Social media has become the de facto stage for all marketing-related activities, right from creating awareness to generating ROI. Since more than half the population of the world is on these platforms, the competition for reaching the target audience it tough.
Social media scheduling tools play an instrumental role in marketers securing a concrete presence on social media using automation.
If you take a peek into the skyrocketing social media statistics, you will notice the unprecedented popularity of these social media scheduling tools. This is because they help maintain a consistent rhythm for social postings on all social channels.
With a social media scheduler, you can align and schedule social media posts to multiple platforms at different times to get the maximum reach.
This blog will walk you through some of the social media scheduling tools. We have conducted thorough research on them. We use them and evaluate every aspect that would prove to be relevant for the actual target users so that we can present comprehensive results.
Now, without any further ado, let’s begin!
How we analyze and select Social Media Scheduling Tools
We have compiled the following list of top-notch social media scheduling tools through extensive research and evaluation. Our process involved actively weighing factors like user experience, G2 ratings and reviews, cost, and scalability. We assessed the proficiency of these tools in automation, crafting content, visualization, analytics, and teamwork to rank them. We have dedicated immense effort to curating this list, with the aim of equipping marketers with insightful data for choosing the right tools that will help grow their businesses.
With so many social media platforms on the market, it’s hard to find one that suits the needs of small businesses—but luckily for you, SocialBee has what it takes.
It has segregated its pricing plans to accommodate the needs of small businesses and agencies. With an intuitive interface, and a set of impressive features, SocialBee can work wonders for both your content strategy and your social media workflow.
Pros
- Sets a posting schedule for social media publishing and gives a real-time preview of your upcoming posts.
- Organizes your posts into different categories, customizes them for each social media platform and then automatically posts them on all your socials at once.
- You can use Canva integration inside SocialBee’s post editor to create outstanding visuals.
Douglass Hatcher
At first, I wasn’t sure how legit SocialBee was, but I got to see that they have great analytics, and posts are easy to schedule. So, if you want to post evergreen content and have great analytics, try SocialBee!
Cons
- The app is only web-based and is not suited for enterprises.
- The AI image creator does not function properly
Nicole E.
The learning curve is a bit high. It’s not the most intuitive platform, and I think there are still features that I’m not using because I either don’t understand them or don’t have the patience to figure them out.
Hootsuite is a planner tool mainly used by enterprise-level agencies. It is a comparatively complex tool to use. Hootsuite has been around in the social media marketing industry for a very long time, with over 16 million users worldwide.
It supports scheduling social media posts on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. But there’s a major drawback.
Hootsuite plans are extremely pricey and small businesses can’t afford this tool. Hence, we recommend checking out other user-friendly Hootsuite alternatives.
Pros
- Hootsuite’s streams feature allows you to engage with your audience and monitor your social accounts right from the dashboard.
- The tool provides account-specific social media analytics to track results by time frame and create customized reports based on your requirements.
- Hootsuite has more than 150 app integrations available in their app directory. You can browse and select apps for efficient collaboration.
Matt R.
It puts everything together on a dashboard, and it makes things way easier to view. I can see messages, comments, and responses.
Cons
- This social media scheduling tool is way overpriced.
- Users are required to pay additional charges to access advanced features such as social media account analytics, customizable reports, URL shorteners other than owl.ly.
- Customer support is not actively available all the time.
Jason G.
I can’t be the only one who is frustrated by their UI. Everything about the user experience is frustrating. Everything feels glitchy. It’s as if they have never actually used the product they built.
Buffer is yet another publishing app for smaller businesses and solo marketers. Buffer is loved by its user community. It works well with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Another great feature of Buffer is its WordPress and Chrome integrations. Want to schedule social media posts via your smartphone? No worries, Buffer also supports iOs and Android.
Pros
- Buffer has a clean user interface, which helps users to navigate within the platform easily.
- This social posting tool lets you customize your posts for every social platform with their tailored posts feature.
- Customer support instantly replies if you face any issues.
