The world of social media management is changing. Instead of sharing content, businesses are now hiring people to manage their various social media accounts. And if you’re looking for “best social media management tools”, you’ve found the right place! This guide will help you find the best social media management tool for your business.
Social media is dominating the web. Companies from around the globe are using it to attract new customers. Every company has a page on twitter or Facebook or Pinterest to represent its brand. That represents a challenge for you, a social media manager to make your page popular. If you are looking for the best social media management tools 2021, you have landed at the right place.
Hootsuite
Price: $19 per month billed annually
Free trial: YES.
What is Hootsuite?
A real life-saver.
The most popular and powerful Instagram management tool for small and large businesses. An all-in-one social media management platform for scheduling, messaging, monitoring, analytics, and advertising your Instagram account that integrates with everything.
Why I Recommend Hootsuite:
- The most advanced Instagram planning and scheduling platform available
- The best management tool for big businesses with multiple accounts and users
- Simple and intuitive interface
- Granular social insights into what’s working (or not!)
- Schedule your social posts in minutes
- Mobile app included in pricing
Hootsuite is my favorite Instagram social command center. This is the only Instagram account management software I use… because I literally don’t need anything else.
It covers all my bases. I can:
- Brainstorm, plan, and schedule posts
- Connect my Instagram marketing with all other social accounts (eg Facebook)
- Easily promote any Instagram post
- Evaluate social content performance and even choose the best influencers based on recommendations
- Monitor my account comments, likes, and message all from one place
Plus it integrates with just about every major marketing app out there. That’s what I really like about it. If there’s something it can’t do, you just add a 3rd-party app and BOOM, now it can do it.
I use it as a solopreneur, but it’s really meant for big businesses and influencers.
You can manage dozens of social media accounts from one spot, manage clients, assign tasks/messages to any user, keep all communication in one place, and instantly add high-quality images, videos, and stories with company-approved media all in one place.
For the price, it’s a steal.
Agorapulse
Price: Free – $159 per month billed annually
Free trial: YES
What is Agorapulse?
Part powerful social media management tool and part project management app.
Agorapulse is your agency’s hive for planning, communicating, and reporting. You’ll never use email, messenger, or spreadsheets again.
Why I Recommend Agorapulse:
- Reasonable pricing for agencies
- Shared Calendars are game changing (explanation below)
- A proven and popular platform (3,000 + agencies)
- Assigned user roles feature – clarify workflows and allow clients to be part of the process
- Mobile app to schedule your posts on the go
- Schedule your posts easily
Agorapulse is like Hootsuite just better for agencies for a few key reasons:
- Shared Calendars: A total game changer of a feature. It turns normal content plans into collaborative work spaces. Create a content calendar and share it with team members and clients. Then, clients can accept/reject, leave comments, chat with team members, and assign back to you. Goodbye email tag.
- Affordable Plans: Agorapulse’s pricing is on point. Hootsuite is $599/mo annually for mid-large agencies. Agorapulse delivers most of the same features with paid plans starting at $159/mo annually. I’m not saying it’s just as good, but $5,000 more in your pocket to grow your Instagram business per year is pretty nice.
- Easy Reporting: As an SEO at heart, I geek out hard on reports. So I love this feature. Agorapulse’s easy reporting tools are a huge value add for your clients too. Just click on their Instagram, choose weekly or monthly reporting, and it instantly creates a report that shows followers, engagement, shares, and cool graphs.
If you’re a small to mid-sized agency having trouble managing clients, Agorapulse is a gamechanger. Better communication, better content plans, better reporting – it’s a no-brainer.
Just don’t expect it to have the same powerful features or analytics as Hootsuite for promotion, engagement, or integrations. It’s not on that level. It’s more a communication and reporting tool than anything else.
Sendible
Sendible is a popular social media management tool that gives you the ability to schedule images and videos directly to Instagram (and other social networks.)
You can choose to schedule your posts for specific times or add them to queues to be published at predetermined intervals. And you have the option to recycle your content.
All of the content you’ve scheduled on Instagram and other networks is displayed on a social media calendar, giving you the option to drag & drop posts to quickly tweak your schedule.
Given that Sendible is an all-in-one tool, you can also run reports for your social networks, including Instagram. There’s a report builder which is especially useful if you have clients.
You can use the built-in social media inbox to manage comments and mentions from all your social profiles – including Instagram.
There’s a built-in CRM with team management functionality which makes it ideal for marketing teams, agencies, and freelance social media managers.
Note: Sendible now allows you to automatically schedule first comments with your Intsagram posts. This means you can keep your descriptions free of hashtags without having to comment manually.
Pricing:
Try Sendible for free. Pricing starts at $29/month for 12 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, RSS posting, social inbox, keyword monitoring, and more.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a powerful social media scheduling tool focused on visual social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest.
Aside from the scheduling functionality, Tailwind offers strong analytics functionality such as profile metrics, trend reporting, and virality & engagement benchmarks.
Like Sendible, Tailwind is an official Instagram partner so you get direct posting to Instagram with business profiles.
There are a few particularly useful features within this tool which include hashtag recommendations, hashtag lists, and a Chrome browser extension for regramming.
And while they offer a useful free plan, paid plans get extremely expensive when compared to the likes of Sendible as they are charged on a per account basis for their popular Plus plan.
Pricing:
There is a free forever plan with limited but useful functionality. Paid accounts start from $9.99/month (billed annually) for one Instagram and Pinterest account and 100 posts/month. For more posts and more functionality consider higher tier plans.
Buffer
Buffer is an excellent and time-saving tool that lets you manage many social media accounts. It is now available for Instagram too, so use it to schedule and publish your upcoming posts and analyze the success of your social campaign.
This is the most popular tool used for social media scheduling because of the easy usability and versatility in terms of platforms. All you have to do is hook up all social accounts and schedule your content to be published at a set time.
Buffer is free for use if you schedule up to 10 posts. For more posts, you can choose their plan that costs only $10 per month and allows for 100 scheduled posts and 10 social media profiles.
Crowdfire
One of the most popular strategies to drive Instagram traffic nowadays is the ‘follow their followers’ strategy. The number of people who will follow you back comes to about 30% of those who you decide to follow. So, by following similar accounts as yours, you can reach many targeted people who will have a genuine interest in what you are offering.
However, to start this strategy, you need to unfollow some people first. Instagram lets you follow approximately 6,000 users, so your options are quite limitless. With Crowdfire, you can learn who isn’t following you and eliminate him from your list. You don’t even have to open Instagram to do that.
There are a free and paid plans for this app. The Pluto plan costs $9.99 per month and is the most popular of them all.
Conclusion:
When it comes to social media, it’s hard to find one place that has all the information you need. Not only that but there are so many different platforms now that manage to look similar yet function differently.