If you are a social media manager for a business and you don’t know what the best platform for scheduling social media posts is, then luckily you landed on this page. The first thing you want to ask yourself is where most of your audience communicates: Facebook, Twitter or Instagram? This will help you decide which platform offers the best way to schedule your posts.
Here are the best platforms for social media post scheduling.
Promo Republic
Promo Republic offers a full-scale social media management software platform, with a range of plans catering from the Solo plan for personal use through to the Advanced Plan, for large businesses and agencies.
You can use Promo Republic to automate your social media publishing and scheduling. You enter all your posts and visuals in one social media publishing calendar, scheduled in advance and posted automatically to multiple social media. They integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
But they offer more than just scheduling posts. You have access to a 100,000 post ideas library and graphics editing tools; not to mention the other features expected of social media management and planning software, such as analytics and reporting and smart posting using AI.
For firms wanting more, Promo Republic offers two other products:
- Social Monitoring – to manage your brand reputation and keep track of your social mentions
- Intelligent Ads to improve your social advertising campaigns
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media posting/scheduling tool. It allows you to both schedule and post across multiple networks. Marketing teams can use it for collaboration, with user-level permissions providing specific access to marketing managers, writers and everyone in between to contribute to a social media calendar.
Sprout Social’s calendar feature provides a team with a bird’s eye view of what’s being published and promoted on a daily basis.
The package also includes a variety of social media analytics so you can see how well different pieces of content perform.
Plans range from $99 to $249 per month, after a free 30-day trial.
Buffer
Buffer operates a freemium model, where you can schedule 10 social updates for free, or with a paid plan you can undertake unlimited scheduling. This gives ample opportunity for a beginner to learn whether social media automation is likely to be of value to them.
As its name indicates, Buffer allows you to build up a selection of relevant posts you want to share, which can then schedule to go out at more suitable, appropriate times for your audience.
It allows you to customize your messages for each social network. The Buffer mobile app and the web browser extension make it easy to add webpage links, titles and images quickly to your Buffer schedule.
It suggests the most suitable times for you to post to each of your networks. Buffer also provides analytics showing how successful your posts were.
TweetDeck
If your only social scheduling needs are for Twitter, then TweetDeck could be ideal for you – particularly as it is free. It allows you to schedule tweets across multiple Twitter accounts. Twitter clearly saw the merits in TweetDeck, as it bought it in 2011.
It includes a comprehensive dashboard allowing you to see the tweets in an account’s Home feed, your Notifications, Messages, Activity, and Mentions. These change in real time. You can also add columns showing other items, such as Lists, Collections, Likes, Followers, Scheduled Posts, and more. You can make alterations to a scheduled Tweet before it’s published. You can also quickly add images and GIFs to your messages.
SocialOomph
With SocialOomph you can manage your Twitter accounts for free. This includes scheduling your tweets, tracking keywords, saving and reusing drafts and more. You can add and manage up to five Twitter accounts (unlimited with the paid plan).
If you sign up for a Professional account ($17.97 every two weeks), you gain similar features for Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Plurk. You also gain the ability to tweet via email and schedule and post blog posts and pages.
With the paid plan you can manage all of your tweets (for all of your Twitter accounts) from oneTweetCOCKPIT. This allows you to integrate your timelines and pull in additional tweets that contain specific keywords regardless of whether you follow the tweeter or not.
One unusual feature available to users of SocialOomph Professional is self-destructing (time-limited) updates for Facebook and Twitter. These allow you to post updates to Twitter and Facebook that will automatically be deleted from your Twitter account / Facebook feed after a period of time that you select.
You can also set up recurring updates, which publish at regular intervals (hours, days, or weeks). You can provide alternative text options so that each post is not identical.
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate content calendar and social media scheduling platform that helps thousands of individuals, businesses, and agencies with their content planning and social media. The platform also defines user permissions and streamline the approval process, manage multiple accounts in one centralized location, and communicate and collaborate with your team on upcoming content. With ContentCal Analytics and Respond you can also keep tabs on content performance and learn how to improve for the future.
Features of ContentCal include social media post scheduling, keyword filtering, collaboration, feedback analysis, reporting, project management, and more. Content creators can use the application to design visual content by modifying the layout and adding a header color and personalized logo. Additionally, employees can create and store posts as drafts, receive feedback from collaborators, and preview posts before publishing.
You’re able to save time, collaborate with team members or clients, and create even better social media content. This platform is perfect for agencies, distributed organizations, or anyone who needs to manage and participate in multiple social media accounts. It could not be any easier, which is perfect for teams with varying degrees of ability. And, the ability to create custom workflows and approvals that reflect your unique governance plan is unmatched. Not only is ContentCal well priced but it is also one of the leading social media schedulers in the market today.
