Marketers are always trying to figure out what’s the best social media management platform for them. Trust me, I know how hard it can be to content marketing tools for digital marketers to try and figure out what is indeed the best social media management tool for them. There are so many options, isn’t there? And the thing is, if you don’t find the right one for yourself, you might end up wasting your time trying to use all of these other tools that just are going to give you more headaches and stress than anything else. I swear, no one wants that.
Social media management is a demanding job that involves organizing, uploading and scheduling tons of content. The number of social media management tools has increased over the past years as well. Some of these platforms also make analytics and reporting easier. Social media management features are an important aspect to consider when you are looking for a management tool.
Are you looking for the best social media management tools? Social media is an integral part of our daily life. Nowadays, it is very important for businesses to have a strong online presence which can be achieved by using social media platforms.
Best Social Media Management Tools 2022 is a social media management tool to manage all your social media in one place. Save time managing your social accounts through its powerful dashboard with easy-to-use scheduling tools and team collaboration capabilities.
What makes a great social media management tool?
Social media management apps have one purpose: to make managing your business’s social media presence easy and efficient. Most small businesses don’t have the staff or the time to waste posting individual updates and checking in on each site a few times every day. With this in mind, we set out some pretty firm criteria on what we felt made a great social media management tool:
- Each app had to support multiple social networks: at the very least, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Support for other networks or services was a bonus but not essential for inclusion.
- It’s easy to waste time on social media—whether you’re posting for yourself or your business. It shouldn’t be a hands-on job that takes time every day. This meant we required apps to enable you to schedule future posts and updates so you could batch your social media work into a couple of blocks each week. Also, it was ideal if apps offered access to your social media inboxes away from the distraction of the feed, so you could reply to customers without getting sucked in.
- Social media shouldn’t be a crapshoot. Different audiences will engage differently with different kinds of content. To make it easier for you to identify what content works for your audience, the best social media management tools will offer detailed analytics on how your posts do. (Unfortunately for marketers, not all social networks allow the same kind of analytics, which means you won’t necessarily get the same features for every social network you use.)
- Finally, all the apps had to be cost-effective for small and medium businesses. There are plenty of enterprise- or influencer-focused apps out there that charge a serious premium for features you’ll never use. Price wasn’t as much the issue as value for money.
Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar offers a single $49 paid plan after a 14-day trial. That plan includes all their features, and you have the option of whether to pay monthly or annually (for a month’s discount).
Meet Edgar is excellent for businesses that want to concentrate on queuing and delivering content. It doesn’t offer any social listening capabilities, nor does it have an in-app inbox.
At its core, Meet Edgar helps you schedule different categories of posts across your social networks. Categories are the heart of Meet Edgar. There are default categories; however, you can add to or adapt them to match your posting style.
You create a weekly recurring schedule for each of your social accounts, deciding on the post category for each slot. There are multiple ways you can source content to fill these slots. You can create original posts, or you can import content by connecting an RSS feed for your favorite blog or importing a CSV spreadsheet containing multiple posts.
Once you approve enough content, Edgar creates a queue for the next two weeks. It matches your queue to your schedule and categories. By default, Meet Edgar selects the newest content in each category first; however, you can click the Shuffle button on a category to reorder the posts into a new random order.
Meet Edgar doesn’t have social listening, a centralized inbox, or much analytics, but it should do the job for people more interested in intelligently scheduling their posts.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the more professional social media management platforms, and it lacks the free or cheap plan that most of the other platform reviewed have. It does offer a 30-day trial for its free paid plans, however. The paid plans range from $99/user/mo to $249/user/mo, varying by the number of social profiles you can manage, along with additional features on the higher plans.
Sprout Social has a clear and intuitive interface and is logically laid out. It features a Smart Inbox which collects all your social messages. You can combine your social inboxes in any way you wish.
It features a Listening module that works similarly. You track mentions of your brand, your competitors, or selected keywords.
Sprout Social makes connecting your social accounts effortless, even for the usually complicated Instagram. It includes tools enabling all your team to collaborate. You can efficiently allocate tasks to each member.
Every time you enter Sprout Social, it presents you with a Dashboard offering suggestions of what you should do next.
It has one of the most comprehensive and intuitive systems to create posts. You can customize your posts to meet the best practices of the different social networks and set your posts for multiple time frames. You can access content from many sources, which you can import and then reschedule or add to your queue.
Later
Later has a highly visual focus. Although it allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, its main emphasis is on Instagram.
Later does offer a free plan, with one social account per platform, one user, 30 Instagram posts, 50 Twitter posts, 30 Facebook posts, and 30 Pinterest posts per month. You can schedule photos and upload unlimited images to their Media Library, see your basic Instagram analytics, can search and repost user-generated content. The four paid plans (starting at just $9 per month) add to these capabilities.
Unlike all the rest of these social media managers that start with a social message and then allow you to add an image, Later requires you to start a post by uploading a picture. You then add suitable text to the image.
The heart of Later is its Media Library. You begin every post by either uploading new media to the library or reusing media you’ve already uploaded. You can add notes and labels to your media items and add a Star to any image you wish to highlight. You can filter your images by Label or Star, by media usage, type of media, and by the time frame in which you uploaded your media. You can store unlimited media, even on the free plan.
The free plan limits you to scheduling static images, but the higher plans add videos, Instagram Stories, and multi-photo posts.
