Feeling overwhelmed with your social marketing strategy? Stop trying to do everything and try social media scheduling. Social media scheduling is a great way to get more posts out to your followers, build stronger relationships and save time. Now you can schedule all your social media updates in one place.
This app is perfect for you if you want to manage your social media scheduling tasks quickly, if you want to learn about the best social media scheduling tools (tips and techniques included so you can use them), if you are looking for free social media scheduling tools or even, if you want to achieve a lot with the top social media management tools.
Loomly
While Loomly doesn’t provide a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its cheapest plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year up-front). That Base plan permits two users and a maximum of ten social accounts.
You can connect all your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to Loomly. It is a simple process, although, like all social media management software, you have to live within limitations set by the social media networks, e.g., you can post to Facebook business accounts, but not personal profiles.
Loomly asks you to set a workflow that matches the way you run your accounts, whether you are part of a team, or operate your accounts solo.
You can select from three views in Loomly:
- Calendar view – shows all posts spread over a calendar month.
- List view – displays all posts as a list and includes essential information for each
- Post view – allows you to examine individual posts
You can do more than just schedule posts in Loomly, however. It offers an interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle @-mentions.
Analytics are available for each of your social accounts, as well as Loomly’s main dashboard containing an overview.
AgoraPulse
Although AgoraPulse offers a generous 28-day free trial, it is one of the more professional, and therefore expensive, social media management platforms, once you’ve concluded your trial. The cheapest plan is the $99 per month Medium plan.
It features an extremely user-friendly interface.
The heart of AgoraPulse is its unified Inbox. It shows your comments, mentions, conversations, and reviews relating to each of your social accounts. The Inbox Assistant allows you to set rules that automatically clean up and organize each account’s Inbox.
It includes a Social Listening module that allows firms to keep an ear open for mention of their brand name (or any other term).
AgoraPulse provides a variety of ways to publish content. The default Publishing tab takes you to a calendar, showing the social messages you have scheduled, queued, published, sent to approval, had assigned to you, or failed. AgoraPulse is at its most potent when you use its bulk publish feature. This lets you import a series of posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or as a group of pictures to transform into posts.
It provides an extensive array of reports, both globally about your social account usage, and also about specific items of content.
Sendible
Sendible offers a free 30-day no-credit card trial on all plans. Its cheapest plan is the $24 per month Micro plan, which accommodates 12 services for one user, with unlimited pst scheduling and up to 10 queues. Other plans add additional features, along with more services and permitted users.
Indeed “Services” are Sendible’s principal point of difference. They are like channels or profiles that you create within your Sendible account and allow you to select which features you need.
Sendible has operated since 2008, evolving with time. You can use it both for scheduling content to your social platforms and drafting and publishing posts on all the leading blogging platforms. You can create your own content, or use Sendible’s Google Chrome Extension to publish or schedule content you come across while browsing the web. You can also find high-quality content to share with your followers through Sendible’s content tool, RSS feeds, and Google Alerts.
You can also use Sendible to help you centralize your social media management, including such things as Facebook moderation (automatically removing comments and posts from your Facebook Pages that contain words or phrases you specify) and uploading and scheduling Facebook Page cover photos to match your marketing campaigns.
Although Sendible doesn’t have an in-built graphics editor, like PromoRepublic, it does include Canva integration, allowing you to create social media graphics with Canva and schedule them to your profiles and pages.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a long-standing favorite in the world of social media management. With Hootsuite, you create and schedule social media posts, make content calendars, interact with followers, and even launch Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads from the platform.
All of this functionality makes Hootsuite versatile; massive publications and independent bloggers alike use Hootsuite to handle their social media accounts.
Plus, Hootsuite has a free social media management plan that includes:
- One user
- Two social accounts
- Up to five scheduled posts
Five posts isn’t much, but if you just want to automate one post a week to a specific channel, Hootsuite’s free plan suffices.
The Professional plan unlocks unlimited social media scheduling, 10 social accounts, and follower messaging for $49 per month. You can use the 30-day free trial to test if Hootsuite is the social media scheduler you’re looking for.
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
Discover the best social media scheduling and management tools tested in this post. These are time-savers, easy to use and free. Save time, create efficiencies and boost your ROI with these best tools for bloggers and content publishers.