Sprout Social vs Flipsnack: Which is a better fit?

Greg A.: Hey there, my name is Greg. I own a marketing agency and I'm a web developer and marketer. And today, I'm giving Sprout Social 5 out of 5 stars. For more reviews, click below. We were using a pretty popular software platform called Hootsuite that a lot of social media managers use. And it worked well for us for quite a while, but we started running into some limitations with it. One, when you get to a certain threshold of accounts to upgrade on Hootsuite, the pricing was very high, higher than we wanted to deal with. The other issue that we were having with it was difficult for us to submit draft work into accounts that someone on our client side could then review. We were looking for a solution that would allow us to draft up content for social media posting and allow our customers to be able to review and comment on that before those things went live. We chose Sprout Social for a few reasons. The primary reason, the thing that we liked best about it, was it has some really powerful features, especially as it relates to creating content that can then be passed along for approval, notes, review, and then publishing by us. So we, in our workflow, we will create content on behalf of our clients. We go ahead and put it all in Sprout Social as if it was ready to be posted onto various social networks. But then before that happens, our client is able to go into Sprout Social and review all of those things. They can either approve them and then that puts them into the schedule to post, or they can leave notes for us on things that they might like to see adjusted or tweaked. So we really like the fact that that's all built into the platform. We don't have to send them all of our content and graphics some other way outside of the software platform. It's all built right in. And if they like it, they just click a green check mark that says "Go" and that schedules it. So it really saves us time. It's a really convenient feature for our clients that they love being able to go in and see the work we've done and be able to interact right within the same platform that we are using. Other things we liked about it, the pricing's very reasonable and fair, we think. We like the way that it is broken into tiers. Some of these software platforms, you get a few accounts you can connect to for one price, and then the jump is really high when you want to start adding an additional block. Sprout's a little more affordable on those lines, which we really preferred. And then everything else about it is very intuitive. It's got a good user interface. It's easy to get your accounts connected. It's easy to do reporting. We've found their customer service the few times that we've needed it to be very quick and thorough. So we've really enjoyed the different features that are available within the Sprout Social platform. Getting started with Sprout Social was really pretty easy as long as we had all of the accounts that we wanted to add to it. We're an agency. We manage lots of social media accounts for many different clients, so that took a little bit of time to gather all of that. But as long as you have all of your logins and you're connected on Facebook, to all the different Facebook accounts you might need and all those things, then really getting connected to those things is pretty fast. Getting our workflow set up in there was pretty easy. We've used other software platforms similar to this before, and there's nothing in Sprout Social that makes you have to completely reinvent or relearn how to do these things. It's a pretty straightforward process to get connected, and then to set up your workspace is nice and easy. There's some options on how you can lay out your screens and what sorts of things you see. But once you learn the menu, and they do have some help documentation that's useful. There's a little walkthrough you can do at the beginning. Once we did all those things, we were up and running easily within the first few days of beginning to use Sprout Social. If you're considering using Sprout Social, maybe you've been using one of many other social media posting tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer or many of the others, I would recommend you try it. It's got some unique things in it that we've found to be really helpful. I would definitely try the tools that allow you to submit things for review to your customers. We were before were having to use a fairly archaic system of Google Sheets and putting all of our content into that. So Sprout Social saved us a lot of time in making just that one single feature. I think that they do offer a trial, which I would recommend. We took advantage of that. And then once we had seen all of it that it had to offer, it was a pretty easy decision for us to keep using it. So I'd encourage you to give it a try, see what you think, and if you like it, run with it. It's been really good for us.

Sara: My name is Sara, and I'm a studio manager for a photography studio. I'm here today to review Flipsnack, which I give four out of five stars. For more reviews like this, just click the link below. Before we started using Flipsnack, we used a program called Smore, which helped us to create kind of informative flyers. But what we found was it didn't allow us to include the amount of information and images that we wanted to include. So ultimately, Flipsnack was an excellent option for us to do that. We chose Flipsnack because we had a lot of information that we wanted to communicate to clients, but we wanted to do it in a way that was digestible for them and in a way that looked beautiful and polished, and Flipsnack was the best option for that. We were able to create these really professional-looking magazines that we could send digitally to our clients. So potential clients got magazines about the process, and once clients were in our workflow, they got magazines about our product offerings, and things like that. So they were just wonderful to include a lot of information in this very usable format for them, and they liked it. I mean, it's a cool format. So Flipsnack was fairly easy to get started with. There is a learning curve with it. So there was some time that was required to become comfortable with the program and to use it kind of to its full extent, but once you're there, it's so worth it, and it's very easy then to take these digital products that you're creating and use them in email communications, in your website. Whatever it may be, we found it to be really fairly easy to do. I personally think Flipsnack could be useful for any business, because it's just an interesting and, like I had said, a really polished professional way to communicate with your client base. The only thing I would say is it is a little bit of a one-trick pony. So it is wonderful in its niche, which is to create these digital flyers or magazines, but it's not something that you're going to use for everything in your business. You're going to need other programs and apps, and things like that, to flesh that all out. But for what it does, it's amazing, and I highly recommend it.