2022 is the year of great social media software, and we have discovered the best one yet. Sprout Social is a fully-featured social media software that we can’t keep our hands off of! Here are five reasons why our agency only uses this social media software:
1. Robust, customizable auto-reporting capabilities
One of the most important things we do as an agency is to show our clients what is working, what isn’t working, and why, while identifying key opportunities for future social media content. Sprout Social has really fantastic reporting tools that allow us to paint this picture in an easy, digestible format with graphs and charts.
Reports can be customized to show specific platforms and metrics, so we are always tracking against KPIs.
Sprout Social will automatically send this report in a PDF version to up to 25 different email addresses – none of which need to be on your Sprout account.
It’s worth noting that as of publication date on this blog, Sprout Social (and all other third party platforms using API data to pull in info) does not provide any reporting data on Instagram Reels. Our current workaround is to pull Reels analytics natively from within Instagram and add this information in a text box in the report.
2. Publish to all your favourite social networks from one place
Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Google My Business are all available platforms to publish to from within Sprout Social. Plus you can add in Google Analytics, Trip Advisor, Glassdoor and Yelp for reputation management purposes.
This means Sprout Social can be your one singular social media scheduling tool, which saves time, money and extra effort! There’s no need to hobble together a combination of native posting plus various singular social publishing tools.
3. Smart scheduling
Posting Times
Ever wondered what’s the best time to post on social media? Sprout Social has proprietary tools built right into the schedule which gives you the optimal posting time for your account.
Optimal Send Times eliminates the guesswork of posting content by offering a list of suggested times based on engagement factors, enabling us to maximize the reach of the content we share.
Asset Library
The Sprout Social Asset Library is a fantastic place to keep frequently used captions (like contact information), hashtags or visual assets. This speeds up scheduling by adding pre-saved text to captions with a click of the button.
Tags
Post tagging allows us to further analyze the performance of specific types of posts. This is an internal Sprout Social tool that allows us to create various categories of tags that are applied to posts when scheduling. After posts have been published, we can then monitor the success of various post types overtime. This provides us (and our clients) important data so we can make fully informed tactical decisions on what types of content specific audiences, platforms and accounts prefer.
Just like Reels reporting, Sprout Social currently does not publish directly to Instagram Reels. Our internal workaround is to schedule this through the mobile publishing workflow for manual publishing.
4. Easy community management
Never miss a comment or DM again! Sprout Social has Smart Inbox – a way of managing comments and DMs all from within the Sprout Social dashboard and mobile app.
Smart inbox will pull in your comments, ad comments, direct or private messages, retweets, media tags and mentions from all connected social platforms into one convenient feed. You can respond directly to all of these from within Sprout, or click to view the comment in the native platform.
Benefits of Smart Inbox:
- You can have a team of people responding who do not require native access to social platforms
- Messages/comments can be marked as “complete”, keeping track of who still requires a response
- You can set up tasks to have specific individuals within your Sprout account take action
- You can even start an internal chat about specific messages/comments
One missing element in Smart Inbox: You won’t be able to see Reels comments or mentions on Reels as this function is not available yet due to API limitations. Our internal workaround is to check in directly for these on the Instagram app while doing other manual publishing work.
5. The super sweet extras
Industry Expert Webinars
By far some of the best, most educational and informative, high-level webinars that we have ever attended have been put on by Sprout Social. Their “Agency Week” series of webinars provided great insight into ways of expanding our business and leveling up our offerings. Sprout pulls in experts from various industries and agencies of all sizes.
Agency Partner Portal
An exclusive benefit for Sprout Agency Partners, the Partner Portal provides our team with partner-exclusive content, like customizable slide decks, benchmarking data, templates and more.
Sprout Community Hub
A brand new forum for Sprout Social users to discuss various topics pertaining to social media and also Sprout-specific features. It’s a fantastic place to touch base with fellow social media agencies and a great way to find out what’s coming next on Sprout and to suggest new features and integrations.
Learning Portal
Learning a brand new social media management platform can be daunting. As can training every individual on your team and every new person who joins your company. Sprout Social has a fantastic learning portal that walks you through all the various areas of the platform. There are video how-tos, in depth explanations and courses specific to all of the areas of Sprout and various social media platforms.
You can even get Sprout-Certified (like us) by taking specific courses and passing tests.
Dedicated Customer Success Manager
Having a direct line to someone at Sprout to help with training, questions, strategy, planning and onboarding is hugely helpful. As an agency partner, we get quarterly calls with our rep where they update the entire Legendary team on what’s coming up next with Sprout, they answer any questions we have, provide insight into best practices and listen and pass along our suggestions and ideas on where Sprout can be improved. (Shout out to our awesome success manager, Sam!)
Legendary Social Media is Sprout Social Platform Certified and Premium Analytics Pro Certified. We are loyal and daily users of Sprout Social, which makes it easy to stay organized, schedule posts, respond to messages, create reports and have a solid overview of all of our client accounts.
If you are interested in using Sprout Social, click our referral link to get started.
Check out our related articles:
- How people will shop from social media in 2022
- Organic social media metrics that matter in 2022 (and how to track them)
- The best social media platforms for consumer brands in 2022
