The 12 Social Media Management Tools That’ll Help You Succeed on Social Media
From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs social media marketers have to complete every day.
Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome social media management tools available to help. These tools can streamline your workflows, help you save some time, and even ensure your content reaches the right audience at the right time.
With so many great social media management tools out there, we thought it could be great to showcase some of the top ones to help you pick what’s best for your business.
The 15 top social media management tools for SMBs
The tools are not arranged in any particular order and they’re all great in their own unique ways.
1. Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by brands, businesses, agencies, and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration.
Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
2. Hootsuite
Manage your social media in one place
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
3. Sprout Social
Powerful social media software
Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.
Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.
Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
4. Agora Pulse
Simple & affordable social media management
Description: Like the social media management platforms mentioned above, Agora Pulse is also an all-in-one social media platform with scheduling, responding, and reporting features.
Unique value: Unlike the rest, Agora Pulse has several unique features such as competitor analysis and Facebook contest apps at a very affordable price point.
5. Sendible
The #1 social media management tool for agencies
Description: Sendible is a social media management tool built specifically for agencies with several clients. On top of most features that social media management tools provide, Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients.
Unique value: Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canvagraphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
6. Everypost
Social media publishing simplified
Description: Everypost makes it easy to curate content, customize, and schedule your social media posts. It has a strong focus on visual content, allowing you to pull images and videos from Instagram, Flickr, YouTube, and your RSS feeds.
Unique value: Everypost is one of the few social media management tools that allow you to customize your social media post for each social media platform. Also, its visual content curation feature allows you to easily find and attach the multimedia content that you want.
7. Social Pilot
Social media marketing & scheduling tool for agencies & social media professionals
Description: I like how Social Pilot fit many of the social media management tools (such as scheduling and analytics but not monitoring) into a simple dashboard and offer it at very affordable prices.
Unique value: Social Pilot curates and suggests content from several industries (such as tech, education, and health and fitness), which is great if you want to find relevant content easily.
8. CoSchedule
#1 marketing calendar for everything you need organized
Description: CoSchedule is more than a social media management tool; it’s a powerful calendar to manage many aspects of your marketing. With CoSchedule, you can manage and collaborate with your team to create your social media posts, content, events, and tasks.
Unique value: CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place.
Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.
9. MavSocial
Affordable and easy-to-use social media management & advertising software
Description: MavSocial is a social media management tool with a focus on visual content. For the higher-priced plans, it seems that you can also manage your Facebook ads with MavSocial.
Unique value: On top of the common features (such as scheduling, monitoring, and reporting), MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use, and edit your multimedia for your social media posts and a search engine where you can browse through millions of stock photos.
10. Edgar
Like hiring a content manager for a fraction of the cost
Description: Edgar takes a creative new approach to social media sharing. The idea is that you just have to create a library of content with various categories and add time slots with a specific category (or a random category). Edgar will automatically fill up those time slots with the content in your library.
Unique value: What people like about Edgar is that it automates social media post creation and scheduling in a clever way. Instead of simply posting your social media posts several times, it recycles your library of content according to the categories.
11. Post Planner
Social media engagement app
Description: Post Planner wants to help social media marketers with three key jobs: find high-quality content, plan the perfect publishing calendar, and post consistently. It curates and rates content suggestions and allows you to create a content-type-based schedule (more below).
Unique value: With its Find tool, Post Planner makes it super easy to find content that has proven to engage people.
12. Tailwind
Smarter visual marketing
Description: Tailwind is a social media management tool for Pinterest and Instagram. Apart from helping you schedule posts, monitor conversations, and measure results, Tailwind provides recommendations for improving your Pinterest and Instagram performance.
Unique value: Tailwind is great for Pinterest and Instagram marketers as it provides a range of features that are specific to these visual platforms, such as Pinterest content promotion and Instagram UGC content management.
What’s your go-to social media management tool?
Social media management tools come in all shapes and sizes, and what suits you best depends on your social media goals and needs. I hope I’ve managed to mention at least one tool that might suit your needs.
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The full version of this blog post was first written by Alfred Lua on the Buffer Social blog on August 8, 2017.