Caroline K.
The interface is easy to use. You can pick up how to navigate everything very quickly. We connected to several social media channels and can schedule and post with relative ease. Their customer service has always been friendly and prompt with responses.
Cons
- Buffer doesn’t have an essential feature, such as a Content Curation feature for finding fresh and trending content.
- Buffer has its own products like Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze, where you have to pay extra to manage your social conversations and social media analytics, on top of Buffer Publish.
Jorge L.
Buffer is missing some crucial collaboration features offered by other software that makes it hard to use for working as a team. And the pricing is just too high for the present standard on social media pricing applications. If you have the money, it is not a problem.
Sendible is used for managing social media publishing for multiple clients and achieving the desired results. It is built for catering to agencies’ needs in mind.
Sendible supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Youtube, and Pinterest, along with other blogging platforms like WordPress, Medium, and Tumblr.
This social media scheduling tool is also great for monitoring campaign performances. Features like sentiment analysis and automation provide an edge to Sendible too.
Pros
- Sendible users find content-management functionalities like the content library, content calendar, and visual content editor are very useful to centralize their social media management workflow.
- You can create posts of multiple types with images, videos, and carousels speeds up the process of content creation and lets them keep their audience engaged with diverse content.
- Sendibles allows users to boost and repost their previous posts as well as tag profiles to them.
Elena P.
Sendible creates a system of accountability and approvals for posts before they schedule.
Cons
- Live posting has failed in several instances, which in turn disrupted posting schedules.
- The pricing and structure of their plans are based on the number of services you use. For, e.g., streaming and publishing to your Facebook page are 2 different services.
Verified Sendible User<
The reporting template is terrible and annoying. The post scheduler got worse since it doesn’t reformat images, and the services page is confusing to share with team members.
Agorapulse is a CRM tool that helps agencies and teams work collaboratively. One can engage, listen, collaborate and measure their social media efforts with Agorapulse.
It supports social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Instagram. This social media scheduling tool also has bulk scheduling, unified inbox, and RSS feed features.
Pros
- Agorapulse helps you understand your audience better with their built-in CRM feature.
- The tool allows you to label your content for easy retrievals and analysis.
Verified Agorapulse User
Our team enjoys the Inboxing feature, which gathers all notifications and messages into one inbox.
Cons
- There are issues related to the display and formatting of images/videos.
- There are some limitations in the popular bulk scheduling feature.
- The lack of customization options for the content to be a hindrance in the scheduling process.
- Agorapulse’s user interface is not instinctive. They need a serious makeover for users to navigate easily within the tool.
Verified Agorapulse User
Not a fan of the dashboard UX, also tech support usually takes awhile due to the time difference.
Sprout Social is a social media sharing tool quite similar to Hootsuite. It’s more of a corporate tool to access features like smart inbox, in-depth social media analytics, and customized reporting. Sprout Social supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Sprout Social can actually improve your work quality by streamlining your efforts in the right direction. Analytics can be pretty valuable to evaluate your overall social media performance.
Pros
- Sprout Social’s bot builder helps you set up, operate, and manage chatbots within Facebook Messenger.
- This social media scheduling tool can group your team members for better collaboration.
- Sprout Social lets you integrate tools like Zendesk, Hubspot, and UserVoice for support teams to manage user issues without leaving the dashboard.
Eileen Moran C.
The listening stream can be customized so that you can choose whatever profiles/hashtags you want to see at that time. You can reply, assign posts, forward posts, retweet, retweet with comments, all from the news stream.
Cons
- Sprout Social can be highly expensive social media post scheduler with teams, as it charges for every team member/user you invite.
- For the price it is offered, Sprout Social doesn’t provide integration with visual platforms like Youtube.
- Though the inbox is intuitive, they don’t have a unified inbox. You have to toggle between different social account streams individually.
Verified Sprout Social User
First, let’s get it out of the way. SproutSocial is expensive. It is not at all affordable for most small or medium-sized businesses.
