Scheduling social updates may not be for everyone but you should consider it if you are a business or an agency. If you want to keep your audience engaged during off-business hours, then this is the way to go!
It’s evident that your business is available on the web and that you post regularly. And while there are many options today when it comes to social media scheduling tools, many of these don’t provide a way to sort through the most important information and actually provide some value. So we’re here to talk about the best social media scheduling tools in this article.
You want to start taking advantage of social media scheduling, but you’re overwhelmed and confused at the same time. There’s so much helpful information on how to do it right, but also a lot of complicated technology based systems out there claiming to do it even better.
Social media posts efforts to achieve peak traffic and conversions. A social media posting schedule is how you will go about planning, organizing and executing the exact times you want your content to be published for your audience
What is a social media scheduling tool?
A social media scheduling tool is an automation tool that helps you schedule social media posts for multiple social media accounts ahead of time. You can’t be active by yourself on social media all the time, so using a social media scheduler helps you be proactive.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a powerful social media management tool that helps businesses and agencies manage their social media accounts. It allows you to schedule posts, monitors mentions, create custom dashboards, and more.
Like other tools, Zoho Social offers a free plan that includes one team member, a zShare browser extension, and publishing on seven social channels. And, of course, premium plans come with more advanced features.
Using this tool, you can schedule unlimited posts, track social media activities, create custom reports to analyze your performance, and get notified when someone shares something about your brand on the web. It also comes with an easy-to-use interface and intuitive design that makes managing multiple accounts easier.
One of the features I like most about the collaboration. It allows you to collaborate with your team seamlessly. You can also assign custom roles to your team members so that they can work on different projects.
Overall, Zoho Social is a great tool for social media management and a free alternative to Hootsuite.
Pricing: They have four different plans. Also, each of the plans offers a 14-day free trial.
- Free plan: 1 team member, one brand, publishing on seven channels, access to zShare browser integration
- Standard plan ($10/ mo): Everything in the free plan, including multi-channel publishing, user tagging, drafts, Twitter location
- Professional plan ($30/ mo): Everything in the standard plan, including Livestream, CustomQ, bulk scheduling, RSS feeds
- Pro plan ($40/ mo): Everything in the professional plan, including SmartQ, content approvals, workflow, collaboration, content targeting, lead ads.
Combin
Are you looking for a way to grow your Instagram following? Then look no further than Combin.
Combin is the perfect tool for anyone who wants to increase their followers and engagement on Instagram. It’s simple, easy-to-use, and can help you quickly gain real followers.
Combin offers two different plans – Growth and Scheduler. The Scheduler tool is completely free to use and includes 15 Instagram accounts management, bulk image uploading, location tagging, user tagging, etc.
You can use Combin to find influencers in your niche or industry so that you can collaborate with them and get more exposure. Or, if you want to promote your account, then this is the perfect tool as well.
Their growth plan includes more powerful features such as it can detect who doesn’t follow you back, check your Instagram audience quality, monitor audience activity, and more.
Pricing: Combin comes at three price tiers.
- Free: One account management, two simultaneous searches, 25 search results for posts, stories mass looking.
- Personal plan ($15/ mo): unlimited simultaneous searches, 1000 search results for posts, statistics, search results refresh ability.
- Business plan ($30/ mo): 5 accounts management, unlimited simultaneous searches, 1000 search results for posts, stories mass looking.
Friendsplus
Friends plus is another free tool for scheduling and automating your social media posts. You can create great content, collect it from all over the web, and then bulk schedule it with their desktop application.
They also have browser extensions that make it easy to share on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Pinterest right from your browser. And if you’re using a mobile device, they also have applications for iOS and Android so you can manage everything in one place.
The dashboard is very simple and doesn’t include many features as other tools.
Pricing: Friendsplus offers five different plans:
- Free plan: One user, two queues, 5 schedule posts per queue, link shortening, Zapier integration.
- Individual plan ($7.50/ mo): 10 additional team members, five queues, 500 schedule posts per queue, Pinterest scheduling, bulk scheduling.
- Small plan ($24.17/ mo): Everything in the individual plan, including 20 additional team members, 15 queues, 1500 schedule posts per queue.
- Medium plan ($49.17/ mo): Everything in the small plan, including 30 additional team members, 30 queues, 3000 schedule posts per queue.
- Large plan ($215.84/ mo): Everything in the medium plan, including 50 additional team members, 120 queues, 5000 schedule posts per queue.
Later
Source: Later
Ready to spruce up your Instagram feed? Later is a tool that helps you customize your feed to create an intentional, powerful presence when people click to your channel. Setting up an Instagram profile is 100% free, so you can launch your influencer career by creating (instead of paying). Get analytics for your IG profile as well.
