Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that allows businesses to efficiently and effectively manage & grow their social presence across multiple channels and turn social connections into loyal customers. Overall, this is really good tool. You can easily connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Analytics accounts and manage them all from one convenient location. For business owners that don’t have the time to waste checking and updating several different social media sites, and don’t have the budget to pay a high priced consultant or service, this is a great tool. You can easily update all your social networks in one place, find new customers with their advanced search technology, monitor conversations taking place across the web either about your brand or your industry, and easily organize all your social media connections in one place, complete with history, notes and more, using the address book feature. They also provide really great analytics that give you detailed information on followers, influence, engagement, clicks and more – all in colorful, intuitive charts & graphs. You can review the data right from your browser, or you can create branded PDF reports with the click of a button (data can also be downloaded in CSV form).

Another great part about this tool is the customer service. Every time I have had a question or needed some help, whether I reached out via email or twitter, I have always gotten a prompt and friendly response. Including follow-ups to make sure I was completely satisfied with the help I was provided.

Highlights

Discovery:

There are 3 types of searches you can perform in this section of the application. Keyword searches, People searches and Business searches. They keyword search allows you to enter different keywords or phrases around your business to search either Twitter or the web to help find new people to connect with, conversations to participate in or content to share with your community. You can choose to either search globally or locally.

Schedule:

You can not only send out one-time, immediate, messages through the platform, but you can also schedule repeat messages. You can choose what day of the week and time you want your message to be sent, and how long you want to to run for (a specific end date or until you manually edit it to stop sending). It even has a link shortner, which you can link to your bitly account, so you can maximize your message and keep track of your links.

Points for Improvement:

Single User Log-on:

One of the issues on the reviewing moment was that you can only have one user logged in at a time. My partner and I both use the service to manage our social media, as well as several clients. We work in separate cities, so when I am in the system and he goes to log on, it kicks me off. I emailed Sprout Social support to see if they allowed multiple users to login at once, and unfortunately I was informed that they do not have that functionality yet.

Engagement and Influence Scores:

It is not really clear how these scores are determined. There have been times when the more you engage with people on Twitter, the lower score goes. Also, while it does explain what the scores mean and how you compare to the average user (which is nice), but what would be really is more suggestions of what you can do to improve your sores in these categories.