If you manage multiple social media accounts, or are simply fed up with manually logging into each account and scheduling updates, it is high time you start looking into social media automation tools.
If these tools aren’t what you’re looking for, there are tons more to choose from. Check out the full list below.
1. SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media scheduling tool that can be used to plan and schedule content for a range of different platforms.
The tool makes it easy to manage social media campaigns at scale thanks to its intuitive category-based scheduling system.
When you schedule a post, you can assign each post a specific category to help you stay on track with your content. At any time, you can use the scheduler tool to pause posts from certain categories, make bulk edits, re-queue posts, and more.
You can use SocialBee to manage your campaigns on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and GoogleMyBusiness. You can also use the tool to plan your hashtags, create hashtag collections, and preview the posts before they go live.
SocialBee is useful when it comes to campaign tracking as well. You can use the custom URL and tracking features to create short URLs that are optimized for social media, and generate tracking codes so you can automatically measure interactions with your social media links.
SocialBee is a great choice for larger companies and agencies as it has some useful collaboration features. You can set up different workspaces if you manage more than one brand, assign users roles, and set up automated content comment and approval workflows.
Overall, SocialBee is an extensive social media management tool that can help you to effectively schedule posts and automate aspects of your campaigns.
Pricing: Plans start from $19/month.Try SocialBee Free
Read our SocialBee review.
2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media management tool that is perfect for managing everything from post scheduling to monitoring and reporting.
It comes with an extensive range of tools including:
- A social media inbox – manage all of your direct messages and comments from different platforms in one easy-to-use inbox
- A social media publishing tool – Schedule and plan content. Publish all your social content from the same organized dashboard.
- A social media monitoring tool – Measure brand sentiment and stay on track of what people are saying about your brand on social media
- A social media reporting tool – Easily generate in-depth reports. Analyze your metrics and optimize your campaigns.
In addition to all of the above, Agorapulse also offers some useful automation features that can make managing your social media campaigns quicker and more efficient.
When it comes to content management and scheduling, Agorapulse offers features such as a saved reply feature and keyboard shortcuts.
The social inbox also has an automated moderation assistant that assigns messages to the right team members, and auto archives spam messages and tweets.
You can also use Agorapulse to automate repeating posts for events, re-queue content, and bulk upload CSV content for posts.
Agorapulse is the perfect tool for brands running large-scale social media operations.
Pricing: Agorapulse has a free plan available. Paid plans start from €79/month.Try Agorapulse Free
Read our Agorapulse review.
3. Missinglettr
Missinglettr is a social media platform with advanced drip campaign features. The tool is designed to automatically detect when you’ve posted content to your chosen medium, be that a blog or even a YouTube video.
The tool will then gather the information in an intuitive dashboard which can be used to set up automated drip campaigns on social media.
This tool is the perfect choice for bloggers and website owners that are keen to push their posts on social media but don’t have the time to devote to a full-scale marketing campaign.
In addition to the drip features, MissingLetter also has a Curate feature, that can help to automate aspects of the post creation process, by pulling blogs, videos, and other media from around the web that your audience will be interested in.
You can then use this to create fresh and engaging posts for your social media accounts. You can also use this tool to connect with influencers in your niche and get your own content shared around the web.
Not only does Missinglettr offer some great automation features, but it also comes complete with a powerful content calendar. It’s an all-in-one calendar that can help you to schedule and publish posts and manage your automations, all from one dashboard.
You can also use the calendar to manage your automated drip campaigns and keep track of how your posts are split between the different social channels.
Pricing: Missinglettr has a free plan available. Paid plans start from $19/month.Try Missinglettr Free
Read our Missinglettr review.
4. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is a social media automation tool designed to help businesses manage hundreds, to thousands of social pages all at one time. They offer 3 different solutions for different-sized businesses from small businesses to mid-sized agencies and enterprises.
PromoRepublic has a range of automation features that can help reduce the load for social media marketing teams, such as:
- Auto reposting of high-performing content – If you had a post that performed particularly well, you can use PromoRepublic to automatically repost the content at a later date to increase engagement.
