In today’s world, a successful content marketing strategy often includes a well-thought-out social media marketing campaign. However, constantly posting on multiple social media accounts throughout the day can be quite time-consuming. That’s where the smart move comes in – social media management software. These tools not only help in scheduling content but also automate the posting process. Imagine being able to publish, monitor, and manage all your social media networks from one convenient dashboard.
To save time and boost the effectiveness of your social campaigns, our comprehensive guide brings you the top-notch social media management software options. Forbes Advisor has meticulously reviewed over a dozen companies, ranking them based on their value, features, and customer ratings. Stick around to discover the best choices available in the market!
The top 10 social media management tools
- Hootsuite
- Later
- Buffer
- Tailwind
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of overseeing your presence across all the social media platforms your brand utilizes. It’s not limited to large corporations; even small businesses and individual creators must handle their social media effectively.
This management involves several tasks such as planning and scheduling posts, engaging with followers, addressing queries, staying updated on current trends, and evaluating your performance.
It might seem like a hefty workload, and indeed it is! Utilizing technology, or in simpler terms, social media management tools, can make this process smoother. These tools will help you in the following ways:
Create and Schedule Posts: Plan and schedule your social media posts in advance.
Unified Inbox: Respond to comments and direct messages from multiple social media profiles in a single inbox.
Analytics Tracking: Monitor your analytics across various accounts and platforms from one centralized place.
Performance Reports: Generate and share comprehensive performance reports.
Automation: Automate audience and industry research through social listening and brand monitoring.
Asset Organization: Keep your creative assets organized and accessible to your entire team.
Customer Support Enhancement: Improve your social customer support processes, response times, and customer satisfaction scores.
From a simple photo editing app to an all-in-one dashboard like Hootsuite, a social media management tool can come in various forms. The key takeaway is that these tools help marketers, business owners, and content creators spend less time on operational tasks (like clicking through countless tabs on different networks) and more time on creative and strategic endeavors.
Moreover, these tools play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy work-life balance while managing social media responsibilities.
Top Social Media Management Tools
Hootsuite
Hootsuite stands out as a go-to social media management tools, streamlining the coordination of your various social media profiles through a unified dashboard.
One of its standout features is the ability to schedule posts, ensuring your content reaches your audience’s social media feeds precisely when it matters most. Beyond that, Hootsuite offers tools for content curation from the web, letting you share interesting finds across your social media platforms.
Navigate your social media journey seamlessly from the Hootsuite dashboard. Edit and create images that align with platform specifications and preview how each post will appear. The platform also supports social media monitoring, keeping you in the loop with brand mentions or specific keywords.
Here’s a breakdown of Hootsuite’s key features:
Post and Schedule Across Platforms: Manage content scheduling across multiple social media platforms.
Preview Posts: Get previews of how your posts will look on each social media platform.
Multi-Platform Support: Works with various platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
Content Curation: Curate content from the web to incorporate into your posts.
Built-in Image Editing: Edit images seamlessly within the platform.
Video Upload and Sharing Tools: Facilitates video uploading and sharing.
Social Media Tracking and Analysis: Comprehensive tracking and analysis of social media activities.
Pros of Hootsuite
Detailed Analytics: Offers in-depth analytics for data-driven decisions and strategy refinement.
Unified Platform: Monitor and post to all your social media accounts from a single platform.
Cons of Hootsuite
WordPress Integration: While it has a plugin for posting to WordPress, auto-sharing WordPress posts to social media profiles isn’t supported.
Limited WordPress Management: Managing social media posts directly from your WordPress website isn’t possible.
Ease of Use
Hootsuite boasts an extensive set of features, which may seem overwhelming initially. However, a robust help center, along with email and live chat support, ensures quick adaptation for you or your social media manager.
Pricing
The Hootsuite Professional plan, priced at $99 per month, enables you to manage up to ten social media accounts, offering a comprehensive solution for your social media management tools needs.
Buffer
Buffer stands out as a well-established social media management tools, offering a suite of features designed to assist both individuals and businesses in effectively handling their social media accounts.
Originally designed to facilitate the writing and scheduling of posts across various social media platforms, Buffer’s core functionality has expanded over time. Paid accounts now provide users with the ability to engage with their audiences directly within the platform and analyze both their posts and their followers’ engagement on social media.
Buffer has recently introduced a set of AI features aimed at helping users grow their social media audience by repurposing existing content across multiple platforms.
Here’s a breakdown of Buffer’s key features:
- Social Media Post Scheduling
- Cross-Platform Post Sharing
- Social Media Analytics (available with paid accounts)
- Hashtag Management (available with paid accounts)
- Tool for Viewing Social Media Comments, Engagements, and Mentions (available with paid accounts)
- AI Features for Post Creation and Repurposing
Pros of Buffer
Streamlined Interface: Buffer offers a user-friendly interface, making post creation and scheduling a straightforward process.
AI Repurposing: Leveraging AI features, Buffer allows the automatic repurposing of high-performing posts to generate new content.
Cons of Buffer
No Automatic Website Post Sharing: Buffer lacks the ability to automatically share posts from your website within the platform. Users need to resort to third-party workarounds or create separate posts to share their content.
Ease of Use
Buffer boasts a simple and easy-to-use interface. Users can access a detailed knowledge base, and email support is available to assist all users.
