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Though, it can be challenging to keep an active social presence without it taking over a sizeable percentage of your time and attention.
One of the major challenges is that social networks have different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to post at these peak times.
It would be near impossible for a business to make all of their posts “live". As a result, software providers have come up with solutions to make social media scheduling and posting more manageable. You can design and bulk schedule multiple posts at once using social media scheduling software platforms.
You can do this at a time that suits you and then use your tool of choice to deliver your posts at the best times. They also give you time to create and push more content. In this post, we review the top social media scheduling and posting tools.
Top 31 Social Media Scheduling Tools for 2023:
1. Brandwatch Social Media Management
Best for: Mid to Large-sized Businesses
Brandwatch focuses on giving social media professionals access to a structured set of features that help listen, engage, measure, schedule and publish content that makes a difference.
Content Calendar and Campaign Planner
Brandwatch considers your content calendar to be one of the most important tools you’ll work with. It provides a view of all your scheduled content across multiple social networks. You can plan, schedule, edit, and post directly from your content calendar. With Campaign Planner, you can map, create a brief, roll-out, and collaborate on campaigns for all social platforms.
Versatile Media Support and Content Pool
Brandwatch supports images, video, Instagram Stories, and Facebook carousels. You can store all your content in Brandwatch’s version of a shared media library called the “Content Pool.” If you have a team, Brandwatch provides roles, approval processes, and an audit trail to boost quality. You can also activate email notifications and share notes. Brandwatch provides access to agencies to smooth your collaborative processes. You can control all access and set permissions.
Customizable Inbox
Brandwatch lets users design their own inbox. You can include multiple feeds, labels and use filters. You can also create custom response templates for quicker replies and bulk actions.
Full Suite Features: Cross-Channel Advertising and Social Listening
If you have the Full Suite, you can promote posts through Facebook and Instagram ads within Publish, which manages all ads in one place. The tool allows cross-channel advertising, automation, saved target audiences, running ads with customer durations, automated ROI tracking, and real-time insights. The Full Suite also includes social listening. With this, you can track trends, monitor your brand, create custom queries, track sentiment, monitor multiple languages, filter extensively, and track campaigns.
Pricing: Three plans are available: Consumer Intelligence, Social Media Management and Influencer Marketing plan.
Key Features:
- Campaign Planner
- Shared media library
- Access control and permissions
- Ads management
- Social listening
2. Loomly
Best for: Agencies, freelancers, startups, non profit organizations, influencers and individuals
Loomly is a powerful social media scheduling and management platform with a clean, intuitive interface.
Calendar Workflows and Collaboration
One useful feature of Loomly is that you can set various calendar workflows. The default setting for teams with more than one collaborator is:
- Draft
- Pending Approval
- Requires Edits
- Approved
- Scheduled
- Published
Streamlined Post Creation Process
There is a straightforward process to go through when creating a post. You can either begin a post from scratch or pull in post ideas from RSS feeds that automatically create draft posts from them. You create the base copy of a post before you customize details for whichever social networks you want to use. If you intend to create a paid post for Facebook, you can customize your audience and set a budget for your campaign, all from within Loomly.
Managing Interactions and Social Mentions
Another useful feature of Loomly is its interaction screen, where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle mentions (through tagging).
Pricing: Loomly offers five pricing tiers after a 15-day trial, ranging from $26/month to $269/month, catering to different social account and user needs.
Key Features:
- Structured post approval workflow
- Automatic draft creation from RSS feeds
- Integrated audience targeting for paid campaigns
- Interaction management
- Social mention tracking
3. Iconosquare
Best for: Brands and Agencies
Although Iconosquare is most renowned for its in-depth social analytics, it has expanded its offering to cover multi-profile social management and a powerful scheduling tool. The various tools cover Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, although fewer capabilities are currently available for LinkedIn or Twitter. In particular, the only Iconosquare tools relevant to your LinkedIn account focus on analytics.
Advanced Scheduling Features
You can schedule Instagram and Facebook posts in advance from your computer or on the Iconosquare app. Insert saved captions or hashtag lists, schedule your first comment, and cross-post to multiple profiles at once in a few clicks. Then, easily preview scheduled posts and re-order your feed using drag and drop.
Instagram and Facebook Post Scheduling
You can schedule photo and video posts automatically to Instagram and Facebook through Iconosquare. Tag accounts and locations in your single-image posts when posting to Instagram using automatic publishing. Tag your location or mention other Facebook pages when posting to Facebook. You need to schedule Instagram Stories and carousels on the Iconosquare website, being notified on your mobile at the time of the post to finish the publishing process on Instagram. No such restrictions reply to traditional Instagram posts, however.
Efficient Content Scheduling
Create captions and lists of frequently used hashtags in advance, then copy and paste them into your posts when scheduling content.
Effective Media Handling
Upload, label, and organize photos and videos from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. Easily schedule posts using content from your media library. Iconosquare even tags any image that you use so that you don’t accidentally repeat it in a later post.
Pricing: Iconosquare offers three pricing plans: Pro, Advanced, and Enterprise, with varying social profiles and team member limits, suitable for different businesses and marketing needs.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive social analytics
- Advanced scheduling for Instagram and Facebook
- Saved captions and hashtag lists
- Drag and drop feed organization
- Media library management from various sources.
4. Agorapulse
Best for: Mid-sized agencies, mid-sized businesses and some enterprise brands
You can use Agorapulse to publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google +, and YouTube.
You can centrally post to all of your social accounts, with a queue or schedule ensuring your content is delivered at the best times. It allows you to re-queue or reschedule evergreen posts. You can also tweak each post to take advantage of features specific to each social network.
Pricing: Agorapulse offers four-tier pricing: Standard, Professional, Advanced, and Custom, with plans starting from $49/month and providing varying features and social profile limits
Key Features:
- Tailored posting across multiple platforms
- Centralized content delivery
- Re-queuing of evergreen content
- Platform-specific post optimization
- Extensive social network support
5. Onlypult
Best for: SMM-specialists, Bloggers, Freelancers, Small and Medium-sized Businesses, Big Business, Agencies
Onlypult markets itself as being the one platform for brands, agencies, and businesses to work with social media. It actually offers more than that, letting you work with images and videos and post to social media, blogs, and messengers. Indeed, the list of apps you can schedule to is one of the largest we have seen: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, TikTok, Tumblr, WordPress, Telegram, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Pinterest, and Medium.
Versatile Scheduling and Post Management
You can upload photos and videos via the web, schedule your posts for the future and publish them in real-time. Onlypult’s scheduling allows you to create multiple social posts and set days and times for them to be pushed through to your social channels. You can even schedule carousel posts and Stories. In addition, you can set posts to auto-delete at a scheduled time, so you don’t have to worry about promotional links and codes floating around on the web or people querying old posts and asking for special discounts.
Efficient Content Creation and Management
Usefully, you can multipost with Onlypult. You can create copy and apply it to multiple posts using different images. Like most of these social media posting and scheduling tools, Onlypult provides you with a content calendar to help you keep tabs on what’s happening and when your content will be published. It is clean and easy to use.
Powerful Tools: Builder and Monitoring
Onlypult includes limited access to two other tools at all plan levels, Builder and Monitoring. Builder helps you create a micro landing page in a few minutes with a convenient visual builder. Monitoring tracks mentions of your competitors, partners, or buyers. You can use Monitoring to find discussions related to your brand to help you make the right decisions.
Pricing: Onlypult offers four plans (Start, SMM, Agency, and Pro) with various features, including image and video editors, multiple accounts, hashtags, planner, calendar, and auto post deletion.
Key Features:
- Extensive platform support
- Image and video editors
- Auto-deletion of scheduled posts
- Multiposting
- Micro landing page creation
- Brand mentions monitoring
6. PromoRepublic
Best for: Franchise and Multi-Location Brands, Direct Sales Organizations, Marketing Agencies, Small Business Owners, Marketers
PromoRepublic offers a full-scale social media management software platform, with a range of plans catering from the Solo plan for personal use through to the Advanced Plan, for large businesses and agencies.
Automated Social Media Publishing and Scheduling
You can use PromoRepublic to automate your social media publishing and scheduling. You enter all your posts and visuals in one social media publishing calendar, scheduled in advance and posted automatically to multiple social media. They integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Comprehensive Features and Tools
But they offer more than just scheduling posts. You have access to a 100,000 post ideas library and graphics editing tools; not to mention the other features expected of social media management and planning software, such as analytics and reporting and smart posting using AI.