Source: Later
Check this out: Later also gives you Linkin.bio, a way to drive traffic to your ecommerce store right from Instagram. Later’s free plan does give you access to Linkin.bio lite, so you may want to consider making your posts clickable for increased conversions.
Planoly
Source: Planoly
Alternative to Later, you can use Planoly to plan and schedule your Instagram posts. The free plan includes 2 social profiles for scheduled posts. So you can automate your Pinterest posts in the same go — up to 30 posts per month. Planoly’s latest launch of Linkit also let you link to products, resources, websites, etc. using the link in their bio.
Pro tip: A blogger might use this tool to double down on visual lead gen. If you love creating graphics, sharing images, and posting other visual content, Planoly can let you take the set-and-forget approach. Simply schedule your Pinterest and Instagram posts in the calendar and then engage with followers and see the analytics of your posts after they’ve published.
Canva
Source: Canva
One of the most popular ways to create fast, stylish graphics is Canva. While there are some great Canva alternatives out there now, we wanted to highlight the OG online graphic editor.
The power of Canva is its simplicity. It provides a robust suite of free tools and templates to help you level up your visual social media posts in almost no time. But that’s just the beginning. Canva has added tons of tools over the years. They now even offer ways to create logos, business cards, flyers, book covers, Instagram stories, and almost any graphic you can come up with—with pre-made sizes to help you nail those technical specs.
Source: Canva
A small business owner might use Canva for all their design needs. Instead of jumping through the hoops of paying for and learning a complex tool like Photoshop, most business owners can create the graphics they need for free using Canva. They even offer hundreds of thousands of free images—so you don’t even have to buy stock photography.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a social media automation and analytics tool for businesses – from small to medium and even large companies. With this social media automation tool, you can expect to enjoy a ton of features such as social media scheduling, calendar management, client management, and more.
Additionally, it doesn’t matter what social media channel you are using because SocialPilot has your needs covered. That said, you can integrate SocialPilot with social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram (Direct Publishing), and TikTok simultaneously.
The best of all is that SocialPilot offers users a social media calendar feature, which will help you monitor your social media campaigns. You can incorporate filters into your calendars and monitor your social media campaigns by groups and accounts.
The calendar functionality also allows users to drag and drop their social media posts and reschedule them, depending on what has changed.
Finally, SocialPilot users can analyze their social media post-performance basis how engaged their audience, influencers, demographics, and competitors are.
Core Features of SocialPilot
Now that you know what SocialPilot can do for you, let’s discuss the core features of SocialPilot below:
- SocialPilot gives you the freedom to schedule your posts as you want with advanced social media publishing capabilities and audience targeting.
- You will get helpful analytics of your automated social posts and know where to adjust with downloadable PDF social media reports.
- Set access levels to your team to maintain the content flow in your company. With its team collaboration feature, you can add your team members and assign accounts and access levels.
- You can use your Social Inbox to moderate conversations on Facebook pages.
- You have control of your Facebook ad campaigns by using Lead Ads or Boost Post.
- Excellent customer service available 24×5 to help you whenever you need assistance via chat / email / call.
Pros
- Enhanced team & client collaboration for hassle-free social media management.
- You can bulk upload up to 500 posts in one go.
- Facebook and LinkedIn audience targeting available.
- Top-notch browser extension.
- Publish native videos, add GIFS, create carousel or album posts for interactive social media posts.
- Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box integration for easy access to your media.
- Create marvelous social media images on the spot with the Canva integration.
- They offer 5 ways to automate your social media posts – immediately, schedule according to the said time-slots, schedule at a specific time, repeat posts in time intervals, and share it after the first post in your queue.
How do I make a social media schedule?
There are social media scheduling tools like SocialPilot that can help you plan out a social media schedule.
- You can set up times to post automatically while connecting your social media account to SocialPilot.
- Add the posts to the queue while scheduling them, and they will be scheduled according to the time-slots you’ve set when you connected that account.
- With the help of the social media calendar, you can view your entire social media schedule in one glance.
Conclusion
Social is where people share their opinions, thoughts, interests and other vital information. It has changed the way we communicate and interact with others. Social media scheduling tools are playing a vital role in such communication and interaction. The social media scheduling tools help to schedule content so that it is shared on time and at appropriate time. There are some best social scheduling tools 2022 free which are used for sharing information, news, brand messages as well as for simple communication purposes
Social media marketing is as important for small businesses as for big corporations. It is about sharing valuable information, gaining customers, increasing sales and reaching new customers. Social media optimization helps small business owners to reach a wider audience, since social media has become the vital part of online business today. Social media scheduling really helps small businesses to optimize their time, because they don’t need to be working 24/7 on social media activities.