Scheduling is one of the most basic and important tasks in social media marketing. Doing the job manually is time-consuming and inefficient with amazing efforts. The wise solution of this period to automate the process is called social media tools.
Influencer marketing has taken social media by storm. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it’s a way for businesses to show real value to their consumers. It’s also a crushing workload for small business owners and marketers who are in charge of all their social media accounts, never mind their other marketing like email and display.
E-Clincher
As social media platforms go, it’s not uncommon to find a tool with tons of features. And while most features can sometimes feel underdeveloped, there are tools that deliver the goods. E-Clincher falls into the latter category and comes with a 14-day trial to boot. In addition to common features like post scheduling and a visual content calendar, you get powerful analytics and reporting, a media library, can publish content using Smart Queues (an auto-posting feature), and have the option to publish content from your RSS feed.
E-Clincher also comes with a URL shortener (with tracking) and a content curation feature. These prove how versatile the platform is, but there’s more that social media marketers and influencers will love about this tool. Take its reputation management and listening tool. It helps you keep tabs on conversations around your brand and content. And there’s the social inbox that stores all interactions in one place. You can also track mentions through listening feeds. Work with a team? E-Clincher handles workflows, too. Create and manage all stages of your content creation and publishing processes and get stuff done like clockwork.
Iconosquare
Social media is a data-driven game and Iconosquare makes it easier to win. You can test the waters with a 14-day trial to see if it’s right for you, and it’s worth the effort. While Iconosquare only caters to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it has all you need to peel back the layers of your content and audience engagement to generate results. Reporting gives a look at content impressions, and average and individual post reach (including average reach rate by post).
You also get Instagram Stories analytics. These show impressions, story completion rates by story type, and the best time to post Stories. Reporting is easy. In a few clicks, you can automate reports and include hashtag tracking, and keep tabs on competitors.
A feature that many will love is Iconosquare’s profile activity tracking. It tells you which links in your profile drive traffic to your site — a great way to tie social to ROI. Analytics aside, you get a social media scheduling tool that helps plan your post rollout effectively. Engagement on social is the goal, and to help drive as much for your content, Iconosquare also offers a “first comment” feature. First comments are posted along with your post, making your social activity look and feel organic and personalized.
Social Champ
Social Champ’s a well-rounded social media management platform. While you only get a 7-day fee trial window, it’s enough to test the platform out. It helps teams improve their hold on social through a set of integral features. As with most platforms, you get a visual social media calendar. It’s where you can view all content or use filters to see bulk, queue, scheduled, recycled, and Forever posts. It also shows sent, future and failed posts, helping you keep track of any content that somehow didn’t get published so you can adjust your calendar accordingly.
Analytics will show top-performing content, and you get to see how audiences respond to content on each channel through platform-specific graphs. If you’re as busy as most social media marketers, you’ll appreciate Social Champ’s collaboration feature. With it, you can build workflows, assign team member rights, and easily turn social content creation and publishing into a predictable and fun process that’s perfected for optimal results. And for users always on the lookout for inspiration, Social Champ’s Chrome extension makes it easy to share images, blog posts, and videos with a click.
Buffer
Buffer is another leading social media management tool that lets you schedule posts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Like Hootsuite and Later, you can also reply to comments and engage your followers right from Buffer rather than logging into individual platforms.
Buffer uses a calendar-style post scheduler like other popular social media management tools. You can create content right in Buffer, add it to your post schedule, and manage all of your social accounts from one central dashboard.
Buffer’s free plan includes:
- 3 social channels
- 10 scheduled posts per channel
- One user
Buffer’s free version doesn’t include hashtag research, Instagram stories, or Pinterest. A lack of Instagram stories and hashtags is a downside. As for Pinterest, you’re better off using Tailwind, the go-to Pinterest scheduling tool, over any free social media scheduler if Pinterest is your focus.
If you want 100 scheduled posts and Pinterest support, Buffer costs $15 per month. For the full software suite, it’s $65 per month, putting Buffer on the pricier side.
Overall, Buffer is a middle ground between Hootsuite, which doesn’t offer much scheduling capacity for free users, and Later, which basically has the same capacity as Buffer but is more flexible in terms of channels.
TweetDeck
If you rely on Twitter for driving blog traffic and networking with other bloggers, TweetDeck is a must-use tool.
This free social media scheduler only works for Twitter, as the name suggests. In a nutshell, TweetDeck transforms your Twitter homepage into a powerful dashboard with real-time timeline updates, easy inbox access, notifications, and a trending tab.
You can also customize your homepage with:
- Lists and collections
- Likes
- Mentions
- New followers
- Messages and mentions for all your Twitter accounts
Finally, you can publish right from TweetDeck and schedule Tweets.
I like TweetDeck because it centralizes everything. So, when you’re crafting posts, you can pepper in trending hashtags, engage with recent followers, or chime in on the latest industry news.
TweetDeck is 100% free, so if you’re a frequent Twitter user, it’s the perfect social media scheduling tool to try.
Socialoomph
Most free social media scheduling tools inevitably get you to pay because they limit scheduling capacity.
In contrast, Socialoomph is one of the only scheduling tools that offers unlimited posting with a free account. As a free user, you get:
- One social profile
- Unlimited post scheduling
- Basic posting features and account management (so no fancy RSS imports, just basic social posting)
Additionally, you can only publish up to three posts per hour. But if you’re only active on one platform, Socialoomph lets you create a massive content queue, set it, and forget it.
Plus, Socialoomph works with a variety of social media platforms, including:
- Discord
- Mastodon
- StockTwits
A lack of Instagram support is a notable downside. However, integrations with community-based websites like Reddit, Discord, and Mastodon are useful if you’re an admin of a group and want to regularly publish content for members.
If you want 10 social profiles, 60 posts per hour, and more in-depth posting options like using RSS feeds, Socialoomph costs $25 per month.
I’d probably go with SocialBee or a premium plan with Hootsuite or Later before paying for Socialoomph. But if you only care about one social platform, Socialoomph is one of the best free social media schedulers out there.
Friends+Me
Friends+Me is another prime player in the social media management tools family. While Friends+Me puts the highest emphasis on Google Plus features, many other social platforms are supported. Friends+Me appears to get rave reviews from users, and has a beautifully designed website with plans available based on the size of your business. And yes, there is a free plan!
While the free plan is not super robust, it still allows for two queues (which is a destination to publish posts), the ability to schedule five posts per queue at one time, link shortening, browser extensions, an integration with Zapier, as well as standard support. The free plan can also be used for a variety of social platforms like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Pinterest and Instagram are supported as well, but you will need to upgrade. Plans range from $7.50 to $216 depending on if you decide to utilize monthly or annual billing.
Conclusion
Are you looking for the best social media scheduling tool? Luckily, choosing the right social media tool is easier than ever. We’ve done deep research here at Software Screenshots to present some of the best solutions. Take a look and select the one that is right for you now.