Sprout Social Upgrades Social Media Management Platform With iOS Support, Personalized Dashboards And More

Chicago-based startup Sprout Social, the developer of a comprehensive social relationship management platform for businesses, has rebuilt its offering from the ground up, adding support for personalized dashboards multi-users, full iPhone functionality, and more.

For background, the startup’s platform, which launched to the public last year, allows businesses to connect to customers and monitor key metrics and the overall competitive landscape using social media tools. Sprout Social integrates with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla, and LinkedIn and includes lead generation, business intelligence, offer and promotion distribution services, as well as brand monitoring and analytics.

Business users can aggregate all of an organization’s social media messaging into a single activity stream, automate cross-network posting of promotional messages, conduct targeted searches for new customers and more.

Because the new version supports multiple users, teams and groups, users can now have personalized dashboards that display the streams and modules that they need to be effective. Sales, marketing, product development and customer service departments can have different profiles and permissions while community managers or others can be assigned administrative roles.

A new assignment capability allows tasks to be placed in user task queues, and the entire platform has been redesigned with a new UI. Sprout Social users can now access the application via an iPhone app, and can monitor their social media inbox, send replies, create and schedule new messages, view assignments on the go. Android is coming soon, says founder Justyn Howard.

Pricing starts at $9 per month. As Howard explains, the new version aims to go beyond just monitoring to measuring and creating engagement for brands, helping them grow their social media presence and find who they should be listening to.

Sprout Social has raised over $11 in funding from Lightbank and NEA.