PageLever (discontinued) vs. Sprout Social

Pagelever has an amazing team that helps clients get what they need. They understand the needs and are there to help you get the benefits you need from your competitors. In comparison with some other vendors we have worked with, they adopted a true partnership approach. They are very good at listening to what we wish to achieve and then helping us tweak the product to meet our goals. We were initially on the Professional plan and even before we eventually upgraded to the more fully-featured Agency plan, they were very willing to work with us to make sure the product did what we needed it to do. Moving to the Agency plan was great since it gave us additional agency features that were very important such as giving our clients automatic acces to their data and allowing us to set up custom KPIs and custom reports.

Sprout is well suited for a social media manager juggling a wide roster of clients. Sprout allows you to schedule weeks or even months' worth of social posts across all different platforms. It is extremely reliable for scheduling posts; I never have to worry if a post gets up the way I intended to get it up. It is also great for reporting key analytics to clients. I do wish there were more analytics at times, but for high-level data, it does the job.

Incentivized

• It has amazing in depth of data about Facebook Pages. For example, it shows us how exactly content is being consumed over time. We can easily see segmented data showing what content is being consumed by which demographic groups. It's also very easy to incorporate all this data into a a usable report which can be share with our clients.
• Analysis with competitive streams: We can compare metrics across client accounts to quickly spot anomalies or see if, for example, low click-through rate is specific to one client, or is common across our account base and possibly due to external factors.
• Very easy to use - great usability. The product is quite flexible and we can easily configure custom reports with dashboards and KPIs that are specific to our client's use cases.
• Client access: Clients can log-in to the system to see customized reports that we configure specifically for them. This is a huge advantage.
• The ability to track changes in metrics over different time periods is also extremely helpful. This is often a key metric for our clients and it is very simple to pul this data from the system.

• The Landscape system that Sprout Social offers allows me to modify all the images that I want to publish on my social networks. This service allows me to modify the size of the image, add filters, modify the colors and much more, it is a very important tool to be able to have a better presentation of the images that we use in our publications on social networks.
• It offers me a perfect statistical system where I can consult all kinds of movements that have occurred in all my social networks, I can see statistics individually or generally. The statistics allow me to see group reports, participation, information on audience movement on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and also allow me to view the activity that has occurred in my account.
• Sprout Social allows me to view a record in real time that shows me all the movements that my social networks are having by my employees. As Director of the Marketing Sector, this is a very important role, as I can know what actions my employees are taking to improve marketing with social networks.

Incentivized

• The interface should be a little bit faster. Since the system contains a lot of data, it can be a bit slow to load.

• Social media platforms don't always play nice with Sprout so it will always be a challenge to get all integrations to work properly.
• Sprout Social is a growing organization and they are acquiring new technologies, which can be good. However, they often spend time in meetings upselling new services. I like to learn about enhancements and opportunities but prefer to focus on my investments first.

Incentivized

PageLever is a fantastic product for agencies. The ability to customize and easily share metrics with our clients is key. Many other tools are great for corporate use, but PageLever is a particularly effective tool for agencies working with multiple clients.

I like Sprout for our needs and I like that it is easy to use. We want something better than HootSuite but don't need a high-level fancy program. The only think I don't like is customer service (except for chat).

Incentivized

Sprout Social's ease of use and navigation throughout the technology are relatively easy to figure out and teach. We also had a representative thoroughly walk us through the features and functionality to set us up for success in using the platform. I didn’t give it a ten because there were times when the navigation didn’t make sense, but once you figured out the quirks, it didn’t cause any trouble.

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

Sprout Social's customer support is extremely responsive. They're also always looking for suggestions on how they can make the product better and will actually take your ideas to their team to see if they're worth implementing. I've never had an issue that couldn't be resolved by them in a timely manner.

Incentivized

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

When scouting different social media management platforms, Sprout Social stood out as the best choice despite other companies offering competitive features and lower rates. Some key factors solidified our decision to stay with Sprout Social. One major drawback we noticed with ione of the competitors was that their Advocacy extension operated under a completely different website name, making the experience kind of disjointed and confusing. Also, unlike Sprout Social’s 24-hour (or less) response time, another competitor’s customer service was based overseas, which limited our ability to resolve issues efficiently I assume. The combination of Sprout Social’s integration and support pretty much made it the clear winner for our needs.

Incentivized

• Great data that can help a lot in decision making. For example, as the system provides very granular, real-time data we can easily see if certain posts / conntent is resonating with the target deomgraphic group or not. If we are trying to appeal to males between the ages of 35 and 45, it's quite simple to see if our messaging is effective in reaching this group. We can do A/B testing and test different things until we find the content that resonates most strongly with this demographic group.

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized