We all know how vital it is to have a presence on social media, both for businesses and for people wishing to be recognized as influencers. But it can be challenging to keep an active social presence without it taking over a sizeable percentage of your time and attention.
Customers expect the firms they deal with to be active online now. Indeed it is often seen as an essential trust metric.
The various social networks have different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to make your posts at these peak times. Similarly, if you work with influencers, you would expect them to make posts at times of peak interest.
CoSchedule collated 23 studies on the best times to post on social media. They conclude that while each of the social networks has peak posting times, they vary between the networks. Some of them are most popular during business work hours, but others are most used outside typical working times. Indeed, they found that one of the best times to post on Instagram is at 2a.m.
It would be near impossible for a business, or indeed an influencer, to make all of their posts “live.” It would be a highly inefficient use of their time and could easily consume a social media manager’s life.
As a result, software providers have come up with solutions to make social media posting manageable. You can design and bulk schedule multiple posts at once. You can do this at a time that suits you, and then use your tool of choice to deliver your posts at the best times.
With a social media scheduling tool, you can operate your social account efficiently. They also give you time to create and push more content. Your audience will come to expect posts at a specific time, and your post scheduler makes it more likely that you can make that happen.
In this post, we have taken a look at a few of the better known social media posting/scheduling tools.
Top Social Media Posting & Scheduling Tools:
- 1. Loomly
- 2. AgoraPulse
- 3. Promo Republic
- 4. Hootsuite
- 5. Buffer
- 6. Sprout Social
- 7. TweetDeck
- 8. SocialOomph
- 9. MeetEdgar
- 10. CoSchedule
- 11. Tailwind
- 12. Everypost
- 13. Sendible
- 14. Crowdfire
- 15. Later
- Frequently Asked Questions
Loomly is a powerful social media 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).
AgoraPulse provides an affordable social media 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.
Promo Republic offers a full-scale social media management 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
Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts to publish at your preferred time in the future. Depending on the plan you choose, you can post to a wide range of social accounts. You can both create posts yourself for future (or indeed current) publishing, or you can select existing posts to post in the future.
Hootsuite supports a wide range of platforms, including personal accounts, business pages, and other types of social activity.
It does offer a free plan which limits you to scheduling 30 messages across three social profiles.
The $30 / month Professional plan is more usable, allowing you unlimited scheduling across 10 social profiles. At this level, you can set up bulk scheduling as well.
If you have particularly serious social media scheduling needs, there are also a $129 / month Professional plan and a $599 Business plan, each adding additional features.
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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.
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.
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7. 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.
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.
MeetEdgar offers most of the usual tools allowing you to schedule content across a range of platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They expect to add Instagram and Pinterest soon. Technically the tool is called Edgar – and the webpage/app is where you “meet” Edgar.
You can use it to queue as much as your content as possible with minimal involvement on your part. You can create multiple categories for different types of content, such as blog posts, promotional materials, quotes, and questions. You use the social media calendar to add post categories at set times you want them to go out.
It makes reposting evergreen content particularly easy. Edgar recycles your updates over time, so your posts don’t go to waste after their initial publishing. As Edgar automatically re-shares your content over time, it becomes visible to more people and different audiences, without you doing any extra work.
MeetEdgar offers a single clear pricing plan – $49 per month, with discounts to military and non-profit users.
10. CoSchedule
CoSchedule provides a way for you to schedule and organize your marketing. For a solopreneur or influencer, this may just involve coordinating your blog and social posts. If you are a business, you may have other marketing activities that need to be centrally organized. It even allows agencies to organize all of their projects for every client.
Social media scheduling, therefore, is just one part of CoSchedule’s offering.
Plans start at $60 per month. This gives you one integrated calendar, with blog and marketing projects, and all-in-one social promotion. You also receive email marketing integrations and business analytics. The more expensive Professional and Enterprise plans add additional features, mainly related to other types of marketing campaign activities.
You can efficiently manage and publish all your blog content and social promotion in one place. You can create a standalone social campaign or add a social campaign to any project. Your promotion can live in the same area as your planning, so your whole team is on the same wavelength.
You can easily schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
11. Tailwind
Tailwind’s focus on assisting you with your visual marketing. It describes itself as being “your end-to-end solution for winning on Pinterest and Instagram.” It is an all-in-one tool that allows you to discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyze results.
It features drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easy for marketers to upload, tag and publish their Pinterest and Instagram posts in bulk. Users can shuffle their post queue, to ensure that they keep variety in their posts.
You can also use Tailwind to automatically recommend the times for you to pin / post your content. Tailwind bases these suggestions on when your audience is most active on the relevant platform.
Tailwind offers three very different pricing plans. Bloggers and small businesses with fewer than 25 employees can use their Plus plan at $9.99 per account per month. Larger brands need to jump to the higher-specced Professional plan at $799.99 per month. There is also a plan for Enterprises.
12. Everypost
Everypost is perfect for sharing visual content across Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr. You can schedule posts to go out at times most convenient to you. You can publish to both personal profiles and company pages on iOS and Android devices as well as Everypost’s website platform.
You can cross-post your messages on all your social networks at once, without posting precisely the same message. This means you can use Everypost to optimize your content by customizing what you share across multiple social platforms. For example, you can add hashtags, photos, videos, or mentions to tailor a post for each social network
Everypost helps you to mix your post types, to ensure you post a balanced mix of industry news, trending topics, and promotional content. It provides you with multiple feeds to assist with content curation.
