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May 9, 2011

Sprout Social – Manage Your Company’s Connections

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that helps local companies turn online fans into devoted customers. Rather than bouncing from website to website trying to manage dozens of different accounts, social media managers that use Social Sprout can log in once to update their business’ Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Gowalla accounts.

When you create a new account on Sprout Social, you’ll be taken directly to a social media dashboard page. Here, you can view your engagement rankings, follower demographics, influence levels, and the number of clicked links in your social media updates in a given day or week. You can also find a “Social Scorecard” which lists how many new followers and mentions your accounts have gotten in the past week. Sprout Social connects with social networking sites big and small, making it possible to keep up with relevant conversations across the web in one central spot. Customize your networking feed to show only the messages that mention your company by name, along with direct messages, check-in notices, and new friend requests. Because you’re using Sprout Social, you can respond to messages from customers, post new updates on all your accounts, and delegate the task of following up with specific online fans to other employees at your firm in just a matter of minutes.

For businesses that are more focused on growing their fan base than monitoring the followers they already have, Sprout Social offers innovative tools that make it easy to pinpoint prospective customers online based on geographic location and relevant discussion topics. Combining these tools with the web-app’s reporting and analytics features is a fantastic way for any company to improve and expand upon its online presence and overall marketing efforts.

Practical Uses:

  • Answer questions from customers on Facebook and Twitter
  • Find out how many people are actually clicking on the links you post
  • Keep track of what people are saying about your company online
  • Reward customers who check-in on Foursquare or Gowalla

Insider Tips:

  • Adjust filters to determine which conversations show up in your company feed
  • Use analytics tools to measure the success of your marketing campaign
  • Compare the performance of your networking accounts during certain date ranges
  • Schedule upcoming messages and social media status updates

What we liked:

  • Integrated Twitter feed makes it easy to categorize followers based on influence
  • Users can create one-time alerts to be sent to followers at certain times
  • Social media managers can sign up to get automatic email or SMS alerts every time someone checks in at their business
  • Negative online messages can be flagged and followed up immediately

What we didn’t like:

  • Nothing

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: August 2009
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: Chicago, Illinois
  • Founded by: Justyn Howard
  • Web site: http://sproutsocial.com

Costs:

  • Free 30-day trial
  • Go Pro plan is $9/month
  • Go Business plan is $49/month

Comments

  1. I love the way Sprout Social built their tools around an intuitive usage for customers, one big disadvantage that i don’t see in your posting is the fact that it’s only accessible in a browser. I want a mobile app too!

  2. Thanks for the great write-up, AppVita!

    @aymanvanbregt – So glad that you found Sprout Social intuitive and easy-to-use. And hold tight… the mobile app is coming (really) soon!! Have you already gone through the free trial?

  3. Oops! Should probably clarify that I’m the Online Marketing Specialist at Sprout Social 🙂

    http://sproutsocial.com

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