Falcon
Falcon focuses on giving social media professionals access to a structured set of features that help listen, engage, measure, schedule and publish content that makes a difference. Falcon offers two plans. The Essential plan targets single users and small teams and focuses on a content calendar & campaign planner with advanced analytics and community management. The Full Suite is more designed for larger companies with multiple teams and markets. It takes everything from the Essentials Plan (although it permits unlimited channels, reporting, and teams) and adds in social media advertising, competitor benchmarking, and collaboration & approval flows.
Falcon considers your content calendar to be one of the most important tools you’ll work with. It provides a view of all your scheduled content across multiple social networks. You can plan, schedule, edit, and post directly from your content calendar. With Campaign Planner, you can map, create a brief, roll-out, and collaborate on campaigns for all social platforms.
Falcon supports images, video, Instagram Stories, and Facebook carousels. You can store all your content in Falcon’s version of a shared media library called the “Content Pool.” If you have a team, Falcon provides roles, approval processes, and an audit trail to boost quality. You can also activate email notifications and share notes. Falcon provides access to agencies to smooth your collaborative processes. You can control all access and set permissions.
Falcon lets users design their own inbox. You can include multiple feeds, labels and use filters. You can also create custom response templates for quicker replies and bulk actions
If you have the Full Suite, you can promote posts through Facebook and Instagram ads within Publish, which manages all ads in one place. The tool allows cross-channel advertising, automation, saved target audiences, running ads with customer durations, automated ROI tracking, and real-time insights. The Full Suite also includes social listening. With this, you can track trends, monitor your brand, create custom queries, track sentiment, monitor multiple languages, filter extensively, and track campaigns.
Loomly
Loomly is a powerful social media scheduling and management platform with a clean, intuitive interface. It offers four pricing tiers after a 15-day no credit card trial. They range from a $20/month Base plan for those with 10 or fewer social accounts up to the $228/month Premium Plan, allowing up to 26 users and 60 social accounts.
One useful feature of Loomly is that you can set various calendar workflows. The default setting for teams with more than one collaborator is:
- Draft
- Pending Approval
- Requires Edits
- Approved
- Scheduled
- Published
There is a straightforward process to go through when creating a post. You can either begin a post from scratch or pull in post ideas from RSS feeds that automatically create draft posts from them. You create the base copy of a post before you customize details for whichever social networks you want to use. If you intend to create a paid post for Facebook, you can customize your audience and set a budget for your campaign, all from within Loomly.
Another useful feature of Loomly is its interaction screen, where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle mentions (through tagging).Related Content:
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NapoleonCat
In the 7+ years that they’ve been in business, NapoleonCat has built an impressive client list that includes brands like the World Wildlife Foundation, Avon, and Allianz. One of their claims to fame is that they can help social media marketing teams to win back up to 70% of their time and energy. Even if this is not the case, just looking and interacting with its beautiful platform will make work feel less of a chore.
All in all, it’s easy to use and set up. One feature that deserves a special mention is that when you set up your social media accounts after signing up, it also gives you the option to keep tabs on your competitors. You just type in the competitor’s social media account name and add it to your watch list. You can also set it up so that each team member gets assigned specific permission. This is useful if you want to control who may create content.
With regards to posting and scheduling specifically, you can use it to schedule and post your content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business simultaneously via a single dashboard. It also generates post previews as you create them which is more useful than it sounds. Then, after your content has been posted, you can use its performance analytics to monitor your reach, engagement, and click-throughs.
While its list of features are pretty much the same as other social media tools, its approach to pricing is different and a lot more flexible. Unlike the majority of tools, NapoleonCat actually lets you select the number of social media profiles and users, making it an ideal tool for smaller teams.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse provides an affordable social media scheduler and management tool for teams and agencies. It offers four plans from $39 per month aimed at Solos, though to a $239 Enterprise plan. The main difference between each option is the number of social profiles and users catered for, although there are also differences relating to data retention and ad comment monitoring.
You can use Agorapulse to publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google +, and YouTube.
You can centrally post to all of your social accounts, with a queue or schedule ensuring your content is delivered at the best times. It allows you to re-queue or reschedule evergreen posts. You can also tweak each post to take advantage of features specific to each social network.
Conclusion
I hope this article has been helpful and that you have learned something new. I did not cover every single app or tool out there, just the ones that I have either used or had recommended to me. I stand firm in my belief that there is no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to scheduling social media posts. The solutions listed here simply represent the best of the best, and you should be able to find something that works for you.