Social media marketing is a complex process in itself. Every step a brand takes must be meticulously planned. Implementing these many social media marketing techniques on a large scale requires a lot of time, effort, and resources.
As a result, social media teams and agencies are turning to smarter solutions and adopting the best social media marketing tools to automate tedious tasks.
Here’s a comprehensive list of the 20+ best social media marketing tools to help you decide which suits your needs. We have segregated them under specific marketing activities for easy reference so you know what to use and when.
How we analyze and select Social Media Tools:
Our process of curating a list of relevant tools involves thorough research and evaluation. Factors considered include platform compatibility, automation, content creation, visualization, analytics, collaboration, pricing, scalability, and user experience. Curated by seasoned professionals, these tools empower marketers with valuable insights to make informed decisions and scale their businesses.
Let’s get started!
Social Media Marketing Tools for Scheduling
Social media schedulers help marketers and brands organize, automate, and plan the posting of their content across different social media platforms.
Social media scheduling tools allow users to manage their campaigns, staying consistent and avoiding the pain of manual posting in real-time.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Tool for Scheduling
- Scheduling social media posts with a tool can free up valuable time for other tasks, such as strategy development and content creation.
- Gives you time to plan and execute a comprehensive social media strategy to align with marketing goals and campaigns.
- Keep your social media feed active by regularly posting, even when you are not online. This will allow you to reach your audience.
- Manage your social media channels all from one dashboard to share a cohesive brand message.
- With the time you have, you can improve the quality of your posts and keep up with the trending content.
Here are some top social media marketing tools for scheduling:
SocialPilot is one of the best social media marketing tools, catering to more than 13000 users worldwide. It allows you to effortlessly automate and manage your social media posts on various platforms all in one place. SocialPilot assists you in creating, planning, scheduling, and publishing your posts using advanced features.
It lets you schedule up to 500 posts at once using bulk scheduling. And with SocialPilot’s collaborative features, you can seamlessly foster teamwork and client engagement.
You can organize your social media strategy with a tool like SocialPilot that offers a clear overview of your posting schedule and analytics for all major social media platforms.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
Scheduling and Performance
SocialPilot is the suite where efficiency meets effectiveness to streamline operations and enhance results.
Collaboration
Team Up and Create Campaigns Together
Engagement
Connect, Captivate, & Charm Your Audience Daily
Analytics
Dive Deep into the Data and Discover the Depth of Analysis
Multi-Platform Publishing
Post on All Channels Seamlessly & Simply
By effectively resonating planning with scheduling, we help you derive high performance and positive results.
Whether you are planning your posts or looking for a way to assign social media tasks, below are some more key features that will help you fully benefit from SocialPilot.
Other Key Features:
- Bulk Scheduling: Queue up your posts in a snap. With bulk scheduling, you can schedule up to 500 posts at once, keeping your feed lively without the daily grind.
- Social Media Calendar: Drag, drop, and dominate your posting plan with SocialPilot’s social media calendar, making scheduling and visualization a piece of cake.
- AI Assistant: Let SocialPilot’s smart AI assistant generate post ideas for you so you are never stuck in the content loop.
- White Label: Customize reports, URLs, email addresses, and dashboards with SocialPilot integrated White Label features for personal branding.
- Content Library: Save content ideas and hashtags in the Content Library for rainy days to ensure you never run out of inspiration and your feed is never dull.
- Advanced Reports: Generate detailed downloadable White Label Reports from the SocialPilot dashboard and get comprehensive insights in a polished and presentable format.
SocialPilot Pricing
SocialPilot offers a 14-day free trial and access to all premium features (no credit card required & cancel any time). Choose a plan that fits your needs.
| Agency+ | Agency | Small Team | Professional |
$170.00/mo$200
Billed annually (Save 15%)
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$85.00/mo$100
Billed annually (Save 15%)
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$42.50/mo$50
Billed annually (Save 15%)
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$25.50/mo$30
Billed annually (Save 15%)
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Streamline Social Media Management
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What People Say About SocialPilot
Brookelyn W
I looked for a while to find the perfect tool for my social media marketing agency. Everything was too expensive, didn’t have exactly the tools I needed, or just didn’t work right. SocialPilot has been the best tool I’ve found! It has everything I could need! Scheduling, analytics, ease of use, affordable, and more! Highly suggest for anyone looking to run their social media channels!
Elaine L
We have used SocialPilot since their early days, and grown along with them. We appreciate the ability to get help farily quickly, add our customers and all our accounts easily, and get great analytics too!
Best for:
Businesses, Mid-stage startup teams, and Solopreneurs.
