What do you like best about the product?

Sprout allows social media managers to schedule content through multiple platforms while tracking in depth results that help grow your social presence.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is nothing that I would say is least helpful, but I would add that using a marketing automation tool such as Sprout has been known to descend said ranking content in the algorithms on FB, insta, and Twitter.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I have realized it helps social media managers stay organized, track content, test content, and pin point where and how you might be losing or gaining followers/clicks.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Use it! it us way better than hootsuite or any other tool out there.

What do you like best about the product?

Sprout Social is an excellent tool for building and publishing social media content calendars across a large number of social media profiles. For agencies dealing with franchises or multi-unit businesses, sometimes we need to publish very similar on-brand content with just certain key words that are different, such as a location phone number or city. Combined with an Excel automation we developed to auto populate these items from our internal CRM, we're able to use Sprout Social's bulk scheduling tool to schedule these posts in a way that is time efficient and error free.

When accounts get disconnected due to an Instagram verification issue or password change, Sprout Social's reconnection process is quick and seamless, keeping down time low. Having worked previously in Falcon.io, that platform often kicked hundreds of accounts off at once, for example every time one of the platforms updated its API, and required us to manually reconnect every single one, which took days and resulted in many clients missing out on promised content - not to mention sometimes content was not published and didn't notify us that there was an error. I trust Sprout Social to get the job done and keep our clients happy! The customizable social metrics reports are also great.

I also enjoy Sprout Social's online response capabilities. After recently attempting to use another platform, Social Studio, to respond to social media comments on behalf of my clients, I found Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Sprout allows you to easily filter and respond to comments directly on paid/dark Instagram and/or Facebook ads as well as regular organic posts and Facebook recommendations, viewing entire conversation threads while moving new/unhandled comments to the top of your queue. Sprout Social recently added review monitoring/response integration with Google My Business and Tripadvisor as well, so it has become a very useful tool for us.

Sprout Social has a dedicated rep for our team who proactively reaches out whenever there are updates to the platform so she can walk us through them, and aside from that periodically talks with us to make sure we're getting the best use based on all of the platform's capacity. I have spoken with and assessed many similar platforms and found that Sprout Social is more affordable for what it offers.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish Sprout Social integrated with Yelp reviews, but Yelp's API is open to very few (if any).
My rep at Sprout Social told me they're working on some more robust reporting for the online response/monitoring side of the platform, but she offered some solutions that are working for us right now, as we're able to track tagging well.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scalability is huge for us as an agency, and Sprout Social allows us to manage the diverse social media planning, scheduling, reporting and online response monitoring and management needs of a large number of clients in a way that is efficient, effective, and reliable. Sprout Social is continuously evolving the platform to stay at the forefront of the evolving digital landscape.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

You will likely have regrets if you choose a different platform -- no regrets with Sprout Social.

What do you like best about the product?

The ability to set up a workflow where someone can create posts and someone else can approve/edit/reject them before they are finally scheduled is invaluable. Also, the calendar view, which allows us to see what is scheduled, when it will post and where it will post to — indispensable.

What do you dislike about the product?

With the rise of Facebook groups, I would love to have the ability to manage groups from within Sprout, rather than having to go to Facebook. There's a Facebook thread where I have seen this feature requested for several years now from many users, so it's definitely something that is needed, not just for our organization.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We're effectively monitoring and managing all our social media under a single umbrella. Time savings, organization and workflow approval are the top benefits we have seen.

Being able to set roles and permissions for users within Sprout — per social media page — lets us properly control who has access to post on which page.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Make sure you set your roles up properly. It's easy to just give everyone blanket access to everything, but as your company grows, it becomes more apparent that you really should set things up on an "as needed" basis only.

What do you like best about the product?