CoSchedule is mainly focused on publishing and known for its content calendar feature. With CoSchedule, you can manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr social profiles.
CoSchedule integrates with blogging tools like WordPress and Hubspot, which helps you organize and publish your blogs right from your Coschedule account. You can also reshare your best-performing posts with a re-queue feature.
But the basic plan doesn’t cover multiple client accounts. You will need a customizable Marketing Suite plan which might be pricey.
Pros
- If you miss out on the social media posting schedule, then it automatically fills in the gap with your top-performing posts.
- CoSchedule has a Kanban Project dashboard, where you can see what your team is working on and their progress at each stage. You can apply custom statuses to workflows based on the way your team works.
Daniella G.
Having the ability to set templates for Social sharing is incredible. It means I can continue to promote my content for weeks after it has been published, and the Requeue feature means it continues to get exposure for as long as I need it.
Cons
- Very basic features in a free plan.
- CoSchedule is very pricey compared to any other scheduling tool in the market, even though it doesn’t have any enterprise-level features like social listening and monitoring.
- CoSchedule doesn’t offer many integrations and collaborations with other tools, which makes it less efficient while working along with the team and streamlining processes.
- The ReQueue feature is great, but it comes with limitations. It only allows you to queue your posts twice.
Verified CoSchedule User
CoSchedule is expensive, has confusing tiers, and has lots of bubbly features that aren’t that helpful. Any smart content marketer isn’t going to put their social media scheduling tool on random autopilot and organize content by “color.” It is simply not a very useful tool after about a week.
Zoho Social is built keeping in mind the needs of a growing business. It helps you work with team members, monitor brand mentions, and manage social conversations. Zoho Social lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.
This social media posting tool has some amazing feature sets like social listening and SmartQ predictions. Zoho Social suggests the best time to share your posts for more engagement based on your profile analytics.
Pros
- Zoho Social offers the best time slots to schedule social media posts with its SmartQ feature (when your audience is most active).
- It has its CRM integrations, where you can engage with prospects and generate potential leads from social media.
- You can create automated reports to deliver to your clients in the format and frequency you choose. You can also include team members in the delivery list and add a personalized message.
Daniella G.
I like Zoho software for many reasons. The most important one for me was CRM and social network collaboration. It has easy-to-use tools.
Cons
- The analytics and reporting feature is not very impressive. They don’t have a combined analytics feature.
- RSS Feed integration is missing in Zoho Social, whereas all other social media planning tools have this feature.
- Zoho Social is pretty expensive for the features and UI it offers.
Verified Zoho Social User
Reporting is where I’d love to see the most improvement – there is no way to look at combined analytics or get accurate engagement numbers.
eClincher is a great tool that supports social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Business Profile, and YouTube. It’s an agency-focused tool that lets you manage your social media campaigns with reporting and analysis functionalities and a convenient unified social inbox.
However this social media scheduling tool does not offer any collaboration feature. It has a learning curve too. Users need to watch a couple of tutorials to understand its functionality.
Pros
- eClincher can find top influencers based on keyword searches and their top content suggestions.
- It has a centralized inbox for monitoring, listening, and viewing competitor activity updates.
- eClincher has an inbuilt media library that lets you upload images and videos to your own dedicated cloud storage.
Harold G.
An important winning point of eClincher is its only control panel, where I can monitor the messages of the social networks that I manage and easily participate with my audience.
Cons
- The user interface of eClincher doesn’t win any awards. It’s not very user-friendly, and it feels dull and outdated. The same goes for their mobile app.
- The unified inbox is a great feature, but it becomes clumsy when using multiple social media accounts.
- eClincher can get quite expensive if you are an SMB or a social media professional.
Angela B.
The price is pretty steep for a small business. The analytics options really are minimal. Quite honestly, it’s not much to go on — the keyword research kind of sucks.
MeetEdgar is a different posting solution than other schedulers. It assists you in uniquely scheduling social media posts with its feature of evergreen posting that doesn’t leave your queue empty.