For firms wanting more, PromoRepublic offers two other products:
- Social Monitoring – to manage your brand reputation and keep track of your social mentions
- Intelligent Ads to improve your social advertising campaigns
Pricing: PromoRepublic offers plans starting at $59/month for small businesses, $99/month for agencies, and custom pricing for multi-location businesses, with a Solo plan starting at $108/year.
Key Features:
- In-app graphics editing capabilities
- Support for major social networks, including Instagram and Pinterest
- Customizable posting schedule and autopilot AI
- Access to 100,000 post ideas library with eye-catching graphics
- Separate workspaces for collaboration and approval workflows
7. NapoleonCat
Best for: Small businesses, e-commerce, agencies, marketers, digital influencers
In the 7+ years that they’ve been in business, NapoleonCat has built an impressive client list that includes brands like the World Wildlife Foundation, Avon, and Allianz. One of their claims to fame is that they can help social media marketing teams to win back up to 70% of their time and energy. Even if this is not the case, just looking and interacting with its beautiful platform will make work feel less of a chore.
Competitor Monitoring and Custom Permissions
All in all, it’s easy to use and set up. One feature that deserves a special mention is that when you set up your social media accounts after signing up, it also gives you the option to keep tabs on your competitors. You just type in the competitor’s social media account name and add it to your watch list. You can also set it up so that each team member gets assigned specific permission. This is useful if you want to control who may create content.
Multi-platform Posting and Performance Analytics
With regards to posting and scheduling specifically, you can use it to schedule and post your content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business simultaneously via a single dashboard. It also generates post previews as you create them which is more useful than it sounds. Then, after your content has been posted, you can use its performance analytics to monitor your reach, engagement, and click-throughs.
Pricing: While its list of features is pretty much the same as other social media tools, its approach to pricing is different and a lot more flexible. Unlike the majority of tools, NapoleonCat actually lets you select the number of social media profiles and users, making it an ideal tool for smaller teams.
Key Features:
- Competitor monitoring
- Team-specific permissions
- Simultaneous multi-platform scheduling
- Post previews
- Performance analytics
- Flexible user-based pricing.
8. Monday.com
Best for: Any project and business
Monday.com is different from most of the products we have included in this post in that it doesn’t specifically target social media posting and scheduling. Indeed, many businesses use Monday.com for things other than social media. Its primary focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your teams. However, this makes it ideal for those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.
The Power of Boards
Boards are the heart of Monday.com. It uses boards as fully customizable tables to manage your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards to represent your workflow. You can create boards to organize any projects and activities your team does.
Social Media Management Template and Workflow
Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point and has one specifically designed for social media management. This template builds two boards:
- Campaign Ideas and Requests
- Campaign Progress and Status
Collaborative Campaign Planning
Members of your team can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts in the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. You then use it to create an efficient and standardized workflow for your social media campaigns.
The Campaign Progress and Status board focuses more on specific campaigns. It shows Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed and Stuck. The two boards join, so when you approve a campaign on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board, it automatically populates the Upcoming Campaigns section on the Campaign Progress and Status board.
Automation and Integration Features
You can include Automations and Integrations on your boards. Automations are rules based on some action that occurs within the site. Integrations are where your Monday.com boards interact with some other software platform.
Pricing: Monday.com offers multiple paid plans, starting at $10/user/month for Basic (5GB storage) up to Pro at $20/user/month, and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing, each plan with increasing features and an 18% annual plan discount.
Key Features:
- Customizable boards for project management
- Specialized templates for social media management
- Automated workflows
- Integrations with other software platforms
9. ContentCal
Best for: Businesses, agencies, and freelancers
ContentCal is the ultimate content calendar and social media scheduling platform that helps thousands of individuals, businesses, and agencies with their content planning and social media.
Streamlined Collaboration
The platform also defines user permissions and streamline the approval process, manage multiple accounts in one centralized location, and communicate and collaborate with your team on upcoming content.
ContentCal Analytics
With ContentCal Analytics and Respond you can also keep tabs on content performance and learn how to improve for the future.
Customizing Visual Content and Draft Management
Content creators can use the application to design visual content by modifying the layout and adding a header color and personalized logo. Additionally, employees can create and store posts as drafts, receive feedback from collaborators, and preview posts before publishing.
Versatility and Ease of Use
You’re able to save time, collaborate with team members or clients, and create even better social media content. This platform is perfect for agencies, distributed organizations, or anyone who needs to manage and participate in multiple social media accounts. It could not be any easier, which is perfect for teams with varying degrees of ability. And, the ability to create custom workflows and approvals that reflect your unique governance plan is unmatched.
Pricing: Starting at $8, ContentCal is not only well priced but it is also one of the leading social media schedulers in the market today.
Key Features:
- Social media post scheduling
- Keyword filtering
- Collaboration
- Feedback analysis
- Reporting
- Project management
10. HeyOrca
Best for: Agencies and teams
HeyOrca makes designing, scheduling, and publishing your social media posts easy. Getting started is just as straightforward and it offers various videos and guides to help with the onboarding process.
User-Friendly Interface and Calendars
Its user-friendly interface focuses a lot on calendars which help you to visualize all your scheduled posts and quickly identify on which days you might have insufficient content planned.
Ideal for Social Media Marketing Agencies
It’s an attractive option, especially for social media marketing agencies and is trusted and loved by more than 10,000 social media managers across the globe. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons why it was launched in the first place was to fill the gap in the market for a solid tool that creative agencies could use for content creation and collaboration.
Features for Effective Agency Management
It, for example, includes multiple social calendars allowing you to separate different clients. Another useful feature for agencies is its content and media libraries where you can manage your posts and media assets. Then, after you and the rest of your team have exchanged feedback (which can be done directly on the posts) and you’re ready to present your ideas to your clients, the final approval phase is just as seamless. Instead of having to send emails back and forth, clients can approve or reject a post directly in the platform.
All in all, HeyOrca is a solid solution for scheduling and much more. While it’s mostly aimed at agencies, brands looking for a social media platform to use in-house will also find its features helpful and intuitive.
Pricing: HeyOrca offers three plans with direct publishing to major platforms and unlimited users, making it an excellent collaboration tool.
Key Features:
- Visual content calendars
- Multiple social calendars for client separation
- Integrated content and media libraries
- Direct post feedback and client approval
- Direct publishing to multiple platforms
11. Planoly
Best for: Businesses of all sizes who post to Instagram and Pinterest
If you’re searching for a social media posting and scheduling tool that has a good app, be sure to check out Planoly. Founded in 2016 by a jewelry brand, Planoly started out as a visual planner for Instagram. Since then, it has expanded its set of features to include tools for social marketing on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
The idea behind Planoly is simple – social media marketing shouldn’t have to be so challenging. So, to help social media managers and business owners, it integrates social strategy and content scheduling.
Powerful Analytics for Instagram and Pinterest
One of the features that deserve special mention is its analytics. You can access basic analytics for Instagram and Pinterest for any specific time frame. It also offers advanced analytics for Instagram and suggestions regarding which will be the best time to post on Instagram based on your target audience’s activity.
Create Shoppable Posts and Engaging Content
Before you can get to studying analytics, though, you’ll first need to get posting. It’s especially useful if you need to create shoppable posts. With the help of sellit, you can transform your social media content on any social platform into a social storefront. Alternatively, if you simply want to create engaging social media posts, its StoriesEdit feature offers designer templates and stickers to help you create and customize content.
Pricing: It offers three paid plans and a basic free plan. So, it can grow with you as your needs change.
Key Features:
- Visual content planner
- Platform-specific analytics
- Shoppable post creation
- Custom story templates
- Social storefront integration
12. Sprout Social
Best for: Brands and organizations of all sizes
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media posting/scheduling tool. It allows you to both schedule and post across multiple networks. Marketing teams can use it for collaboration, with user-level permissions providing specific access to marketing managers, writers and everyone in between to contribute to a social media calendar.
Sprout Social’s calendar feature provides a team with a bird’s eye view of what’s being published and promoted on a daily basis.
The package also includes a variety of social media analytics so you can see how well different pieces of content perform.
Pricing: Plans range from $249 to $499 per month, after a free 30-day trial.
Key Features:
- Multi-network scheduling
- Team collaboration tools
- Integrated calendar view
- Role-specific access
- Comprehensive content performance metrics
13. Buffer
Best for: Publishers, mid-stage startup teams, non-profits, higher education, sports teams, e-commerce, solopreneurs, businesses
As its name indicates, Buffer allows you to build up a selection of relevant posts you want to share, which can then schedule to go out at more suitable, appropriate times for your audience.
It allows you to customize your messages for each social network. The Buffer mobile app and the web browser extension make it easy to add webpage links, titles and images quickly to your Buffer schedule.
