Best Social Media Management Tools in 2023
Plan, schedule, and analyze effortlessly for optimized engagement
Social media has become an essential part of modern life, and for businesses, it’s a critical component of their marketing strategy. As a freelancer, managing multiple social media accounts can be a daunting task, especially if you don’t have a dedicated social media team. However, with the right social media management tools, you can streamline your social media strategy, save time, and focus on what you do best: creating high-quality content.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at seven of the best social media management tools for freelance writers, editors, social media managers, and other content creators. These tools are designed to help you keep your social media accounts active, schedule posts, analyze performance, and engage with your audience.
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1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite also allows you to manage multiple social media accounts, schedule posts, and analyze your performance, all under one roof. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and publish posts in advance, ensuring a consistent posting schedule across platforms. Hootsuite also provides streams to monitor and engage with relevant conversations, and it offers tools for analytics and reporting to measure the performance of your social media efforts.
The platform’s monitoring capabilities enable you to stay on top of mentions, messages, and comments, allowing you to engage with your audience in real-time. Its analytics features provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your social media strategy, helping you make informed decisions and optimize your content for better results.
One of the most useful perks of Hootsuite is that it supports collaboration among team members. You can assign tasks, share streams, and coordinate your social media activities within the platform, ensuring smooth teamwork and preventing scheduling conflicts.
It’s important to note that Hootsuite offers various plans with different features and limitations. Depending on the plan you choose, you may have access to additional functionalities, such as team management, advanced analytics, or integrations with other marketing tools.
Whatever plan you choose, Hootsuite can help simplify social media management by providing a centralized platform to schedule posts, monitor activity, engage with your audience, and analyze performance across multiple social media accounts.
2. Buffer
Buffer is another popular social media management tool that helps individuals and businesses streamline their social media posting and scheduling processes. After signing up and connecting your social media accounts, you can create a posting schedule that determines when your content will be published. Buffer provides an intuitive interface to craft your posts, including text, links, and images.
The scheduling feature allows you to plan and queue your posts in advance, ensuring a consistent posting frequency. Additionally, Buffer offers analytics and performance insights to track engagement metrics and measure the impact of your social media efforts. You can adjust your strategy based on this data and optimize your content accordingly.
Collaboration is made easy with Buffer as it enables team members to work together on managing social media accounts. By assigning roles and permissions, you can ensure the right level of access and control for each team member. Buffer also facilitates engagement with your audience by providing tools to monitor and respond to comments, mentions, and messages from within the platform.
Overall, Buffer streamlines social media management by providing a centralized platform to schedule, publish, analyze, and engage with your social media content. It saves time and helps you maintain a consistent and effective social media presence.
Remember that social media strategies should be tailored to your specific goals and target audience. Buffer is a tool that assists in managing the logistics of social media posting, but it’s essential to develop a content strategy and maintain an authentic and engaging presence on social media.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that provides businesses with powerful analytics and reporting features, as well as the ability to monitor and engage with their audience on multiple platforms. This means you can schedule and publish social media posts across multiple platforms in advance, saving time and ensuring consistent content delivery. The platform also enables you to monitor and respond to comments, messages, and mentions in real-time, making it super easy to stay engaged with your audience.
Additionally, Sprout Social provides powerful analytics and reporting tools to track the success of your social media campaigns. You can measure key metrics, such as engagement, follower growth, and post reach, to gain insights into your performance and make data-driven decisions. And its social listening capabilities allow you to monitor brand mentions and sentiment, helping you stay informed about customer feedback and industry trends.
Overall, Sprout Social simplifies social media management by combining publishing, monitoring, engagement, and analytics features in one platform, empowering independent freelancers and businesses to effectively manage their social media presence and drive meaningful results.
4. Plann
In the fast-paced world of social media, managing multiple accounts and staying consistent can be a daunting task. That’s where Plann, the innovative social media scheduler, comes in to simplify your life. With Plann, you can take control of your social media presence and elevate your strategy to new heights. It’s not just a social media scheduler but an all-in-one Instagram and social media content planner, scheduler + strategist with post ideas, free templates — plus a free link-in-bio tool.
Plann understands the importance of aesthetics and visual appeal in capturing your audience’s attention. With its intuitive visual planning feature, you can effortlessly curate a stunning Instagram feed or a cohesive social media profile. Simply drag and drop your photos, videos, and captions onto the virtual grid, and watch as your content comes together in perfect harmony.
This powerful tool allows you to manage your social media content across various platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more. With its user-friendly interface, you can easily schedule your posts in advance, ensuring a consistent and timely online presence. Whether you’re a solopreneur or a large-scale enterprise, Plann streamlines your social media workflow, giving you more time to focus on creating remarkable content.