About Buffer
Buffer is a tool for all aspects of managing one’s social media presence. Whether it’s an individual marketer, small agencies, growing start-ups, or well-established enterprises, Buffer caters to the whole lot.
You will need a separate subscription to enjoy all Buffer features, such as Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze, which are usually offered without any extra charges by Buffer alternatives.
Best for:
Small Businesses, Agencies, and Enterprises
About Planable
Planable features are tailored for small social media teams. You can move all your communication from email threads to this platform by leveraging features like tagging and real-time content feedback.
This social media tool for marketing also offers localized workspaces with amazing team collaboration services. You can even access most edit history and restore older versions.
Best for:
Freelancers, agencies, non-profit organizations, startups, individuals & influencers
About Loomly
Loomly started as a simple social media calendar focused on content discovery, organization, and management.
Now, they’ve added scheduling and publishing capabilities through an integration with Buffer. It also gives you post ideas for upcoming holidays, the latest trends, and best practices, which makes it one of the best tools for social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Analytics
Social media analytics tools are software that collects, analyzes, and interprets interactions on various social media platforms. These tools gather data from social channels and segregate it for brands and businesses to see.
Social media marketing tools for analytics can help understand content performance on metrics such as user behaviors, trends, sentiments, demographics, growth, interaction, etc.
Any marketer can benefit from these data-driven analytics to enhance their future goals and strategy.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Tool for Analytics
- Users can track down the performance of the recent campaign and understand which effort got them the best outcome.
- Using social media analytics tools can ensure you get accurate data for your content marketing to make the best decision.
- Understanding analytics helps in crisis management, which will protect your brand from negative promotion and take quick action.
- It helps you know more about what and how your competitors are performing.
- These tools provide in-depth insights into the audience and their interest.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
About SocialPilot
SocialPilot’s social media analytics helps you view analytics for major social media channels. SocialPilot’s in-depth and comprehensive analytics reports give you an overview of all essential metrics such as engagement, top fans, best times to post, popular hashtags, and more.
To create a consistent brand experience, SocialPilot enables you to add your organization’s name and logo to the reports. You can either export the PDF and Excel reports or mail them to your team and clients using the tool itself.
Best for:
Big marketing agencies, brands, and enterprises.
About Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an advanced analytics tool that helps you better understand your customers and audience’s minds with AI-powered insights, social listening, sentiment analysis, and reporting capabilities. This tool is apt for you if you are an agency dealing with big brands and handling all their marketing processes.
Brandwatch also helps you find micro-influencers in your niche, create visual data reports, and find relevant data with many filters. Brandwatch’s target audience comprises agencies and enterprises. Hence, for small to medium brands, Brandwatch pricing may seem steep.
Best for:
Marketing agencies and big brands.
About Mention
Mention works as a community management tool by monitoring keywords, analyzing competitors’ strategies, and finding relevant influencers. One of the most popular features of Mention is its ‘alerts’ system. When you set to track a keyword, you get notified about its mentions in real time.
You can get summaries of your analytics delivered to your inbox every day. You have instant access to all your brand mentions on the web, along with the ability to filter analytics to focus on specific metrics.
Best for:
Agencies, SMBs, and Enterprises.
About Rebrandly
Rebrandly is a social media marketing tools for small businesses known for its custom URL shortener that lets you shorten, brand, and track every link you create and share with the detailed analytics feature.
Its more advanced features include link retargeting that enables you to track anyone who clicks on your links. It gives you the power to personalize your audience’s journey based on their surfing behavior.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Management
Social media marketing tools for businesses and social media managers will help them streamline various aspects of social media, including management. They support them in content creation, scheduling, monitoring analytics, and audience engagement.
A good social media management tool is like a package that ensures your strategy is on track and delivers results.
Benefits of social media marketing tools for management:
- AI social media marketing tools help in content creation with different integrated features such as AI assistants.
- Let’s schedule numerous posts on different platforms all at once for your preferred time.
- It provides insights and analytics on content performance, giving you the liberty to make future decisions.
- With automated scheduling and publishing abilities, productivity also improves.
- Give you an opportunity to collaborate with your team and clients for approval and effective workflow.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
About SocialPilot
If you are looking for a social media marketing management tool, you need one that manages all the aspects of the social media process. SocialPilot is the best social media marketing tool for management, and it can promise all that. It has intuitive automated features such as scheduling, social inbox, team collaboration, analytics, AI assistant, and much more.