Pricing
Buffer, the one among the best social media management tools offers a limited free plan that allows users to plan and publish posts on three social media platforms. The essential plan, priced at $6 per month per social media account, unlocks additional features, including engagement tools and analytics, providing a comprehensive solution for social media management.
Tailwind
Tailwind stands out as a distinctive social media management tools, specializing in the seamless sharing of visual content across Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook. Unlike traditional scheduling, Tailwind takes the guesswork out of posting by automatically scheduling your content when your audience is most active and engaged.
This platform goes beyond basic scheduling with its built-in editor, allowing you to craft on-brand social media posts effortlessly. You can add text, images, and videos, and Tailwind will automatically resize your content to perfectly fit the dimensions of each social media platform.
Tailwind offers an array of features:
- Post Planning and Idea Generation
- Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook Post Scheduling
- Auto-scheduling for Peak Audience Engagement
- Image and Post Creation Tools
- Hashtag Suggestions
- Comprehensive Post Analytics
- AI Tools for Copywriting Accompanying Images
- Email Marketing Features
Pros of Tailwind
Advanced Post-Creation Tools: Build optimized image-based posts for each platform effortlessly with Tailwind’s advanced tools.
Robust Analytics: Gain insights into your Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram posts, discovering which types of content garner the highest engagement.
Cons of Tailwind
Focus on Visual Content: Tailwind is tailored for image-based posts on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, making it less suitable for those aiming to share text-based content or website links on social media.
WordPress Limitations: Tailwind does not support automatic posting from WordPress websites, requiring manual creation of social media posts in Tailwind for each share.
Ease of Use
Tailwind’s user-centric and intuitive platform simplifies the creation and scheduling of image-based posts. A comprehensive help center and accessible email support are available to all users.
Pricing
Tailwind offers the Pro plan at $12.99 per month, allowing connection to one Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook account. The Advanced Plan, priced at $19.99 per month, provides additional resources and supports multiple accounts, offering a flexible solution for various social media management needs.
Revive Old Posts
Revive Old Posts is made to make sharing your website content on social media easy.
With Revive Old Posts, you can automatically reshare your old blog posts to bring in more visitors. It does this by reposting your content at times you choose. If you go for the premium versions, it can also help you plan and share posts directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Here’s what Revive Old Posts – iconic social media management tools offers:
- Support for various social media accounts, including Facebook and LinkedIn
- Automatic sharing of posts, pages, and custom post types at specific times
- Option to add categories or tags as hashtags
- Custom post scheduling (in premium version)
- A URL shortener with click tracking (in premium version)
- Custom post variations (in premium version)
Pros of Revive Old Posts
Boost Traffic: It helps drive more visitors to your older blog posts by automatically resharing links, keeping your social media presence active.
Cons of Revive Old Posts
Limited Scheduling: The free and basic premium versions don’t let you schedule when to share on social media. You can only share posts right after publishing and at set intervals.
Limited Customization: While premium plans allow custom messages, they rotate with your default post structure, and the plugin doesn’t pick the best image from your posts automatically.
Ease of Use
Revive Old Posts is easy to use. Once you link your social media accounts, it starts sharing your old posts automatically. Some advanced features need a bit more setup, but there’s a knowledge base to help. Premium users can also get support through email.
Pricing
Revive Old Posts has a free version, and if you want more features, premium plans start at $75 per year. Plans with custom scheduling begin at $149 per year.
Later
Later started as a tool just for Instagram, especially for small businesses. But as time passed, it expanded to support more social media platforms like Facebook and TikTok. Later helps you plan, schedule, and post on social media. You can use their mobile app or web platform, which includes a visual calendar to easily schedule posts by dragging and dropping images.
Here are some key features of Later – one of the impressive social media management tools:
- Plan, schedule, and publish posts on various platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest
- Visual social media content calendar
- Tools for creating content
- Tools for curating user-generated content (UGC)
- Social media analytics
- A ‘link in bio’ tool, letting you share links or a shoppable Instagram feed in your social media bios
Pros of Later
Visual Content Calendar: Later’s calendar gives a clear view of your scheduled content, and you can easily drag and drop posts to reschedule or reuse them.
Content Creation Tools: Later’s tools make it simple to turn an image into a great post for Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest.
Cons of Later
Platform Focus: Even though Later supports more platforms now, it’s still more suited for businesses that focus on sharing image-based content.
Post Limits: There’s a limit on how many posts you can publish each month on each platform.
WordPress Posting Manual: You can’t automatically share your WordPress website’s posts using Later. You need to create a post manually and upload images to share your website’s content.
Ease of Use
Later has an interface designed around a visual calendar, making it easy to navigate. It’s quite intuitive, and they offer email support to all users.
Pricing
Later’s Starter plan is $18 per month, letting you connect a single account per platform and post 30 times a month for each. The advanced plan is $40 a month, allowing up to three accounts per platform and 150 posts a month.
Conclusion
In the world of social media management tools for businesses, options like Hootsuite, Later, and Tailwind offer diverse functionalities catering to different needs. From comprehensive scheduling to visual-centric approaches, these tools streamline the process, ensuring efficient management across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and more. Embracing such tools is not just about convenience but signifies a strategic move for businesses aiming to enhance their online presence, engage audiences effectively, and make data-driven decisions in the dynamic digital landscape.
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