It suggests the most suitable times for you to post to each of your networks. Buffer also provides analytics showing how successful your posts were.
Pricing: Buffer operates a freemium model, where you can schedule 10 social updates for free, or with a paid plan you can undertake unlimited scheduling. This gives ample opportunity for a beginner to learn whether social media automation is likely to be of value to them.
Key Features:
- Custom post scheduling
- Platform-specific content customization
- Web and mobile content addition tools
- Optimal posting time suggestions
- Post success analytics
14. TweetDeck
Best for: Small businesses
If your only social scheduling needs are for Twitter, then TweetDeck could be ideal for you – particularly as it is free. It allows you to schedule tweets across multiple Twitter accounts. Twitter clearly saw the merits in TweetDeck, as it bought it in 2011.
It includes a comprehensive dashboard allowing you to see the tweets in an account’s Home feed, your Notifications, Messages, Activity, and Mentions. These change in real time. You can also add columns showing other items, such as Lists, Collections, Likes, Followers, Scheduled Posts, and more. You can make alterations to a scheduled Tweet before it’s published. You can also quickly add images and GIFs to your messages.
Pricing: The tool is free to use.
Key Features:
- Real-time Twitter dashboard
- Multi-account scheduling
- Comprehensive feed views
- Adjustable scheduled posts
- Multimedia attachment capabilities
15. Meet Edgar
Best for: Businesses of all sizes
MeetEdgar offers most of the usual tools allowing you to schedule social media content across a range of platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They expect to add Instagram and Pinterest soon. Technically the tool is called Edgar – and the webpage/app is where you “meet” Edgar.
You can use it to queue as much as your content as possible with minimal involvement on your part. You can create multiple categories for different types of content, such as blog posts, promotional materials, quotes, and questions. You use the social media calendar to add post categories at set times you want them to go out.
It makes reposting evergreen content particularly easy. Edgar recycles your updates over time, so your posts don’t go to waste after their initial publishing. As Edgar automatically re-shares your content over time, it becomes visible to more people and different audiences, without you doing any extra work.
Pricing: MeetEdgar offers two plans: Eddie Monthly Plan ($ 29.99 per month) and Edgar Monthly Plan ($ 49.99 per month).
Key Features:
- Automated content recycling
- Category-based post queuing
- Evergreen content reposting
- Scheduled content recycling
- Platform-specific scheduling
16. CoSchedule
Best for: Professional marketers, marketing teams, and marketing agencies
CoSchedule provides a way for you to schedule and organize your marketing. For a solopreneur or influencer, this may just involve coordinating your blog and social posts. If you are a business, you may have other marketing activities that need to be centrally organized. It even allows agencies to organize all of their projects for every client.
Social media scheduling, therefore, is just one part of CoSchedule’s offering.
You can efficiently manage and publish all your blog content and social promotion in one place. You can create a standalone social campaign or add a social campaign to any project. Your promotion can live in the same area as your planning, so your whole team is on the same wavelength.
You can easily schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Pricing: Plans start at $29 per month. This gives you one integrated calendar, with blog and marketing projects, and all-in-one social promotion. You also receive email marketing integrations and business analytics. The more expensive Professional and Enterprise plans add additional features, mainly related to other types of marketing campaign activities.
Key Features:
- Centralized marketing coordination
- Multi-project integration
- Blog and social post scheduling
- Marketing campaign activities
- Cross-platform social promotion
17. Levuro
Best for: Small to medium-sized businesses
Levuro takes center stage as a versatile social media management tool, providing key features such as post scheduling, streamlined social media planning, and comprehensive analytics. With Levuro, it’s easier than ever to schedule your social media posts ahead of time, allowing you to maintain a consistent posting routine while freeing up precious time for other aspects of your life or business.
Streamlined Social Media Planning with Editorial Calendar
Notably, the tool’s editorial planning function presents a user-friendly calendar view, which simplifies your social media strategy. It permits you to organize and rearrange your planned posts with a simple drag and drop mechanism, while also providing the option to switch between list view and calendar view as per your preference.
Efficient Post Scheduling for LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook
To optimize your productivity, Levuro allows you to schedule LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook content ahead of time. This functionality supports bulk scheduling, enabling you to focus on other tasks without the need to manually post content daily. Scheduling posts using Levuro is an easy task, even in its free version, thus making your social media management efficient and hassle-free, while acting as your personal social media calendar.
Pricing: Levuro offers a free plan and paid options from ‘Starter’ at €14/mo to ‘Business’ at 99€/mo, with increasing features per upgrade, all including a 14-day free trial.
Key Features:
- Intuitive calendar for editorial planning
- Drag-and-drop post organization
- Bulk scheduling for major platforms
- Switchable list and calendar views
- Versatile pricing options
18. Tailwind
Best for: Enterprises, midmarket and Small Businesses.
Tailwind’s focus on assisting you with your visual marketing. It describes itself as being “your end-to-end solution for winning on Pinterest and Instagram.” It is an all-in-one tool that allows you to discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyze results.
It features drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easy for marketers to upload, tag and publish their Pinterest and Instagram posts in bulk. Users can shuffle their post queue, to ensure that they keep variety in their posts.
You can also use Tailwind to automatically recommend the times for you to pin / post your content. Tailwind bases these suggestions on when your audience is most active on the relevant platform.
Pricing: Tailwind offers three very different pricing plans. Bloggers and small businesses with fewer than 25 employees can use their Pro plan at $12.99 per account per month. Larger brands need to jump to the higher-specced Advanced plan at $19.99 per month. There is also a plan for Enterprises.
Key Features:
- Visual content scheduling
- Drag-and-drop bulk uploading
- Post variety optimization
- Audience activity-based scheduling recommendations
- Comprehensive analytics
19. Crowdfire
Best for: Social Media Managers, agencies, brands, individuals, enterprises and startups
Crowdfire claims to be the first social media management app that supports posting to TikTok. You can use Crowdfire to post to virtually every major social network, as well as sharing material from a large selection of blogging platforms, online shops, and video sites, including YouTube and Twitch.
Content Curation and AI-powered Recommendations
It puts a lot of emphasis on content curation. You tell Crowdfire the topics that interest you, and it suggests a wide range of articles, images, posts (yours, including your YouTube videos), and RSS feeds. You can easily share these or help Crowdfire’s AI by telling it you aren’t interested in a particular content source.
Optimal Time Scheduling and Queue Management
Crowdfire keeps a queue of content and schedules your posts to go out at the optimal times for your audience. You can set these times yourself if you prefer, however. Crowdfire gives you the option to set your best times manually, network by network, and day by day. You have a Queue Meter that indicates the number of posts you have yet to make for the next week.
Pricing: Crowdfire offers four plans, ranging from a limited free plan (effectively for testing Corwdfire’s capabilities, through to the $74.98/month VIP plan that showcases all Crowdfire offers.
Although social sharing is at the heart of Crowdfire, the higher plans also offer competitor analysis, Mentions (social listening), and more advanced analytics that allow you to build custom reports, focusing on your preferred metrics.
Key Features:
- Multi-platform posting
- Content curation
- AI-assisted content recommendations
- Optimal time scheduling
- Advanced analytics
- Competitor insights
20. Feedly
Best for: Busy professionals and curious minds
Feedly is awesome. It lets you categorize the blogs you follow into feeds so you can easily group similar topics together. When you have content in one feed, you can view everything from that feed and ignore the other, less relevant feeds. Feedly is a robust feed reader that aggregates information from around the web into one convenient place. You can use it to view updates on any topic you’re interested in, whether they come from the news, blogs, social media posts, RSS feeds, or other sources.
The best part about Feedly is that you can use it to share social media content. The power scheduler allows you to schedule the same piece of content multiple times in the future. I would recommend only using this feature to schedule out tweets. You can then remove and/or edit the piece of content to say whatever you would like. It’s nice to no longer have to stress about finding 3rd party content to share on your social platforms and not have to a million different websites when you’re ready to schedule.
Pricing: Feedly offers Pro, Pro+, and Enterprise plans with diverse features and pricing to suit individual reading needs or advanced industry intelligence.
Key Features:
- Content aggregation and categorization
- Multi-source feed reader
- Power scheduler for repeated posts
- Content discovery and curation
- Customizable scheduling options
21. Sked Social
Best for: Agencies, brands, freelancers, or businesses of any size
Sked Social is an all-in-one visual marketing platform for businesses, brands, and agencies to create, store, find and use their social media marketing content online – whilst collaborating with staff and partners. If you’re looking for social media management software that saves time and increases ROI, then Sked is the one thing you need. The platform provides you with powerful tools to help create visual marketing masterpieces that connect with your audience on an emotional level. From the social media post creator to the photo editor and Instagram tagging features, you have everything you need to capture leads and sales.
