From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs social media marketers have to complete every day.
Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome social media management tools available to help. These tools can streamline your workflows, help you save some time, and even ensure your content reaches the right audience at the right time.
But how do you decide which product to use?
With so many great social media management tools out there, we thought it would be great to showcase the top 21 ones to help you pick what’s best for your business. The list is broken down into two sections:
- Tools more suitable for small-to-medium businesses and
- Tools more suitable for enterprise businesses
The distinction is largely made based on the price and isn’t clear-cut. If you are a small-to-medium business, a tool on the second list might suit you, and vice-versa.
Top social media management tools for businesses
1. Buffer
The platform for successful social media management. Forever free plan. Paid plans start at $6 per month per channel with a 14-day free trial.
Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by small businesses and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products that support publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
Once you’ve researched all your options and if you think Buffer might suit your needs, we would love for you to give it a try and see the difference it can make for your social media management.
2. Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place. Limited Free plan. Paid plans start at $49 per month, with a 30-day free trial.
Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 18 million people and more than eight hundred Fortune 1000 companies.
There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
3. Sprout Social
Real people. Real brands. Real connection. Paid plans start at $89 per user per month with a 30-day free trial
Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.
Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.
The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
4. Agora Pulse
Social media management simplified. Free. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Like the social media management platforms mentioned above, Agora Pulse is also an all-in-one social media platform with scheduling, responding, and reporting features.
Unlike the rest, Agora Pulse has several unique features such as competitor analysis and Facebook contest apps at a very affordable price point.
5. Sendible
Plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial
Sendible is a social media management tool built specifically for agencies with several clients. On top of most features that social media management tools provide, Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients.
Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
6. eClincher
Best in class social media management tool. Plans start at $59 per month with a 14-day free trial
Like most social media management tools, eClincher allows you to schedule and publish posts, respond to social messages, and analyze your social media performance.
What makes eClincher different from other tools is that it enables you to auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds, has a media library for your images, and lets you search for social media influencers.
7. Social Pilot
Simple and cost-effective social media management tool for teams and agencies. Plans start at $30 per month with a 14-day free trial
Social Pilot fit many of the social media management tools (such as scheduling and analytics but not monitoring) into a simple dashboard and offer it at very affordable prices. With its client management feature, I believe it’s great for agencies that work with several clients.
Social Pilot curates and suggests content from several industries (such as tech, education, and health and fitness), which is great if you want to find relevant content easily.
Another valuable feature is its white label reports, which are especially handy for agencies.
8. CoSchedule
Free plan, with paid plans starting at $39 per user per month (14-day free trial)
CoSchedule makes a simple promise: it has the best marketing calendar. This is reflected in its pricing which is free for basic access to the calendar – users who want more features will have to speak to the Sales team. With CoSchedule, you can manage and collaborate with your team to create your social media posts, content, events, and tasks.
CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place. Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.
9. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a simple tool that can help with brand monitoring, identifying newsworthy topics and finding leads. The beauty of Google Alerts is in its simplicity and ease of use. Just add the keywords or topics you’d like to receive notifications and connect your email address.
Anytime that keyword is updated, you’ll be instantly notified with an email. This affords you the opportunity to build links to boost SEO, generate additional content for your social media channels, and even boost engagement by commenting and sharing certain posts.
10. Later for Instagram
Plan your Instagram dashboard ahead! Later’s Visual Instagram Planner lets you optimize your feed by dragging and dropping media files to see how they’ll look on mobile.
All Instagram marketers know the pain of fitting visuals into the feed – even if we’re talking about high-quality photos. Sometimes they just don’t go well with one another.
And before Later, it was nearly impossible to tune or check how your feed would look like without actually sharing posts. Now you can create the perfect Instagram aesthetic with no risk.
And60 percentof businesses curate a cohesive Instagram look by using the same filter for every post, proving that consistency really is key.
Later helps you curate content with ease by allowing you to save content around the web with the Later plugin for Chrome.
However, you can also search content by hashtags, users or likes and then plan the re-posting ahead. Later also helps you schedule your posts automatically – a coveted feature for Instagrammers everywhere.
11. Regrann for Instagram
As you’re probably aware, Instagram doesn’t directly allow you to share posts from other users on your account — even if they post about your business or mention you. Luckily there’s an app for that.
Regrann enables you to repost other people’s pictures, as long as you tag them on your post as owners. (That’s just good social media manners, anyway.)
