Social media can help you to build your brand, increase sales and drive website traffic. However, connecting with your audience across multiple social media platforms can be very time-consuming.
We have reached out to 67 social media experts and asked them: which social media management software would you recommend others to use and why?
Last update: 1 March 2023
About this guide
This social media management software guide is written based on the feedback of 67 social media experts.
We interviewed each one of them and ask them about their previous experience with social media software and which one they recommend using.
After that, we dug into the ones that got recommended the most compiled a pros and cons list of each and added some comparison tables. The goal of all of this is to make it easier for you to find the right social media management software.
Top 10 Social Media Management Software 2024
Without further ado, let’s dig into the ones that our expert recommended.
1. Hootsuite (16 votes)
Hootsuite makes finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content easier. They have an integration with 20+ of the most popular social media platforms, making managing multiple ones a lot easier.
2. Sprout Social (13 votes)
Sprout Social let’s you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with an all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.
3. Buffer (12 votes)
Buffer let’s you plan, collaborate, and publish content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand. You can also measure your performance, create reports, and get insights.
4. Canva (7 votes)
Canva is a graphic design platform. It allows you to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content by using an easy drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts.
5. CoSchedule (6 votes)
CoSchedule is a work management software for marketers. It offers a range of agile marketing tools that will help you stay focused, deliver projects on time, and make your team happy.
5. Later (6 votes)
Later is a social media planner and scheduling tool, with a strong focus on Instagram. It lets you visually plan, schedule and analyze posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
7. Planoly (4 votes)
Planoly is a visual planner for Instagram. It helps you manage, plan, and schedule your Instagram posts for multiple accounts.
7. Sendible (4 votes)
Sendible has a strong agency focus and let’s you manage multiple brands on social media. Their tool improves communication with multiple stakeholders when scheduling and approving content.
9. Tailwind (3 votes)
Tailwind is a social media scheduling tool for Instagram and Pinterest. It helps you to post at the best times for engagement and to get more actionable analytics.
10. Grammarly (2 votes)
Grammarly is a free writing app to make their online writing clear and effective. It can help you to improve your content writing for social media.
By streamlining your social media accounts, reporting and analyzing the data, and actively monitor activity and engagement you can manage your social media accounts more effectively. A social media management tool can help you in this process.
A social media tool is software that helps you with the planning, execution and reporting of your social media accounts. Most tools will have an integration with at least one social media channel. Depending on the social media accounts that you manage, you might want to consider using multiple tools.
There’s no doubt that social media has become an essential part of marketing for businesses of all sizes. But with so many different platforms and strategies to consider, it can be tough to know where to start – or how to keep up. That’s where social media management tools come in.
Management tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social offer users a variety of features to help them plan, publish, and measure their social media activity. With these tools, businesses can save time and ensure that their social media presence is consistent and effective.
Additionally, social media management tools offer users insights into their audience’s behavior. This data can help businesses to better understand what content is resonating with their audience and make adjustments accordingly.
Overall, social media management tools are a valuable asset for any business seeking to navigate the ever-changing world of social media marketing. With the right tool, businesses can save time, produce better content, and connect with their audience in a more meaningful way.
Full Software Reviews
Now, let’s dig into the top social media management software tools individually.
First, there are first grade social media tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer. These tools have a direct integration with multiple social media platforms. Their main focus is to manage your social media accounts more easily.
Then, there are tools that are not necessarily focussed on social media management but that can make your life a lot easier. For example, Canva is a graphic design platform and can be used for creating images for social media. Grammarly can help you with the spelling of your social media posts.
Now, let’s dig into a few of these a bit deeper.
Hootsuite makes finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content easier. They have an integration with 20+ of the most popular social media platforms, making managing multiple ones a lot easier.
Your Go-To Social Media Manager
Our experts voted Hootsuite as the go-to social media manager. It’s among the most popular social media management platforms. The single dashboard shows an overview of the most popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter Instagram and Facebook. Within this dashboard, you can manage and schedule posts, receive updates, follow people and much, much more.
It significantly reduces the number of hours needed to manage your social media. To do this, Hootshoot offers automated scheduling to maintain your social media. It schedules posts into a content calendar and sends reminders when to post your content.
Also, there are options to add team members. This makes Hootsuite perfect for small and large organizations where there are multiple stakeholders.
Hootsuite is a great tool to manage multiple social media channels at one central spot, and measure the results to optimize the ROI of your organization. It’s a go-to social media management tool for every social media manager.
Among our experts, there are a few huge fans of Hootsuite who recommend using the tool to others. Its convenience and efficiency are praised, as well as the fact that it helps social media managers to be increasingly time-efficient.
