Sprout Social Review (@SproutSocial)
There are a number of Social Media Management apps available and I have been looking for the best one for me to use to manage my social streams for Web App Central and for my personal social channels.
Having tried a number of different ones, some of which were pretty good, some not so, I have finally settled on a great social media management solution in Sprout Social.
I can give it no louder endorsement than the fact that I have signed up after my 30 day free trial period, despite there being other competitors that are completely free. Sprout Social has a range of plans but their entry level offering is $9 (just under £5.70 at todays exchange rate) per month.
So what can you expect from Sprout Social? What are the key features:
Keep track of how your social channels are performing, including:
How well you are engaging and influencing others
What posts are getting the most reaction from your followers
You can see the demographic breakdown of your followers which helps you to target appropriate posts for your demographic
The dashboard gives you a quick, easy to read and frankly gorgeous view of how your social channels are performing.
In here you have something called the Smart Inbox which displays all the messages that are currently on Twitter which are pertinent to your brand.
You can filter the results here by the social platform, type of message (i.e. Mentions, Direct Messages, Retweets, User Wall Posts, etc), and you can specify brand keywords so that you can easily see who is discussing your brand and what they are saying about it.
As Sprout Social allows you to have multiple users, they also provide Task functionality as well as the ability to add notes to contacts which gives Sprout Social almost like a Social CRM feel to it.
You can also see your Sent messages under the Messages section with details of the number of clicks, responses (broken down separately between Retweets and Replies) and the resulting number of people each post has reached.
You can configure web alerts.
The Feeds tab is where you would see your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds (i.e. all the posts from the people you are following). Sprout Social also integrate with Google Reader so you can also see and share all the RSS feeds that you are subscribed too from this section.
Sprout Social allows you to schedule posts and also has the Sprout queue which will automatically schedule your posts for you. If you are on the Premium plans, the system will automatically schedule the tweets for you at the optimum times, which is something that Sprout Social say will increase engagement by up to 30%.
This is where the system will help you to discover the most appropriate people for you to follow, find new customers, monitor competitor activity and search Twitter via a keyword or person search.
You can see the people who follow you but that you are not following back, see the people you have conversed with or have mentioned you.#
There is also a great Clean Up facility that highlights people who you are following who have gone silent (i.e. they have little or no recent activity), people who have irregular usage and people you follow who have not followed you back.
From here you can easily tidy up your followers by unfollowing them.
Last but definitely not least, the Reports tab is where you see all the gorgeous analytics that Sprout Social has to offer.
You can customise the reports and they can be exported to CSV or PDF with one click.
If you are on the Deluxe plan, you can intergrate with Google Analytics as well.
Finally, they also support mobile devices with a great iPhone app, Android support and I believe they are working on an iPad app (although they have not announced when this will be available yet).
I hope this has given you a flavour for what Sprout Social is. I found it so easy to use when I started my trial, especially after watching one of the twice weekly free product overview webinars that they run, and today I had cause to contact their support team who provided me with a fantastic response.
What more could you want?
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