If you’re in the social media game, you know how quickly things can change. One minute you could be riding a popular Twitter wave and the next minute you may find that you don’t have any recent or new followers. While it’s tough to control what happens social media wise, it’s not impossible to keep track of many different social media platforms all at once. Yet, there are plenty of tools that will show Twitter updates and Facebook posts. Thankfully, Sprout Social is different.

Sprout Social will show you everything that’s happening with your Facebook and Twitter accounts. In addition, this website (and now iPhone) application will provide you with helpful statistics and analytics. What’s even better is that Sprout Social does all of this in one spot, so you don’t have to jump around from site to site to see what’s happening in your social circles.

Using Sprout Social

I love the idea behind Sprout Social. When you sign up for a Sprout Social account (free for 30-days), you will be asked to connect to Twitter, Facebook, or both. Once that’s done, you will see all kinds of data about your existing accounts. Data such as how many tweets you’ve sent out, what your influence is on all networks, and whether or not you have a strong social presence. The site will also pull up demographic information that you can use for market research.

Sprout Social claims that the site can also find any blog (or other site) mentions of your company. However, when signing up for this account, I didn’t come across any blog mentions, even though I know the company I run social media for has been mentioned numerous times across numerous blogs – perhaps Sprout Social will fix this issue. All in all, using Sprout Social makes a good deal of sense if you happen to run more than one social media account at a time. It also makes sense if you have a small business – in fact, Sprout Social was built for small businesses.

What I Don’t Like

Sprout Social definitely has a place in the business world, but the site’s interface (in this reviewer’s opinion) needs work. When using Sprout Social, I found the interface to be clumsy and lacking. Tabs aren’t explained well and icons seem to be off. In fact, the whole color scheme and font of the site seems to be not quite right. That said, this is a very promising site that many people will find very useful. Sprout Social also happens to be very reasonably priced.

The developers behind Sprout Social want this site to work for small businesses. Smaller businesses often have smaller budgets, which is why Sprout Social offers a number of easily affordable plans. As mentioned above, you can also opt for a thirty day free trial, which will provide you with enough information about the site, so that you can determine whether or not this is one site you can’t live without.

I urge you to take a few moments to sign up for a Sprout account. While I believe that this site could be better (and has lots of potential), it’s still a worthwhile site to check out if you are running a small business or a social media campaign.