Sprout Social Releases Queue and ViralPost To Help Clients Better Reach Their Audience

Billy Gallagher

Billy Gallagher is a contributor for TechCrunch. He is currently the co-student body president at Stanford University, where he is on track to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2014. Billy was previously the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily. Disclosures: As a poor college student, I own no stock and have no financial interests... → Learn More

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012
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Sprout Social, a social management and publishing tool suite, released Sprout Queue and ViralPost today, estimating that the new features will help brands increase engagement with social content by 30-40%.

Sprout, founded in 2010, offers users tools for social media monitoring and engagement, a “smart inbox” that combines social feeds, collaborative tools and analytics, among other features. CEO Justyn Howard tells me the company, which counts Nike, McDonald’s and Yahoo among its more high-profile clients, is known for its simple user interface and collaborative style.

Sprout Queue allows users to add content to a queue for automated future publication. Howard says the company original worked on Queue with ViralPost as an embedded feature, before realizing ViralPost would be better on its own.

ViralPost analyzes the users’ audience and gives the user the optimal times to deliver content based on “usage and engagement patterns, content velocity and other factors.” Similar to Queue, ViralPost automatically delivers content at the optimal time. Sprout Social says the models have improved engagement by 30% for the average user and up to 300% in some cases.

“We’re trying to solve the problem of when’s the right time to reach your audience,” Howard explains, saying Sprout Social is taking the guesswork out of reaching your target audience.

While many similar services offer free and premium versions, Sprout Social only offers a monthly subscription (although they do have a 30-day free trial).

Howard tells me they are working on an iPad app, which will be released in the coming months, and are building more tools to allow teams to collaborate on publishing.


Company: Sprout Social
Website: sproutsocial.com
Launch Date: 2010
Funding: $11M

Sprout Social’s innovative tools help businesses more effectively manage their social media and social care efforts. Sprout provides social media engagement, publishing and analytic tools for top global brands including AMD, McDonald’s, Nokia, Pepsi, and UPS. Sprout’s world-class tools enable top brands – and more than 10,000 customers – to engage on numerous social platforms including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The platform manages more than 6 million social interactions per day and makes it incredibly efficient to for brands...

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