Top 9 social media scheduling tools to use

Having an active social media presence is vital, both for your business and for your customers. But keeping an active social presence without it taking over a considerable amount of your time and efforts can be quite challenging. Why? Because customers expect that the companies they follow to be active online at all times, as it represents an essential trust metric for them. 

Most social media content scheduling tools are loaded with features like analytics, publishing, and team collaboration, but only a few of them offer functionalities that your team is looking for. We get that and trust us, you are not alone in this! Deciding on the best social media scheduling tool for your business is a complicated task. 

In this blog, we will introduce you to our top nine social media scheduling tools that could make your life much easier, and supercharge your social media management activities. But before we dive deep into this topic, make sure to find out what is social media scheduling is and why it is important. 

What are the best social media scheduling tools?

We’ve put together a well researched and curated list of the best tools for scheduling social media posts, which will help you select the tool that fits your company the best. 

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great social media scheduling tool for all-in-one social media monitoring, scheduling and analytics, and it is used mainly by enterprise-level companies. 

It is quite an elaborate social media management tool, and it has been around for a very long time. The tool supports social media scheduling on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Pinterest, and YouTube. Our honest recommendation would be to use other user-friendly alternatives, which we will discuss in a bit. 

Pros:

• Great social streams feature which allows you to engage with audiences, and monitor all social accounts from one dashboard 
• It makes it easier to view all your messages, comments, and responses in one place
• Account-specific social media analytics with customised reports based on your exact requirements 

Cons:

• It is overpriced, and it has a very complicated user interface 
• You must pay for every service, like access to customisable reports, and access to social media account analytics 
• Weak customer support, and you even have to pay for priority support

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is one of the best social media posting and scheduling tools to use currently. It’s the only social media scheduling tool that lets you post on numerous social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, TikTok, Google My Business, Pinterest, VK, and Tumblr. Pretty cool, right? It also provides reliable customer support to all users via email, chat, social, and phone. 

Its excellent features include: 

• Customised posts for individual platforms 
• Analyse, report, and monitor all your social performance 
• Team members management with collaboration features
• Content curation feature which suggests new types of content 
• Blogs sharing with RSS feed automation 
• Social media calendar feature to visualise your content strategy
• Smarter URL shortener feature
• Bulk scheduling up to 500 social media posts 

All in all, what can you NOT Do with SocialPilot? This social media scheduling tool is designed with a vision to add as much value as possible to your social media marketing efforts. 

3. Buffer

Buffer is another one of the best tools to schedule social media posts in our opinion, and it has both a free and a paid plan. The free plan allows you to schedule 10 social updates for free, whilst the paid plan will enable you to schedule unlimited amounts of posts. 

This is a great social media scheduling tool for beginners, where they can learn if social media automation could bring them any value. You can easily customise all your social media content for each social network of your choice, and you can do so from the Buffer app as well. Both the Buffer app and the web extension makes it easy to add website links, titles and images to your social media schedule. 

Another great benefit? Buffer suggests the most suitable times for you to post on each social platform, and it also gives you detailed analytics to see how successful your posts are. 

4. SproutSocial 

SproutSocial is a great social media management tool for team collaboration, helping your business form and deepen relationships with your audiences. 

Whilst being quite similar to Hootsuite, it’s more of a corporate tool where you can access Smart Inbox, customised reports, and detailed social media analytics. This tool supports social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, and Pinterest. 

Pros:

• It has a bot that helps with setting up, operating, and managing Facebook Messenger chatbots 
• You can group team members 
• You can integrate other tools such as HubSpot, UserVoice, and Zendesk 

Cons: 

• High cost as it charges for every team member and the user you invite 
• It lacks integration with visual platforms like YouTube 
• It doesn’t have a unified inbox, which means you must go back and forth between different social media platforms individually 

5. Loomly

Loomly is a simple and affordable social media scheduling tool with a clean and intuitive interface for its users. The prices slightly range for their base and premium plans, and one of the best features of this tool is that you can set various calendar workflows. 

There is also a very straightforward process to go through when you create a social media post. You can either start a post from scratch or pull in ideas from the RSS feeds which automatically create draft posts. You can easily make the base copy of your posts before you customise them for whichever social platforms you want to publish them on. 

It also has a great interaction screen where you can effortlessly manage all your messages, comments, and social media handle mentions in one place. All in all, Loomly is a great social media tool that can empower your marketing team to grow your business through great collaboration, publishing & analytics features. 

6. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media scheduling tool that can help agencies and their teams to work collaboratively. It supports social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, YouTube, and Instagram. 

Pros:

• It lets you label your content for easy retrievals and analysis 
• You can assign messages to your clients with customised notes and comments via the Social Inbox 
• It helps you understand your audience better through their in-built CRM feature 

Cons: 

• The reporting feature is very basic and not very helpful 
• Its user interface is not instinctive 
• Limited features when it comes to social media scheduling tools comparison

7. Zoho Social 

Zoho Social is a great social media management tool that can help you grow your presence on social media, and you can sign-up for free. Here you can work with your team members, monitor your brand mentions, and manage all the social media conversations on one platform. It supports social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Instagram, and Google My Business. 

Pros:

• It offers the best time slots to schedule your posts due to its SmartQ feature 
• CRM integrations 
• You can make automated reports to give your clients in a format and frequency of your choice 

Cons: 

• The analytics feature is not very good 
• RSS Feed integration is missing 
• It is an expensive social media scheduling tool, especially considering the features that it lacks 

8. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is not your typical social media scheduling tool, as it can assist you in scheduling your content with its feature of evergreen posting. What does that mean for you? That your social media queue will never be empty! Once you schedule your post, MeetEdgar saves it in the library to reuse it later. It supports social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

Pros: 

• It has a posting queue that will never leave your queue empty 
• It has category based scheduling 

Cons: 

• You can’t shuffle your posts in the queue to reschedule them 
• Limited features 
• You can’t add team members, a social inbox, or in-depth social analytics 

9. HubSpot 

And we’ve left the best till last, the HubSpot Social Media Management Tool. 

You may ask yourself, why is HubSpot good? Well, there are plenty of reasons, however, particularly when it comes to social media, HubSpot can help you spend more time connecting with your audiences instead of stressing out on publishing your social media campaigns.

Whilst this CRM platform allows you to manually publish your content directly on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, you can also connect all your social media accounts and schedule content for later times. HubSpot also gives you recommendations on your brand’s best posting times, which allows you to get your content in front of your audience at the right times. Besides social media scheduling, you can also monitor all your social mentions and message interactions, so you can connect with the people who matter the most. 

Another big plus of using the HubSpot Social Media Management Software? You can easily create and receive social media reports so that you can compare the performance of different social media platforms, campaigns, and publishing times! We say that being able to report on your social media campaigns’ success across all your channels from one location is pretty useful and time-saving, don’t you think? So yes, Hubspot social media scheduling is the way to go! 

We are proud to announce that Lnet is a HubSpot marketing agency partner that can offer you dedicated support services to help you grow your business with a unique social media scheduling system. To find out how HubSpot could enhance your marketing efforts, book a FREE HubSpot CRM consultation with us today. 

Social media is very important because it allows your business to reach, nurture, and engage with your target audience, no matter their location. We have a couple more articles on the topic of social media that we think you will enjoy reading, such as a beginner’s guide to social media for business, how to create a social media strategy, and how to create a social media holiday campaign.