Plann goes beyond scheduling by providing valuable insights to optimize your social media strategy. It analyzes your audience’s behavior and identifies the optimal posting times, ensuring maximum engagement and reach. With personalized recommendations based on comprehensive data and intelligent algorithms, Plann empowers you to make data-driven decisions that drive your social media success.
5. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a great social media management and marketing tool that lets you plan and schedule your content using a visual calendar, ensuring organized and efficient content creation. You can create and customize social media posts, add images and videos, and optimize them for different platforms.
CoSchedule’s marketing calendar is a super useful tool for anyone — from solopreneurs to social media management teams for large businesses — to plan and schedule their social media posts alongside their other marketing efforts, providing a comprehensive overview of their marketing strategy. You can set automatic posting by choosing specific dates and times for your content to go live, or use CoSchedule’s best time scheduling feature to optimize your posting schedule. The tool also offers automation features like recurring campaigns and content libraries to save time and ensure consistent sharing of evergreen content.
Collaboration and analytics are key features of CoSchedule. You can collaborate with team members, assign tasks, and streamline the approval process for social media posts. The tool provides analytics and reporting to track the performance of your campaigns, allowing you to measure engagement, clicks, and conversions. By integrating with other tools and offering browser extensions, CoSchedule enhances your social media management capabilities.
The platform simplifies social media management by providing a comprehensive solution for content planning, scheduling, collaboration, and analytics. It helps you automate your marketing efforts and track the success of your campaigns — all from a centralized dashboard.
6. Agorapulse
Like the others, Agorapulse allows you to schedule and publish content across multiple platforms, helping you plan and automate your social media calendar. But its standout features include social listening, publishing, and reporting, as well as a comprehensive CRM system.
The social listening features allow you to monitor conversations about your brand by providing a unified social inbox where you can view and respond to comments, messages, and mentions from all your connected accounts. Additionally, Agorapulse enables you to monitor keywords and hashtags, keeping you updated on conversations related to your brand or industry.
Furthermore, the platform offers robust reporting and analytics features that provide valuable insights into your social media performance. You can track metrics such as engagement, reach, and follower growth to measure the effectiveness of your strategies. The tool also supports team collaboration, allowing you to assign tasks, review content, and coordinate efforts within your team. This is an important feature that promotes efficient workflow and ensures consistency in social media management.
7. Later
Later is a visual marketing platform for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Its user-friendly interface lays out the tools for you to easily plan and schedule your social media posts, monitor engagement, and track analytics.
One of Later’s most useful features is its visual planner, which lets you see your posts in a grid format and plan your content accordingly. You can upload and organize your media files within Later’s media library. Along with a content calendar, you can plan your posts, add captions and hashtags, and get a visual preview of your grid layout.
You’ll also have the ability to schedule your posts for automatic publishing. You can choose the date and time for each post, and Later supports multiple social media platforms. The platform also provides editing tools to customize your images and videos before scheduling them, ensuring optimized content for each platform.
Later offers engagement and analytics tools as well. You can manage comments and messages across social media platforms and engage with your audience from within the platform. Additionally, basic analytics and insights help you track the performance of your posts, allowing you to refine your social media strategy based on metrics such as likes, comments, and follower growth.
With Later, you’ll get everything you need — from media organization, visual grid layout preview, post scheduling, content customization, engagement tools, and basic analytics. Whether you’re working as a solo freelancer or as part of a big team, these features will help optimize your social media presence and improve audience engagement.
Using Social Media Management Tools to Streamline Your Workflow
Social media management can be a time-consuming and overwhelming task for freelance writers, editors, and other content creators. However, with the right tools and apps to streamline your workflow, you can save time and improve the overall performance of your social media strategy.
Some tools may be more suited to managing multiple social media accounts, while others may be better for creating and scheduling visual content. It’s important to take the time to evaluate your social media needs and try out a few different tools to find the one that works best for you.
Hootsuite and Buffer are both great options for businesses that want a comprehensive social media management platform that supports multiple platforms and provides in-depth analytics.
Sprout Social is an excellent choice for anyone looking for advanced analytics and social listening features. With Plann‘s intuitive visual planning, seamless scheduling, and data-driven insights, you have all the tools you need to excel in the competitive social media landscape.
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that includes social listening, publishing, and reporting features, as well as a comprehensive CRM system. Later is a visual marketing platform that is especially useful for businesses with a strong focus on visual content. Finally, CoSchedule is a marketing calendar and social media management tool that allows businesses to schedule posts, collaborate with team members, and track analytics in one place.
In addition to these social media management tools, freelance writers and editors may also want to consider using social media scheduling apps such as Hootsuite’s mobile app, Buffer’s mobile app, or Later’s mobile app. These apps allow you to manage your social media accounts on the go, making it easy to stay connected with your audience and engage with them in real-time.
Originally published at https://www.jenniferberube.com on June 25, 2023.
