Sprout Social 2022 Review: Is Sprout Social Worth It?
Social media management tools have become increasingly popular over the last few years, and sproutsocial, in particular, has enjoyed great growth due to its ease of use and value-for-money pricing.
However, as with any other service, there are some pros and cons to using Sprout Social that potential users should be aware of before making their decision.
What Is Sprout Social?
Sprout Social is an all-in-one platform that provides everything you need to manage social media.
You can publish, schedule, and post content, measure performance, make reports, and more.
It integrates with most, if not all, social media platforms at this point.
Its CRM tool allows your team members to track conversation history, contact information, and other notes for customer interactions.
If you need reports on your competitors, it’s also very helpful.
The Main Features of Sprout Social
1. Dashboard
The dashboard is where you’ll spend most of your time, and it’s a simple web interface with a lot of features.
The interface is streamlined and intuitive, so even if you’ve never used the platform before, it should be easy to figure out where everything is.
Here you can do several things:
- Create a new social media post
- Open conversations among team members
- Connect a new profile
- Open sproutsocial’s help center or start a live chat session with the support.
- View a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts
2. Publishing
The Publishing tool is divided into several sections, starting with a social media calendar.
You can view scheduled posts in different formats with this calendar.
You can use different filters to narrow your view down to specific social media profiles, post types (queued, drafted, needs approval, etc.), as well as tags.
This tool makes social media scheduling vital to any business’s social media marketing strategy.
So, instead of logging into each social media platform to create each post one by one, you can schedule all of them at once with a single draft.
3. Reports
Sprout Social shows you different reports for individual platforms.
This way, you can view metrics for post-performance, audience growth, impressions, and more like any other social media management tool.
These reports are divided into four categories:
- Strategy & Insights,
- Competitive Analysis,
- Content Performance,
- Customer Care & Team Performance.
Sprout Social Pricing and Plans
- The Standard plan costs $89/month per user if billed annually. This plan supports five profiles. You can publish, schedule, draft, and queue posts, among other things.
- The Professional plan costs $149 per user/month (billed annually). You get 10 profiles with more available for purchase. You get everything the Standard Plan has, plus competitive reports for different social media platforms, scheduling for optimal send times, etc.
- The Advanced Plan costs $249 per user/month (billed annually), and it also supports 10 profiles. With this sproutsocial plan, you get automation tools, chatbots, automated link tracking, and more.
Conclusion
Pros
Sprout Social is a decent tool for social media management.
The social calendar workflow is a proper solution for getting client approval for scheduled posts before they go live.
It is user-friendly, and it helps organize social media posts with a single login.
It’s a great tool for a business with an internal marketing department; however, it’s not an enterprise tool.
If you have a small business, the limitation of ten platforms and the expense of adding more can get really expensive.
It provides good analytics of what is working and what is not.
If you need to make decisions based on data, Sprout won’t disappoint, and the ability to track competitors is an excellent tool.
Cons
There are a few downsides to this tool, though.
If you need to post carousels and stories, Sprout Social can’t really help.
You cannot edit your posts once they get approved for publishing.
And while reports are a must, there’s no way of seeing gross follower gain/loss.
This makes it difficult to understand if that growth is organic or not.
The tool is somewhat on the expensive side, so keep that in mind before committing to Sprout Social.
