I’ve been using Hootsuite for about a year now, prior to that I was using Spredfast and Tweetdeck.  So what made me decide to change?

Reporting in SproutSocial

The level of reporting is stunning – and that’s one of the key reasons why I moved over. I run a number of campaigns for clients and reporting is important for measuring the ROI for the social campaigns.

Walking the talk is important for me as well – and for one of the other businesses I run, On Landscape, I wanted to measure the reach of our campaigns more efficiently.

Understanding the demographics of the followers and fans is imperative, so you can see that you are targeting your audience. More importantly you can then respond to the information about your followers e.g. On Landscape we realised quite a lot of our subscribers and followers / fans are international so are now targeting more international content.

Feeds

Pulling in RSS feeds is great, so you don’t have to dive off into Google Reader. More importantly the lists can be managed and viewed here.

Smart Inbox

Being able to move tweets that you’ve responded to into the archive is an efficient way of managing Twitter & Facebook. The ability to see a track of the conversations with users and add notes is useful. Certainly for our business On Landscape we can marry this up with users on the site which makes it more of a social CRM in that aspect.

Hootsuite doesn’t alert you to when you have a RT nor a new follower, which is a key thing when building an audience and community. SproutSocial does both, which is a great feature.

Any downsides to SproutSocial?

Sprout Social doesn’t support Google+ which is a bit of an annoyance having to manage that separately. It does cost more than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite has a lot of hidden costs, as you add users and extra credits for reporting, it soon adds up.

Conclusion

Sproutsocial has made me more focused on the campaign managment as I get more reporting on the types of content, so I can evaluate what content generates more engagement, which in turn drives more fans and followers.