Top Social Media Tools
There’s more than first meets the eye to planning, managing, and executing successful social media campaigns. Whether you’re responsible for just one business or multiple, content creation, scheduling and measurement can be complex and time-consuming.
In the same way that local SEO tools can help to grow your local search visibility, the right social media tools can be incredibly beneficial. Having a few select tools at your disposal can streamline workflows, simplify technical tasks such as video editing, and do the heavy lifting of optimization and analytics.
Want more insight to inform your social media strategy and better integrate it with other areas of your marketing? Check out our local SEO resources for helpful guides and best-practice advice.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most widely used social media tools, allowing you to manage all your social media profiles from one platform. You can schedule and publish content, promote posts, and perform easy social listening.
The simple-to-use ‘stream’ functionality makes it easy to see what’s happening on each of your social profiles. In addition, you can set each stream to show specific information, such as social mentions, upcoming scheduled posts, or recent posts for a particular profile.
The helpful calendar view allows you to see all scheduled posts easily. You can promote posts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn directly from your Hootsuite dashboard if you want to boost reach.
Hootsuite: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$49 – $739/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
It’s a complete tool for planning, managing, scheduling, and posting to all of your social media channels.
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Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a multi-account, multi-team, multi-user platform. This makes it one of the best social media tools for larger teams and agencies. With reporting functionality and the ability to mark and discuss specific posts internally, Sprout Social is an easy way to manage social media at scale. It can be handy if delivering excellent customer service via social media is one of your aims.
In addition to the standard post scheduling and publication features, it has paid tools for post promotion, custom workflow creation, and engagement tools. You can also use it for auditing competitor activity.
Sprout Social: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$89 – $249/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
Yes. 30 days.
What makes it unique?
Some packages include the ability to create and manage chatbots for social networks.
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Post Planner
Do you have a creative mental roadblock? It can be tough to come up with new, creative content ideas. Post Planner makes it easier. By giving you “Status Ideas” like questions, fill-in-the-blanks, contests, motivational sayings, and more, you will always have excellent, engaging post ideas. It also connects to Canva, so you can easily create posts using Canva’s vast gallery of images.
As well as facilitating post scheduling, Post Planner also makes it easy to curate content from various sources. The algorithm helps you find viral content and create topic-based streams to access your favorite content sources easily.
Post Planner: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$6 – $349/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
Yes. 7 days.
What makes it unique?
Post Planer’s post ideas, quotes, questions, and contests help you to formulate your content rather than simply schedule it.
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Quuu
Quuu is a little different from some of the other social media management tools you may be considering. While many alternatives are built around scheduling and post management, Quuu is dedicated to content curation.
If you’re too busy to create enough original content or don’t have the resources to search out third-party content regularly, Quuu curates posts for you.
Powered by AI, Quuu will seek out appropriate podcasts, blog posts, videos, etc., across 500 different categories. Then, Quuu can share the post for you, or you can review and schedule yourself via a tool such as Hootsuite.
Quuu: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$5 – 15.83/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version.
What makes it unique?
Quuu allows you to find and share relevant curated content to your social profiles with no hands-on work required.
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Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar is very similar to Hootsuite but comes with the added advantage that you can save your social media updates after you have posted them. With other tools, once your posts have been published, they are on your social profile but not kept by your social media scheduling tool.
Meet Edgar adds your posts to a content library, so you can push out regular updates using the same content without having to recreate your posts each time. It also has a great calendar feature meaning you can clearly schedule your social media updates for the days and weeks ahead.
Meet Edgar: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$24.91 – $41.58/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
Meet Edgar saves your posts to a content library to make resharing the same posts in the future quick and easy.
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Animoto
Video is essential to social media, especially for platforms like Instagram, Snap, and TikTok. They are a fast way to engage visitors and provide useful information, but many people are still overwhelmed by the thought of creating videos for their business. Animoto can lighten the load by removing some typical barriers associated with video production.
