Sprout Social Review (2024)

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.

Setup and Analytics

We set up Facebook and Twitter pages and an email account to service them, and populated each new social media account with tweets, retweets, and mentions. The accounts weren't swarmed with activity but there was enough activity to test features. Sprout Social's account setup was easy as were the setups with Hootsuite and Zoho Social (15.00 Per Month for the Standard Plan, Billed Monthly at Zoho Social) . They all ask for personal information, email address, and credit card number, though a credit card is not mandated to start. We added LinkedIn and Twitter accounts as separate profiles. Sprout Social pulled in all Twitter data.

Facebook data took a bit longer. At the initial connection of the Facebook page, backfill for that new page happens almost immediately after attachment but it may take 1-2 hours. However, backfill doesn't go through immediately in rare cases, so Sprout Social gives 24 hours as the benchmark for customers upon setup to account for those cases. We got Sent messages in the Smart Inbox to show by unchecking the "Hide Completed Items" box in the Filters menu on the right-hand side of the UI. Once unchecked, our outgoing Facebook activity populated. Hootsuite and Sprout Social both use Facebook Insights, which are only available after at least 30 people like your page.

We tested with Facebook and Twitter accounts but Sprout Social also includes Feedly, Google Analytics, Instagram, and LinkedIn as possible options to hook into. In the interest of testing analytics reporting tasks that involved retweets, we added a team member and sent that person a task to retweet. We also set up a Twitter Comparison Report with a competing brand.

Sprout has made significant improvements to its publishing and analytics suite, adding a built-in Sprout Image Editor built on the Adobe Creative SDK Sprout's image editor to enable publishers to add filters, frames, text overlay and stickers, as well as to adjust color, brightness, shadows, and more. The Image Editor also includes an intelligent crop tool with preset options to resize your social images for specific networks and post type. This feature update gives Sprout Social by far the most powerful social image editing capabilities of the bunch.

Sprout Social also stands out with its social CRM capabilities, providing a set of tools for sales and marketing teams to engage social prospects and leads. Sprout Social also integrates with Zendesk for customer support and released a new Facebook Contact View to help marketers contextually engage Facebook users, reference social conversation histories, and collaborate on a campaign. Contact Views are now available for both Facebook and Twitter.

Finally, there's the Bots section which places a lot of machine learning at the disposal of the user to build a chatbot for the purpose of automating repetitive conversational tasks and resolve customer support issues faster. Instead of having customers wade through your frequently asked questions (FAQ's) these can be sorted through your chatbot. Building a chatbot in Sprout Social is easy and fun, but you need to take care to cover all the bases and provide a logical flow to help customers find answers. There's nothing more infuriating than an ill-designed chatbot confounding customers looking for answers.

Revamped Reporting Suite

Sprout Social's reporting and data analysis capabilities are close to ideal for an SMB. The Group Report gives an overview of your different profile networks; they are shown combined in one graph and separately in others. The Group Report also breaks down the data by profiles/pages attached so you can see things such as Total Fans/Followers, Messages Sent, and Link Clicks.

The Engagement Report starts accumulating data from the date you set up your profiles. In order for Sprout to count engagement actions, they need to be completed through Sprout, which precludes the platform from pulling in historical data. Sprout has released major updates and enhancements to its entire reporting suite in the past year; specifically, it has added the Facebook Competitors Report, Instagram Competitors Report, LinkedIn Sent Messages Report, Scheduled Report Delivery, Advocacy Report, and Report Builder. According to the company, they plan on improving Sprout Social's paid reporting in the near future.

At the moment, Sprout Social delivers competitive analysis through a Twitter Comparison Report, Facebook Competitors Report, and Instagram Competitors Report. You can compare one competitor profile to yours. Your engagement score indicates how well the business interacts with its audience. The higher the engagement value, the more valuable your audience will become to your business. The Influence score indicates business growth and audience interest level, which translates to potential customers. Numbers will start low. The goal is to increase them over time, which will result in greater brand awareness. Sprout Social gathered the minimal quantity of data instantaneously, though it took a day to generate the competitor's metrics. Reports can be exported as CSV or PDF files.

Beyond the Analytics Reports, Sprout Social also includes other social media tool necessities for SMBs such as Influencer Identification, Publishing, Social Listening, and Team Tasking elements in the suite. In regards to social listening and influencer identification, in particular, Sprout's Smart Inbox specializes in Instagram and Twitter. The tool suite includes Twitter keyword monitoring, Instagram keyword and location monitoring, and more advanced listening, including "Share of Voice" metrics for multiple brands or products, comparison reports for Twitter, along with broader trend and engagement reports.

Reporting such as Sprout's Twitter Keyword Report and Trends Report are also quite graphically sleek, and pull out influencers—both brands and individual users—with high follower counts talking about the keywords and topics to which you're listening. The overall social listening and influencer identification has some of the best Instagram-specific metrics and reporting of the tools.

Since we first reviewed Sprout Social, the company has acquired Simply Measured, and the boosting of the platform's reporting capabilities reflects that and makes them a bit more competitive in the enterprise space. With that said, its overall capabilities still paled in comparison to enterprise offerings such as Editors' Choice Talkwalker (Get Demo at Talkwalker) . But, with everything else Sprout can do all rolled into one platform, the value for SMBs is unbeatable.

Since we last reviewed Sprout Social, the company has made a great platform even better. With a refreshed UI and an updated pricing structure, the platform still maintains its Editors' Choice spot for SMBs. This review focuses primarily on Sprout Social Premium capabilities, but at the Professional and Advanced tiers, Sprout has added a bevy of additional features and updates, such as a message approval workflow similar to what you'll find in Sendible (Free Trial at Sendible) and Planable, message tagging for more comprehensive categorization in the Smart Inbox and Compose features, a new Tag Report to analyze the effectiveness and sentiment of marketing campaigns or social initiatives with specific tags. The addition of a chatbot creation function will be valuable for SMBs that are more customer service oriented.

The Team Report also comes with new Reply Metrics to help enterprises identify the social support professionals and marketers with the most effective track record at engaging followers and influencers. At $249 per user per month, the Advanced plan definitely adds more enterprise value in team collaboration and more detailed social marketing analytics and reporting, but may be out of the monthly price range of your everyday SMB.

Sprout Social is a full-service social media suite of tools. It has the best mix of social media management and analytics to serve most SMB's needs. The UI, social networks it supports, and its detailed analytics provide plenty of fodder for SMBs to gain insight from and begin to build a social program on. At $99 as tested, with a focus on the analytics tools combined with its management capabilities, it remains our Editors' Choice for social media management solutions.