Sprout Social Reviews

Sprout lets you add multiple profiles from multiple platforms and schedule social media posts at whatever times you want or using a queue with times set by you. The listening stream can be customized so that you can choose whatever profiles/hashtags you want to see at that time. You can reply, assign posts, forward posts, retweet, retweet with comments all from the news stream. It works well with Zapier for RSS automatic posting of blog posts also. We started using it about 7-8 years ago, and the price has not changed for us, so it's a very good value for our money. The dashboard is easy to use and has multiple types of views, like calendar, so you can see if you have a lot of messages bunched up and spread them out. Support is good and the Sprout All Stars Slack group is another souce of information. Over time features have changed because of changes to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, but Sprout has consistently improved the platform and added or revised features as needed. It's a great tool for small/medium businesses. You can mark messages as read/done to get them out of the stream.

Sometimes the software logs you out when no one else is trying to log in. It can also sometimes seem like a post has not been scheduled but when you refresh the page, it is there. It works better with Twitter than Facebook or LinkedIn, so if those are your main platforms you may want a different tool. I think the issue may be more with FB and LI changing their rules than Sprout.

The data we are able to get from Sprout is fantastic. They recently added an inbox activity tracker which has been a game changer for engagement management. Being able to get an export of all of our post data too is phenomenal. WAY better than trying to pull things directly from each app.

Not being able to pull YouTube comment data is a big detractor. You also aren't able to not include some posts in reporting (for example we did a giveaway post on Instagram which skewed our entire metrics for the month). No one has TikTok data yet and I am not sure Sprout will be the first as they take a while to implement feedback (if at all).

I manage 13 different social media accounts so I need scheduling software to keep up with everything!

The majority of the reports on sprout are the same as you can find on your social media channel, but having everything in one place makes reports easier.

We have had some issues with Sprout since we signed up and the customer service along with the follow-through has been less than ideal. First off you have no account manager, the guy who signed us up washed his hands of us the second he got the check. I found this out when we were having issues connecting our Instagram. After 2 MONTHS, yes 2 months, of talking to support and engineers none of which could help us solve the issue we finally spoke with someone who had an idea of what was going on. After a couple of hours on the phone with him, everything was all fixed, except it wasn't truly fixed. The next day we discovered that since they were having issues connecting our business FB to our business Instagram they just created another business page for us to connect it to. So now we have a business page out there that isn't ours that we can't get Fb to remove.
In addition to this major issue we have has small ones such as not being able to post a gif, and not being able to post multiple photos to Instagram through the desktop. It seems the more we use Sprout the more we realize it is not up to par.

Sprout Social is very effective, especially for duplicating posts and distributing them across social media, because automation allows us to do everything from a single dashboard. Sprout Social's scheduling functionality allows us to post to multiple accounts simultaneously or at different times based on priority. Sprout Social lets us schedule posts, generate reports, analyze data, and makes teamwork easy.

I always want more improvements via upcoming updates, and I want to build more efficient artificial intelligence, so that we can manage all our social media sites better, like liking all flagged posts at the same time. Sprout Social may ignore posts.

It is so nice to be able to have all of my clients' social profiles in one place! With Sprout Social, we're able to not only keep our clients' profiles together, we're able to schedule posts to all of their platforms in the same interface. I think the shining moment for Sprout Social is the Inbox feature, where you can respond and engage with your online social community right there in the Sprout interface. You want to talk about efficiency...our team was spending hours a day logging in and out of different profiles for a client, responding to comments, engaging with other users, etc. Then, they had to do the same thing for the rest of our clients! Having the ability to cut out that unnecessary time spent logging in and out has been a life saver.

Unfortunately, Sprout Social does NOT have the ability to schedule stories on Instagram. While they claim you can "schedule", it's actually a manual process. You can go ahead and create the story post and "schedule" it, but all that means is you'll get an alert to go manually post the story to your profile. This doesn't help increase efficiency and can actually distract from other work in the middle of the day when you have to stop what you're doing to go manually post.

One of the best features on Sprout is the ability to have multiple users create, review, and publish content. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time on our team. The user interface is really nice and accessible, and the features are all the essentials you would want in a scheduling tool plus some bonus features that I don't use often but are nice to have. Most of all, the reporting tool saves me a tremendous amount of time. It's customizable so you can quickly pull a report for a certain channel and window of time when needed.

