G2 Crowd’s top social management tool in customer satisfaction is …

Sprout Social.

That software management tool took home the highest overall customer satisfaction in the new G2 Crowd report on social media management tools, winning praise especially for its social sharing and social engagement.

Software review site G2 Crowd regularly publishes reports on software products, largely based on reviews written by business professionals.

The top of four categories shown on the Grid (see top of this page, and here for the live version) is Leaders, which are the products having both the highest satisfaction and the highest market presence, as indicated by vendor size, market share, and social impact.

The three products declared Leaders: Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and TweetDeck.

The second highest category, also with high levels of satisfaction but lower market presence, is High Performers. In that group: AgoraPulse, Sendible, Viralheat, Buffer, and GroSocial.

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G2 Crowd has had one previous report on social management tools, last winter. There are more than 85 software vendors in this year’s category, but only 14 qualified for ranking on the Grid with at least ten reviews.

Compared to that earlier report, Sprout Social’s market presence score increased, and Hootsuite and Tweetdeck continued as Leaders.

“The category seems to be growing in presence,” G2 Crowd president Tim Handorf told me via email. There were over 600 reviews considered for this report.

He noted that, in addition to Sprout Social, “several other vendors’ Market Presence Scores showed relatively large increases — Sendible and AgoraPulse,” which could indicate the category’s growing maturity.

Reviewers want “more improvements made to their platforms’ reporting and analytics capabilities,” Handorf pointed out, and there were some reviewers who “wanted their platforms to be quicker to adopt new and emerging social media platforms.”

Most of the reviews for newly ranked software products like Viralheat, Sprinklr, and Shoutlet, Handorf pointed out, were written by employees at either mid-size or enterprise-size companies. This means that the ratings may not reflect the sentiments of employees at smaller companies.

One reviewer, Socialize Your Event owner Roxanne Darling, commented on how she loved Sprout Social’s “reporting, the PDF exports, the research capabilities,” and the feeds, as well as the productivity of getting more done with the fewest clicks.

CPXi marketing associate Melissa Mandel pointed to multiple social account management and scheduling on Hootsuite. And one KSI International marketing manager described the Sendible social media dashboard as “truly sensational.”

The full report is available for $599.