Regrann minimizes time spent creating images for Instagram while empowering brands to raise engagement through user-generated content.
Featuring clients and consumers on your social media accounts will increase brand awareness and boost brand loyalty. What’s more? The more user-generated content you post, the more your audience will likely create for you!
12. Canva
Canva is an intuitive, easy to use photo editing tool that offers preset sizes ideal for social media posts. You can choose from free-to-use backgrounds and photos, and if you want additional options, Canva charges only $1 per paid picture.
This is a great solution if you want to manage social media promotions on your own but don’t have a designer on hand (small businesses and startups, take note!)
Everything is based on a drag and drop interface.
Pick the background you want, upload your picture or a logo to create posts with watermarks and increase brand recognition, customize text color, font and size and voila! You have a social-media-ready post. You can export the picture in various document formats like PNG and PDF.
Canva also has free PowerPoint templates you can use. People respond well to visual content so if you have some data you want to showcase or use for a sales pitch, or growth report, going visual can help you get your point across.
13. WordSwag
This extremely simple-to-use application proves to be a worthy adversary to the competitive tools out there today. WordSwag is the simplest picture editor there is — and we really mean it’s simple as it sounds.
This app offers one feature only: Adding customized text to photos. WordSwag lets you adjust the promotional materials you plan on posting online to you fit your marketing message.
Developers brag that this is a “pocket graphic designer” and that it saves hours of adjusting text within promo photos. And, as a matter of fact, it does save a bunch of time, even though it is just an add-to-image editor.
14. Quuu
Quuu is a service that prides itself on curating the content your page should be posting and talking about in general.
It works using a feedback system, in which you as a business have to select specific interests to form a huge pool of categories (over 300!). After that, the compiling mechanisms of this service generate topics and curate the content you should be posting.
This way, you’ll not only have access to the niche content that works best for your brand, but you’ll be able to post it using a more human approach. The content (based on your parameters) that Quuu curates is, as they say, hand-picked, and they even offer a well-developed recycle system.
Acquiring new customers and/or clients through this channel will help brands achieve a more organic reach.
15. SocialBee
SocialBee is one of the fastest-growing social media management tools which allows you to share content across all your favorite platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google My Business.
One of the best features of SocialBee is the Evergreen Posting that enables you to recycle your content and re-share it again, after you’ve created multiple variations of one post or after you’ve made custom edits for each profile.
The content you add to SocialBee can be organized in Content Categories, so you can get the best mix of content while having all your posts organized. After you have the content added to SocialBee, you can generate a schedule for your profiles based on best practices.
While Hootsuite has Ow.ly, Buffer has Buff.ly and Bit.ly, SocialBee offers the possibility to use either Bit.ly, Rebrandly, JotURL, PixelMe, and many other URL Shorteners.
SocialBee offers a 14-day free trial, so you can test all their features and if it is a good match for you, their plans start at $19/ Month.
16. Tailwind for Pinterest
Pinterest is a useful platform that’s often underused when talking about brand’s social activities but is greatly important. 87 percent of Pinterest users say they have completed a purchase due to the social media network.
If your product is visually appealing or needs an e-commerce boost, Pinterest can help.
Think of Tailwind as a drag and drop content calendar that lets you re-pin directly from Pinterest and schedule those re-pins whenever you want.
Tailwind also comes with an analytics tool that will help you post your content at the best time based on traffic, engagement, virality and audience.
Reports are visually represented and easy to comprehend.
You can track growth regarding your followers, re-pins, likes, comments and boards, and analyze post performances by keywords and hashtags. If you integrate Google Analytics, Tailwind can even help you monitor revenue and traffic from Pinterest.
Tailwind also helps you discover what’s trending, on what days and at what times. These features, called Trending Content and Interest Heatmaps, analyze the network, hashtags, categories, and your own boards as well.
Gain an even more in-depth understanding with this case study on how three sisters gained 20k Pinterest followers and half a million visits to their blog thanks to Tailwind.
Conclusion
A good social media presence can help you with customer relationships, customer retention and brand visibility. It’s important that you engage your customers and hold conversations alive.
It’s easy to provide your consumers what they want if you listen to them carefully and these are the best social media tools that can help you manage and grow your business by using actionable insights and metrics.
Your ideas, impeccable design and business drive can all go to waste, no matter how advanced they are, if your social media presence is not properly covered.
We talked about a professional set of tools that every social media handyman should utilize in order to finalize their product. And they’re vital for success.
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