The number of people using social media is now over 3.5 billion. The number of people in need of assistance is increasing every year, and it is a growing trend.
Due to the widespread use of social media, businesses are thronging to implement various social platforms in order to engage with their target audience and convert them to customers.
Social media marketing enhances the effectiveness of online businesses by connecting and engaging with their customers, promoting their social media presence, working with influencers, creating awareness about products, and ultimately endowing Online Businesses with more income.
Despite this, it would seem that it is a much easier thing said than done.
When trying to manage your numerous social media channels, you are not only dealing with lots of time-consuming steps but also a lot of stress when you lose track of everything going on.
This post will help you make a better decision by ranking and reviewing some of the best social media management tools on the market to help you automate your work on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social networks.
The following tools will help you:
- Plan your social media posts in advance.
- You can track the engagement and clicks on your social media accounts.
- Engage with social media users by following, unfollowing, and engaging with them.
- The list goes on and on.
Let’s start.
Table of Contents
Here is a list of the top social media management software who will help you kick start your social media marketing campaigns this year.
1. Crowdfire
Crowdfire, which was designed to manage social networks, launched in 2010 by the company justunfollow, later renamed itself to Crowdfire in 2015.
In order to make a point it is the first platform that can operate on both iOS and Android devices, and has over twenty million global users, including artists, freelancers, e-sellers, and bloggers.
There are many features in Crowdfire that allow you to run a complete social media management campaign with features ranging from content curation, social media monitoring, analytics, and much more.
For the best interaction, dive deeply into data and listen to what is being said regarding topics related to the brand, this software works best for individuals, small companies, and digital agencies that desire increased engagement through social media.
Key Features:
- Learn what your audience will love by discovering relevant content – By exploring videos and infographics based on your interests, you are likely to find content your target audience will love.
- Create a schedule for your content to be published in advance and pre-schedule all your content at the time that you prescribe.
- Monitoring the social media channels of your brand in order to find out what is being said about it and analyze your competitors’ actions.
- Adding extensions – With Crowdfire, you can install various add-ons, such as Chrome extensions, on your browser.
- A free account can be opened and used on every social media website and it offers a 14-day free trial period so users can test out its premium features before they commit.
Cons:
- There is no other way to suggest videos or infographics other than those created by your fellow members
- The number of options for promoting blogs is limited
- Quality is less of a priority than quantity when it comes to this project
Pricing:
It offers one account for every social media site for free and a 14-day free trial for the top plan. Other than that, it has three paid plans to choose from.
There are three types of membership plans available: ‘Plus’ which costs $7.48 per month, ‘Premium’ which costs $37.48 per month, and ‘VIP’ which is $74.98 per month.
With Crowdfire, you get complete social media management functionality with a rich feature set for both companies and individual users at every level who wish to increase their post count, communicate with followers more effectively, and perform social listening.
2. Rebrandly
A popular tool that makes link management easy is Rebrandly. It will allow you to shorten your long URLs so you can share them on social media and promote your brand easily.
Links can be tagged in the link manager of their website, custom URLs can be created, fast redirects can be performed, and a link can be set to expire at a specific time.
Rebrandly is a must-have for large brands that often post on multiple social channels and social media apps and have branded links that need to be short and memorable. Comparatively to Linktree and its alternatives, it is also a more advanced tool.
Key Features:
- Route traffic – Create deep links and route traffic so that you have complete control over the social media links you use on your website.
- Collaborate with your team – Have extra seats for your team, a single sign-on (SSO) interface for different levels of access, and two-factor authentication (FFA).
- Link analytics – A custom URL and report builder tracks all your link clicks, actions, and social media engagements based on your social media links.
- Training and support – the Rebrandly team is available by e-mail, on the Rebrandly Knowledge Base, and through video tutorials and active account management.
Cons:
It does not include all of the features that other tools on this list include, such as scheduling social media posts and scheduling contests.
Pricing:
There are four pricing options offered by them and a custom enterprise plan as well.
- There is no limit to how many redirects, clicks, and branded links you may send per month under the Free Plan.
- In their Starter Plan, you will receive 25,000 clicks per month and 5,000 brand links per month.
- There is a Pro Plan available for $69/month, while the Basic Plan is just $56/month.
- With the Premium Plan, you get 1.5 million clicks and 150,000 branded links each month and it costs $499 a month.
- Additionally, they offer an enterprise plan with a customized pricing structure.