- Content approval workflows – If you’re working with a range of brands and different agencies, you can set up automated workflows to ensure that everyone is happy with the content before it’s published.
- Smart automated posting – Schedule posts from a curated database to be published at the perfect time for your audience.
One of the best features of PromoRepublic is the selection of ready-to-use content available for small businesses.
If you want to populate your social profiles, but you don’t have time to dedicate to creating social media content, you can choose from a selection of PromoRepublic’s wide selection of industry-relevant content to keep your followers engaged and improve your reputation.
Overall, it’s a great choice for small businesses or larger enterprises that want to streamline their processes.
Pricing: Plans start from $9/month.Try PromoRepublic Free
5. Sendible
Sendible is a social media tool that provides an extensive unified dashboard for managing and automating all of your social media accounts. It’s an all-in-one tool that will help you to manage everything from posting and scheduling to brand monitoring, tracking, and analytics.
When it comes to automation, Sendible has a range of great features that can help your team to work more efficiently and productively when it comes to social media.
Sendible allows you to set up automated approval processes for social media posts, so nothing ever gets posted before it’s been checked by the right people. Sendible also includes a bulk scheduling feature, making it easy to plan batches of content and reduce the workload for social media managers.
In addition to automation, Sendible also offers a range of tools that can help you to optimize your social media campaigns.
Sendible includes extensive monitoring features that will allow you to track every aspect of your campaigns, as well as a powerful social media listening tool that will ensure that no comment about your businesses is ever missed, and you can stay up to date with what people are saying about your brands across all platforms. You can also create in-depth reports for your team and clients in just a few clicks.
Pricing: Plans start from $29/month.Try Sendible Free
Read our Sendible review.
6. Pallyy
Pallyy is a social media platform that is perfect for managing visual content campaigns. Although Pallyy can be used to schedule for a range of social media platforms, it’s best suited to Instagram marketers and has some extensive automation features that can help streamline your Instagram workflows.
You can use the client features to automatically send content to your clients before its posted for them to provide feedback. You can also use the Pallyy content planning tools to search for user-generated content to repost in order to save time on content production.
Unlike many of the options on this list, Pallyy is available on mobile devices, meaning you can stay on top of your Instagram marketing and social media scheduling on the go, making it perfect for busy people.
Also, if you’re working with a range of clients, and you have a lot of content to upload, Pallyy offers a bulk uploading feature that can make scheduling large campaigns much easier, and faster.
Overall, Pallyy is a great tool to use for Instagram marketing, and its visual editor and client features make it a great choice for freelance social media managers, and small agencies.
Pricing: Pallyy has a free plan available. Paid plans start from $15/month.Try Pallyy Free
7. Audiense Connect
Audiense Connect is the best dedicated Twitter marketing platform on the market. Their Connect tool is designed to make marketing using Twitter easier and more efficient.
With Audiense Connect you can stay organized with the help of automated direct messaging chatbots and advanced monitoring and listening features. In just a few clicks, you can design and deploy your own Twitter messaging chatbot that can handle repetitive tasks such as responding to common queries and managing opt-ins, and more.
You can also use Audiense Connect to analyze and optimize your Twitter campaigns. With the help of automation features like filtering, following and unfollowing, feed organization lists, and more, it’s easier than ever to manage large-scale Twitter marketing campaigns.
You can also use the reporting, analytics, and competitor comparison features to make sure that your campaigns are the best they can possibly be.
When it comes to social media marketing, most platforms focus on providing solutions that target all the major social media outlets. However, Audiense Connect focuses solely on Twitter, meaning you can use this tool to create more advanced and effective campaigns.
Pricing: Audiense Connect offers a limited free plan. Paid plans that include all the Twitter marketing features start from $79/month.Try Audiense Connect Free
8. NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a social media tool that offers an extensive range of automation features.
