Social integrates with:
- Shopify
- Facebook shops
- Glassdoor
- Google My Business
- TripAdvisor
- YouTube
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 quite new in the social media marketing space. The software has a suite of reporting, monitoring, and publishing tools. Pocket integration is one of the interesting features that eClincher has–with this feature. With it, you can share saved content from your Pocket account directly to social media.
But you cannot collaborate on social media tasks using eClincher. You cannot assign social media messages as tasks, so you would have no other option but to collaborate on the app through email or Slack.
You may find it hard to navigate eClincher’s User Interface, so you may need to read through its support documents carefully. However, if you keep using it, you will get accustomed to it.
It is suitable for medium-sized agencies and has a 49 dollars monthly plan, a 99 dollars 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 does integrate with other networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Pinterest, but it has limited support. SocialOomph is good for those people who need Twitter growth hacks and don’t mind using other networks to handle Instagram, Facebook, and other networks.
It has a free plan, but the paid plans cost 6.97 dollars monthly and 17.97 dollars monthly, respectively.
It is best for social media managers that focus on just 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 will need to share the same MeetEdgar login with all of 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 an entire 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, but it also 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.
Based on company overview, dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities, let’s compare these powerful tools below.
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 major aim is to aid businesses in managing their social media accounts in a central place. Some of the popular customers of Hootsuite 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 the way each of them 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 of those accounts. 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; rather, it 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 collaboration among team members to be seamless.
Publishing and scheduling
As regards publishing, both 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 important 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 posting times that are suitable 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 features in Hootsuite are 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 is replying to the post.
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 will also have access to 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, in terms of 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 to 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 support through live chat or phone, and it has fewer social listening capabilities.
Pricing
As regards pricing, Sprout Social has three subscription packages. The
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, 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, they also use 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 a large suite of various enterprise-focused tools. For instance, the software’s smart 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 that Sprout Social offers, you can try out any of the Sprout Social alternatives that have lower prices with amazing features.