Additionally, Hootsuite has seamless integration with your favorite project management tools, like Canva, Slack and Zendesk.
Being used by companies around the world, Hootsuite
Sprout Social lets you understand and reach your audience, engage your community and measure performance with an all-in-one social media management platform built for connection.
All The Bells & Whistles
Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool. However, the main thing that sets them apart is the ability to work with your team.
From within the app, you can see who created which post, who left a comment and who is managing a profile. Therefore, Sprout Social is perfect for larger organizations that have multiple people managing their social media.
Sprout Social is made for understanding and reaching your audience, engaging with that audience and measuring the performance of your social media engagements. It has many resources available that can help you when research content. Like Hootsuite, it also offers a calendar tool that will help you to plan your social media strategy in advance. This will save you time and effort.
Buffer lets you plan, collaborate, and publish content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand. You can also measure your performance, create reports, and get insights.
Automated Content Scheduling
Buffer is focused on automated content scheduling across multiple platforms. Its multi-functional analytics dashboard allows tracking the performance of your social content in real-time. It has the ability to schedule posts for peak times of social media, depending on the time zone a user is located.
Buffers can connect directly to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. The platform allows you to schedule posts far into the future, letting you schedule your social media posts in advance and let you sit back.
Planoly is a visual planner for Instagram. It helps you manage, plan, and schedule your Instagram posts for multiple accounts.
Official Instagram Partner
If you are only using Instagram, Planoly is the way to go. They are an official Instagram partner which means that the integration is never in danger to be paused.
It is a great way to visualize your Instagram posts and plan for the future. You can move things around and have a visual representation of how your feed will look like. Their calendar drag-and-drop grid preview is great for this.
Canva is a graphic design platform. It allows you to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content by using an easy drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts.
Graphic Design At Its Best
Canva is a very different tool than the others in this list. It’s an online content creation tool, which allows you to create social media content without much graphic design knowledge and skills.
If you don’t have the skills to use tools like Adobe Photoshop, Canva will help you out. And even if you do have these skills, Canva can most likely still help you out. It has many (hundreds) free templates, which makes it very easy to create images for Instagram, Facebook etc.
Canva is a great tool to help social media managers to get the social media graphic and any others.
Table Comparison
Then, let’s compare these top social media management software.
Now, let’s have a look at how the 3 most popular social media management tools compare against each other.
These three tools have a direct integration with multiple social media platforms. Their main focus is to manage your social media accounts more easily.
Hootsuite vs Sprout Social vs Buffer
Hootsuite
✓ Free trial
✓ Paid plans start from US$49/month
Schedule post across:
✓ Instagram
✓ Facebook
✓ Twitter
✓ LinkedIn
✓ Pinterest
✓ Youtube
✓ Auto-scheduling
✓ Optimal send times
Content calendar
✓ Campaign tagging and reporting
✓ Multiple users*
Sprout Social
✓ Free trial
✓ Paid plans start from US$89/month
Schedule post across:
✓ Instagram
✓ Facebook
✓ Twitter
✓ LinkedIn
✓ Pinterest
✓ Youtube
✓ Auto-scheduling
✓ Optimal send times*
✓ Content calendar
✓ Campaign tagging and reporting*
✓ Multiple users
Buffer
✓ Free trial
✓ From $5 per social channel per month
Schedule post across:
✓ Instagram
✓ Facebook
✓ Twitter
✓ LinkedIn
✓ Pinterest
Youtube
✓ Auto-scheduling
✓ Optimal send times
Content calendar
✓ Campaign tagging and reporting
✓ Multiple users*
* Available in a more expensive price package.
Best Social Management Software: Which One To Choose?
A conclusion of what we have learned from the experts that we interviewed.
Now, with all the different platforms that are available. The critical question is: which social media management tool is best for you?
With the vast array of social media management tools available on the market, it can be difficult to know which one is right for your business. Here are a few factors to consider when making your decision:
First, identify which platforms you need to be active on. Not all tools support all platforms, so it’s important to narrow down your options based on which ones will work for you.
Next, consider your budget. Some tools are free, while others can be quite expensive. Determine how much you’re willing to spend before starting your search.
Finally, think about what features are most important to you. Do you need help with scheduling posts? Analytics? Customer service? Make a list of must-haves before beginning your research.
By taking the time to figure out which factors are most important to you, you’ll be able to narrow down your choices and find the social media management tool that’s right for your business.
There are a number of social media management tools available that can help businesses effectively manage their social media accounts. Some of the most popular tools include Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social. Each of these tools provides users with a range of features that can help simplify managing social media accounts.