3. Agorapulse
Agorapulse, founded in 2011, assists individuals and businesses with managing social media content easily. With the use of this technology, users are able to carry on meaningful conversations online effectively.
Approximately 17,000 social media managers across the world are using Agorapulse every day for scalability of their marketing efforts in social media. You can also try the program for free for 28 days.
For medium-sized businesses and agencies making use of multiple users to manage at least a dozen different social media profiles on a regular basis, Agorapulse is as good as it gets.
Key Features:
- Scheduling tools that are flexible enable you to schedule, reschedule, queue, or upload your posts in bulk utilizing these powerful tools.
- Social Inbox – Find & filter out specific mentions and important messages with the help of our social inbox.
- You can get instant reports – unlimited reports for determining the ROI of an engagement strategy.
- Easy collaboration features – Giving users the power to assign items from their inbox and draft posts in an instant keeps social media in a smooth and fast lane.
Cons:
- A mid-tier plan that is among the most expensive plans on the market.
- There is a need to improve the listening feature
- Emoticons do not have enough diversity
- It is not possible to search the inbox of a given email address
Pricing:
It offers four different pricing plans, each tailored to fit the needs of a particular business type.
- There is a Medium plan that costs $99 per month (10 social profiles, 2 users).
- In the case of the Large plan, it costs $199 per month (25 social profiles, 4 users).
- There are multiple plans to choose from, but the X-Large plan is $299 per month (40 social profiles, 8 users).
- There are three different Enterprise plans that are available at a price of $499 per month (60 social profiles, 20 users).
If you choose an annual payment plan for every plan, you will get almost 20% off the regular price. Moreover, all annual plans include a subscription to the Social Media Manager School, which would otherwise cost $997 per person.
4. Buffer
In case you are familiar with social media strategy or digital marketing, then Buffer is probably something you already know. Buffer is one of the best social media management tools you will find on the internet, so you can keep track of all the social profiles you have on the web.
With its social listening products, as well as its data analytics, it is able to provide insights into how users are using a variety of social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Additionally, they have a mobile app for iOS and Android that allows team members to collaborate on the move.
What Buffer is most suited to: Buffer is an application that allows you to schedule and publish content across all your social media platforms.
Key Features:
- Publishing and sharing content – You can publish and share content on numerous social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook with a single click of a button.
- It is possible for you to create free images with the help of Pablo, a built-in image creation tool on the App Store. With Pablo, you can create images and upload them to various social media websites.
- Extension for Chrome – It can be installed as an extension for Chrome, which will allow you to share links, post blogs, or post pictures from any location.
- Analyze your social media performance in an intuitive way with Buffer’s Analytics tool. Using the new metrics you can look at your social media performance in a variety of ways. Moreover, you are able to create reports, get recommendations, and extract actionable insights for better marketing.
Cons:
- There is a problem with the Instagram integration
- Currently, there is no tool that allows user to search hashtags and searches selectively
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans offered by Buffer.
- For publishing, you have the option of paying $15 per month or going up to $99 per month.
- A monthly subscription to ‘reply’ starts at $15 per month and goes as high as $35 per month.
- There is a starting price of $35 per month for ‘analyze,’ and there is a maximum price of $50 per month.
You will get 20% off your annual payment on all plans.
5. Sendible
Sendible is a great tool that is designed to help social media marketers stay on top of their game.
Many of its competitors lack features in this product that make it stand out from the crowd. You can, for example, measure ROI from the very same dashboard that you use for managing your social media, which saves you time from switching screens on multiple occasions.
In addition to that, it is fully integrated with all of the popular social networking sites. With more than 10,000 businesses trusting it, the free trial offer is also an attractive feature.
The best thing about Sendible is that it is ideal for lead generation, scheduling posts, and managing multiple clients all at once. It is suitable for companies (large, medium, and small) as well as entrepreneurs who are self-employed to use.
Key Features:
- Preview your social media posts – You can now see beforehand how your posts will appear after posting them on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
- Create a content calendar that helps you plan your content – let’s you schedule individual and bulk posts, or you can queue them up.
- Establish individual dashboards for clients to better segregate and organize their work in order to become more productive.
- Building your brand 360 degrees now includes enhancing reputation building and monitoring while incorporating your brand KPIs and objectives.
Cons:
- The interface of the Inbox can be confusing at times
- It is difficult to post multiple images in a single Instagram post
- A limited set of analytics features are available
Pricing:
There are four pricing plans offered by Sendible.