We love being able to seamlessly post on multiple sites at once. Not only is it easy to schedule, but also to duplicate posts and change them slightly based on the audience/event. It has made us more efficient on social media, reaching more of an audience to share our mission.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish there was a way to post on instagram stories.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our team is spending less time on social media throughout the day because we are able to schedule a full week/month's worth of posts at once. It is saving us time and allowing us to focus on other things throughout the week.

Additionally, we are better engaging with our social media following because we can do more with sprout social.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would highly recommend Sprout Social to anyone looking to streamline their social media efforts, save time and be more engaging with their following!

What do you like best about the product?

It's a user-friendly program that has the comparative reports that are important to analyzing our success. The Sprout Social app is responsive and doesn't have any bugs (which was a problem with a competitor).

What do you dislike about the product?

I haven't found any downsides to using the platform. In fact, I tried a competitor for a year (it was less money), and immediately regretted it because of problems with it—which were never addressed even though there were multiple complaints.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It allows me to do my job seamlessly. I can schedule posts, both with my desktop and with the phone, when I'm on the go. I have several students who work for me and they are able to create their own posts, which I can then easily edit, publish, etc. The report functions are accurate and incredibly easy to share with colleagues, which enables us to make decisions on future content.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

It's a responsive and impressive product.

What do you like best about the product?

As a small team, Sprout Social is absolutely necessary in helping keep us organized and on track to reach our digital media goals. The scheduling feature is by far the best and allows you to track everything with no limits when it comes to reporting.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish the Instagram feature allowed for multiple photos posts. I also wish the reporting "compare" feature allowed you to compare to the previous year or a select time frame compared to just the previous amount of time. For example, comparing July of this year to July of last year instead of just July to the month prior.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Time management, organization, reporting, success metrics and engagement monitoring

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Sprout Social has helped ease the stress that comes with managing day-to-day social media as well as long term strategy. It has helped my team become more efficient as well as provided insight on areas to improve on!

What do you like best about the product?

Being able to always reach out to our rep with any questions or concerns and knowing we'll speak to someone. The new features that are being rolled out throughout the year ensure we're able to provide the best service to our customers and stand behind the results.

What do you dislike about the product?

I dislike, especially with LinkedIn, the profiles constantly disconnecting themselves. As an agency, we don't always have the passwords on file and going to the customer often causes a lot of unnecessary back and forth.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

For many of our clients being able to provide hard results through the reporting and being able to create strategies based off those results shows are worth.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the reporting that Sprout offers, the ability to schedule all posts, the suggested time for posting, and the ability to create chatbots!

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish Instagram carousels could post automatically but other than that, love Sprout!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Makes managing multiple accounts so much easier because I have everything in one spot!

What do you like best about the product?

I can schedule social media for every account in one place.

What do you dislike about the product?

Sometimes there's a bug where I can't reschedule tweets. I have to restart my computer to get it to work.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Problems: buggy interface
Benefits: everything in once place, convenient to use, calendar format helps me see how all our posts are spread out.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Make sure to include hashtags you'd like to follow in your messages.

What do you like best about the product?

The optimal send times is the most helpful part of Sprout. Being able to see top posts and analytics is very helpful and it allows us to tweak our strategy accordingly.

What do you dislike about the product?

After using Sprout for about 8 months here are some recommendations that could optimize user experience:
1. Default optimal send time when scheduling a post. If multiple channels are selected (using same image) automatically select the optimal send time for each platform. I have to take a lot of extra steps to schedule each individual post and select send time.
2. Break down audience to show personal and business accounts. For example, we use Twitter for B2B and our data says that most of our audience is male when in fact most of the pages we follow are organizations and its likely they just selected a gender when creating their account.
3. There's a glitch when posts are moved or scheduled, you always have to refresh the page for it to show up on the publishing calendar view.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Social media consolidation ability to break down data for platforms. After using Sprout, I'm not sure how there was any other way to manage social media.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you're new to social media management tools, Sprout Social is the total package. I look forward to continuing to work with this company because they improve features as social media changes and provide credible resources for social trends and tips.