The Pros and Cons of Using Sprout Social for Your Business

When it comes to managing your social media accounts, it’s important to select the right social media management tool. Sprout Social is a tool that I use frequently to schedule a variety of different social media posts for an array of clients. It gives you the ability to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms at certain times. However, with any tool out there, it comes with its own set of pros and cons. We will further explore these pros and cons to help you make a better-informed decision about whether Sprout Social is a good tool for you to use or not.

Pros

Well-Organized Dashboard

The dashboard on Sprout Social is well-organized with easy access to different tools. This dashboard is broken down into six main categories – Messages, Tasks, Feeds, Publishing, Discovery, and Reports. These are spread right across the top in a line making it very simple to find what you are looking for and to navigate there.

sprout social dashboard layout

Analytics / Reports

The Reports section of Sprout Social is helpful when it comes to engagement and monitoring how your posts and social media accounts are growing. There is an option to look at your profile performance across different social media platforms including getting a look at how competitors compare to your profiles. You can also choose to connect your Google Analytics to gain an even better understanding of how your social media posts are driving traffic to your site. Ultimately, this is a valuable section on Sprout Social to keep tabs on how your social media accounts are performing.

Finding Content

This is a cool feature that Sprout Social introduced in 2018 where you can find content ideas to share on your social media profiles. This can come in handy when you are out of ideas and are having a tough time finding content. You simply go to the publishing tab and use the “find content” tool. From there, you can select a specific category such as Business, Health, Sports, and much more. After that, different relevant articles will appear that can be immediately sent to compose to share.

Sprout Social Find Content Screen

Scheduling

Scheduling social media posts is relatively a breeze with Sprout Queue. This is an advantageous tool that Sprout Social has created that allows users to set specific times and days that you want content to be posted. This removes the hassle of manually deciding what time of the day to schedule a post for. You can find content at any time and place it in the Sprout Queue and you can rest assured that it will be posted on the correct day and time that you have specified.

Sprout Queue

Cons

Pricing

The pricing of Sprout Social is a big pain point that turns away many businesses from choosing to use this social media management tool. The Standard plan starts out at $99/month per user. This includes the basic essential tools that you would need with 5 social profiles. The next step up is the Professional plan which is $149/month per user that includes additional features and 10 social profiles. The top-tier Advanced plan is $249/month per user that gives you access to premium features and 10 social profiles. Something to note, these prices are based upon only one user. So, if you have a team of people that need access to Sprout Social, you can imagine how these prices climb rapidly. If you want to give Sprout Social a try, they do offer a 30-day free trial with no credit card needed to see if it’s a good fit for your social media management needs.

Sprout Social Pricing Packages

Compose Window

While Sprout Social has made changes to enhance the compose window such as including a network preview, it is still something that could use improvement. The placement of the compose button is awkwardly tucked away in the upper right-hand corner of the screen making it difficult to see at times. Also, if you choose to download the Sprout Social Google Chrome extension, be ready for problems. This extension can be difficult to use across some platforms including Pinterest. Using this feature should help make scheduling easier, however, it usually takes a few tries to get the right information into the compose section. This adds unnecessary time to scheduling posts when it should be a simple process.

Kelli Kaufman

Kelli joined the Netvantage Marketing team as a Junior Search Analyst in April 2018. She assists the search engine optimization team as well as managing clients' social media accounts.

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