Cision Communications Cloud vs. Sprout Social

For a small start-up, the cost-benefit to add lift to press releases [and] particular milestone accomplishments is definitely there with the Cision [Communications] Cloud. Much of what we do, by necessity, is done internally without the benefit of outsourced press folks, so the Cision [Communications] Cloud ease of use and reporting is very important.

Incentivized

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

• Influencer research: I am able to quickly find the right reporter or editor for my pitch because Cision lets me know what they write about, their communications preferences, past articles, etc.
• Distribution: I appreciate a template to help streamline my pitch and press release distribution that allows me to send my news to a targeted list of contacts without having to send individual emails. I can send out communications with just a few steps, in just a few minutes.
• News search: I use Cision to scan for news and monitor for mentions of my clients. I also use this feature to keep tabs on topics and key terms of interest to me and my clients to stay ahead of emerging trends and stay on top of emerging discussions in my clients' industries.

Incentivized

• 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 social component could be upgraded to more accurately collect metrics on ephemeral content.
• Social listening is done in a completely different program than the media monitoring - combining the two would make report creation much easier and allow for a fuller picture of an incident across traditional and social media on the built-in dashboard section.
• Social listening only tracks Twitter. Public Facebook comments would be key in seeing a fuller picture of how an incident or campaign is playing out on social media.

Incentivized

• 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

For all of the reasons I had mentioned before, I haven't found a product that surpasses what they offer. I will maintain renewing with them for a few years and then reexamine the market to see if any new competitors arise. Until then, I have no reason to leave them for someone else.

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

The flexibility and customization of Cision Communications Cloud (TrendKite)* is among its most important features. Changing the dashboards, using keywords in the saved searches to pull out the best stories and the integration with marketing automation tools gives me confidence that I will able to continue using this tool well into the future. The future implementation and integration of the media contact database will complete the suite, making list management and email marketing programs much smoother. *This review was written before Cision acquired TrendKite. TrendKite is now part of Cision Communications Cloud.

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

Easily accessible 24/7.

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.

Generally, Cision performs well day to day, but it's got some annoying bugs that slow down usage/require user workarounds which is inefficient. More seriously, a few months ago, as a result of a major system upgrade, certain critical functionality was not working and I was unable to use the service for more than a day when I had time-sensitive work to execute

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

For Cision TrendKite in particilar, support always responded, but it was sometimes slow. For some of our booleans and search queries, we would need help refining and excluding terms/phrases that weren't relevant to our client or campaign. This sometimes took 1-2 days just to get a response back, which sometimes was too late when a last-minute report was due. This was only with the support staff, not necessarily our customer success manager or sales rep.

Incentivized

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

The online training sessions available for the Cision Communications Cloud are helpful and informative. There's more than one option - initially, I signed up for the live webinar classes on basic functions and that is what I recommend other new users do as well. If I have specific questions or something I want to learn more about, I can search the online database and find article or online training videos to get the information I need.

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

There is no implementation at the customer's end so this doesn't really apply to my instance of Cision (possibly to all instances of it).

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.

I found Cision [Communications Cloud] to be much more simple to use, and it offers the ability to track [a] wider array of media placements without additional fees attached to it. Now that it has incorporated TVEyes, it can offer print, online, radio, and TV tracking nationwide. This is [crucial] because very often your institution or company could be referenced in a variety of ways, nationally or briefly, on local TV/radio, and you would have no way of knowing about it.

Incentivized

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

Easy to use, but still room for improvement.

Incentivized

• It seems as though media pickups have overall been down this year, perhaps related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Cision Communications Cloud has enabled us to develop numerous localized media lists for press releases, especially on grant recipients. These localized press releases have generated the best pickups that go beyond our KPIs (key performance indicators).
• The ability to save media lists provide a great starting point for developing future lists. The "talking about" helps to see what media contacts are talking about, and whether they might potentially be interested in our news release.

Incentivized

• 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