Social media lies at the heart of digital marketing. Typically, a brand uses at least three social media platforms to reach out to its audience. An additional challenge is discovering new audience segments and increasing the brand’s reach and traction when using these channels.
This translates into a lot of effort required in posting the content at the right time on the right platform. The investment in time and efforts increases during season campaigns (BFCM and New Year) and events where the volume of content increases and posting schedules could go haywire.
Brands could avoid the hassle by opting for social media scheduling tools that streamline social media management processes and allow brands to focus more on creativity rather than worrying about the problems caused by manual posting at multiple platforms.
Social media scheduling tools help you manage multiple social profiles from a single tool, schedule posts in advance, run contests, track analytics across platforms, well the list goes on. Social media marketing tools can prove to be a game-changer for your social strategy!
Main Elements To Look For In Social Media Scheduling Tools
Social media scheduling tools make social media management insanely simple through automation and produce great results for minimum effort.
However, the struggle to find the right tool that ticks all the boxes could get to many social media marketers. With so many options available, it can be quite overwhelming to find the one that integrates well with your existing processes. To help you make an informed decision, here are several features and functionalities that must be present in a good social media scheduling tools. Note that several of these tools can be used as social media automation tools to make sure you focus on only the essential marketing tasks.
Easy to Use
There is nothing more annoying than a tool with a complicated UI where you can’t find anything. Therefore, lookout for a tool that has a clear and easy-to-understand interface. Honestly, this would save you so much time.
The best scheduling app is super easy to use and saves you tons of time.
Analytics & Reporting
Analytics and reporting is another feature that you should never compromise on. Social media is evolving at the speed of light, and you should always know where your content stands to ensure that your audience stays interested.
Analytics and reporting features present beautiful graphs that make it a lot easier to understand the trends and present the team’s win to the management. A tool with no analytics and insights is honestly not even a tool worthy of your time.
Social Media Calendar
Social media calendar is one of the most helpful features of a social media scheduler. It is a huge time saver and something that you should never compromise on. A scheduling calendar enables you to schedule, create, edit, and delete posts from one place.
A social media content calendar also helps you see what your profile will look like in the next week, month, or even a year.
A social media calendar is particularly useful for agencies, as they often take care of multiple social profiles for their clients. Thanks to the calendar, they can keep the clients separate, and there would be no risk of posting the wrong content.
Customer Support
Learning to use a new tool can take a lot of your time. This is where excellent customer support comes into play. If you use a tool with next-level support readily available, you can easily direct your queries towards them and get a quick resolution.
Customer support can make or break a social media scheduling tools. While selecting an app for your business, make sure that you specifically go for one that has incredible customer support.
Free Trial
A free trial is super important as it allows you to test the features of the tool. During the free trial, you can check out the essential working of the tool and determine how well it works for your operational requirements.
During the free trial, you can also talk to their customer representative and see if they can help make the experience better for you.
Top 15 Tools to Schedule Social Media Posts
Now that we have covered how important a social media scheduler is, it is time to find the one that best fits your need. Confused with all the available options?
Fortunately for you, we’ve rounded up a list of the top fifteen best scheduling tools to incorporate into your marketing processes, starting with our personal favorite, Social Champ!
1. Social Champ
Social Champ is definitely one of the best social media scheduling tools out there. It has incredible customer support and scheduling features and supports six major social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Business Profile, and Pinterest.
Here is a rundown of its key attributes and star features;
- Create, edit, and schedule social media posts from an all-in-one content dashboard.
- Design posts via Canva from within the content dashboard and post them directly via Social Champ.
- The bulk upload and scheduling feature allow you to post tons of content at once using a CSV file.
- The social media calendar presents a grid view of all published and scheduled posts with a drag-drop option to edit or reschedule a post.
- You can create a whole new post using the calendar by clicking on the small plus icon on the side of each box.
- Sentiment Analysis feature tracks the sentiment of each post to keep brand voice uniform across all platforms.
- Repeat evergreen content for maximum engagement on Facebook and Twitter.
- Create collections using your best-performing content and use them in future campaigns.
- Track and monitor the analytics of all posts on social media with platform-centric metrics.
- Download PDF reports with beautiful charts and graphs explaining the analytics.
- Team collaboration enables you to work with your teammates without sharing credentials and by assigning roles, such as admin, author, editor.
- Connect your favorite blogs and websites to social accounts to keep them active using the RSS feed.
- Chrome extension to share text and pictures from anywhere on the net.
- A free 7-day trial with four pricing plans for businesses of all sizes.
- Customer support, help desk, FAQs, and guides for any queries that you might have.