When drafting content, sometimes it's difficult for tags to load or come through at all, especially with regards to Facebook. I also wish that you could customize the metadata on links in Sprout, with the same functionality of something like Yoast, so that your social person could swap out thumbnails quickly. I do have issues from time to time with what attachments are generated as well; depending on the order in which you insert links into the draft, it will pull different attachments. Sometimes you have to delete and re-insert links in the draft to get the right attachment. It would be better if Sprout added a section to choose the link you want to attach.

Sprout Social is an easy-to-use product that allows the Beginner Social Media Manager/Coordinator the ability to save time and be efficient. It has a basic reporting cluster and overall, it's a good tool.

There was no drap-and-drop ability. This may seem petty but when you're scheduling 60-90 pieces of content per month, having to manually open each desired post to edit the date and/or time so that the posting doesn't clash with another post is quite cumbersome. Furthermore, when you have all of these posts on different days and at different times, it's hard to go into a day and recall which date had which post on which social platform at which time. Seeing all of this in a calendar view and literally moving the desired post and everything that corresponds with it, to another date is soooo easy and pleasant to the mind.

The lack of a social queue was a major deciding factor as well.

Easy to schedule posts, cool upgrades for tracking & analytics. User experience is great

No snapchat or Tiktok integration. Also, its really expensive if you have multiple social channels. Reasonable price for 10 channels but since each FB, insta, twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest etc counts as 1 channel, 10 goes fast. Also, Insta & FB are owned by same company and you can push your insta post to FB automatically so why do each count as a channel against your 10? We have 3 brands so that means I would have to pay for 18 channels (6 for each) with insta, twitter, FB, GMB, LinkedIn, Pinterest, that pricing gets crazy.

Sprout Social is the best solution I've found for managing all social media platforms from one site, including LinkedIn

It could be easier to respond to social media comments. For example, you can't "reply" to a comment, you can only add an additional comment on Facebook.

The best thing about this software is the number of features it offers to facilitate post scheduling without it feeling overwhelming.

The worst part about this software would probably only be the price. While it makes sense to pay for what you get, it was just barely out of our budget at the time.

Sprout Social makes social media management simple. I publish content on a daily basis and review our notifications, messages, and assign tasks when needed. The crop tools help us with our photography and graphics for each platform. Most platforms also allow alt text, which is extremely helpful and is a huge priority for us as an institute of higher education.

Sometimes the content calendar glitches and it shows all of the posts per day, including shares, that we didn't necessarily create. It can be a little messy and difficult to navigate when this happens, but it is rare and likely occurs when the software is going through updates. And who doesn't want updates/improvements? Definitely not a deal breaker in the slightest.

Firstly. Sprout is extremely user friendly and simple to use.
I honestly really enjoyed that all comments and direct messages from any platform are collected in an inbox for me to respond to as soon as possible and never miss a comment. This was very important to me and something that I could not find on other platforms.
I also enjoy the Scheduler, which is important to be but similar to any other scheduler.
The competitors analysis of their social media was very enlightening and brought a whole new spin to the game which I also really appreciated! The software has your typical reporting and listening tools, which is also essential. I would say that sprout is very on point when it comes to doing a cohesive social media strategy. Would definitely recommend to anyone who wants One place to take care of all things social media related.

You can not control any Ad accounts from sprout, but you can engage with boosted posts and ad's once they are live. Hence, sprout will work in compliment with the original ad account.
I also struggled with the fact that I was only allowed 10 accounts. We are not an agency but still need more than 10 social accounts. Their price to add accounts asked too much for us to beable to continue with the purchase of the software. We operate in South Africa. So going from Rand to Dollar is quite a big leap. Although the software has many lovely tools, the price just didn't equate for us.
The only other tool I can think of which would be missing is SEO in terms of Social. Otherwise Sprout Social pretty much has most tools you would need from a Social Managing platform

Sprout is great for interactions. Having over 1000 pages to look after means we need to be able to access specific pages quickly, and view messages for just the one page in a set profile group - this is really easy with Sprout! In terms of quality reviewing responses from a management point of view, it is great - you can see full threads and who did what. For reporting, you can tailor reports for each clients needs. After using an alternative platform, Sprout is MUCH faster all round - finding interactions and, general interaction in terms of loading and sending messages. In regards to task management, it is really good at making sure that you keep on top of things, as you can add an internal note which is front facing when you click into your tasks. The updates are also handy, as you can now select oldest to newest or newest to oldest - when there is a large number of incoming interactions it means there are less loading issues.