Once you schedule your post on this social media planner, it saves the post in the library to reuse later. MeetEdgar supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It has a simple UI powered with AI integrations for the successful execution of your social media strategy.
Pros
- MeetEdgar has a posting queue that never leaves your content trail empty. It recycles your evergreen posts forever.
- It has a category-based social media posting schedule. You can group your content into different categories and schedule them accordingly.
Andrea C.
Edgar is an evergreen social media content planning tool. You will be able to keep a library of your best content, put them into separate categories, and assign time slots for them to be automatically reshared in the future.
Cons
- Though you can plan social media posts based on categories, you can’t shuffle your posts in the queue to reschedule them for later time slots.
- You cannot add team members. There’s no social inbox and in-depth social analytics.
Shauna W.
Edgar now has no reporting capabilities.
SmarterQueue is a different solution than other schedulers. This social media planning tool recycles your content, so your queue is never empty. SmarterQueue supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can categorize your content for quick access. This social posting tool suggests a custom schedule based on your profile metrics too.
Pros
- Easy to assign time-slots to categories. It also recycles evergreen posts automatically.
- You can create variations of your posts for re-queueing so that you don’t have to make unique posts always.
Kristi Porter
The two features I love most are the ability to re-queue previous posts and customer service.
Cons
- SmarterQueue is highly-priced for the features it offers. You can manage only 25 social accounts at a price of $79.99/month for just one user.
- It has no collaboration feature where you can add team members and manage multiple client accounts. It doesn’t offer in-depth reports.
- It doesn’t have a social inbox where you can manage your social conversations.
- Their user interface is neither intuitive nor user-friendly.
Violeta P.
I don’t love how the app looks. It isn’t as pretty or clean looking.
StatusBrew is one of the best post schedulers. It has got a social inbox, analytics, and listening features. There are even advanced team collaboration features with diversified permission capabilities.
It supports social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube. You can even use Statusbrew for ad campaign moderation on Facebook and Instagram. It also offers security features in its enterprise plans.
Pros
- StatusBrew has decent analytics and reporting features.
- You can target newer audiences based on social listening capabilities.
Greg J.
Statusbrew lets us work intelligently on social media. This social media scheduling tool enables us to connect effectively with our audience and makes it more approachable.
Cons
- The UI can be overwhelming, and users need time to understand its features.
- This social media tool has a high starting price and less platform integration.
Verified StatusBrew User
They should improve the UI of the tool for better user engagement. Moreover, they should give a tour guide for beginners who are going to use this tool for the first time.
Later is a popular content planner tool, jam-packed with features. You can use Later to schedule posts on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it is most suitable for Instagram posting.
This social media content planning tool offers features like hashtags and keywords for content research. You can visually plan your content calendar and store each media in the asset library. You can add notes, labels, and stars to every media for quick filtering.
You can also use this library for storing evergreen content and schedule it frequently in a stipulated time.
Pros
- Later has Linkin.bio feature that directs website traffic from Instagram.
- You can generate hashtags and tags while scheduling social media posts.
Leah I.
What I like best about Later is the ease of scheduling posts, rearranging, and timing items for the feed and stories. I especially appreciate the Preview feature, which allows you to view what your Instagram profile grid will look like with your scheduled posts.
Cons
- Bulk upload is missing, which is an essential requirement of multiple businesses.
- It doesn’t let you post on social media without images.
Joy S.
It is not so intuitive, although, with practice, better handling of the platform is achieved. It does not allow you to save some publications as drafts, which can be frustrating to lose published information due to system errors or web problems.
One of the finest management tools is NapoleanCat. You can manage popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google BusinessProfile, Twitter, and YouTube.
Its main features include managing several social media profiles, automating customer support, assessing marketing results, keeping track of competitors’ activities, and team collaboration.
You just pay for what you use with NapoleonCat. They provide customized add-ons like social tracking, campaign optimization, analytics, and reporting.