With Sked, you can write unique descriptions and hashtags you want to appear within the first comment of your Instagram posts – keeping your main captions clutter-free and professional. You can also write unique descriptions and hashtags you want to appear within the first comment of your Instagram posts – keeping your main captions clutter-free and professional. Sked was designed from the ground up to help you visually plan your social media content, giving you an unfair advantage over your competitors.
From the social media calendar, hashtag manager, and visual feed planning features, Sked ensures you leave no stone unturned before you hit “publish”. With Sked’s hashtag manager, you can create and save hashtags and Instagram username mentions to be used in your social media posts. This will save you a lot of time, as you won’t have to type out your most effective hashtags every time you post.
Pricing: The platform offers pricing plans for individuals, teams, and large companies, with various features and support tailored to their needs.
Key Features:
- Clean captioning
- Hashtag management
- Integrated photo editing
- Collaborative tools
- Saved hashtag sets for efficient posting
22. Zoho Social
Best for: Businesses and agencies
Zoho Social is a social media management tool that helps businesses and agencies grow their presence on social media. Zoho Social is a social media solution that helps organizations build and grow their online presence. The platform allows businesses and other organizations to reach the right audience at the right time and engage them with the right messages. Users can easily manage multiple social media accounts and schedule posts. Your social media team can also collaborate via multiple accounts using the same standardized dashboard. Zoho Social helps you track marketing revenue over social media as well.
With Zoho Social, you can publish relevant content to your target audience more effectively. You can make informed publishing decisions using data analyzed by Zoho Social’s prediction engine. You will be able to engage your audience better and listen to their sentiments in real-time, enabling you to initiate a more engaging interaction.
Businesses will get to know the pulse of the market and the sentiments surrounding their products, services, and brands. These data are all accessible via reports that can be shared with your social media team, other departments, or the senior executives. Zoho Social works great with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Furthermore, it is best used in an integrated way with Zoho CRM and other modules in the complete Zoho Suite.
Pricing: Price starts at $11.09 for businesses. For agencies, plans start at $255/month.
Key Features:
- Schedule content in multiple ways
- Monitor brand reviews, @mentions, and keywords
- Collaborate with teammates through chat, audio, and video calls
- Generate intelligent reports for brand performance analysis
- Facebook and Linkedin Lead Ads Integration
- zShare Browser Extension
- Zoho CRM and Desk Integration
- Canva Integration
23. SocialBee
Best for: Businesses of all sizes
SocialBee has made it possible to focus on content more and it’s scheduling less. SocialBee is a social media management tool focused on scheduling of posts to various social media platforms and analyzing your performance after. Unlike the market leader, HootSuite, SocialBee lacks features like social media listening and engagement, content curation, A/B testing of posts, and PDF report generation.
Efficient Social Media Management
However, SocialBee is an established social media management tool and comes with its own mobile application, for social media management on the go. SocialBee lets you assign posts into categories, making it easier to schedule different types of posts, rather than granularly set them. However, you can still set them individually if needed. As setting posting schedules is a tedious affair, this feature is a huge timesaver. SocialBee notifies you if you run out of scheduled posts or if something goes wrong. SocialBee allows you to study your competitors’ followers on Twitter and recommends potential good ones. You can then reach out to them to build an active audience. While you can do the same without SocialBee, SocialBee makes it so much easier.
Integration
While most other social media management tools integrate with bitly and roll out their own link shortening service, SocialBee integrates with a host of link shorteners. This includes Rocketlink, Replug, Switchy, and Rebrandly, among others.
Pricing: SocialBee is affordable. Compared to Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sendible, SocialBee’s plans are reasonable and well within the budget of small-medium businesses or large digital agencies. This pricing allows you to scale your business, instead of keeping your team small due to ongoing software costs.
Key Features:
- Categorized post scheduling
- Mobile app for on-the-go management
- Competitor follower analysis on Twitter
- Multiple link shortener integrations
- Post depletion alerts
24. e-clincher
Best for: Small and Medium Businesses
e-clincher is a social media management platform catering to a wide range of social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, TikTok, and more. It also has integrations to cloud storage platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive and creativity apps like Canva.
Scheduling and Publishing
e-clincher has a real strength with its social media posting and scheduling tool. Its support for direct Instagram publishing is a real bonus that not all of its competitors can achieve yet. The Visual Calendar lets you schedule posts by choosing dates and times. You can then drag and drop anything you have planned from one date and time to another, rather than editing each entry and having to type in the information.
Pricing: e-clincher has different subscription levels offering increasingly expanded features—however, only a handful of features are missing from the lowest tier (Basic), which starts at $65/month. The differences between each level generally reflect how much you can use a feature, e.g., the number of users, social profiles, brands, suggested content feeds, and the like. The Basic plan also lacks much of the analytics available at the higher tiers.
A significant reason for eclincher’s success is the quality of its support. It offers 24/7 live support, even at its lowest tiered subscription.
Key Features:
- Referral invites & notifications
- Multiple referral program types
- 1000+ referral program templates
- Landing page builder
- Social media sharing buttons
- Fraud and user verification alerts
- Analytics
- Automated publishing
- Contact management
- Keyword filtering
- Multi-account management
- Post scheduling
- Social media management
25. Socialoomph
Best for: Social media users
Socialoomph provides some excellent scheduling and queuing power but is less user-friendly than much of the competition. As a result, it is particularly suitable for social media managers with above-average computing and coding skills.
Connecting Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to Socialoomph can be a mission. You effectively have to write a Facebook (or LinkedIn) application and have it approved by a development team at the relevant social network. However, connecting to Twitter is much easier and is as automated as many of the other social scheduling managers.
Socialoomph also has one notable omission from its scheduling roster – there is no mention of Instagram. On the other hand, you can use it to schedule many lesser-catered-for channels, such as Pinterest, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, StockTwits, and blogs (Shopify / Tumblr / WordPress.com / WordPress.org). You can even use webhooks to automatically create social and blog posts from services such as IFTTT.
If you run social accounts for clients, you can smoothly run everything from one account, yet can also partition each clients’ accounts if you prefer. You can easily ensure that the right team members receive the correct privileges for each social account.
Socialoomph uses queues well. You have multiple ways to automatically fill up “never-go-dry” queues for each social account.
Pricing: Price starts at $55/month.
Key Features:
- Advanced scheduling options for unique platforms
- Partitioned client account management
- “Never-go-dry” content queues
- Enhanced user permissions
- Webhook integrations for automated post creation
26. SocialPilot
Best for: Digital marketing agencies and SMBs
SocialPilot’s interface is simple, clean, and very organized. For example, you can sort each account into relevant groups (by channel, by client, etc.) This makes posting to multiple channels particularly easy, as you set up a group of social channels that you regularly post to together. Then, just select the group, and your post will go where you want it to.
Instagram Direct Publishing and Post Scheduling
One significant change since we wrote our review on SocialPilot is that it now supports Instagram Direct Publishing. You can manage multiple accounts and directly publish posts on all of them. You can also schedule and publish the first comment along with all your Instagram posts. In addition, you can add hashtags in your first comment to give your post a broad reach while conveniently staying away from the message you want to convey.
Schedule Multiple Videos on TikTok
SocialPilot also now lets you create and Schedule multiple videos on TikTok. You can seamlessly schedule videos for multiple TikTok accounts by setting up an individual posting schedule.
Pricing: SocialPilot offers plans ranging from Professional at $25/mo up to Agency at $85/mo, although you can save 15% by taking out an annual plan. SocialPilot has an advantage over many of these competing apps because they let you sign up more social media accounts at each pricing tier. For example, with the lowest level Professional plan, you can sign up ten social accounts, and agencies can sign up 75 accounts. SocialPilot stresses that this should enable you to post all your updates without ever worrying about running out of limits.
Key Features:
- Direct Instagram and TikTok video publishing
- Structured interface for managing multiple accounts
- Group-based posting
- Hashtag management in the first comment
- Scalable plans for varied account needs
27. Post Planner
Best for: Small-Business
Post Planner is a web and mobile app that helps marketers manage social media campaigns, integrating well with Facebook and Twitter. The app is also effective for other social media platforms, such as Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Post Planner’s advantage is its user-friendliness. Its features are meant to fulfill five goals: connect, curate, compose, schedule, and analyze.