- Starter is at $29 per month (12 services and 1 user).
- Traction is at $99 per month (48 services and 3 users).
- Growth is at $199 per month (105 services and 7 users).
- Large is at $299 per month (192 services and 12 users).
With all plans, there is a 15% discount for annual payments.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another popular social media platform that was established in 2008 and is based in Vancouver, Canada.
Currently it has over 16 million registered users worldwide and offers a variety of social network integrations for its users including Reddit, Tumblr, and Marketo, as well as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.
Moreover, you have the option to test drive it for 30 days without charge.
Hootsuite is a great tool to have as part of a complete marketing suite that enables you to listen to social media and manage customer service, monitor multiple social media at once, and easily schedule your posts.
Key Features:
- With Hootsuite, you can use social media accounts from multiple platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram without installing any software on your computer.
- Management of multiple accounts – Customized to help you manage multiple accounts at the same time.
- Automated posting scheduler – allows for you to schedule different posts to be automatically posted on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Analytics robust and in-depth – Comprehensive and in-depth analytics reports are available.
- Performance tracking – You can track performance metrics to create customized reports and make better data-based decisions based on information gathered from over 70 different metrics.
Cons:
- In some cases, auto-scheduling can take some time to process because of software issues
- There are some apps that require you to pay extra fees in order to use them
- On Facebook, there is no thumbnail or summary preview for published articles
- Shortening custom URLs costs a lot of money
- Engagement and reach on Facebook are low on this platform
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans offered by Hootsuite:
- When billed annually, the Professional plan begins at a monthly fee of $29 per month. One user is included in the report and there are 10 social profiles.
- The Team plan, which includes 20 social profiles, 3 users, and a minimum of $129 per month when billed annually, starts at $129 per month.
- It starts at $599 per month for the Business Plan, billed annually, and it provides users with up to 35 social media profiles as well as five to ten users.
- In the Enterprise plan, you will be charged on a quote-per-need basis, depending on your requirements.
There is a 30-day free trial period for the first two plans. It is very important that you request a demo before using the last one.
7. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that has become a standard in the industry. In order for this system to succeed, it had to be built around the idea of creating deep, meaningful relationships between individuals, communities, businesses, and brands based on the idea of social media management.
Despite the fact that it has a fairly high price tag compared to many of its competitors, the value it provides more than makes up for the price.
The best suited companies for Sprout Social are small, medium, and large businesses. However, the tool is also useful for enterprise and social media strategy purposes as well.
Key Features:
- Intuitive and user-friendly dashboard – Sprout Social provides a user-friendly dashboard which is one of the significant advantages it offers.
- Messages organized by topic – Also known as a ‘Smart Inbox,’ this area gathers all of your messages from all your connected social media sites in a single place.
- Scheduled messages – It allows for users to schedule their messages in advance. As an added bonus, with Sprout Social, you are able to schedule your posts to go out at a predetermined time schedule.
- Discovery – A unique feature of Twitter, ‘Discovery’ is an inbuilt platform that allows you to monitor a list of people with whom you have interacted and who have mentioned you in a tweet.
- Trial for 30 days free of charge – this trial is an opportunity for you to see whether you will be able to use the software in the way that you intend.
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans offered by Social Sprout.
- There is a Standard plan available for $99 per month, which provides five social profiles.
- With the Professional plan, you get 10 social media profiles for 149 U.S. dollars per month.
- Advanced plan is $249 per month and includes 10 social profiles and 10 email addresses.
A free trial period of 30 days is offered with all the plans.
8. SocialPilot
In short, SocialPilot has been trusted by more than 100,000 businesses around the world for managing their social media, engaging with their customers, and providing them with detailed analytical insights. This makes it one of the best softwares available on the market today. The product is a top choice for many people all over the world because it offers a lot of value at low prices.
SocialPilot is designed to help you more efficiently manage your social media marketing efforts and to help you save time. There is an emphasis on social media professionals, medium-sized agencies, and small scale businesses, but the guide is just as useful to individuals and entrepreneurs.
Key Features:
- SocialPilot provides priority email support when it comes to customer support, which is one of its strong points. You can always depend on it to help you out when you need it.
- You are provided with content suggestions as part of a unique feature. This means that you will always have content you can post to your blog. If you wish to create social media post templates, then you can also use this tool in conjunction with graphic design software such as Canva.
- The software can be explicitly customized to meet all your needs as long as it can be expressed clearly. The tool can automate the publishing of your custom posts with the help of an RSS Feed URL that you can provide for example.