Sometimes there are bugs, which can cause functionality issues (but this does happen with all software). Because we are a UK company, and Sprout's support team are in the US it does mean that we have to wait until the afternoon on our time for any additional information - although you are able to log the error you are experiencing.

So many great features and usability! Truly the the most innovative tool for social media on the market.

- It would be nice if when you select multiple social media profiles to post to at the same time it would automatically post to the most optimal time for each instead of averaging the time of all of them.

- If we have a piece of content that we really want people to see, it would be nice to know optimal send time over a given week instead of only being able to see optimal send time on one given day. Maybe it is a a stat that shows up on your dash board like "the best time to post this week is: Thursday at 12:05 PM." Optimal send times could be its own page or report.

- It would be GREAT if you could see a breakdown of business demographics vs personal profile demographics. I think our demographics for Twitter are inaccurate, because most of our followers are businesses/organizations and automatically assign a male gender and random age when they create their profile.

- It is not clear in your "Always up-to-date" specs for LinkedIn the exact size of an image when you post it.

- Exact image specs for social is kinda confusing. It looks like Twitter's in-post preview doesn't match the specs - graphics get cut off. Also, it looks like Twitter and Facebook also previews different content sizes in addition to what is listed on your specs pages. For example, in-post square images show up on Facebook and Twitter without getting cut off. It would be nice to know all the different sizes each social media sizes that are offered as they change.

This software has continued to impress me the longer i have been with it. What continues to impress us is the scheduling, and calendar which is easily to export and send through the clients. It looks great and clients can easily see which dates, and platforms posts will be scheduled in. The new addition on optimal post times when scheduling has really seen an increase in engagement rates and the weekly reports that are being sent out really help our clients, and also ourselves get a better picture on how the page is performing.

One thing that i think they could improve on is their interface a tiny bit. When selecting a page to filter the publishing calendar by, when you select to publish it will default to the last page you published with and not the one you have selected on the side. It's a small issue but i think it could improve the speed of publishing significantly.

The smart inbox is Sprout Social defining feature. It sets Sprout Social apart from its competitors. You can manage every type of interaction (direct messages, mentions, likes, comments, replies, etc.) of all your social media profiles in one single feed which integrates functions as important as task assignment to members of your team.
The smart inbox can be "splitted" into as many inboxs as necesary, depending on your needs, the size of your team, or just for getting more organized your social media feeds and timelines.

The listening features are in a transition period after Sprout Social has acquired Simply Measured. I understand they're integrating both platforms but the "deep listening" features are not available as of July 2018. Having said that, the "Reports" feature is more than enough for providing the metrics and analytics you need in your day to day work.
Also, when you're working with teams of more than five or ten people, you'd like to see a thumbnail pic of them to assign tasks and stuff like that. Well, Sprout only allows the teams members to upload their personal pics through a external WordPress-based platform, Gravatar, which is a bit annoying (we're used to upload profile pics directly from our computers files). It's a minor setback, though.

Smart Inbox: this is the best feature I have come across in social monitoring platform. You choose what results you want to see and it shows you all of them from every platform you choosing in one convenient space, and allows you to respond to any comments/messages, follow back, like, delete, etc. without leaving Sprout's website. I have never had a notification slip through the cracks and it helps immensely with interacting with people on multiple channels

They are a little slow on offering features to utilize updates on social media platforms. They almost always eventually add features, but a nice compromise would be to put out an article or email saying "we know about the update, here's what you need to know, we're working on implementing it on our platform".

I think the Reporting looks highly polished and professional for presenting to clients. For Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter it offers an excellent scheduling and social media management solution.

I think the price is prohibitive for small businesses, and the software is more geared toward agencies. I also wished there was integration with Pinterest and YouTube.

