An Honest Review of Sprout Social

There are 2 things I despise.

1. Taking twice as long to do something that could be done quickly.

2. Constantly feeling like I am a step behind.

Once you reach a certain point in your following on social media, it’s easy to start feeling both of these things about the whole process!

I started a quest to find a better way to manage it all.

Enter Sprout Social.

This helpful little tool has changed my world! I wanted to share about it with you, in case you are looking for something similar.

What is it?

Sprout Social is a program that can help you manage every aspect of your social media. You pick a plan that suits your business, pay a monthly membership, and then – you can run all aspects of your social media from the dashboard right there.

When you are managing all of the posts, scheduling, comments and replies across multiple platforms – it’s easy to let OVERWHELM creep in. Sprout kind of tackles that overwhelm in one fell swoop.

What does Sprout Social do?

You can do everything from creating and scheduling posts, to responding to comments, to keeping an eye on your competitors. Some of the many features include:

• Creating and scheduling posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google +, and LinkedIn
• Seeing all of your posts in one calendar (across all your social platforms)
• Replying and responding to all comments easily in the dashboard
• Finding all comments and mentions of your brand (even when you aren’t actually tagged!)
• Getting constant analytics of all of your social accounts (so you can actually KNOW what’s working.)
• Keeping tabs on competitors of your choosing and how their accounts compare to yours
• It identifies the biggest influencers that are connecting with your brand
• It can even identify the best times to send your posts and tweets!
• Keeping a thread of your interactions with customers. (Example: when you reply to a Tweet, you can see right there all previous tweets and messages between you and this customer.)
• Allowing you to task things and make comments among your own team.
• Allowing you to create drafts of posts, get approval for them, etc. (Perfect if you are having an assistant or intern creating posts.

What does Sprout Social cost?

One great things to note: ALL plans have a free trial option, so you can test it out first. And – you don’t have to give them your credit card with the free trial, so there’s no risk.

All pricing is based per user. So if it’s just you = 1 user. If you have a team that will need logins, that’s more users. (Sorry if that was insultingly simple, just going for clarity!)

There are 3 plans:

The premium plan is $99 per month/per user.

The corporate plan is $149 per month/per user.

The enterprise plan is $249 per month/per user.

If you are not sure which plan you need, not to worry – you can always switch plans after you get going.

My favorite aspects of Sprout Social:

If you’ve been around Social Media and Coffee for long, you know that I love to find ways to do things really well, without it taking all of my time and energy. Sprout Social allows that.

I love the feeling of logging in to my dashboard, replying to all the comments, and knowing that I haven’t missed anything. Before Sprout, I always felt like I was chasing all over the internet and social sites looking for comments, replies and reviews – and always felt like I was missing something major.

It saves SO MUCH TIME and energy to just log in one place and see it all.

That alone is worth the cost to me personally.

How does Sprout Social improve your business?

A successful social media presence requires a lot of attention and engagement with our customers. (Especially since the recent Newsfeed changes with Facebook!)

Without a great tool, that level of engagement is difficult to achieve.

Also – Sprout’s analytics are powerful! You can see what you are doing and whether it’s working. You can set goals for your social media presence and actually KNOW if what you are doing is getting you closer to your goals.

Sprout takes the guesswork out of that.

And, Sprout simply gives you more time. Scheduling posts and managing engagement becomes so simple that it takes considerably less time overall.

I’m guessing we could all use a little more time in the day!

How about you? Have you tried Sprout Social? Head over and try out the free trial. I would love to know what you think!