If you’re keen to set up highly automated cross-platform campaigns, this is the tool for you. Some of the main automation features that NapoleonCat include:
- Social customer service – Filter and automatically respond to generic messages and comments on paid and organic content on Facebook and Instagram. You can also set up automatic redirection so that messages reach the right team members for the job.
- Social sales – Automated ad moderation features as well as setting up auto-responses for pre and post-purchase questions
- Teamwork – Set up automatic workflows and notification systems to help your whole team stay in the loop of what’s happening on your social media channels
- Analytics and reporting – Set up automated report generation and delivery for specific recipients
In addition to all this, NapoleonCat is complete with a powerful scheduling tool that allows you to schedule and auto-post social media content from your Mac or PC. So, if you need a reliable scheduler that allows you to manage all of your social media content in one place, this is just the ticket.
Overall, this is the perfect solution for busy teams that often run paid or organic ad campaigns on social networks like Facebook and Instagram.
Pricing: Plans start from $21/month.Try NapoleonCat Free
9. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an extensive social media marketing platform that comes packed full of automation features.
The platform includes everything you’d expect from a social media marketing solution, such as scheduling and publishing features, analytics, and more. However, when it comes to automation it really stands out from the crowd. Some of the most useful automation features it includes are:
- Bot builder – Design and deploy chatbots to automate customer interactions on platforms like Twitter and Facebook
- Automated scheduling – Schedule your post to be automatically published at times when engagement rates are highest
- Message prioritization – Automatically categorize and organize every message that hits your inbox to stay on top of your social media communications.
In addition to the automation features above, Sprout Social also offers a powerful social media listening tool that can help you keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to brand sentiment. All in all, it’s a great solution for optimizing and automating your social media marketing efforts.
Pricing: Plans start from $89/month/user for 5 social profiles.Try Sprout Social Free
Read our Sprout Social review.
10. StoryChief
StoryChief is a full-featured multi-channel marketing platform with some powerful social media management and automation features.
The tool can help you to manage everything from social media campaigns to SEO copywriting and more. In terms of automation, StoryChief offers a range of useful features such as automatic publishing to all your social channels and CRMs and content approval workflows.
StoryChief also gives you access to a useful content calendar that you can use to plan social media content, blog posts, and more, all from one unified dashboard.
Overall, StoryChief is a great solution for businesses that are planning to include a range of channels including social media in their content marketing strategy.
Pricing: Plans start from $100/month.Try StoryChief Free
11. ContentCal
ContentCal is a social media and content planning tool with powerful in-built automation features.
You can use it to plan your campaigns, schedule posts, build content calendars, collaborate with your team, and much more.
Avoid bottlenecks, minimize communication, and save time by setting up approval workflows for your team. All you have to do is assign user roles to your team members so that whenever a ‘Creator’ is finished working on content, the ‘Approver’ automatically receives a notification telling them it’s awaiting their approval.
If you’d prefer to have multiple stages of approval, you can add more steps to the workflow within ContentCal. This is really helpful for larger agencies that manage the social accounts of multiple brands and have more complex operations.
ContentCal also provides powerful auto-publishing tools. You can use the scheduling feature to automatically publish to different social platforms at your chosen times and dates, and create reporting schedules to export reports automatically each month.
Pricing: ContentCal plans start from $30 per month. You can also sign up for a 14-day trial (no credit card required).Try ContentCal Free
12. IFTTT
IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. It’s a revolutionary automation tool that makes it easy for anyone to create automated routines anywhere and everywhere.
It works by allowing you to enable or create automations called ‘applets’ using conditional logic, triggers, and actions. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t – IFTTT makes it super simple. If X happens, IFTTT will automatically do Y. All you have to do is specify what X and Y are.
It’s an incredibly versatile tool and the possibilities are almost limitless. There are many ways you can leverage these automations in your social strategy, for example:
- Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter
- Automatically share a link to your social channels alongside a specific message when you upload a new video to YouTube
- Sync all your new Instagram posts – or those with a specific hashtag – to your Pinterest board
- Automatically Tweet out breaking news when there’s a new post in a certain RSS feed
- Automatically Tweet out when you start streaming on Twitch to notify your followers that you’re live.
