Sprout Social is one of the first and most venerable social media management and analytics solutions in the industry. Having landed a $40.5 million round of Series D funding in December 2018, it has continued to add functionality for small to midsize businesses (SMBs). Starting at $99 per user per month for the Standard plan, Sprout Social offers a good balance of social media management and analytics that can be the sweet spot for most businesses and their social media managers. For its overall quality and feature depth, Sprout Social earns the PCMag Editors' Choice award in our social media management review roundup.
Sprout Social also offers social listening and influencer identification features, and even has some social media-oriented customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, too. Sensible pricing, an intuitive user interface (UI), and impressive analytics capabilities are what keep the solution in its market leadership position, especially for SMBs that may find that it answers most of their needs.
Pricing, Features, and User Interface
Being one of the first social media management solutions puts Sprout Social at an advantage. The company now has over 25,000 customers, and has listened and learned from them to refine its features and functionality. With a massive collection of data points, Sprout Social has a deep understanding of where the industry is going and what problems need to be solved.
This is evident once you set up your dashboard. Sprout Social pushes a series of pop-up questionnaires to you to better determine your company's needs. This means Sprout Social experiences can be shaped depending on your immediate needs, and it saves a lot of time.
The company offers a fully functional and hassle-free 30-day trial, without requiring you to plunk down a credit card. There are now three pricing tiers: Standard, which begins at $99 per user per month and gives you five social profiles; Professional, which begins at $149 per user per month and gives you 10 social profiles and added features; and Advanced, which begins at $249 per user per month and gives you still the same 10 social profiles and even more features like chatbot integration, a digital assets and content library, and message spike alerts. As you go up the tier ladder, Sprout Social adds new features on top of the lineup from the tier below. The Advanced tier is a better deal than that of Mention ($299.00 at Mention) , which is over the $200 price mark and monitors fewer social sources. But Sprout Social isn't as good a deal as you'll find in other combined social publishing and analytics platforms, such as Hootsuite, Sendible, and Zoho Social.
Clean design usually means something is missing but not in Sprout Social's case. Across the very top of the screen, the Flowkey Productivity bar shows tabs for Messages, Tasks, Feeds, Publishing, Listening, Reports, and Bots. Font choice and sizing is modern and elegant. The gray-and-white background is restrained, interlaced across the top with gray icons the user can click to switch groups, connect a new social profile, invite team members, or view tasks. Below these activity-oriented elements are informational sections, such as New Messages, Publishing Queue, and Daily Engagements. In the very top right-hand corner, you'll find the Universal Gear Settings icon. The dashboard is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, which is not as many languages as the dashboard in Hootsuite provides. That said, Sprout Social can translate over 50 languages by using Google Translate, as can Hootsuite.
You easily get to the Analytics area by selecting Reports. It takes you to updated Reports Home screen as the default, which displays all of the available reports. At the bottom of the scroll-down page, you'll find your Google Analytics report, which will populate your data (as long as you have the app attached). There are nine standard reports in the Premium plan and 22 standard reports in the Enterprise plan. This also includes a button you can use to create a report with customized branding.
PROS
- Manages social media channels and brands in a cohesive and powerful dashboard.
- Solid reporting capabilities.
- Strong social CRM and help desk features.
CONS
- Social listening and keyword monitoring options are limited in Basic tier.
- Adding multiple users can get expensive for SMBs.
How it works
Using Landscape is simple and easy to understand with easy to follow steps. The app can be found on the Insights page on the Sprout Social website and is one of many tools developed by the company to help social marketers create and distribute content on the platforms they use. The steps for using Landscape are as follows:
- Upload the selected image to the page on Sprout Social.
- Select the networks for which you want to resize the image. The platform currently supports image formats for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ LinkedIn and YouTube.
- If you are planning to use the image for a social network that is not listed, you can click on the “Custom” box, which allows you to enter your own resizing dimensions.
- Select the type of post you want to create with your image. Options include profile images (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and In-stream wide photos.
- Go ahead and crop the image, all the while ensuring you are selecting the best parts of the image and taking care not to crop out any essential content.
- Once completed, a ZIP file will be created with your newly resized images, which are also automatically renamed to indicate which network and setting they will be used for.
- You can then import the files and share them accordingly on the social networks you desire or you may use another Sprout Social tool called Sprout to schedule the posts on their respective platforms.