This robust video creation platform allows you to make professional-looking videos or slideshows with no fancy editing software or equipment required. Making your videos is as easy as uploading images, dragging, dropping, adding text, and ready-to-use music. You can even add a video within the video. Or create voiceovers, animations, transitions, and other effects to give a polished look.
You can connect to some social networks, such as Facebook, to enable sharing directly to your feed from Animoto.
Animoto: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$8 – $39/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
You can create your first video in three steps with no prior experience needed. Ready-to-go templates and video ideas provide inspiration.
Website
Buffer
With Buffer, you can schedule social media posts, track the performance of your content, and manage it all in one place. Its Buffer for Instagram tool even allows you to schedule to Instagram directly, something other social media management tools have struggled to achieve.
Specific engagement tools allow you to manage audience comments more easily. For example, the buffer will show you all unanswered comments, highlight the most important comments and allow you to respond directly from your Buffer dashboard. Smart alerts will also alert you to troubling comments, such as those with a negative brand sentiment, so you can take quick action.
Reminders prompt you to share TikTok and Instagram stories.
Buffer: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$5 – $100/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
Yes. 14 days.
What makes it unique?
Smart alerts to automatically notify you about important conversations, such as unanswered questions on posts or negative feedback.
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Canva
It can take years to train as a graphic designer – time that not everyone can afford to dedicate to the craft. Especially when there’s an immediate need for professional-looking social media content.
Canva is a design tool for non-designers. It has a wide range of visual templates for social media content creation. There’re multiple formats to choose from, including Reels, stories, posts, adverts, and covers. Each comes ready-sized to the correct dimensions for the intended network. Templates can be used as they are or edited to reflect the brand style, colors, and imagery.
For teams, a helpful content planner allows everyone to see designs planned for future posts.
Canva: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$119 – $149/year.
Does it have a free trial?
There’s a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
The sheer scale of pre-formatted design templates covers every kind of social media content you could ever wish to create.
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Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the social media big hitters. Its suite of tools covers almost everything you could possibly need for social media management.
For small businesses, an Essentials package includes a content calendar to keep content planning and scheduling organized and visible. Analytics offer useful data around post reach and audience engagement, which can feed into future content planning.
If you offer customer service via social media, a single inbox brings together all direct messages from each connected network, cutting down the time required to respond.
Brandwatch also has crisis and brand management tools, with real-time alerts and live data so you can spot trends. Are you planning an influencer marketing push? You can also use Brandwatch to identify influencers and manage the whole campaign right through to measuring results.
Brandwatch: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
Contact sales.
Does it have a free trial?
Yes. 14 days for SME users.
What makes it unique?
Industry-leading AI keeps close tabs on emerging trends so you’re always in the know with real-time data and alerts.
Website
Social Blade
Social Blade simplifies social media analytics. Unlike many social media management tools on this list, Social Blade doesn’t have post creation or scheduling functionality. What it does is help you understand how your brand and rival businesses are performing across YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter.
Put in any social media handle to see detailed statistics for that account. Data on offer includes follower growth, post frequency, and estimated monthly earnings from social media. Social Blade also assigns a ranking for each account, giving an idea of how it measures up against others in their category or country.
Social Blade: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
Free – $99.99/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
No.
What makes it unique?
See how your social media rivals stack up in terms of follower growth by comparing two or more brands against each other.
Website
Pulsar
If you’re looking to add one or more social listening tools to your toolbox, Pulsar combines AI and data visualization to offer advanced listening capability.
Its data-driven insights don’t just allow you to see what your audience thinks overall or which type of content resonates best. You can drill down to specific communities within your audience to get a clearer idea of how each one talks about your brand. As well as social media sources, Pulsar also allows you to listen in on consumer sentiment on other platforms, including Amazon and Reddit.
Pulsar helps you to personalize your social media content in line with identified audiences and their specific language and behavior.
Pulsar: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
Contact sales.
Does it have a free trial?
Contact sales.
What makes it unique?
Pulsar is the only social listening tool to bring audience segmentation, AI and conversation analysis together in one solution.