One of the most loved and cost-effective tools, SocialPilot, makes social media processes easy for 13,000+ users and has been rated 4.5 on G2. With SocialPilot, you get a hub of streamlined content management across multiple social platforms from a single dashboard.
Best for:
Individual, small businesses, and marketing agencies
About ContentStudio
ContentStudio is one of the top social media marketing tools for management, designed to streamline your workflow. It can plan, schedule, and publish your content on various social platforms.
ContentStudio is also facilitated with features such as AI Assistant and analytics to be a partner with you in content management for social media publishing.
Best for:
Creators, freelancers, agencies, social media managers, and small businesses.
About Later
Later, is a social media management tool best for curation, scheduling, and analyzing content across various social media platforms. With its comprehensive suite of features, you can plan months of content later in just a few hours.
One reason Later is at the bottom of our management tools list is its pricing. $80/month is expensive for most agencies and SMBs, and finding a tool with better features at lower prices is also very easy.
Best for:
Mid and large businesses and enterprises
About Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media marketing tool for management that is suitable for enterprises and big brands. It has features such as scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analytics, and reporting from a unified dashboard that can help marketers manage workflow better.
However, Sprout Social’s pricing plans are on the higher side compared to other tools. This is why Sprout Social is recommended for enterprises more than marketing agencies and SMBs.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Automation
Social media automation tools are designed to help you manage social media activities. They are made to automate and streamline the aspects of a social media manager’s workflow.
Using automated tools can help you automate repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on high-quality content production and strategy-making. These tools set a much higher standard of saving time for every marketer who uses to share content manually.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Tools for Automation:
- Saves time when you schedule your posts in advance.
- Helps remain consistent even when you are not working.
- Enhance engagement with the audiences by promptly replying to comments and DMs.
- Higher online reach with effective keyword and hashtag usage in social media content.
- With features like team collaboration and approval on the go, marketers can easily manage their social media schedule.
Social media marketing tools for automation take up the responsibility and free up your hand for more valuable aspects of social media management. Below, you will find some of the best social media tools you can choose from if you are looking for features like automation.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
About SocialPilot
SocialPilot is the best social media automation tool, saving you from manual efforts. It has features like bulk scheduling, schedulable custom analytics reports, social media calendar planning, team collaboration, an AI assistant for idea generation, and many more to boost your visibility.
These features are designed to automate your small business, marketing agencies, or brand on all social media channels. SocialPilot generates higher engagement for your business with smart social inbox features and efficient management to foster better community building.
Best for:
Individual, small businesses, and marketing agencies
About ContentStudio
ContentStudio is a social media automation tool for agencies, brands, and marketers. It helps them streamline their social media presence with automation features like scheduling, publishing, planning, AI assistant, etc.
It provides users with analytics to help them understand their performance, as well as a unified dashboard for comments and DMs. ContentStudio is a tool you can use if you are looking for ways to cut down your labor that can be automated for social media presence.
Best for:
Businesses, Agencies, and Enterprises.
About Hootsuite
Adopted by thousands of users, Hootsuite is one of the top social media marketing tools for automation. It offers users the ability to plan, schedule, and automate their social media presence for the highest reach. Hootsuite lets you automate your content on all major social media platforms, giving you a wide opportunity to expand your audience.
With Hootsuite, you can automate your posting and engagement with features like social listening. It also has several app integrations to support you as you manage your social accounts and online content.
Best for:
Marketing agencies, individuals, and small businesses.
About CoSchedule
Initially, CoSchedule was designed for solopreneurs and marketing agencies to help them stay efficient with their social media games. However, in recent times, this tool is also widely used as a social media marketing tool for automation.
CoSchedule works well as a real-time content planner, helping users schedule content on major social media platforms. It also has an AI assistant, Mia, who helps generate content ideas and captions for social media posts.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Calendar
Social media calendar tools allow you to view your entire social media schedule in a single interface. Managing multiple brands, accounts, and platforms for a marketing agency is never possible without a clear, concise, and easy-to-use social media calendar.
Before you move forward with picking your social media marketing tool for the calendar, you must be sure that it provides you the ability to reschedule posts then and there, helps you visualize your posting calendar in one place, and keeps you well-prepared with a content plan.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing Tools for Calendar:
- Keep your content calendar well organized for several weeks to come.
- Help you remain consistent with your posting schedule so your engagement remains at the top.
- Enable long-term content planning for several social accounts and channels in one place.
- A calendar is a perfect way to automate your social media scheduling and posting and save time for other marketing efforts.