Let’s discuss connect first. With Post Planner, you can link all social media accounts in one tool. That means all data and content for all profiles are accessible in this app. With its curating feature, you can check for content trends and other insights from around 60 million pages on Facebook, 200 million Twitter profiles, and 2.5 million Reddit subreddits. You can customize and create a single stream of content from your chosen industry experts and/or competitors.
Post Planner also features streamlined composing, reviewing, scheduling, and posting tools that make it easy to optimize content management. You pick and design images, videos, GIFs, status updates, and links you want to publish. It’s possible to create a month’s worth of social media content in a matter of hours when you use this app.
Post Planner calculates the best time slot for posting your content. For international brands, one of the trickiest things is adjusting to different time zones. But Post Planner has an auto-time conversion tool that creates a uniform time slot for your posts wherever your audience is in the world. So all your 11:00 am posts will appear at that exact time regardless of the time zone.
Lastly, Post Planner has a dashboard where you can generate analytics reports and see how well certain posts are performing against your set metrics.
Pricing: Price starts at $5/month.
Key Features:
- Unified social media account management
- Content curation from vast online sources
- Streamlined content creation tools
- Optimal time slot calculation for posts
- Real-time performance analytics dashboard
28. StoryChief
Best for: B2B marketing teams and content agencies
StoryChief is a content marketing planner that combines SEO with planning and scheduling convenience. Unlike other social media tools with more convoluted interfaces, StoryChief has a simpler dashboard.
Streamlined Content Planning and Copywriting
The app simplifies content planning, specifically the copywriting aspect, with its intuitive interface. For each blog or social media draft, you have approval flows, commenting sections, and editorial briefs, which can all help organize your team’s inputs. It eliminates going back and forth for clarifications among team members.
When it comes to publishing, StoryChief can automatically schedule and share SEO-guided blog posts on your website. You can control which social media channels they’ll be posted on and when they’ll be posted. Social media posts, events, and blog posts are all placed on a calendar and can be launched on autopilot.
Versatile Media Editing Features
StoryChief has a varied built-in media editing software where you can edit text and photos, recolor, resize, and put overlays. Its smart cropping feature keeps your social media posts auto-cropped to suit different social media platforms.
Seamless Content Management and Integration
StoryChief simplifies content management with integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, Cloudinary, Bynder, and Canto. And while StoryChief mostly focuses on content-based features, it doesn’t neglect to provide users with accurate data analytics. With the app, you can review the performance of posts, tweak and repost content, and monitor your audience interactions in real-time.
Pricing: Price starts at $40/month.
Key Features:
- Integrated SEO guidance
- Content approval flows and commenting
- Automatic SEO-focused publishing
- Built-in media editing software with smart cropping
- Real-time audience interaction analytics
29. Later
Best for: Businesses of all sizes
Later lets you post to a variety of social networks, but its main emphasis is on Instagram. Unlike many social media posting and scheduling tools, you begin a post in Later with an image, rather than its text. You upload the image to Later and then create the accompanying caption.
It can initially be challenging to set up Later so that it posts directly to Instagram (thanks to Instagram’s revamped API). Still, once you have changed your Instagram account to either a Business or Creator account, the process becomes easy.
At the heart of Later you have a Media Library. You begin each post by uploading images to your Media Library, and they remain available for future posts. You can add notes and labels to your media items and add a star to any image you wish to highlight. You can filter your images in many ways.
You can also upload and share videos if you have one of Later’s paid plans. Later also helps you to upload and create Stories.
With Later’s Quick Schedule, you can drag and drop posts into time slots in your schedule. This is Later’s equivalent of a queue. Later populates your next available time slot with your media content.
Pricing: Price starts at $18/month. If you have one of Later’s business plans, you have access to Conversations. Conversations allow you to manage your Instagram comments directly inside Later.
Key Features:
- Image-centric posting approach
- Media library for organized content storage
- Drag-and-drop scheduling
- Instagram Stories support
- Integrated Instagram comments management
30. Hootsuite
Best for: Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools for social media scheduling, and for several reasons.
Multi-Network Management and Customizable Dashboard
One is that it enables you to have and manage your multiple social media networks in columns, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. It also supports WordPress. The intuitive dashboard is fairly easy to navigate, although you may be overwhelmed at first with the number of data present. The good thing is you can customize what info will appear for each account.
Scheduling, Customer Conversations, and Real-Time Analytics
Hootsuite can schedule multiple posts, keep track of customer conversations, manage and review organic content, and provide real-time analytics. With this app, you can check out a user’s social data with a click and identify social searches, keywords, and other useful data for your custom stream.
Integration and Video-First Support
Hootsuite integrates with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. If you’re in a large team, the app supports convenient, collaborative posting and workflow because each member can access digital assets easily. And recently, they introduced a better video-first support to optimize video content for Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Analytics and Reporting with Limitations
For analytics, while Hootsuite has one of the most sophisticated analytics and report generation out there, it limits some of the important templates for pricier plans. For example, team productivity reporting and Facebook Aggregate are only available on the Enterprise Plan.
Pricing: The main drawback for Hootsuite is the price, which may be too steep for small businesses. But for a larger company with a bigger team, this is a worthwhile, sophisticated tool. Price starts at $99/month.
Key Features:
- Centralized management of multiple social networks
- Customizable data columns
- Real-time analytics and reports
- Advanced video support for major platforms
- Seamless collaboration for larger teams
31. Sendible
Best for: SMMs, corporate marketing teams and digital agencies
Sendible describes itself as “The #1 Social Media Management Tool for Agencies”.
Diverse Social Network Connectivity and Blog Integration
You can connect to just about any social network, as well as post directly to your WordPress, Medium, Tumblr or Blogger blog. You can use Sendible’s geo-targeting features to reach specific segments of your audience. Sendible helps you upload videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Sendible features an integrated dashboard and tools relating to publishing, collaboration, analytics, CRM, listening, and mobile.
Publishing and Scheduling Capabilities
In the area of publishing, it allows you to plan, schedule and publish posts, images, and videos to multiple social networks simultaneously using their powerful compose box. You can schedule social media posts, images and videos individually or in bulk as far in advance as you need. Sendible allows you to set your best-performing content on repeat to keep your social media profiles active. You visualize your content on a shared publishing calendar.
Canva Integration for Visual Content
One useful feature is a tie-in with Canva to help you design better-performing visual content.
Pricing: While it lists the $240 Scale Plan – “For growing agencies & brands” as its most popular plan, it does cater for other organizations, with a $29 Creator plan for freelancers and a $89/month Traction plan for startup agencies & brands, along with a Custom plan, for large teams & agencies.
Key Features:
- Multi-network publishing
- Geo-targeting for audience segments
- Integrated publishing dashboard
- Repeat scheduling for top-performing content
- Integrated Canva design tools
What You Need to Know About Social Media Scheduling Tools
Picture this: you’re switching between multiple accounts, pages, and platforms, trying to get everything done for your brand’s social media campaign. You painstakingly comb through each page on each platform, crafting posts and reviewing them, hoping to get a green light from your stakeholders. In between, you have to worry about your content’s reach and engagement rates and whether it’s reaching the right audience at the right time. Difficult, right?
With a social media scheduling tool, you’re able to better manage multiple pages on multiple platforms, get the data and analytics you need to enhance your social media marketing strategy, and optimize your reach. With that in mind, here are key things you need to know about social media scheduling and posting tools.
What is a Social Media Scheduling Tool?
Simply put, a social media scheduling tool is an application that automates the planning and posting of your social media content. It lets you schedule your posts ahead of time, so even if you’re not always active or online, you can still manage to get your posts up. While each tool’s features can vary, it works by letting you upload your post to the app and determine a schedule for posting as well as the platform where it’s going to go live. It also doubles as a content curation tool.
Why Use a Social Media Scheduling and Posting Tool?
A social media posting tool is a crucial addition to any business’s or social media manager’s marketing arsenal. Because it helps automate manual tasks, you can maximize your time and focus on other more complex issues or tasks.
More importantly, it’s tricky to manage multiple accounts and pages while trying to reach your target audience. You may be able to do so using traditional marketing methods, but you may incur more expenses, get irrelevant data, and reach an untargeted audience segment in the process. With a social media scheduling and posting tool, you’re able to plan and stay on top of things, such as launching a new product or promoting an event.
Furthermore, these tools can help your business become more consistent and stay true to your branding. Consistency is vital, especially when you’re on social media. It delivers a seamless experience for both your patrons and potential customers and creates a unified identity and messaging for your business. By being consistent, you can stand out from the competition because people will know what to expect from you. For example, if your brand is consistently using a certain design or layout for your content, then people will know that this particular post is from you.
Source: brandwatch.com
These tools let you review your posts, allowing you to check for consistency across different platforms without having to go through each page or platform one by one.
