What is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is a social media management tool, enabling business owners and marketers to schedule posts, manage engagement and measure results across multiple social media channels.

The platform provides a kickass array of analytics reports, all of which can be exported or sent directly via email to present the fruit of your blood, sweat and tears to the boys upstairs.

How Much Does Sprout Social Cost?

Billed annually, monthly payment plans include:

Standard Plan
$89/user/month
  • 5 social profiles
  • All-in-one social inbox
Professional Plan
$149/user/month
  • 10 social profiles
  • Competitive reports
  • Smart scheduling at optimal times of the day
Advanced Plan
$249/user/month
  • 1 social profiles
  • Chatbots
  • Asset and content library
  • Inbox automations

There are additional costs for adding social profiles and advanced tools such as "social listening", but for the majority of SMEs, the base plans have you covered.

For small companies with one social media user, the Standard Plan works great. The plan includes our favourite feature: the all-in-one social inbox. More on that later.

Costs get a little hairy as you scale up with users, so you need to justify the value each additional member brings to the table.

We use the Advanced Plan at Digidom. As an agency, the advanced automation helps us support multiple clients with efficiency.

What Are the Alternatives to Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is our weapon of choice, but there are other social media management platforms out there.

The top two rivals, as we see it, are Buffer and Hootsuite.

We've used both and they work great. They are cheaper alternatives to Sprout and are well-suited for inhouse social media teams.

Why We Use Sprout Social

As an agency, we find Sprout is a clear leader at managing many clients and organisations under a single account. Each client has its own “Group” of profiles, its own workflows for approving posts, and its own inbox and reports.

There is one stand-out feature that we now just couldn't live without, and that's its all-in-one social inbox, AKA Smart Inbox.

Smart Inbox

Unique to Sprout Social, Smart Inbox is a game-changer. It collates all messages from all channels in to a single feed. A message could be a new post, a mention, a comment, a chatbot result—basically any form of engagement. You can even ban unruly folks from interacting with your organisation's Facebook pages directly from the inbox console.

Inbox filters let you view messages of certain types. Maybe you'd like to focus on replying to comments on your paid social ads, no problem. Or, say you need to export all replies on posts tagged as “competition”, the inbox filters have got your back.

Combined with Sprout's rule builder, you can automate the hell out of your inbox. For example, you can send a mobile and email notification to a particular user, if a message hits your inbox containing a certain keyword or phrase. Powerful stuff.

Sprout Agency Partner

We recently joined Sprout's Agency Partner Program and have enjoyed becoming experts as we keep our client's profiles buzzing.

Sprout's made our day-to-day social media work more enjoyable, engaging and more productive. It's a keeper.