Website
https://www.pulsarplatform.com
Iconosquare
Iconosquare combines the best of social listening tools with powerful social media analytics. Are you looking to make data-backed decisions to optimize your posting schedule? Iconosquare will number crunch your account performance and audience behavior and tell you when to post.
For Instagram Stories, you can see engagement and reach stats, including Story completion rates organized by Story type. This level of detail can inform your Story posting strategy for increased engagement.
In-depth insights include engagement from sponsored versus organic posts, enabling you to see which works better. Meanwhile, Mentions analytics report back on mentions by type of comment and type of media.
Iconosquare: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$49-$79/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
Yes. 14 days.
What makes it unique?
The detailed analytics insights across every aspect of your social post performance, including detailed engagement data.
Website
Unfold (Instagram Only)
Unfold by Squarespace is available as an app for iPhone and Android. It’s an Instagram content creation tool with more than 400 pre-designed templates to give your Stories and posts an instant professional polish. In addition, it’s packed with preloaded filters for fast photo and video editing, so you don’t need to manually adjust each image or purchase other presets before you can publish.
Effects include exclusive fonts, stickers, and other assets to improve the look and feel of your Instagram updates.
To ensure your audience can easily access all your feeds and other useful links, Untold can create a free bio site. This is the page you see when you click on the link in your profile on Instagram. For example, you can use this to drive traffic to your latest YouTube video or a product catalog page. Finally, to ensure you can manage your Instagram feed, you can write captions in advance and schedule your posts to publish from the app with the visual content calendar.
Unfold: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$21.27/yr.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this app.
What makes it unique?
The quality and diversity of the Stories templates make creating professional quality updates seriously quick and easy. The bio page creation is also a helpful feature to maximize audience engagement.
Website
Followerwonk (Twitter Only)
You might have heard of Followerwonk, especially if you’ve been on Twitter for a while. It’s often named one of the best free social media management tools because it goes deeper into your Twitter analytics than you could manually in a short amount of time.
If you want to dive into your Twitter account performance, discover new accounts to follow, and keep tabs on who’s following your competitors, Followerwonk can help.
You can use it to track net follower gains and losses for your own profile and those of any rivals you benchmark. This can give you some idea of how successful your Twitter content strategy is and how you compare with competitors.
Followerwonk: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$29 – $79/mo.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
The ability to sort your (or a competitor’s) follower list based on metrics such as their social authority or number of tweets is useful for identifying influencers, potential brand ambassadors, and relevant accounts to follow.
Website
BeeCut (TikTok Only)
If you want to succeed on TikTok, having polished, professional video content is a must. BeeCut is a free social media tool designed for those who want to share video content but aren’t well-practiced in video editing.
While some video editing tools can be complex and come with a steep learning curve, BeeCut couldn’t be simpler. You can trim and cut longer videos to make them the ideal shorter length for TikTok. For fast recap-style videos, you can merge multiple pieces of footage into one and then add text overlays, custom intros and subtitles.
BeeCut does also allow for more advanced editing, such as color correction and video in video editing.
BeeCut: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$29.95 – $59.95/yr.
Does it have a free trial?
There is a free version of this tool.
What makes it unique?
It’s one of the easiest pieces of video editing software out there for TikTok newcomers.
Website
Pageview (Facebook Only)
It’s not always easy to generate engagement via Facebook. The reason? The algorithm has a low organic reach to encourage more paid social adoption. However, Pageview can help you track what’s being said and tailor your approach.
A plug-in for Hootsuite, you can use it to keep track of recommendations, audience comments, and posts to your page. If you opt to set up an alert, you’ll receive an email notification each time a comment is left, so you can quickly respond to boost your engagement levels.
To quickly get a handle on who’s saying what and who your most active audience members are, you can filter data by metrics such as user or type.
Pageview: Cost, Trial, and Features
How much does it cost?
$5 per five pages.
Does it have a free trial?
No.
What makes it unique?
You can group multiple Pages together into one view. This means you can seamlessly monitor all recommendations, comments, and posts across multiple Pages from a single interface.
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