Everrypost has a range of plans, from a “Pay with a Tweet” Personal Plan, up to a $99.99 / month Team plan, depending on your requirements.
Sendible describes itself as “The #1 Social Media Management Tool for Agencies”. While it lists the $199 Medium Plan – “For Growing Agencies” as its most popular plan, it does cater for other organizations, with a $29 Micro plan for solopreneurs and a $99/month Small plan for small businesses, along with a $299/month Large plan, for large teams.
You can connect to just about any social network, as well as post directly to your WordPress, Medium, Tumblr or Blogger blog. You can use Sendible’s geo-targeting features to reach specific segments of your audience. Sendible helps you upload videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Sendible features an integrated dashboard and tools relating to publishing, collaboration, analytics, CRM, listening, and mobile.
In the area of publishing, it allows you to plan, schedule and publish posts, images, and videos to multiple social networks simultaneously using their powerful compose box. You can schedule social media posts, images and videos individually or in bulk as far in advance as you need. Sendible allows you to set your best-performing content on repeat to keep your social media profiles active. You visualize your content on a shared publishing calendar.
One useful feature is a tie-in with Canva to help you design better-performing visual content.
Crowdfire claims to be the first social media management app that supports posting to TikTok. You can use Crowdfire to post to virtually every major social network, as well as sharing material from a large selection of blogging platforms, online shops, and video sites, including YouTube and Twitch.
It puts a lot of emphasis on content curation. You tell Crowdfire the topics that interest you, and it suggests a wide range of articles, images, posts (yours, including your YouTube videos), and RSS feeds. You can easily share these or help Crowdfire’s AI by telling it you aren’t interested in a particular content source.
Crowdfire keeps a queue of content and schedules your posts to go out at the optimal times for your audience. You can set these times yourself if you prefer, however. Crowdfire gives you the option to set your best times manually, network by network, and day by day. You have a Queue Meter that indicates the number of posts you have yet to make for the next week.
Crowdfire offers four plans, ranging from a limited free plan (effectively for testing Corwdfire’s capabilities, through to the $99.99/month VIP plan that showcases all Crowdfire offers.
Although social sharing is at the heart of Crowdfire, the higher plans also offer competitor analysis, Mentions (social listening), and more advanced analytics that allow you to build custom reports, focusing on your preferred metrics.
Later lets you post to a variety of social networks, but its main emphasis is on Instagram. Unlike many social media posting and scheduling tools, you begin a post in Later with an image, rather than its text. You upload the image to Later and then create the accompanying caption.
It can initially be challenging to set up Later so that it posts directly to Instagram (thanks to Instagram’s revamped API). Still, once you have changed your Instagram account to either a Business or Creator account, the process becomes easy.
At the heart of Later you have a Media Library. You begin each post by uploading images to your Media Library, and they remain available for future posts. 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 in many ways.
You can also upload and share videos if you have one of Later’s paid plans. Later also helps you to upload and create Stories.
With Later’s Quick Schedule, you can drag and drop posts into time slots in your schedule. This is Later’s equivalent of a queue. Later populates your next available time slot with your media content.
If you have one of Later’s business plans, you have access to Conversations. Conversations allow you to manage your Instagram comments directly inside Later.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best social media scheduling tools?
It would be near impossible for businesses or influencers to make all of their posts “live.” It would be a highly inefficient use of their time and severely disrupt their lives. We have looked at 15 of the best social media scheduling tools that help solve this problem in this post:
Loomly
AgoraPulse
Promo Republic
Hootsuite
Buffer
Sprout Social
TweetDeck
SocialOomph
MeetEdgar
CoSchedule
Tailwind
Everypost
Sendible
Crowdfire
Later
What is the best free social media management tool?
While there are many high-quality social media scheduling tools, most come at a cost. Some offer a free version with limited capabilities, however, that may be suitable for small organizations. These include:
Hootsuite
Buffer
TweetDeck (this one only has a free version)
Socialoomph
Everypost (pay with a tweet)
Crowdfire
Later
Quite a few of the other tools examined in this post offer free trials.
What social media tools are the most useful for business?
All the social media tools we have covered in this post would be useful for business. They all make the process of managing your social media accounts more manageable. The various social networks have different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to make posts at these peak times. Using these tools, you can design and bulk schedule multiple posts at once at the optimal times.
What should I look for in a social media management tool?
Social media management tools help simplify the process of creating and scheduling posts. Indeed, they are often the only way you can schedule social posts in advance. We have looked at 15 such tools in this post, and they vary significantly in their capabilities. Some limit themselves to the core post creation and scheduling capabilities. Others add to this with features such as social media monitoring and listening, analytics and reporting, engagement with combined inboxes, alerts, and other capabilities.
Is Hootsuite or Buffer better?
Both Hootsuite and Buffer have strengths as social media marketing tools. However, they take different approaches. The core of Hootsuite is Streams, columns of information. A Stream could be a series of posts on one social network. With Buffer, whenever you find an item you want to share, you add it to your “buffer,” and the software publishes it on your behalf at an agreed time. Think of Buffer as being one big queue, where you add posts, which Buffer “uses” at agreed times.
Hoe much is Buffer per month?
Buffer’s main product is Buffer Publish. They offer a series of plans, that differ by
The number of social accounts you’re looking to schedule content to
The number of users who will need access to the tool
The number of posts you’re looking to schedule
Whether or not you require features limited to higher-tier plans
The base monthly price for each plan is:
Free – $0
Pro – $15
Premium – $65
Small Business – $99
Medium Business – $199
Large Business – $399