I work for a non-profit, so this software is a great value for the features it offers. It is fairly intuitive and easy to pick up quickly. I like the calendar view, and I like being able to comment on posts that are being drafted to communicate with my coworkers.

There are a few weird quirks it would be great to fix, if possible. Having to manually post the multi-picture instagrams leaves a larger margin for human error (I realize this is mostly instagrams fault, but is a consistent issue I have). While I love being able to message my coworkers in sprout, the notification feature for this could use some improvement. Instead of spamming inboxes (why do I get an email when I make a comment..?), it would be great to have red notification flags within the software (I use a desktop, maybe this is available on the app?), so anytime my coworkers log in they can see it. I also find it frustrating that I need to constantly refresh in order to see the most up to date calendar/drafts. We have many marketing team members, so being able to have it auto refresh would be helpful in keeping up with what is most up to date. I wish I was able to send comments when I send a post for approval (ie. Need to add a picture, should we schedule this for xx date, I'm having trouble with this sentence, how would you phrase it, etc), since the notifications on post comments isn't great and my manager doesn't always see them. Lastly, the desktop version has an outdated emoji keyboard available - would love to see it offer all the emojis you can get on your phone.

It offers simple navigation which helps a new user to use the platform with ease.And also it helps to manage multiple social media accounts in a single platform so that time consumption is less and high productivity.

According to me ,social media management tool is inevitable in my work so I chose tools with chrome extension .This tool ofcourse offers extension but it has little glitch.There is a room of improvement else it is wonderful tool for social media marketers .

Never has managing several social media accounts been so simple. Time is significantly reduced by switching between accounts and scheduling postings. The reports provide precise information about how everything operates and aid in making informed decisions. My teammates enjoy utilizing the user-friendly Functionality since it is so effortless.

The expense is the only drawback. It would have been much more sought after if the pricing had been slightly lower.

The most useful tool of Sprout Social is the smart inbox, which brings together all the interactions, messages and comments of all social media profiles that are handled in a single working queue.
This allows you to easily manage large amounts of work and is particularly useful for CRM jobs with social networks.

The limited capacity to conduct complex social listening research.

Sprout Social saved us so much time with our social media and helped us see what was going on with all of our accounts. We manage 12 different accounts, and this put almost all of it in one place. The user interface is extremely easy once you figure it out, and if you have any issues, the support is instantaneous through the chat feature. You can't afford not to save the time Sprout saves you, so do yourself a favor and get it.

The biggest issue with Sprout Social is that it doesn't actually post to Instagram for you, although it does allow you to create a schedule and then notifies you when to post. That is the single biggest feature that needs to be added, as some other competitors have already done so. But as far as the rest of the social media accounts you can manage, it's second to none.

I like having a hub to store photos (the asset library) as well as a hub for all user activity across multiple social media accounts (smart inbox).

*The maximum number of images that can be added to the Asset Library at a time is 10, and if you want to batch 'tag' all of the photos, you can only choose 1 'tag' per set of 10. For content creators that upload hundreds of photos to the asset library per week (like my team), this makes for an extremely cumbersome process.

*You can't search the asset library by file name. You can only sort by file name, date added/modified /etc or search visually. It is truly incredible that there is no "search by name" function for the asset library.

* The mobile app does not offer access to the Asset Library - a huge pitfall, as my company invests a lot of time and resources in building the Asset Library. We are then unable to publish content on-the-go using asset library images.

*The Reports area does not give the ability to customize the data that appears in a report. i.e. if I want to draw data from multiple reports, I can't choose to create a custom report using only the data I selected.

*The listening tool comes at an added cost.

I really liked that Sprout Social gave me more ways to manage and track my social media profiles then Tweetdeck and Hootesuite. The back end is easy to navigate and the ability to schedule/reschedule out social updates was simpler than any other SMM tool. You can also switch or post of different profiles easily and all from one screen. Replying to comments, sharing, and direct messaging for all profiles can also be done from your back end screen.

I do feel like the analytics they provide you lack depth, especially since LinkedIn doesn't share information with them. You get conflicting information about impression and clicks when compared to Google Analytics or with the social platform itself.