Sprout Social

One of the best features on Sprout is the ability to have multiple users create, review, and publish content. This has saved us a tremendous amount of time on our team. The user interface is really nice and accessible, and the features are all the essentials you would want in a scheduling tool plus some bonus features that I don't use often but are nice to have. Most of all, the reporting tool saves me a tremendous amount of time. It's customizable so you can quickly pull a report for a certain channel and window of time when needed.

When drafting content, sometimes it's difficult for tags to load or come through at all, especially with regards to Facebook. I also wish that you could customize the metadata on links in Sprout, with the same functionality of something like Yoast, so that your social person could swap out thumbnails quickly. I do have issues from time to time with what attachments are generated as well; depending on the order in which you insert links into the draft, it will pull different attachments. Sometimes you have to delete and re-insert links in the draft to get the right attachment. It would be better if Sprout added a section to choose the link you want to attach.

I've been using Sprout Social for a while now and it's been a good tool for managing our social media presence. The ease with which I can pre-schedule posts and preview them as they will appear natively on each platform is nice. What I find especially helful is the unified dashboard that allows me to view and respond to all comments, tags, and direct messages across multiple social media sites. The Smart Inbox feature is a huge time saver as it eliminates the need to log in to each platform individually.

A negative point is its cost, compared to other platforms that perform the same function, I consider it expensive, another negative point is the customer service, it is slow and it takes time for them to understand the problem, I think they need better training.

Our team has used a variety of social media scheduling platforms, including Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and others, and Sprout Social is by far our favorite for many reasons.

• As an agency with hundreds of profiles, Sprout Social makes multiple account management a breeze.
• The scheduling browser is very easy to use.
• It offers ideal posting times to help you optimize reach and engagement.
• It offers a birdseye view of the month. (One of our pain points with Hootsuite was that this was not an option.)

There are also many features that those who work with social media every day can appreciate that the average user might not, such as:

• The option to schedule and create a new post without having to click into a new window each time.
• The ability to download reports by platform and specific date easily and quickly.
• The option to view data which allows you to see which content is performing the best.

I won't beat around the bush. It's pricey. Very pricey. If you're a freelancer or not using social media daily, it may not be worth the investment. If you're an agency working with multiple clients or if social media is part of your daily routine, a scheduling software that offers everything Sprout Social offers is well worth it.