- It allows you to stay flexible with the posting schedule and adjust and reschedule the content in response to trends and analytics.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
About SocialPilot
SocialPilot is the best social media calendar tool, giving you a clear understanding of several months of content all in one place. With its user-friendly interface, minimum learning curve, and accurate calendar, SocialPilot has become a favorite social media marketing tool for many marketers.
You can visualize, plan, schedule, and adjust content with just a drag and drop on SocialPilot’s intuitive Calendar. SocialPilot tool is every brand’s go-to software for its accuracy and advanced scheduling features. It lets you filter posts wisely on a clutter-free dashboard for a better understanding of the schedule.
Best for:
Freelancers, agencies, non-profit organizations, startups, individuals & influencers
About Loomly
Loomly is a social media marketing tool initially designed for calendar abilities. Popularly known as a brand management tool, It is also used by several small and big companies.
With Loomly, you can plan, schedule, and publish content on several social channels. It provides you and your team with a collaborative calendar interface for managing content workflow and also allows you to obtain client approval for upcoming scheduled posts.
Best for:
Small Businesses, Agencies, and Enterprises.
About Planable
Planable is another social media marketing tool known for its calendar and planning abilities. It provides a convenient way to view content planned for different accounts on various social media platforms. Planable also lets you sync your content to different social platforms facilitating repurposing of content.
With multiple ways to view your content, Planable is improving the visualization for different users. However, many have also faced issues with the cluttered view provided by the Planable calendar, making this visualization sometimes difficult to achieve.
Best for:
Mid-sized businesses, mid-sized agencies, and some enterprise brands.
About Sendible
Sendible is one of the top social media marketing tools for calendars. This tool completes our list of the best marketing tools, as it is comprehensive software with robust planning and management abilities the biggest standout feature is the social media calendar
It supports multiple social media platforms and provides a unified vision of the content planned for several weeks to come. Sendible lets you manage and adjust your content on the calendar, ensuring you stay consistent and strategic with your social media planning.
Bonus Tools
With the evolution of social media platforms and the increasing use of visual graphics in the feed, marketing is not limited to planning and automating. There is a strong need for easy-to-use tools for visual purposes and design.
SocialPilot is a platform that ensures all your marketing needs are fulfilled. It has bought you these two tools, which have all the necessary resources.
Best for:
Marketing agencies, SMBs, designers, and developers.
About Unsplash
Unsplash is a renowned platform offering a vast range of high-quality images. It is a hub of visuals widely used by social media agencies and managers to fulfill their visual content requirements. Unsplash is integrated with SocialPilot and is one of the major design tools for social media marketing.
This integration enhances SocialPilot users’ social media presence and experience, Allowing them to access thousands of stunning images for their feeds seamlessly. Unsplash integration with SocialPilot is useful for creating visually appealing posts and fulfilling graphical needs.
Best for:
Social media managers, SMBs, and Agencies.
About Canva
Canva is unarguably the most popular image creation and editing tool used by professionals across various industries. Canva’s hundreds of templates for social posts and photo and icon libraries make it easy to create compelling visuals.
SocialPilot has integrated Canva directly into its interface to make creating and scheduling visual content easy. This will help users manage the images and graphical aspects of social media posts, and they will be able to upload their designed videos, graphics, or images while planning content through SocialPilot.
This feature is rolled out to ensure that the workflow from designing to scheduling is easy for users to maintain a consistent and visually appealing social media presence.
Why Do We Need Social Media Marketing Tools?
In the previous section, we assembled a list of nifty tools for social media marketing and what are social media marketing tools. These tools serve diverse functions and contribute to boosting your social media presence in tandem.
However, they cost money, and marketers and agencies often work on a limited budget. If you are still wondering whether to invest in these tools or not, that’s a legitimate concern.
We can shed some light on how much help these tools can be. Let’s see what exact benefits users get from using social media marketing tools.
Boost in Productivity with Automation
Social media marketing tools enhance productivity through automation. They enable posting across multiple platforms and scheduling for future posts, saving time.
Additionally, some tools provide analytics reports to measure success, showing post shares, popularity, and user interactions. With this data, you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Others offer features to monitor and manage communication with social media audiences.
Nowadays, AI integrations enable users to create graphics and video content with just a few lines of prompts, which would take days to do manually.
Easy Access to Data and Analytics
A social media marketing tool is like having your data hub wherever you go. This eliminates the need for jumping between platforms. It’s super handy for social media managers too.
They can research, monitor channels, and check analytics anytime, anywhere. This saves a ton of time and keeps campaigns consistent. Plus, they won’t forget what they were doing when switching devices.