For example, many of these tools offer users the ability to schedule posts in advance, track social media analytics, and engage with followers. Additionally, some of these tools also offer features specifically designed for businesses, such as team collaboration and customer support. By taking advantage of the features offered by these tools, businesses can save time and effort while still ensuring that their social media accounts are effectively managed.
If you’re after an all-in-one social media management tool you should pick between Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Both are very similar. Buffer would fit into this area as well, although they started off as a tool to just schedule your posts.
Planoly is best if you are only using Instagram and don’t care about anything else.
You can use Canva alongside each of these tools, as it will help you to create visual content a lot easier.
Read What The Expert Said About The Best Social Management Software
Find out what each expert had to say about their favorite software. Select the software from the list below.
Oksana Chyketa
Kelan Kline
✓ Buffer
I recommend new online business owners to use Buffer since it’s free. They allow a bunch of social media channels and let you schedule up to 10 things in each of your queues. Most likely you will soon outgrow their free plan and have to upgrade but at $8 per month, it’s a bargain. We used them for 3 years with our online business and loved how simple and easy to use it was. They also provide some great insights as to what times to post, reach, clickthrough rate, etc.
We recently switched over to SmarterQueue to make things a little less hands-on and created evergreen posting schedule. It’s been great so far and has saved us hours upon hours of work being able to set up posts to auto-rotate every couple of months.
Anjana Wickramaratne
✓ Hootsuite
As a social media manager/marketer, I personally use Hootsuite as my go-to social media management tool.
I am a huge fan of Hootsuite and I recommend this tool to others because it is convenient and efficient as you are able to see all your social media platforms under one tab/page. This is a huge advantage for many people especially social media managers as they are very time-sensitive.
Also, it allows them to schedule their posts for later dates which is also a bonus point. Hootsuite also makes social listening much easier for social media marketers and managers.
Carlo Borja
✓ Trello
If you like more of a kanban visual style of project management, then Trello is the best tool for you. Some people like seeing things progress visually. Trello is excellent at this.
Sarah Walsh
✓ Later
For my social media clients, particularly those using Instagram, I always recommend Later as a great tool.
Later originally sparked my interest because of their link in bio function, which they made available on their free plan. But after further investigation Later, I realized the fantastic variety of insights the tool provided. Some of my favorite features include: the ability to add return spaces in an Instagram caption without any work arounds or periods, hashtag suggestions, a hashtag counter so you don’t exceed IG’s limit, the ability to save captions for future use, and their analytics that tracks which hashtags are the most successful in your captions.
This is just a small selection of all the wonderful functions of Later. They also have a great blog that isn’t overly sales-y or Later-centric and provides truly valuable insights.
Kimberly Phan
✓ Sprinklr
Sprinklr is the gold standard for social media management. Its social suite contains the most comprehensive and unified software that helps enterprises connect and serve their clients at any range. Their suite of products offers 5 modules for marketers: Modern Marketing, Modern Advertising, Modern Research, Modern Care, and Modern Engagement. It has the capabilities of publishing, community management, in-depth analytical reporting, team collaboration, and more. The AI-driven technology allows real-time insights to help increase customer satisfaction.
✓ Sprout Social
Sprout is a cost-effective system that has social media scheduling, monitoring, and reporting capabilities. One of the things that set Sprout apart from say, Hootsuite, is its reporting capabilities and how seamless it is to export their beautiful reports. They also have an incredible CRM tool (customer relationship management) that helps marketers serve their clients better.
Social Listening
✓ NetBase
NetBase’s social listening tool gives real-time insight into online and customer conversations. Its AI-driven technology determines audience sentiment, behaviors, hashtags, people, and brands from social conversations. Their platform delivers automated theme and helps brands capture consumer adjacencies earlier than competitors, leading to rapid ideation.
✓ Brandwatch
Brandwatch’s powerful social listening tool has the most extensive set of analytics and allows marketers to analyze discover insights within billions of conversations. Its data capturing capabilities allow marketers to hone in conversations and monitor mention volume, demographic data, image recognition, trending topics, segment data in relevant categories and react in real-time.
Amanda Ruth Garcia
✓ eClincher
By far, this is my favourite out of all the tools I have used. It’s highly functional and crosses almost known all social media platforms. It also has additional features like content curation, social listening, analytics and automation among others. The only downside with this tool is that it’s a bit pricey compared with other social media management tools. But if you’re looking for a highly efficient all-in-one tool and willing to pay to cost, this one is it.