Pros
- Its social inbox feature lets you manage conversations on multiple platforms from a single dashboard.
- All plans are highly customizable.
Agnieszka K.
Two absolute favorites: social inbox and automated moderation. The former saves us so much time, and we can stay in control of what’s happening in all our profiles without being all over the place – everything is in one app, finally. And the latter – it’s great for answering messages even when your team is offline and deleting all that spam.
Cons
- Connection with social media platforms, especially Facebook pages, is quite patchy.
- The tool is slow and takes a lot of time to load at times.
Kat B.
I believe the interface could have been made easier to navigate/user-friendly. I find that, at times, it was difficult to find a specific comment we wanted to get to.
Post Planner is one of the solutions for managing and scheduling content on social media. It supports the top 5 platforms, which include Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Fill in your content calendar with branded posts and schedule them to the desired time slot. You can even filter popular posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit if you dig in useful content for your audience to maintain an impactful social media presence.
This social media scheduler even lets you monitor your brand mentions, so you don’t miss out on any opportunity for meaningful interaction with your audience.
Pros
- The content discovery feature is its highlight.
- Multiple value-adding integrations are available.
- Provision to tailor content for specific platforms.
Bob S.
I love the ease of use and the fact that I can post to all my social media sites with just a few clicks. They have a great search tool to find relevant content and even allow me to import my blog posts straight from my site. I also love the repeat post and recycle features.
Cons
- It supports just 5 platforms.
- Customer support isn’t prompt.
Michael H.
Frequent outages, constant need to refresh share tokens to enable publishing, its “randomizer” is not random at all.
Planable is a social media post planner designed around one simple principle: ridding marketers of tedious tasks and allowing them to create content.
One of Planable’s most powerful features is the multi-level approval process built to ensure seamless collaboration for marketing teams. With real-time collaboration and four types of approval workflows (none, optional, required, and multi-level), Planable is suitable for teams of all sizes. Planable is the perfect place to make your social media workflow foolproof.
Planable is integrated with Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Business Profile, YouTube, and TikTok.
Pros
- Planable has multiple views to visualize content as you create it: feed, calendar, list, and grid view.
- Leave comments (tag your teammates, attach files, and leave reactions) and replies next to the post that needs feedback.
- The ability to preview content exactly as it would appear on social media feeds before publishing.
Bob S.
I have been using Planable for my Agency ever since. My Clients totally love it, and it is so easy for my team to schedule posts. Very convenient and makes life easier for all of us! I don’t think we can do Social Media Management without Planable, as it is one of the best social media management tools!
Cons
- As a free social media scheduling tool, it can only allow 50 posts.
- No social listening features are available.
- It doesn’t include analytics and reporting.
Verified User
Features are very limited; you can only schedule and approve or comment. I would like analytics, space to chat with my client, etc.
Conclusion
There are numerous types of social media scheduling tools available, but growing businesses can’t afford all of them. Agencies, in particular, need advanced features for social media publishing but are on a tight budget.
Hence, pocket-friendly tools like SocialPilot exist to meet the needs to these businesses. The tool has enterprise-level advanced scheduling and publishing capabilities while being affordable. You can collaboratively manage your social media marketing for all platforms within a single dashboard. Sign up for a free trial to set your social media publishing on auto-pilot.
Frequently Asked Questions
About the Author
SocialPilot
$30
For 10 Social Media Profiles
SocialPilot is a social media scheduling tool that lets you post on numerous social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram (Direct Publishing), YouTube, Google Business Profile, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
Every feature of SocialPilot is designed to simplify creating social media schedules to optimize marketing efforts. This social media post scheduler also provides reliable support to its users via email, chat, phone, and social.
Features
What Do SocialPilot Users Say?
Tal T.
What can you NOT DO with SocialPilot? In all honesty, I don’t have any clue. The ultimate friendly all-in-one social media scheduler, with great value. I highly recommend any marketer out there to check it out and give it a chance to prove its massive powers.