Keeping an Eye on Competitors
Social media is a very competitive field, and it is important to monitor your competitors’ moves constantly. This is where social media tools come in handy. With monitoring features, this software helps you see how your peers in the industry are performing.
From social media campaigns they run to the trends they start or follow, you can see everything from one dashboard without having to chase them all over the internet. You can also see the type of audience they have and the collaborations they take part in to competitively align your strategy and stand out from the crowd.
Streamlining Collaboration and Teamwork
If you’re working with a large account—or several smaller accounts—you may have a team helping you out. However, several people working together on social media can get a bit confusing. You may run into issues like multiple people posting the same content, delayed post approvals, or worse, posting content with errors or missing out on the best scheduling time slots.
A good social media marketing tool allows you to work within a shared workspace, shows you when someone is currently on which project, maintains transparency in communication, includes clients in the workflow, and gets timely approvals and edits, etc.
Efficient Handling of Social Engagement
Social media has made it super easy for customers to connect with brands, and customers are using this direct channel more than ever. And it is imperative that you respond to all these messages. Taking a few seconds to reply can turn a casual customer into a loyal fan.
Of course, managing tons of social interactions isn’t easy. That’s where social media marketing tools come in handy. They bring all your messages into one place, making it a breeze to track incoming messages and send out responses.
There are many more benefits associated with social media tools for marketing, as there is a huge diversity of them available. However, how do you know which one to go with?
Read on to find out.
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Tools for Your Business
Choose What Fits Your Business
Social media tools usually have specific features tailored to certain tasks. If your brand wants to track audience opinions for PR improvement, go for a tool with great listening capabilities and easy communication management.
To establish posting consistency, use a scheduling tool. Analytics and social monitoring tools can help you better access data on your own and others’ performances online.
Budgeting Matters
Managing your resources smartly is key. Before diving in, determine how much you can spend to ensure it matches your long-term goals. Whether you’re a small business or a big player, it’s important to find a tool that fits your budget. You can also go for more than one tool for multiple purposes or get a versatile tool to manage your affairs overall.
And keep an eye out for hidden extra charges!
Look for a Free Trial
A free trial allows you to get hands-on experience with a product without any strings attached. By actively using the tool, you gain practical insights that go beyond what a simple demo or tutorial can provide.
This firsthand experience allows you to assess better whether the tool aligns with your needs and preferences. Ultimately, a free trial empowers you to make a more informed decision about whether to invest in the product.
Consider Scalability
If your business is on the rise with a growing team, or if you’re an agency constantly gaining new clients, the software you choose must be scalable.
Ensure you understand how flexible the social media software is regarding adding new team members or managing additional accounts. Often, these changes come with additional costs.
Don’t Forget Customer Support
Customer support is essential for any software. Whether it’s helping you get started or quickly resolving any issues, good customer support greatly impacts the user experience.
You can evaluate this by testing the tool yourself, contacting the support team, or checking out reviews from past users on different platforms.
Now that you have options and the criteria to evaluate them, you’re ready to make an informed decision about your social media marketing tool.
Conclusion
The growing importance of social media marketing is causing companies to devote more time and money to it as they realize social media’s immense potential. However, you can’t take advantage of the potential without the right technology stack.
The effectiveness of a tool depends on its scalability, user-friendliness, and value for money, and we incorporated these qualities into our list so that they are ready to grow with your team, help you increase productivity, and save you time.
If you are all set to heighten your social media marketing for real, get started with SocialPilot. Take SocialPilot’s 14-day free trial and volte-face your branding altogether.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a comprehensive content creation and promotion process on popular social media sites for branding purposes. Marketers also leverage social media tools to execute their strategies and analyze their efficiency.
What are social media tools used for?
Social media tools streamline social media activities across multiple social media sites. They are also beneficial for those who manage multiple accounts on the same platform. Social media tools are efficient and great time savers.
What are the best social media tools for marketing?
The best social media marketing tools are:
- SocialPilot
- Buffer
- Planable
- Loomly
- ContentStudio
- Sendible
Which social media marketing tools do I need for my social media team?
You need social media scheduling tools, content curation tools, social media analytics tools, influencer marketing tools, and designing tools as a complete social media marketing tool stack for your team.
Which social media designing tools should I use for my social media posting?
The best and easy to use designing tools for your social media team are:
- Canva
- Unsplash
- Lumen5
- Fotor
- Animoto
- Snappa
- Visme
What are the best influencer marketing tools to work with for your social media marketing?
The best influencer marketing tools to work with for your social media marketing are:
- Buzzsumo
- Upfluence
- IZEA
- NinjaOutreach
- HypeAuditor
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