I recently took a social media writing class, and a student asked which analytic tools our teachers recommended to track social media effectiveness. The teachers were technology-agnostic and didn’t provide a direct answer, but I wanted to shout out, “Sprout Social!” I’m a big fan of Sprout Social and think it is a great, inexpensive tool that provides basic reporting metrics for social media campaigns.
“Sprout Social is a solid offering for the smaller brand or agency; it offers robust management tools, and it’s still affordable” – Mashable
Here are five reasons I love Sprout Social:
• Effective Dashboard – When you log in to Sprout Social, the dashboard provides a quick overview of your account’s activity. It scores your engagement and influence level, provides a social scorecard that shows how you’re doing compared to previous weeks, and provides basic stats.
• Reporting – Sprout Social provides basic information about your activity and user activity around your brand. It shows the number of re-tweets, clicks, mentions, new and lost followers/fans, etc. It compiles data from all of your social networks and displays it in well-designed, easy to understand graphs and maps.
• Affordable – Sprout Social offers two plans: Go Pro and Go Business. Go Pro is designed for small and independent companies and costs just $9/month. Go Business is targeted at companies that manage multiple accounts and offers enhanced functionality. It is competitively priced at $50/month. If you aren’t sure which plan is best suited for your company, you can start at Go Pro to test it out and then upgrade to Go Business at a later time.
• Easy to use and understand – Sprout Social has a great interface that is easy to use and understand. It takes very little time to set up your account and familiarize yourself with the features and functionality.
• Schedule tweets and Facebook posts – It allows you to queue up posts in advance and integrates with your bitly account. Before using Sprout Social, when I posted a link I had to leave the social network, go to bitly to shorten the link, and then go back to the social network to post it. Not an ideal user experience. With Sprout Social, I can get a bitly link in seconds and don’t have to leave the page! It saves time and keeps me happy!
These are just a few reasons why I love using Sprout Social to help manage our social media campaigns. What are your favorite tools and services to manage your online presence?
