If you manage multiple social media accounts, then you’re more than familiar with having to spend an hour in front of the computer posting content. For companies, this is a huge opportunity cost — you can’t very well have your team all cooped up in an office for hours on end, can you? But what if there was a way to lessen this burden? What if the best free social scheduler app could make it easier for your employees to post seamlessly across all your social media channels? Well, I’m here to tell you that it does exist.
Scheduling tools for social media are designed to let you create several posts ahead of time, and publish them whenever you desire. You can essentially create a week’s worth (or more) of content in one sitting, and schedule each post to publish on a different day. But, what are the best scheduling tools for social media, and which ones should you be using? Here’s a compiled list of social media scheduling apps.
Facebook Creator Studio
Did you know that Facebook has its own scheduling feature? This one is great for beginners as it’s completely *free, and is a ready-to-use feature for Facebook Business Page managers. And as Facebook owns Instagram, you can also use the Creator Studio to schedule posts and videos to Instagram.
Creator Studio is a great scheduling tool for new solopreneurs or for anyone that doesn’t feel they’re ready to use a paid version and just wants to get a feel for what scheduling to social media is all about.
Because it’s a Facebook feature, it’s really easy to use and we haven’t really had any issues using this scheduler in the past. The Instagram scheduling feature is a newer feature but is very similar to the Facebook scheduler. Creator Studio has the ability to schedule IGTV videos too, which is great, as a lot of other scheduling tools don’t seem to be able to do this.
Overall, I would only really recommend this tool to beginners as while it’s free and easy to schedule posts, the platform itself isn’t as intuitive and is subpar to a lot of other tools.
Hootsuite
If you’ve done any research into social media scheduling apps, the name Hootsuite will be familiar to you. Hootsuite is one of the most comprehensive social media management systems out there and is widely used by both small and large businesses. With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube.
In my experience, Hootsuite isn’t well suited to beginners or solopreneurs. It is a really comprehensive tool, which makes it overwhelming when you first start using it. The process of post scheduling itself is pretty simple, but as it is a lot pricier than the other social media management tools mentioned in this article, you want to make an effort to use all of its features to their fullest. And I feel that to do that, you need to have a dedicated social media manager on your team who has the time to focus solely on building your social media with this tool.
In my opinion, Hootsuite seems better suited for medium and large businesses as it is a much more expensive and robust system – I don’t think that small businesses would get their money’s worth out of this tool.
So I wouldn’t recommend it for small businesses as I just don’t think they can take full advantage of all of its features.
Later
Later is one of the newer scheduling tools and was originally built as an Instagram-specific social media scheduler. However, they now allow you to also schedule to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Being so focused on Instagram, Later has a lot of features created to help you create aesthetically pleasing posts and is optimized for sharing images, videos and stories.
We currently use Later as our main social media scheduling tool. It has the most user-friendly dashboard of any scheduling tool I’ve used, and the media library and calendar feature make it easy to visually track your schedule. We primarily use it to schedule Facebook and Instagram posts and I have had no issues with the platform so far. Later is around the same price as what we used to pay for Buffer, but I much prefer Later’s dashboard as there are more features and everything is laid out in a more dynamic way. The media library is also a great feature, as you can store all of your future posts there which makes batching much easier.
However, if you primarily post to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, this may not be the best option for you. As Later is mainly focused on Instagram, you can only schedule posts that include images, so this limits what you can do with platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, as you can’t post regular tweets or link posts.
Overall, Later is very highly rated and I understand why. However, it’s not ideal for some social media platforms, so keep in mind where your audience is when choosing a scheduler.
Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar works slightly differently than the other scheduling apps on this list. It was designed so that it not only schedules posts but can save those posts to be reused as often as you want. One of its other unique features is to trawl the internet for shareable snippets that it can automatically post to your social media (evergreen content). It was designed with the purpose of helping small businesses spend less time on their social media management and allows you to schedule to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
So, Meet Edgar is quite different from any other scheduling platform I have used. It’s a little bit confusing when you first sign up, and the dashboard isn’t the most intuitive, so you definitely have to put some effort into learning the features of this tool. Because of this, I wouldn’t consider this a beginner-friendly tool for someone who has never used scheduling software before.
The ability to create evergreen content that can be reused, and pretty much manages itself is a big selling point for the tool, however, I think this could be dangerous for someone who is new to social media. With a tool like this, it’s easy to just set and forget. But building a social media presence is as much about engagement as content creation, so no matter how tempting it is, you shouldn’t let a tool like this take all of the work out of it. But as long as you keep this in mind I think Meet Edgar has a lot of potential in helping you grow your social media.
Planoly
Planoly is often referred to as a direct competitor to Later. It’s also an Instagram scheduler, but it also works for Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. It’s an official partner with Instagram and Pinterest, so it’s a platform your business can trust.
What’s unique about Planoly is its “sell it” feature. You don’t even need a website to market your products on your Instagram account. Sell allows users to get more information and buy your product simply from a picture on social media. Essentially, it allows you to turn your social media page into a storefront, where you can either sell physical goods that need to be shipped or digital items your customers can receive right away.
When it comes to using Planoly as a social media scheduler, you can use it to plan your posts, or your Instagram stories ahead of time. It will also instantly give you follower data and other analytics you can use to make sure you’re posting at the right time and offering content people want to see.
Buffer
Buffer is an app designed to work across multiple social media platforms to schedule posts for you. What does that mean?
If you want to post something or share something with your social media account, it might not be best to do it right away. There are optimal posting times throughout the day, and you don’t want to bombard your followers with multiple posts in the span of an hour.
So, create your post(s), put them in the queue, and Buffer will publish them at the next available time. It’s a great way to take charge of your social media while having someone else take care of the best practices.
Any of these scheduling tools for social media are great ways to stay more organized, post the right content at the right time, and feel less stressed and overwhelmed by multiple platforms. Because they each do something slightly different, don’t be afraid to try a few different ones to determine which is best to fit your business’ needs.
Airtable
Since Buffer and Hootsuite let you schedule lots of content at once, you should consider using another tool in tandem that will let you plan your content and collaborate with others to create posts: Airtable.
It’s like a magic, interactive spreadsheet that can act as a hub for all your social media needs. Before you schedule your posts, you can use their Social Media Planning and Design template to organize your content. You can even have collaborators upload their images so one person can do the scheduling for your nonprofit:
Once you’ve created your content in Airtable, you’re able to download as a .csv and upload your posts to your preferred scheduling platform.
Conclusion
Have you ever felt like you have to be on top of everything, all the time? Perhaps you have to maintain your social media pages, keep up with emails, make phone calls, and even manage your website on a regular basis. How can you get everything done when one task alone would be enough for any self-respecting human being?