Pricing
Social Champ is one of the best budget tools in the market, with plans starting from as low as $10/month. You can also schedule a free demo with a customer advocate to see all the features in action.
2. Buffer
Buffer allows you to create posts and then schedule them to go live at the designated time.
It enables you to customize your message for various social networks. The Buffer web browser extension and the mobile app make it simple to quickly add web page links, titles, and images to your Buffer schedule.
It recommends the most suitable times for posting to each of your networks. Buffer also shows the analytics covering the performance of your posts.
Pricing
Buffer starts at $15 per month and goes up to $99 per month.
3. Keyhole
Keyhole is a relatively new social media scheduler and publisher for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. One of the best features of Keyhole is real-time tracking of social media analytics, which they claim enables businesses to make better data-driven decisions, manage digital campaigns, plan influencer marketing strategies, and much more!
The website claims it is an all-in-one social media tool, which allows you to save tons of time and reduce costs.
They also offer a team collaboration feature, which leads to better team management while working remotely!
Pricing
Keyhole has plans starting from $99 per month.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite enables you to schedule posts to publish at the selected time. Depending on the plan you prefer, you can post to a broad range of social accounts. You can both produce posts for the future or select existing posts to post in the days ahead.
Hootsuite maintains a wide range of platforms, including individual accounts, business pages, and other social activity types.
Pricing
It does offer a free plan, which limits you to scheduling 30 messages across three social profiles.
Hootsuite has pricing plans starting from $19 + tax/month; however, they only provide one user and 10 social media accounts in this plan.
5. AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse initially was one of the most affordable social media scheduling tools for teams and agencies. However, they have increased their pricing to $99/month for the pro plan. They do have three more pricing plans with different combinations of features.
The principal difference between plans is the number of social profiles and users, although there are also variations in data retention and ad comment monitoring.
You can work with AgoraPulse to publish, engage, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It champions Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google +, and YouTube.
You can post to all of your social accounts centrally, with a queue or schedule guaranteeing your content is delivered at the most desirable times. It allows you to re-queue or reschedules evergreen posts. You can tweak each post to take advantage of features particular to each social network.
Pricing
Agorapulse has three pricing plans starting from $79 per month, the next one is priced at $159 per month, and the last one is custom, which is only available on a demo.
6. Later
Later lets you post to all popular social networks, but its primary emphasis is on Instagram. Unlike many social media scheduling tools, you begin a post in Later with an illustration rather than text. You upload the picture to Later and then create the accompanying caption.
It can initially be intimidating to set up Later to post straight to Instagram (thanks to Instagram’s revamped API). Still, once you have upgraded your Instagram account to either a Business or Creator account, things become easy.
At the core of Later, you have a Media Library. You create each post by uploading pictures to your Media Library, and they remain accessible for future posts. You can attach notes and labels to your media pieces and add a star to any image you want to highlight.
Also, you can upload videos if you have one of Later’s paid plans. Later also encourages you to upload and produce Stories for Instagram.
With Later’s Quick Schedule, you can drag and drop posts into time cuts in the schedule. This is Later’s equivalent of a queue. Later populates your upcoming open time slot with your media posts.
Having Later’s business plans mean you have access to Conversations that enable you to manage your Instagram comments from inside Later.
Pricing
Later has four pricing plans starting from a free plan with no add ons. The paid ones start from $15 per month with support for all networks and 60 posts per social profile.
7. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a great option to schedule and plan your marketing. For an entrepreneur or influencer, this may include coordinating your blog and social media posts. .For agencies, the tool allows separate account management for simplified customer handling.
Social media scheduling, therefore, is just one component of CoSchedule’s offering.
You can efficiently maintain and publish all your blog content and social improvement from one place. You can produce a standalone social campaign or attach a social campaign to any project. Your promotion can exist in the same area as your planning, so your entire team is on the same page.
You can quickly schedule posts to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Pricing
Plans begin at $39 per month. The entry-level plan provides you one integrated calendar with blog and marketing schemes and all-in-one social development.
8. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar allows you to schedule content across various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Technically the tool is described as Edgar – and the webpage/app is where you “meet” Edgar.
You can utilize it to queue your content at your ease with minimal effort. Also, you can set up multiple categories for different content types, including promotional materials, blog posts, quotes, and questions. You use the social media calendar to leverage categories to bring variety to your posts.
Reposting evergreen content is incredibly simple as Edgar saves your updates over time, so your posts don’t go to waste after their original publishing. Edgar automatically reuses your content over time; it enhances visibility to a broader audience without you doing any additional work.
Pricing
The tool has a lite and a regular version with pricing set at $19/month and $49/month!