7 Key Benefits of Social Media Scheduling
There are plenty of benefits to using social media scheduling and posting tools. Here are seven of them:
- Manage accounts and pages in multiple social media accounts
Let’s start with the more obvious benefit—being able to manage multiple accounts using one platform. A dedicated social media scheduling and posting tool lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts without requiring you to log in to each platform manually. Before using a social media scheduling tool, you’ll have to link all your social media accounts to it. This way, you can enjoy a single login process and get a unified dashboard where you can manage your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.
- Saves you time
Humans are prone to making errors and forgetting even the most important things. With a social media scheduling tool, you can plan for up to a month in advance. Plus, these tools let you reschedule your content, so if something unexpected or urgent crops up, you can adjust your content calendar accordingly. They also let you check and review your content before they’re posted, mitigating the risk of any errors on your posts.
The bottom line is that these tools can improve your workflow and save your team from distractions. Schedule your content ahead of time without having to worry if they’re live or reaching the intended audience. You won’t have to check in periodically to monitor their performance, and in turn, you’ll have more time to engage with your audience.
- Improve content curation
Social media scheduling tools can greatly enhance your content curation process. The reality is that it’s challenging to create and promote relevant, engaging, and high-quality branded content every single time. Using social media scheduling tools lets you curate content from other resources, giving you a convenient way to share content created by others on your social media channels. With this, you won’t have to always come up with new content every time. You’re also introducing your audience to more varied but still relevant pieces of content. Many social media scheduling tools have content curation features such as RSS feeds. Some even have integrations that let you find and share top-notch content relevant to your brand and message.
- Get relevant data to improve your strategy and campaigns
One of the best features of social media scheduling and posting tools is they give you access to critical data through analytics. With analytics, you’re able to measure your post’s performance, determine which type of content your target audience often engages with, and what’s the optimal posting time. By monitoring and measuring your content’s performance, you’re can take the necessary steps to improve not only the content itself but also your social media marketing strategy as a whole. Furthermore, many of these tools let you conduct market research and monitor other important components such as keywords and customer reviews or feedback.
- Drives real-time engagement
Source: brandwatch.com
Nowadays, posting consistently just doesn’t cut it. You also need to up your audience engagement. Social media scheduling tools can organize and help you keep track of your conversations. Using your dashboard, you can easily search for conversations or respond to queries in real-time across different social media channels.
- Improves team collaboration
Source: sendible.com
These tools simplify collaboration. You won’t have to monitor what each person in each team is doing. You can add members to your account and control their access to what’s only relevant to their responsibilities. You can also assign which member or team should work on what aspect. For example, you can use your scheduling tool to assign a person to monitor conversations while another team monitors your analytics.
- Easily customize posts
Social media scheduling tools not only help you manage your content across platforms but also let you enhance or customize your posts. Many tools have integrations with design apps and photo-editing apps, such as Canva and Giphy, allowing you to create immersive visuals that will appeal to your target audience.
What’s the Best Time to Schedule Posts Using a Social Media Scheduling and Posting Tool?
The “best” time to schedule posts varies for each organization. For some, it can be one week in advance. For others, up to a month. How you schedule your content depends on your needs and how far you can manage to plan out posts in advance.
Planning is advantageous, but scheduling your content too far ahead also comes with risks. You may face unexpected events that will cause you to reschedule your content calendar or remove “irrelevant” posts entirely.
Can Small Businesses Use Social Media Scheduling Tools?
Yes, they can! For small businesses, social media can play a major role in their growth. By being able to manage your social media channels more effectively, you’re more likely to build and maintain not only an active online presence but also an engaged following.
Small businesses often juggle many roles with only a limited number of resources, like manpower. Social media scheduling tools can help you streamline your business processes and workflows, save time and money, improve collaboration, and create the right content for your target audience, all on one dashboard. So, even with a small number of people, you can still produce high-quality content that appeals to your intended audience. If you’re a small business that’s looking to leverage the capabilities of such tools, make sure that you consider your budget and utilize their free trial offers. This way, you can get a firsthand experience of what it’s like and see whether its capabilities can meet your needs. Make sure that the social media scheduling and posting tool you choose offers round-the-clock customer support.
Finding the Right Social Media Scheduling Tool
With the sheer amount of social media scheduling and posting tools out there, it can be tough to find the right one for your organization. Here are some key factors to consider when finding the best social media scheduling tool:
- Features
Determine what your business needs and goals are and what challenges you’re currently facing when it comes to social media management. Do you need an app that has advanced scheduling features, or do you want something that offers integrations for creating visuals? Do you need an app that lets you create a content calendar? What about monitoring conversations and analytics? Different tools offer different features. From there, identify the features you need to have in a social media tool.
To give you an idea of what features to look for, here’s a rundown of key features to consider:
- Publishing tools
A good social media scheduling tool should make it easy for you to schedule and publish content across different channels, meet your goals (whether it’s increased engagement, acquiring new followers, or something else), and get your brand out there. It should have a robust scheduling tool that will let you schedule and organize weeks’ or months’ worth of content in one go.
Another great feature to have is a queueing and rescheduling tool, which automatically shares posts even if you’ve lapsed on some content and allows you to insert evergreen content. You may also want to consider additional features such as post time optimization and post geotargeting. The former helps you automatically post content at optimal times to maximize audience engagement, while the latter lets you publish content for specific locations to ensure that you reach the right audience.
- Engagement tools
Engagement is vital to establishing growth. You need to engage your audience to maintain their loyalty and attract new customers. Your social media scheduling and posting tool should have engagement tools, such as an integrated social media inbox that lets you keep track of all messages and lets you do appropriate actions like replying to them.
It should also let you monitor keywords, allowing you to monitor conversations about your brand and engage your audience in a dialogue or identify what people are searching for so you have the opportunity to tap into trends and leverage that information for your campaigns.
- Platform integrations
Integrations let you do more with your social media scheduling tool. For example, an integration with Canva or other photo editing apps will let you directly add images or videos directly to your content in one place. Email integrations also let you seamlessly conduct email marketing using your scheduling tool.
- Analytics and reports
Analytics tools enable you to gauge your performance and inform future actions or strategies. Reporting tools let you communicate essential information to all your stakeholders and team members.
For example, if your social media scheduling tool has an engagement report feature, you’re able to monitor your performance when it comes to audience engagement, such as if you’re frequently responding to messages or answering them in a timely manner.
A team reporting feature is also helpful to monitor large social media accounts. You’re able to see which aspects are doing great and which ones need more attention or if you need to expand operations for that particular aspect, allowing you to make better strategies.
A trends report functionality will also come in handy. This lets you view hashtags or mentions about your brand or posts so you can tailor your future content accordingly and determine the kind of audience that engages with your brand online.
- Collaboration features
If you’re running large-scale social media accounts, then it’s highly likely that you’re working with large teams. Collaboration features that let you assign tasks, get notifications, manage permissions, and detect overlaps or task collisions can streamline operations for each department and minimize the risk of team members having to spend more effort completing a task.
Additionally, you should keep an eye out for approval workflows, which can help streamline your scheduling process. This also gives you more control over the posts as you can choose to accept or approve them prior to scheduling.
- CRM
CRM functionalities let you monitor audience interactions and derive more information about your audience, including customers. One useful feature that your scheduling tool should have is a conversation history tool that lets you check past conversations to better tailor your response to current interactions.
- Customizability
A good social media scheduling tool is customizable, so you can program it to fit your needs. While presets are good and can help make your work easier, they’re not that helpful if you’re unable to tailor them according to your needs and preferences. For example, your scheduling and posting tool should let you choose what you need to see on your content calendar, as well as how that calendar should look like.
With this in mind, you also need to look at a scheduling tool’s capacity to make regular updates and fixes. Bugs can interrupt your operations, which is why it’s crucial to find a tool that offers routine fixes for bugs. These updates can also add new features to your tool, making it more comprehensive.
- Supported platforms
Check whether your social media scheduling tool supports the social media platforms you’re currently using. If it doesn’t, you may end up switching from one scheduling tool to another, which can lead to additional costs and reduced efficiency.
- User interface
Find a scheduling tool that’s intuitive and easy to use. This way, you or your team won’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use it, so you can focus on creating quality content instead.
- Pricing
Check your budget. How much are you willing to spend on a scheduling tool? Many scheduling tools offer a variety of pricing options, and most of them offer free trials. Check if a certain plan has features that meet your needs or if you need an upgrade to access more advanced features. You can also check scheduling tools that offer free plans if you’re working on a tight budget.