Hootsuite – $19/month
Best for being a comprehensive platform for monitoring multiple accounts and keywords.
This tool is one of the most amazing tools for handling social media accounts. There are almost 15 million people in the world and job sectors that are currently using this tool.
Researches have shown that almost 800 big international companies are using this tool. Users are in love with the all-in-one characteristics of this feature.
There are multiple ways of handling your social accounts using this outstanding platform. Some of its most amazing features are given below.
Features:
- This tool has the capacity of managing accurate content and also schedule it for any time you want
- You can also measure the performance and business analytics of your websites by using this tool.
- The option for keeping the posts by using this tool is available in bulk.
- You can also access your s on the Socials by using this tool.
- With the help of brand mentions and the easy availability of tags, you can easily keep an eye on the trends.
Socials Managed:
This tool helps in managing the account of over 35 socials.
Price:
There are multiple plans for making this tool accessible to you including professional, team, business, and enterprise. You can also avail of the free Version. 1,3,5 and unlimited users will have access to this plan.
The professional plan starts from $19 per month. For the team plan, you have to pay $99 per month. Both of these plans have a free trial of 30 days.
For a business plan, you need to pay $599 per month and for the enterprise plan, you can ask for the custom prices.
Rating:
One of the best social media marketing tools is rated as 4.1 in the market.
Buffer – $5/month
Best for being a clean and intuitive tool for your business.
This tool is loved by brands and businesses to increase the value of your products. It is helping a lot of businesses and agencies to increase the growth of their business.
The best thing about this tool is the exceptional customer support service experience. It also provides an exceptional opportunity for team collaboration, suite publishing, and management of engaging content.
Features:
- With the help of this tool, you can easily measure your performance by just doing some clicks.
- You can also collaborate and plan your campaigns according to the social networking requirements.
- It allows a fast engagement with the customers by providing an outclass opportunity to respond to the customers twice as fast.
- The control panel will also allow you to control the overall business performance and quality of your business.
- This tool will help you in staying updated with the trend and you can focus on marketing strategies.
Socials Managed:
Buffer is currently available for handling 8+ Socials including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and others.
Price:
There are three plans available for this using this tool including free, essential, and team plan. You can enjoy basic publishing tools and landing page builders without paying anything.
For essential and team plans you can avail of the services of planning and publishing tools. Users can also take advantage of analytics and engagement tools by paying $5 and $10 per month.
Rating:
One of the most amazing free social media marketing tools is rated as 4.5 by the users.
NapoleonCat – $27/month
Best for handling multiple social media channels
It is an amazing social media networking tool and it provides the best results for the performance of agencies and marketing businesses. This site was founded in December 2013.
It is considered to be an all-in-one platform for scheduling your social media marketing publications. Users can also collaborate within teams to provide efficient results.
Features:
- It has exceptional tools for the management of social media and you can easily manage social analytics, publishing, and social engagement.
- The dashboard is also available for giving you an overview of the scalability of the business.
- It also has complete access to the competitor analysis and also for the post and follower analysis.
- The option for sentiment analysis and social reporting is also available.
- Influencer identification is also the most important feature of this tool.
Socials Managed:
This tool is currently managing 8+ social media with its amazing campaign running capacity.
Price:
There are three pricing plans available for this tool. You can choose from the basic plan, pro plan, and enterprise plan. These plans start from $27 and $55. You can also use the enterprise plan according to your requirements and budget.
Rating:
This tool is rated as 4.8 by its users.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media management software solution that provides everything you need to dominate social media right out of the box.
As an all-in-one tool, it comes with a diverse range of powerful features to help with all aspects of your social media marketing efforts. These features include:
- A unified inbox to manage communications across your social platforms
- Advanced publishing tools to create and schedule your social posts in advance
- Social listening tools to help you find out what customers are saying about your brand on social
- Team collaboration tools to make it easy to communicate and collaborate with your team members and clients
- Insightful analytics to help you gather data about your social media marketing performance
- And more!
Agorapulse also offers next-level support. They’re always available to answer any queries you might have, with an average 30-minute response time. If you’re running a social media marketing agency, this kind of rapid-response support is key to avoiding costly business interruptions.
Considering the depth of features Agorapulse offers, the price is very reasonable. There are various pricing plans available depending on the size of your team.
Pricing:
Agorapulse offers a free pricing plan limited to 1 user and up to 3 social profiles. Paid plans suitable for larger teams and more social profiles start at $79/month. A free trial is also available.
Which social media management tool is best for you?
As with most things, there’s no one best social media management app—just the most appropriate for your business needs. We suggest you check out the free trials for any of the apps that look like they could work for you and go from there.
While we’ve focused on complete social media management apps, there are also some apps that are designed to work best with a single network—like TweetDeck for Twitter or Later for Instagram—that are worth considering if you want to prioritize your marketing efforts on a single platform. You can also use Zapier to automatically post to your social media accounts, if you want an even more hands-off solution.
Conclusion
These are some of the best social media management tools that offer free plans, allowing you to test-drive them before upgrading to a paid version. The tools provide business owners with a clear view into their brand’s social media performance.
Social media management has changed completely in the last few years. It is no longer a back office task. Social Media Managers now must be full-fledged social media marketers, who not only manage their brand’s profiles but also produce content for these profiles.