- A single dashboard with user-friendly features that pools all your needs and allows you to manage them from a single platform.
Cons:
- The video feature is only available for uploading videos
- There are some countries where the free trial is not available
Pricing:
There are three different pricing plans offered by Social Pilot.
- It is possible to obtain an Agency plan that is $100 monthly (providing 100 social media accounts) and billed annually for $83.33 per month.
- There is a Small Team plan available at $50 a month ($41.66 a month if billed annually).
- The Professional plan costs $30 per month (but only $25 if you are billed annually).
During the trial period, you can try all three of these plans for 14 days. If you would like to talk to them about creating a plan tailored to meet your particular needs, then you can contact them.
9. Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar is a very popular tool for managing social media. It is very easy to use and quite fast.
The social media management platform you choose to use at this point offers you a variety of services ranging from scheduling posts and curating content to repurposing it. There is a great thing about this set of tools; it generates content for extended periods of time, even when you do not have any content so that you do not need to worry about where your customers might go when you are out of content.
The best use of this social media tool is to manage many social media accounts at one time, despite the fact that you do not have the time to do so. Having a tool that can handle social media scheduling at regular intervals of time, preferably automatically, is ideal for businesses that require this function.
Key Features:
- Automated variants – The software is able to automatically write your posts for you. A quick summary of what it does is find, at the click of a button, a variety of quotes based on various articles and blogs.
- Offers Extensions, like those found on Google Chrome, Safari, or a Bookmarklet, for various browsers.
- This is a very useful feature because it allows you to keep posting even when your blog doesn’t have anything to talk about.
- It’s a great support team – you will get a response within 48 hours after contacting the support team and they will go above and beyond to help you.
- Testing Social Messaging A/B – A/B testing allows you to get actionable insights and to rethink your strategy based on the results of the tests.
Cons:
- There is no integration with Pinterest at the moment
- Quite expensive compared to what I expected
Pricing:
You will have to pay $29 per month for the first four months in order to use Meet Edgar. The price for the fifth month will grow to $49 per month after that.
A 30-day money-back guarantee that comes with the package is included as well as 25 social media accounts.
10. eClincher
It is important to note that eClincher was created primarily for the purpose of streamlining social media management for businesses. In this instance, the purpose was to extract or ‘clout’ as much benefit out of social media as possible.
It offers users an extensive range of services, including the ability to publish and schedule posts, monitor and listen to incoming feeds, analyze data according to advanced analytics, etc.
A benefit of using this product is that it is great for small and medium businesses who do not want to outsource their social media management activities to third parties. Additionally, it would be useful for vendors to be able to manage multiple accounts belonging to different businesses.
Key Features:
- eClincher offers automatic scheduling capabilities for you, allowing you to set up a schedule for your posts and publish them according to that.
- Engagement – Apart from posting materials, it engages your clients by responding to their comments, which can lead to a beneficial relationship.
- Integration with almost any social media platform – In addition to Facebook Pages, YouTube, and Instagram, it thoroughly integrates with Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
- Keeping track of mentions – This program is excellent for either monitoring mentions on social media or monitoring hashtags and keywords over several platforms.
- Google Chrome extension plugin – It allows users to share quickly, schedule and queue up posts without opening the software application by means of extensions such as the Chrome extension.
Cons:
- It has been reported that the software contains some bugs that users have complained about
- The user interface does not seem to be very intuitive at all
- There is a problem with tracking the post queue dates
Pricing:
eClincher comes with three different pricing plans to choose from.
- There is a Basic plan that is 59 dollars per month (1 team member, 10 profiles).
- There is a Premier plan that costs $119 per month (20 profiles, 3 team members).
- A monthly fee of $219 is charged for the Agency plan (40 profiles, 6 team members).
There is a 14-day trial period available with all plans.
11. CoSchedule
CoSchedule was founded in 2014 and based in the US. It is a leading provider of social media management software, catering to over 10,000 satisfied customers worldwide.
A Chrome extension, for instance, provides shortcuts for organizing and tracking all your content. It also integrates with a variety of other tools and allows you to gain actionable insights in a single click.
This software is most suitable for small and medium businesses and enterprises, as well as for creating case studies to use as reference materials in the future. Creating and tracking blogs can also be taken advantage of by individuals.
Key Features:
- In order to streamline marketing, you should put tasks on centralized calendars so that employees can refer to them easily.