- Automation
Automation functionalities are a great feature to have in your social media scheduling tool. Automation ensures that you get things done even if you’re not online all the time. It also gives you more control over what you’re posting, as well as your scheduling process. It lessens your workload, ensures consistent engagement on your social media channels, and expands your online reach. Being able to leverage automation can lead to better outcomes when it comes to engagement rates, sales, and brand awareness. Some of the scheduling tools on our list, such as Brandwatch, Monday.com, and Buffer have automation features.
- Customer support
When using a new tool, you don’t expect everyone to get the hang of it right away. Find out if your provider offers resources like guides and training for new users. Also, check to see if they offer round-the-clock support and the available channels their customer support services are on so you can get in touch with them if you have any questions or concerns.
- Scalability
As your business grows, you may find that your needs will start to change. You’ll need to determine whether your social media scheduling tool is scalable to accommodate your growth. Find out if your chosen tool offers a flat rate (regardless of your scale) or if it charges a separate fee for each user. If it’s the latter, check to see if the total cost still fits within your budget or if you need to make allowances.
- Mobile app
Make sure that the scheduling tool you choose offers a mobile app. This way, you can access it even when you’re on the go. Check to see if the mobile app is easy to use and comes with all the features that its desktop or web counterpart has.
Which Social Media Scheduling Tool Should You Choose?
So, how do you choose the right social media scheduling tool for your needs? Aside from looking at features that are important to have, we’ve come up with separate categories for recommendations. These cover individual creators, SMBs, large-scale enterprises, eCommerce businesses, and more. In these recommendations, we’ve outlined the capabilities of selected scheduling and posting tools and how these can help your brand.
Recommended Social Media Scheduling Tools for Creators and Small Businesses
Creators and small businesses have several considerations when it comes to choosing the best scheduling and posting tools for their needs. We’ve looked at several scheduling tools that combine functionality, ease of use, and affordability, as well as their scaling capabilities.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a robust social media scheduling tool that lets you create content, schedule posts, and streamline operations without breaking the bank. It offers a “Free Forever” plan that comes with basic features, such as basic analytics. However, this freemium version has limited capabilities. For example, you’re only able to work on one account each for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook.
It does offer a Pro plan that starts at $12.99 per month, which comes with more advanced features, such as access to 200 Post Designs per month and advanced analytics, making it a good option for individual creators or businesses that are just starting out.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is another tool that offers plenty of features without the hefty price tag. Despite its feature-rich platform, its affordability and ease of use make it a great choice for creators and small businesses alike. You get content suggestions, analytics, and even white-label functionalities. It also has several useful integrations, such as Zapier, Canva, and Snip.ly. Its Professional plan starts at $25.50 per month (when billed annually) and lets you manage up to 10 social media accounts. However, this plan is limited to only one user.
PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is a versatile tool that can cater to a range of users, from small businesses to enterprise-level businesses. This all-in-one local marketing platform offers a pricing plan designed for small businesses, which starts at $49 per month. With this plan, you can manage ten social media accounts and have access to key features like an all-in-one social inbox and local SEO.
Sendible
Sendible is an easy-to-use scheduling tool that lets you manage different social media platforms in one place, including Facebook Ads, Google My Business, and YouTube. It also supports an array of integrations, such as WordPress, Canva, and Dropbox. It has separate pricing plans for creators (one user only) and startup agencies and brands (up to four users), starting at $29 per month and $89 per month, respectively.
Later
Later offers a user-friendly interface and visual scheduling functionalities. If your business is growing, you can upgrade to its Growth plan, which starts at $40 per month.
Buffer
Buffer is a versatile social media scheduling tool that lends itself well to smaller-scale operations and individual users. It also offers a free plan that comes with support for various channels, including LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. The free plan also gives you access to a limited number of planning and scheduling tools, integrations, and customer support.
Note that the free plan doesn’t give you access to analytics, insights, reporting tools, and functionalities like engagement and team management. You can upgrade to Buffer’s Essentials plan, which starts at $6 per month per channel. If you want to add more channels, be prepared to shell out $6 per month for each additional channel.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an immensely popular social media management tool that also works well for small businesses and individual users. With a free account, you can manage two social media accounts and five scheduled messages. Want something more powerful? There’s the Professional plan, which goes for $99 per month. With this plan, you can manage up to 10 social accounts, schedule unlimited posts, access an integrated inbox, and more.
Here’s a table outlining some of these tools’ useful features for creators and small businesses, should you opt for a free plan or starter plan if the freemium version is unavailable:
Post Scheduling | Integrations | Accounts Supported | Platforms Supported | Analytics | Support | |
Tailwind | Yes | No | 1 each for Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram | Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and up to 5 Tailwind Communities | Basic analytics | Yes |
SocialPilot (Professional Plan) | Yes, but no Custom Fields function | Yes | Up to 10 social media accounts | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, TikTok, VK, and Google My Business | Yes, but only limited to detailed social media analytics and post performance | 24x5 support and self-service knowledge base |
Promo Republic (Small Business plan) | Yes | N/A | Up to 10 social media accounts | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google My Business | No | 24x5 support |
Sendible (Creator Plan) | Yes | Yes, but limited to Canva integration | Up to six profiles and one user | Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, and WordPress | Yes, but limited to quick reports with Google Analytics | Live chat is available from 9 am to 10 pm (GMT). Comes with group training sessions |
Later | Yes (photo and video) | N/A | One social set, one user, and one access group | Instgram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn | Yes, but limited to Instagram Analytics Lite | N/A |
Buffer | Yes | Yes | Up to three channels for one user | Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Start Page (landing page) | No | Yes |
Hootsuite | Up to five scheduled messages only | N/A | One user and two social accounts | TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest | N/A | N/A |
Recommended Scheduling Tools for Medium-Sized Business
When it comes to social media and social media scheduling tools, medium-sized businesses want something that can help them reach their goals, expand their reach, nurture their brand image, and boost brand awareness without necessarily having to resort to more expensive options. Additionally, much like small businesses, medium-sized businesses are looking to reach the right audience.
With this in mind, having a scheduling tool that lets you manage your posts, get insights and analytics, generate reports, and monitor keywords can help you meet your online goals. Below are some of the social media scheduling tools that medium-sized businesses may find useful:
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a great scheduling tool to have if you’re running a small agency or a medium-sized business. With its simple, easy-to-use platform, you get a user-friendly interface that lets you draft and schedule posts, monitor ratings, respond to reviews, keep track of profiles, keywords, and locations, and access group, profile, and post-level reports, as well as CRM tools.
Its Standard plan, which goes for $249 per user per month (billed annually), has all these features and more. If you want to get analytics and deeper insights, you can upgrade to either the Professional or the Advanced plan, which goes for $399 per user per month and $499 per user per month, respectively.
Agorapulse
If you want a social media scheduling tool that also offers competitor analysis functionalities, then Agorapulse is a great option. Similar to Sprout Social, it’s easy to use and offers quick customer support for its paid plans.
Its pricing plans are also designed for growing teams, making it a good choice for medium-sized businesses. It offers a freemium version, which lets you schedule a limited number of posts, monitor ad comments, and get access to its Agorapulse Academy and a Facebook ROI calculator.
If you want something that’s a bit more powerful, you can go with its Pro plan ($79 per month when billed annually), which is designed for smaller teams. If you want an option that can handle your growth, its Advanced plan ($119 per month when billed annually) is also a great alternative. With the Advanced plan, you can add up to 20 social profiles and two shared calendars. Note that corresponding fees apply with each addition.
Eclincher
While eclincher is designed for a variety of users, be they agencies or franchises, it’s also one of the best solutions for medium-sized businesses. With eclincher, you can access a range of tools that will let you publish and schedule posts, manage an integrated visual calendar, monitor keywords and hashtags, engage with our target audience in real time, and more.
Moreover, eclincher helps you protect your growing brand and online reputation with its reputation management tools and access to 24x7 live chat support. It doesn’t offer a freemium plan, but you can get a 14-day free trial. You can also opt for its Basic plan ($65 per month), which can accommodate one user and up to 10 profiles. Meanwhile, its Premier plan ($175 per month) can accommodate three users and 20 profiles. You can also go with its Agency plan ($425 per month), which works for six users and up to 40 profiles.
It’s worth noting that even with its Basic plan, you can already get plenty of useful features, including analytics reporting, team collaboration and post approval, and post scheduling functionalities.
