Sprout Social gets our pick for Social Media Collaboration!

Immediately from the start VPS.NET has been a company that has embraced social media. For fun, for marketing, and to stay connected with our customers; it’s something that we enjoy and feel comfortable with. As we’ve grown, adding many new staff members to our social media team, we’ve needed to take advantage of outside tools to help us work together as a team and CoTweet, by Exact Target, was a great tool that we loved and used gleefully. Unfortunately, Exact Target recently announced that CoTweet, the free edition, would be shut down February 15th. Immediately we looked at their enterprise option, now known as Social Engage. While Social Engage was a great product, and one we would’ve certainly embraced, its price tag, was not. We found ourselves saddened at the thought of our easy social media fun being a thing of the past, but alas, we found other options.
We had a few important requirements that ruled out many competitors like HootSuite and TweetDeck. They work really well for smaller teams, and even larger ones in certain situations, but for us they just wouldn’t work. The thing we loved about CoTweet was the inbox and outbox; we could see all messages directed to us, and about us, allowing us to easily engage our audience. This also allowed us to assign certain team members to handle specific conversations, and topics, which they were well versed in. Another requirement of ours, was that we wanted to avoid using a desktop application, which signed directly into Twitter. There’s issues with accountability (i.e. who said what?), but also, many of us telecommute and use multiple different devices to stay in touch with social media, so we really wanted a hosted application in order to avoid multiple installations.
That’s when Sprout Social popped up on our radar, and I think I can safely say, we’ve been in love ever since. With an elegant, easy to use dashboard, that not only allows us to easily stay in touch with our followers, but also learn about them, and their interests, Sprout Social is the perfect application for us. Further, it even gave us the ability to take advantage of some unique tools, like Facebook and bit.ly integration, that we previously weren’t used to.
While Sprout Social isn’t a free application, it does have a 30 day free trial, and monthly plans start at $9 a month, something we’d glad to pay as it makes our lives tremendously easier. If you’re struggling with social media collaboration tools, Sprout Social gets a thumbs up from us!