- Get automatic notifications when a specific Reddit user makes a post
I could go on, but I won’t. There are also other use cases aside from social automations. For example, you can also use IFTTT to take your smart home to the next level.
You could set up applets to automatically adjust the thermostat based on the latest weather report, or to automatically turn on your security systems when you leave. Cool, huh?
Pricing: IFTTT has a forever-free plan, limited to 3 custom Applets. IFTTT Pro costs just $3.33 and comes with unlimited Applet creation. Developer, Team, and Enterprise plans are also available.Try IFTTT Free
13. Brand24
Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that can help you to measure and maintain your brand’s online reputation.
Brand24 provides you with tools that enable you to ‘listen in’ on conversations people are having about your brand across the social media landscape.
When anyone posts a social comment that includes your brand name, Brand24 will automatically find and analyze it. The automated sentiment analysis tools use AI-powered algorithms to analyze the context around the brand mention and determine whether what the author is saying about you is positive, negative, or neutral, and then categorize it accordingly.
For example, if your brand mention appears alongside ‘negative’ words like ‘hate’ or ‘bad’, it may categorize the sentiment as negative. If it appears alongside words like ‘love’ or ‘great’, it’s most likely a positive comment.
Imagine how long it would take to do all that yourself, manually? You’d have to search for brand mentions on all the different social platforms yourself, analyze what each user was saying, and determine whether it was positive, negative, or neutral – it’d take forever.
Fortunately, the automated algorithm does all this for you at scale in an instant, allowing you to get an overview of the general sentiment towards your brand at a glance.
Brand24 can also provide you with notifications whenever you receive a negative mention. This is helpful as it enables you to quickly respond to negative comments and complaints before they gain traction, thus mitigating damage to your online reputation.
Pricing: Plans start at $49 per month and a 14-day free trial is available (no credit card required).Try Brand24 Free
Read our Brand24 review.
Why should you automate your social media campaigns?
Managing a social media presence is extremely time consuming. You can’t always be active on your social media channels at the same time as your audience.
But with social media marketing automation, you can ensure that you are always visible to your audience. You can grow your audience and execute on your social media strategy while working on other tasks.
What is a social media automation tool?
In order to use social media automation, you will need software or a tool to help you. Instead of manually signing into your social accounts and publishing content at a specific time, you would schedule the content ahead of time and it would be published automatically.
However, you can automate more than the publishing of social media content. For example, automation can be used for brand monitoring, content curation, comment moderation, reporting, analytics, and more.
How do I automate social media for free?
There are a number of social media automation tools that offer free accounts. For example, Pallyy, Agorapulse, Audiense, and Missinglettr can all be used to automate social media for free.
However, free social media tools will naturally have limitations. To avoid those limitations, you will need to upgrade to a premium account.
How do I set up automatic social media posts?
To automate the publishing of your social media content, you will need access to a social media scheduler such as SocialBee. You simply create a schedule, then add the content you wish to be shared.
This content will then be shared automatically at intervals of your choosing. Alternatively, you can choose to add an RSS feed to automatically promote content to your social media accounts.
Choosing the best social automation tool for your business
When choosing a social media automation tool, it’s important to think about exactly what your business will use it for.
You should consider which social media platforms you are targeting with your campaigns and your budget when choosing an option. If you’re not sure which one to choose, you can’t go wrong with one of our top 3 picks:
- SocialBee – The best social media automation tool overall.
- Agorapulse – The perfect all-in-one solution for businesses running large-scale social media campaigns.
- Missinglettr – A useful tool that can help you generate social media campaigns automatically based on blog posts.
Conclusion
The best social media automation tools are ones that help you save time while building relationships. In this article, I’ll take you through 15 of the top social media automation tools and explain how they can help you automate your social media activities.