Enterprise-Level Scheduling Tools Worth Trying Out
While they’re already operating at a relatively larger scale, enterprise-level businesses still need to bolster their online visibility, keep track of key metrics, and manage potential risks. Given their scale, they’re likely to run more social accounts and multiple campaigns at the same time. To help you better manage your online presence, here are a few enterprise-level social media scheduling tools that you should check out:
Brandwatch
Designed as a tool that can keep up with our rapidly-changing world, Brandwatch lets you access an extensive archive of consumer opinion, leverage cutting-edge AI to discover trends, manage workflows and approvals, and protect your brand reputation, among other capabilities. Its enterprise-level solution offers a full product suite that lets you manage multiple social media channels, access a centralized social CRM, monitor your brand, and use benchmarking tools to measure your performance.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan gives you all the features in its Team and Business plans without all the limitations. You can get ad campaign management for up to 10 ad profiles, employee advocacy features for up to 25 employees (free), team productivity reporting, and message tagging. It also lets you connect and manage up to 50 social accounts all in one place.
Sprout Social
More than being just a social media scheduling and posting tool, Sprout Social also works as a powerful social media management tool for enterprise-level businesses. With its enterprise-level solution, you can conduct competitive analysis, trend analysis (Twitter keywords and hashtags), create automated chatbots, and access social CRM tools. When it comes to publishing and scheduling, you get media integrations, a campaign planner, social commerce tools, social listening tools, and employee advocacy solutions.
Sendible
Sendible’s Expansion plan for large teams and agencies lets you manage your social media channels at scale. With it, you can connect up to 15 users and 105 social profiles. You’ll also be able to use cloud integrations and get images from your Google Drive or Dropbox account. What’s more, you can schedule up to 500 posts and use smart queues for 120 posts. You’ll also be able to customize access to each team member’s dashboard, share live reports, customer success onboarding and training, and a dedicated customer success manager.
Social Media Scheduling and Posting Tools for eCommerce Businesses
eCommerce businesses will also benefit from using the right social media scheduling tool, which can help them oversee social activity and conversations about their brand and engage with customers and leads. This list includes some of the scheduling tools that work well for eCommerce businesses:
TweetDeck
If you’re running an eCommerce business, chances are you have a Twitter account. TweetDeck lets you manage different timelines, monitor competitor mentions and timelines, and monitor trending tweets. It also lets you schedule tweets and establish alerts for brand mentions.
SocialOomph
SocialOomph works for both individuals and teams. With it, you can autopost what’s on your queue, schedule content, upload posts in bulk, and prevent post flooding. It also lets you craft social media posts and comes with an optional keyword filtering feature. Whether you’re running your online business solo or working with a team, SocialOomph can help you streamline your workflows.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule lets you optimize your eCommerce marketing with its suite of social media management tools, which include a marketing calendar and a marketing suite. The former offers great flexibility with its drag-and-drop interface. Its pro version lets you automatically assign repetitive tasks, access advanced social publishing features, and bolster real-time collaboration with different teams. Its marketing suite offers four organizer solutions—calendar, content, work, and asset—all of which are designed to help you optimize your eCommerce marketing strategies.
Meet Edgar
If you want automation, then MeetEdgar is an excellent choice. With MeetEdgar, it’s possible to automate several major functions, such as your scheduling process and how you repurpose your content. Perhaps one of its best features is it lets you track A/B test variations, so you know what works best with your target audience on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Google My Business.
Social Media Scheduling Tools With Multi-Platform Support
A good social media scheduling tool is capable of supporting most, if not all, major social media platforms. Here’s a quick look at some of the scheduling tools that support a broader range of social platforms (6 or more channels supported):
Channels and Social Media Integrations Supported
YouTube | TikTok | Google My Business | Others | ||||||
Brandwatch | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | - | - | |
Hootsuite | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
Loomly | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Snapchat |
Sendible | Yes, including Facebook Ads | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
NapoleonCat | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | - | Yes | |
Onlypult | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Medium, VK, Telegram, Tumblr, OK (Odnoklassniki), WordPress |
ContentCal | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | - | Yes | - | Yes | Medium |
Sprout Social | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google’s Business Messages, Reddit, Tumblr, Yelp |
Buffer | Yes (pages and groups) | Yes | Yes | Yes (pages and profiles) | - | Yes | Yes | - | Start Pages |
CoSchedule | Yes (pages and groups) | Yes (including profiles and business accounts) | Yes | Yes (profiles, pages, and showcase pages) | - | Yes | - | - | |
Crowdfire | Yes (including pages and groups) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | WordPress, Medium, Vimeo |
Later | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | - | |
Zoho Social | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | |
SocialBee | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
Eclincher | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | (soon) | Yes | Blogger |
SocialOomph | Yes | - | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | - | - | Mastodon, Discord, Tumblr, WordPress.com, WordPress.org |
SocialPilot | Yes (pages and groups) | Yes (personal and business profiles) | Yes | Yes (profiles and business pages) | - | Yes | Yes | Yes | VK, Tumblr |
StoryChief | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | - | Yes | Yes |
Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Limited Budgets
Scheduling tools can get very expensive, depending on the plan you go with. The good news is several social media scheduling tools offer a freemium or forever free option. Note that while these services are free, they have very limited capabilities. Keep this in mind if you’re looking for a solution that can accommodate your growth. Most of these scheduling tools do offer upgrades and let you change plans at any time. Check out the social media scheduling tools that let you get started for free:
- Buffer
- TweetDeck
- Hootsuite
- Planoly
- Tailwind
- Later
- Crowdfire
Number of linked accounts or channels | Scheduled posts per account | Number of users allowed | |
Buffer | Up to 3 | 10 for each channel | 1 |
TweetDeck | Add up to 200 accounts | Up to 30 tweets per hour | Multiple users |
Hootsuite | 2 social accounts | 5 scheduled messages | 1 |
Planoly | 1 social profile | 30 uploads per month for each profile | 1 |
Tailwind | 1 each for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook | 20 posts per month (Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook) | 1 |
Later | 1 social set (one each for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn) and 1 access group | 10 posts per month for each social platform supported | 1 |
Crowdfire | 3 | 10 per account | N/A |
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best social media scheduling tools?
It would be near impossible for businesses or influencers to make all of their posts "live." It would be a highly inefficient use of their time and severely disrupt their lives. We have looked at 31 of the best social media scheduling tools that help solve this problem in this post:
1. Brandwatch (Formerly Falcon.io)
2. Loomly
3. Sendible
4. AgoraPulse
5. Iconosquare
6. HeyOrca
7. Onlypult
8. PromoRepublic
9. NapoleonCat
10. Monday.com
11. ContentCal
12. Planoly
13. Sprout Social
14. Buffer
15. TweetDeck
16. Meet Edgar
17. CoSchedule
18. Tailwind
19. Crowdfire
20. Later
21. Feedly
22. Sked Social
23. Zoho Social
24. SocialBee
25. e-clincher
26. Socialoomph
27. SocialPilot
28. Post Planner
29. StoryChief
30. Hootsuite
31. Levuro
What is the best free social media management tool?
While there are many high-quality social media scheduling tools, most come at a cost. Some offer a free version with limited capabilities, however, that may be suitable for small organizations. These include:
Hootsuite
Buffer
TweetDeck (this one only has a free version)
Socialoomph
Everypost (pay with a tweet)
Crowdfire
Later
Quite a few of the other tools examined in this post offer free trials.
What social media tools are the most useful for business?
All the social media tools we have covered in this post would be useful for business. They all make the process of managing your social media accounts more manageable. The various social networks have different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to make posts at these peak times. Using these tools, you can design and bulk schedule multiple posts at once at the optimal times.
What should I look for in a social media management tool?
Social media management tools help simplify the process of creating and scheduling posts. Indeed, they are often the only way you can schedule social posts in advance. We have looked at 31 such tools in this post, and they vary significantly in their capabilities. Some limit themselves to the core post creation and scheduling capabilities. Others add to this with features such as social media monitoring and listening, analytics and reporting, engagement with combined inboxes, alerts, and other capabilities.
Is Hootsuite or Buffer better?
Both Hootsuite and Buffer have strengths as social media marketing tools. However, they take different approaches. The core of Hootsuite is Streams, columns of information. A Stream could be a series of posts on one social network. With Buffer, whenever you find an item you want to share, you add it to your "buffer," and the software publishes it on your behalf at an agreed time. Think of Buffer as being one big queue, where you add posts, which Buffer "uses" at agreed times.
Hoe much is Buffer per month?
Buffer's main product is Buffer Publish. They offer a series of plans, that differ by
The number of social accounts you're looking to schedule content to
The number of users who will need access to the tool
The number of posts you're looking to schedule
Whether or not you require features limited to higher-tier plans
The base monthly price for each plan is:
Free - $0
Essential - $6
Team - $12
Agency - $120
