7 Best Social Media Management Tools

“How do we keep our social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in sync?”

“How do we ensure that we are not repeating content on different social profiles?”

“We started our Instagram page five months ago, but we have only 150 followers. How do we scale up?”

Regardless of the kind of business you own or work for, if you’re doing social media marketing you’ve definitely heard such questions. 

Managing social media can be an overwhelming task, especially due to the vast scope of items one needs to track. Additionally, any negative comments that go unanswered or missed customer reviews have the potential to damage your online reputation and customer relationships. 

Fortunately, there are social media management tools that automate parts of the process and can make it much easier to handle your social media profiles. 

These tools offer a range of features, including post scheduling, interaction tracking, engagement tracking, topic or brand monitoring, and analytics. Some advanced tools offer additional features such as audience segmentation, hashtag planning, and sentiment analysis. 

To help you understand social media management tools and find one for your business, we’ve prepared this list of top tools. 

But first, what does “best” mean? To be considered for this article, the tool had to have at least an overall rating of 4 out of 5 on GetApp’s software directory. For more details, read our methodology at the bottom. 

Following are the tools we will discuss (arranged alphabetically):

Agorapulse is a social media management tool that helps businesses streamline multiple social media accounts via a single social inbox. It helps schedule and publish content, identify influencers, monitor social media activities for engagement, and generate reports to analyze a variety of metrics.

Analyzing social media activity with the reporting feature in Agorapulse

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• “Assign” feature that helps build content workflows to allow multiple users to create content and send it to the right stakeholder for approval.

• Automated inbox assistant that monitors comments on all social pages to flag spam and highlight questions/comments that need to be answered.

• Automated audience segmentation based on industry, sales funnel, location, annual spending, etc., as well as identification of top followers, influencers, and ambassadors.

• URL-related features, such as Bitly integration (a link shortener) and a built-in UTM code generator that helps monitor how many people are clicking on a post and on which platforms.

Social media platforms the tool serves: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS. 

Pricing: Starts at $79 per month for 10 social profiles and 2 users. The vendor also offers a few free modules, such as AdReports Ad Reporting, Employee Advocacy, Facebook Page Barometer, and Twitter Report Card. 

Case story: NewFire Media, a digital media agency in North Augusta, South Carolina, used the tool to reduce the time spent on monitoring comments on Facebook ads. The option to monitor comments on social ads has helped avoid spam and manage the brand’s online reputation. 

Buffer is a social media management tool that enables businesses to publish content on multiple social media platforms, analyze responses, and generate audience engagement. 

Customizing captions for social media platforms with Buffer

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• “Approval” and “draft post” features to help teams collaborate on content, create posts, and send them to reviewers.

• Predictive analytics and reporting to gain insights, such as the best time to post, the appropriate type of post, and post frequency.

• “Shop grid” feature to embed links into the Instagram bio to showcase products or shopping pages.

• “Hashtag planner” that suggests and helps plan appropriate hashtags for posts based on social media trends and past performance.

Social media platforms the tool serves: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS. 

Pricing: Separate pricing for the Publish and Analyze modules, starting $15 per month (8 social profiles and 1 user) and $35 per month (8 social profiles and 1 user), respectively. 

Case story: Fortune magazine used the tool to avoid posting in clusters and create a posting schedule instead. This helped generate an uptick in traffic on regular posts and improve engagement on photo posts. 

Hootsuite was one of the first tools to enter the market back in 2008. It started as a tool to schedule social media posts on popular platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Today, it has evolved into a suite of modules for employee advocacy, impact analysis, social media advertising, etc.

Creating a keyword-based search stream in Hootsuite

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• “Search streams” created with hashtag, location, or keyword to find and curate compelling content for social media profiles.

• “Assign” and “approve” features that help teams collaborate on responding to posts and comments.

• “Reporting” feature for creating customized reports using up to 200 metrics to measure the impact of social media content across profiles.

• Integrations with third-party tools, such as Trello for project management and Slack for team collaboration. 

Social media platforms the tool serves: 20+ social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS.

Pricing: Starts at $19 per month for 10 social media profiles and 1 user. Hootsuite also offers custom pricing for enterprise clients. 

Case Story: UNESCO used the tool to create the #TruthNeverDie campaign in 2019, which generated the best engagement for the nonprofit in over four years. The campaign had a potential reach of 2 million users and saw 15,400 tweets on the fifth day alone. 

HubSpot is marketing automation software that offers a social media management module. You can use the tool’s marketing features, including blogging, landing pages, email, lead segmentation, and ads, to create a digital campaign. The social media module allows publishing content to streamline social profiles and promote content. 