9. Feedly
Feedly lets you distribute the blogs you follow into feeds so you can quickly group similar topics. When you have similar posts in one feed, you can inspect everything from the feed and disregard the other, less related feeds.
Feedly is a powerful feed reader that aggregates content from around the web into one handy place. You can use it to see updates on any topic from social media posts, news, blogs, RSS feeds, or other origins.
The best thing about Feedly is that you can utilize it to share social media content. The power social media scheduler allows you to schedule the same content piece multiple times in the future.
You can then eliminate and edit the content to say whatever you prefer. It’s nice to see processes for finding third-party content to share on your social platforms.
Pricing
Feedly has pricing plans starting from $8 per month, the next one is priced at $12 per month, and the third plan is only available on private consultation.
10. HeyOcra
HeyOcra is a relatively new tool for managing, scheduling, and planning your social media calendar, all from the exact location. With the subscription, you can access one social media calendar, which allows you to preview all the scheduled posts before it gets posted.
The tool is primarily based on a calendar, so their pricing plans are highly dependent on how many users can use and access the social media calendar and how post previews are allowed for one account.
HeyOcra is one of the easiest social media scheduling tools that keep your posting timelines well within the deadline.
Pricing
HeyOcra has only one pricing plan for $129/month, which allows you to connect unlimited users and 10 social profiles.
11. Oktopost
Oktopost is one of the several social media scheduling tools that mainly focuses on B2B industry by helping large brands manage their online presence and encouraging them to engage with their audience.
Oktopost offers some amazing B2B CRM tools with multiple automation features, such as publish, schedule, manage, and analyze. Oktopost also provides a content calendar, which has the option to reschedule, edit, remove, or manually publish content.
Oktopost does not publicly reveal their pricing as their primary audience consists of B2B customers. To know their pricing, you need to book a demo on their website.
However, you should only invest in this tool if you are a B2B business.
12. Sked Social
Sked Social is mainly an Instagram-centric tool that helps brands curate content for their audience. The tool does, however, work with other platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Sked Social includes scheduling and auto-posting to Instagram stories, tracking analytics, adding links in the bio, and a visual planner. It makes Instagram scheduling ten-folds easy as you can test what your feed would look like pre-publication.
Sked Social focuses on eCommerce stores, retail brands, and solo-entrepreneurs, aka freelancers, as their target audience. If you are any of these and want to keep your Instagram active and fun, do check out Sked Social!
Pricing
Sked Social offers a 7-day free trial with pricing plans starting from as low as $25/month!
13. Tailwind
Tailwind is quite an old one of the social media scheduling tools and has been in the market for some time. It focuses on visual content for Instagram and Pinterest.
Tailwind offers recommendations for improving Instagram and Pinterest performance. Furthermore, the tool has scheduling, monitoring, and tracking features.
It comes with an excellent image editor that enables you to crop an image according to the recommended size by the platform.
Tailwind mainly provides solutions for influencers or influencer marketers.
Pricing
Tailwind pricing plans start from $19.9 per month with one Instagram and Pinterest profile.
14. Plannable
Plannable is on our list because it is one of the most useful social media scheduling tools with a specific sneak peek option to view your posts pre-publication. Other than that, Plannable offers multiple editing options for text, visuals, and more.
Plannable promises to cut down your working hours in half by increasing productivity. It is mainly a calendar that provides a sleek view of all the posts in a functional yet attractive way!
Pricing
Plannable allows you to test the platform for free initially for 50 posts and is then priced at a reasonable $33 per month for 3 users and 1 workspace.
15. CrowdFire
CrowdFire is another social media scheduling tool focusing on startups and entrepreneurs. Surprisingly it has support for quite a lot of platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
The tool is as simple as it gets with basic scheduling and publishing features. It also helps you search for content ideas across the internet and filter choices based on topics.
The platform also offers a pop-up calendar that helps in scheduling posts in advance.
Pricing
The pricing starts at $9.99 per month with 5 social accounts.
Wrapping Up
Brands invest a lot of money these days in creating killer content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the numerous other social media platforms out there. Whatever business you’re in, reaching your customers, clients, and readers requires a consistent social media presence.
But there’s no point spending time and resources on fantastic Facebook posts and tremendous tweets if you don’t know how to monitor their impact and influence effectively—counting how many followers you have only told part of the story.
For example, while social media is often taken for granted by companies, they often don’t understand that social media audiences are often not in the right frame of mind to buy your product. So, direct sales don’t usually work unless you leverage FOMO and similar tactics.
Getting the most out of your chosen social media platforms is an integral part of your content marketing and the overall online marketing strategy.
This is why we tried making your work easy by giving you these choices to discover the right social media scheduling tools.