✓ Sprout Social
Coming in a close second is Sprout Social. Aside from the common features like scheduling and automation, itcomes with a really good social media listening tool with it. It offers trend analysis for hashtags and keywords as well. And it’s reasonably priced. So, if you’re looking for a much affordable alternative to eClincher, this is a consideration.
✓ BuzzSumo
When it comes to social listening, nothing beats this tool. Apart from providing you with valuable content which can help with ideation, it also allows you to search influencers within your industry who can boost your social media networking.
✓ Content Studio
When it comes to content curation, this tool is my go-to. Content Studio is a gold mine if you want to look for shareable content you can post on your social media channels.
Paul Strobel
✓ IFTTT
I highly recommend using IFTTT.com with your website. IFTTT helps you automate the tiresome social media sharing process by automatically syndicating your content to all your social media profiles. Even better – it’s free! A whole lot of different integrations are available and their database of integrations is constantly evolving, making life all the more simple for you.
With IFTTT you won’t have to jump around between Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr and what not just to share every new blog post you publish. Simply hook up your WordPress installation or website RSS feed to IFTTT and configure your settings and it’s all smooth sailing from there.
Ashley Sterling
I have experience with a wide variety of social media tools (from graphic creation to scheduling platforms and analytics). My favorite tools are listed here:
✓ CoSchedule
What: Social Media scheduling platform and analytics platform
Why: CoSchedule has leading user-friendly experience when scheduling out multiple days/weeks/months worth of social media content. Additionally, you can track the analytics directly in the platform vs having to go to each of the Social Media networks to see the numbers. Their customer service is top notch and they do their best to resolve any issue as quickly as possible.
✓ Canva
What: Graphic creation platform
Why: As someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with Photoshop, a simple and easy-to-use graphic creation platform like Canva is a small miracle. You can create anything from an Instagram Story to a PDF Flyer for an event. The free version offers a good array of stock images, and the paid version is reasonably priced.
✓ Lumen5
What: Video creation platform
Why: Video marketing and video content is becoming a leading source of marketing in today’s world. Lumen5 offers users the ability to turn a blog into a video in 15 minutes or less (in my experience). This platform has licensed music, stock video, and the ability to customize themes to match the brand you’re working with.
✓ Grammarly
What: Grammar Checker
Why: Posting social media copy can be daunting when you are working with hundreds of posts — this means there are hundreds of opportunities to miss a spelling error or a sentence that doesn’t make sense. Grammarly automatically checks your spelling and grammar to ensure you are in a good position to post. There are free and paid versions.
Sally Falkow
✓ Sendible
I’ve been working in social media for more than 10 years and I finally found the perfect tool for social media management – Sendible.com
It has more features than most other tools and they’ve been smart about connecting to other tools, like Canva and Google Analytics. So you can do everything in one place – create a calendar, design, create, post, reply and engage, find influencers, assign tasks to team members, and track results.
They offer a free trial and have excellent video tutorials.
Dustin Vann
✓ Planable
One of the best social media management tools there is out there is Planable.io. It allows for multiple team members to collaborate, and is a very streamlined process. You can view the posts as if they were live, so you really get the idea of what your audience will see. It allows for you to see the differences you can make for each platform, giving the audience a truly unique experience no matter where your content is placed. With the ability to provide feedback to posts, you can make tweaks and changes really easily. I would highly recommend this tool.
Samantha Edwardes
✓ Sprout Social
Sprout Social greatly assists in maintaining complete oversight over multiple social media accounts.The reports the platform provides are very comprehensive and the PDF downloads are easy to share with clients. The ability to track our hashtag analytics is my personal favorite feature, allowing us to further refine our strategy each month.
✓ Canva
Graphic design platform Canva is not only incredibly user-friendly, but includes a plethora of inspiring layouts. I use Canva multiple times a week, developing all sorts of branded content – engaging social media posts, themed Stories, and attractive, on-brand newsletters.
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Social Media Management Software FAQ
It depends on your business and target audience to decide which social media platform is the best for you. There are many social media platforms out there, most of them have different users and engagement levels.
Our experts voted for Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer. See our article for the full list.
A social media management tool can help you find, schedule, manage and report on social media content.
By streamlining your social media accounts, reporting and analyzing the data, and actively monitor activity and engagement you can manage your social media accounts more effectively. A social media management tool can help you in this process.
One reply on “Best Social Media Management Software 2024”
Nice article! Out of all the Instagram tools that I’ve used, I love using Planoly for auto-posting. I talk about this in my Planoly Review, but it offers a lot of functionality beyond just auto posting content, ranging from its hashtag discovery tool, built-in analytics dashboard, and even auto-posting videos and Instagram stories.