Reporting dashboard in HubSpot

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• “Content scheduling” to plan and create calendars and automatically post content on social media profiles.

• “Interaction tracking” to create a single stream of comments from all social profiles and posts for quick replies.

• “Keyword monitoring” to track engagement and posts relating to a particular keyword as well as find and curate compelling content for sharing.

• Custom reporting to analyze and compare the performance of multiple campaigns, posts, and publish times.  

Social media platforms the tool serves: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS.

Pricing: $800 per month for the “Professional” marketing package that includes the social media module. This package supports 50 connected social media profiles and 10,000 posts a month. 

Case story: Plastic Printers, a business based out of Hastings, Minnesota, used HubSpot’s social media management tool to streamline lead generation for its social media profiles. It was able to bring its Twitter followers into its leads database and qualify 64% of the new top-of-the-funnel leads into sales. 

Sendible is a dashboard-based tool that not only provides the core social media management features but also enables social media listening for trends and broader monitoring of news and blogs for mentions of your business. It can be used to plan and execute social media campaigns as well as create posts via the collaboration features.

Sending posts for approval in Sendible

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• “Assign” and “approval” features to delegate the task of responding to comments and messages to appropriate teammates as well as setting up approval workflows for outgoing messages.

• Automatic sentiment analysis to identify social media, news, or blog mentions of your business on the web.

• Integration with third-party tools, such as Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Medium, for content curation and sharing, project management, and team collaboration.

• Google Chrome extension to share or schedule content from across the web as you browse. 

Social media platforms the tool serves: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS.

Pricing: Starts at $29 per month for 12 social media profiles and 1 user. 

Case Story: Fearless & Framed, a business based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, used the tool to plan and execute their social media campaigns. This has helped them grow their social media followers by over 11,000 and their list of podcast and blog subscribers by 50%. 

SocialPilot is a social media scheduling and analytics tool that helps businesses push content across social platforms and monitor its performance. It includes modules for publishing and scheduling, collaboration, social inbox, analytics, and Facebook ads.

Responding to messages in SocialPilot

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• Unified calendar to view and schedule posts across multiple social platforms. 

• Ability to share pictures and GIFs when responding to comments from within the tool.

• "Assign" feature to delegate tasks to teammates and set up approval workflows for outgoing content.

• Analytics for reporting metrics such as the best time to post, top followers, audience engagement, content performance, and hashtags.

Social media platforms the tool serves: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Google My Business, VK, and Tumblr.

Mobile apps: Android and iOS.

Pricing: Starts at $30 per month for 25 social media profiles and 3 users. 

Case story: Seriously Social, a digital marketing business based out of Manchester, U.K., recently ran a campaign called “The Christmas Carol of the Day,” which prompted people to participate in a social media challenge. They were able to execute the campaign by identifying the right hashtags and queuing appropriate content to be published. 

Sprout Social is a social media management platform that also offers CRM and help desk features. The tool integrates multiple modules, such as social media listening, publishing, engagement, and analytics.

Reviewing Instagram performance in Sprout Social

Here are some of the tool’s highlights:

• "Contact views" to access customer records, conversation history, and internal notes for each contact.

• “Message completion" to mark replied comments and hide completed conversations from the active view of the inbox.

• “Message tasking” to turn any social media message into an actionable task and assign it to appropriate teammates.

• "Send time optimization" to figure out the best time to publish a piece of content.

• Multiple types of reports, such as Facebook pages report, cross-network group report, and Instagram competitor report, for granular insights on trends and audience engagement.

Social media platforms the tool serves: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

Mobile apps: Android and iOS. 

Pricing: $99 per month for 5 social profiles. 

Case Story: Innisfree Hotels, a hotel chain based out of the U.S., used the tool to find guest posts talking about its hotels and used those as testimonials on its social profiles. It also used the tool’s monitoring features to find people looking for hotels in certain towns and reach out to them for reservations. 

Now that you have an understanding of what the top tools have to offer, it’s time to start shortlisting. Following are some considerations to keep in mind:

✔ Set a budget that you can comfortably spend and stick to it. 

✔ Ensure that the social media platform of your choice is supported by the tool. 

✔ Read reviews on platforms, such as ours, to understand what real users of the tool have to say about it. 

✔ Take a trial of the tool to get a hang of the user interface and learning curve.

✔ Explore the FAQ section on the vendor’s website to find answers to common questions that you might have. 

Check out the following resources for more information:

• 5 Social Media Marketing Apps for Restaurant Owners