- View in read-only mode – Share your calendar in read-only mode so that your calendar doesn’t end up being edited by any other user.
- Integration with an array of platforms – It syncs seamlessly with MailChimp, Zapier, Google analytics, and so on.
- Chrome extension can be used to meet many different needs and can be found for a wide range of platforms.
- Publish content co-schedule – It allows content marketers to schedule content marketing efforts and share them across all platforms at the same time.
Cons:
- Despite the fact that the interface is not very intuitive, it does work
- To use the re-queueing feature you will have to make an additional payment
Pricing:
The pricing plans are divided into three levels, including:
- The cost of the Blog Calendar subscription is $19 for each user, per month (billed annually).
- In order to use the Marketing Calendars, you will have to pay a monthly fee of 39 dollars per user (billed annually).
- It is necessary for users of the Marketing Suite plan to get a custom quote from the company prior to signing up.
With all plans, you can try them for free for 14 days.
12. MavSocial
This list also includes MavSocial, which offers a full feature-rich social media management tool with a lot of impressive features. It has a strong visual appeal that makes it stand out from its competition. This tool comes with the usual features that you will find on websites like this, but it also allows you to manage and edit your content through its inbuilt digital library. Additionally, you can try the application for seven days at no cost.
The best use case for MavSocial would be for companies whose brands are based on a high level of visual aesthetics. With millions of free images offered by this platform, it is a perfect tool for SME’s who require seamless social media publishing.
Key Features:
- Find out what’s trending on social media and discover what’s working and what’s not by tracking social media.
- Content filtering – Easy method for quickly sorting through tons of data. Use filters like exclusion, retweets, and more.
- Check out your past engagement history by viewing all the messages and comments you have left.
- The monitoring and analysis section will help you keep track of what is happening in real-time on social media, as well as generate actionable insights for more guided marketing strategies.
- Content scheduling and automation – Use a flexible content scheduling and publishing automation tool that can handle a wide range of content types.
Cons:
- There are many issues with the interface, including poor user-friendliness and lack of intuitiveness
- It does not have a free basic version
- Due to the frequent changes of APIs, this package may contain bugs
Pricing:
There are four pricing plans available for MavSocial:
- The Advanced plan will cost you $16 per month (1 user, 10 profiles).
- In order to sign up for the Pro plan, you will have to pay $65 per month (3 users, 30 profiles).
- I would recommend the Business plan which costs $166 per month (5 profiles, 5 users).
- There is an Enterprise plan available for $416 per month (20 users, 70 profiles).
A free trial period of 14 days is available for all plans.
It is easy to automate most of your social media management strategy using tools that are specifically designed for this purpose. The marketing team will be able to schedule posts, coordinate marketing campaigns, and monitor all your social media accounts at once, so you can monitor everything.
It is one of the best approaches to accelerate your social media efforts and promote the content you produce if you make use of one of these SaaS tools.
The following tools will help you with the following tasks:
- Reaching out to your core audience is essential.
- Understanding your strengths and weaknesses through actionable insights.
- Reducing time and effort spent on workflows.
- The scheduling and distribution of your social media content through a variety of channels.
- Monitor and respond to social media comments and posts.
How do social media management tools work?
To manage social media at scale, one of the most important tools is social media management. Without social media management tools, brands (or influencers) have a lot to manage once they get multiple large social accounts.
Is there a good free tool for managing social media?
Later offers a free plan that’s feature-rich and can handle most of your social media posts for your brand and personal accounts.
How do media managers manage their media?
Buffer, Hootsuite, and Crowdfire are the most widely used social media management tools. Most of the social media marketing tools offered here are suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Conclusion
A major benefit of social media is its instant reach to more than half of the global population.
David Alston, an entrepreneur who has founded several tech and marketing companies, argued that social media was not a media. It’s important to listen, engage, and build relationships.
When selecting marketing software, take the time to think about what you hope to accomplish with it, and which features are most aligned with your business needs.
For example, Buffer could be ideal for social media influencers who would like to schedule more posts on Instagram.
To build your social media follower count, Crowdfire could work well for small businesses.
Consider all these factors while making your decision. You can test out any of the tools on this list free of charge before making a final decision.
Note: Apart from the social media management tools listed above, you may also need other tools to market your online business. As the marketing technology develops very fast in recent years, there is a lot of new software being launched every month. Using advanced software can help you save time and money in business operation. To help you decide what marketing software you should use, you can read the detailed reviews of the most innovative marketing software below: