I ♥ Sprout Social

Sprout Social, the social media workflow software, asked me to publish an ‘honest review’ of their product. Here’s what I think, no holds barred!  

As the Community Manager here at inbound marketing agency Tomorrow People, I’ve long been a lover of Sprout Social, the social media workflow software. So when they asked me to write an honest review of the product, I was happy to oblige – because being honest is easy when everything you have to say is good!

Sprouts: not just for Christmas

Sprout Social, for those who haven’t used it, is a social media metrics tool which can integrate with Google Analytics. It’s a series of dashboards which give you at-a-glance statistics on how many people are following your social media engagement, which of your company profiles are popular and which of your team need some gentle encouragement (or a kick up the backside) to engage more on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Sprout Social is a top level tool every PR and marketing professional can benefit from. I also use it to learn more about my target audience’s age and gender.

My Top Five Features

It lets me know if I’m not working hard enough!

Sprout Social offers ‘Engagement and Influence Scoring’ statistics and measurements. I can track mentions of my clients’ brand names, keywords and products, new Twitter and Facebook followers and blog traffic. Engagement is measured as ‘high’ or ‘low’ based on past performance – so I don’t have to keep spread sheets.

It can manage all my clients’ social media profiles at the same time

I’d go mad trying to manage all my clients and social media profiles without Sprout Social. I’ve tried lots of social media management tools, and this is one of very few which makes it easy to switch from one client to the next – a must for agencies.

It’s on my smartphone

Well, it would be awful to pop out to lunch and not know who’s retweeting… Sprout Social’s dashboards look great and are simple to follow both on my PC screen and my iPhone. I can easily post to multiple networks at once while I hoof my meatball marinara. Which doesn’t sound like much, but many software products get it wrong with ugly, complicated interfaces.  

It lets me view contacts’ social media presence

A big part of my work is following (stalking!) influential people. I often notice vocal, powerful people within an industry who I want to collaborate with. Sprout Social allows me to track all their tweets so I never miss a message. Of course, I could do this on Twitter, but it would involve changing screens a lot.

It lets me keep notes on my past history with contacts

It’s easy to track my engagement with someone without having to remember it on Sprout Social. I can also search Twitter profiles for keywords – to find out who my next friends will be.

Check out their blog

Did I also mention that they have an amazing blog that I subscribe to that gives me all the latest updates across all social media platforms? Be sure to subscribe!

Would I like Sprout Social too?

I love Sprout Social because it’s simple. It’s not a marketing automation system or an email marketing software –  it’s just a monitoring tool. It’s not expensive (US$99 a month) and it’s easy-to-use.

If you need a sanity check – on those days when you feel like you’re tweeting to no one, and need some reassurance that your social media marketing strategy is working – Sprout Social is for you. And if you need to generate good looking, accurate reports for a client, Sprout Social is highly recommended!