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.
Alex Williams
Jane Kovalkova
✓ Sendible
We’ve tried out quite a few social media management tools and it boils down to a handful that we use the most. The one that we really love is Sendible, for several reasons. First, it has the highest number of available networks – 20.
The second reason is that it supports WordPress so that we can plug in all of our latest posts and they immediately get scheduled when a post goes live. Finally, the ability to monitor keywords across our social media accounts is great. Basically, when someone uses the word “pricing”, we immediately get a ping and our sales team is on it. Overall, it’s not just one tool, it’s an entire stack of tools that performs incredibly well.
Maggie Ganley
✓ Sprout Social
If you are managing multiple clients like me, an affordable, all-encompassing tool like Sprout Social is excellent to have in your arsenal. This software truly is a jack of all trades and allows us to schedule content, engage with comments and reviews, conduct reports and much, much more on behalf of our clients.
✓ Snapseed
If you don’t have an amazing creative team at your disposal like I do, you can take photos from blah to WOW with this free tool. Within minutes, the photo editing app allows you to make impactful edits to your photos and give them an added oomph. It’s free to use and is one of my personal favorites.
✓ Linktree
If you get frustrated with Instagram’s link in bio capabilities, Linktree is for you. It is a free, user-friendly link in bio tool that allows users to share multiple links in their Instagram bio. It makes managing Instagram a breeze.
✓ Canva
I’m fortunate to have a team full of talented graphic designers to fulfill most of our social graphics needs. However, for quick turnaround social graphics, I recommend utilizing Canva. With hundreds of templates to choose from, access to free stock photography and a wide selection of font options, this tool is graphic design made easy.
Meg Marrs
✓ Tailwind
One of my favorite social media tools is Tailwind – it can be used to schedule and post Pinterest pins as well as Instagram posts.
Tailwind makes it really easy to add tags, post to specific boards, and re-publish certain seasonal or timely posts during specific times of the year! Their “Tribes” section also encourages other Tailwind members to share other people’s posts, spreading the reach of your pins and driving traffic.
Pinterest is a social media network that’s often underutilized, and Tailwind makes it really easy to crush it at the Pinterest game!
Joseph Sleek
✓ Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar can simplify your entire social media management process. When you upload social media content to this tool, it allows you to store it in your library to use on any platform. What makes this powerful though is that you can set up the tool to randomly select posts from your library so your social media is fully automated.
For example, if you add ten blog posts, fifteen motivational quotes, and twenty niche-specific tips, you can tell the tool to select a random blog post on Monday, random quote on Wednesday, and a tip every Friday. The tool knows to not repeat any posts too close to each other and your social media will be taken care of for at least two months.
You can use Meet Edgar like a regular scheduler for social media as well and it can automatically tweet new blog posts or products if you integrate it with your website. Using this tool probably saves me six to eight hours a month on my social media.
Sarah Donawerth
✓ Later
This scheduler is made for the visual-first marketer. It provides previews and editors that can help you create an aesthetically pleasing feed. It works with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, so there’s plenty of platforms to start growing.
✓ Carro
Social media managers and digital marketers can find all the influencers who love their brand with this tool. In addition to discovery, Carro also helps streamline the entire influencer collaboration process, from product gifting to tracking mentions. It’s an all-in-one influencer marketing platform that can save hours from a marketer’s schedule.
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.
Beth Ryan
✓ Sprout Social
My #1 tool is Sprout Social. It has resources for researching content to post, it allow for easy scheduling and repeated scheduling, and reporting on the success of those posts. Sprout Social is an essential tool for our social media team. Scheduling posts in advance with their calendar tool allows us to plan a strategy in advance, we can post a tweet to go 3x in the same week without any extra efforts. It saves us time and keeps our clients happy. The reporting from Sprout Social is extraordinary. We can easily load in the dates we want reporting from, and get all kinds of data in return. We can see which posts were seen by the most people and which posts caused our audience to take action. When we know more about our successful posts, we can recreate that content for the future. We can learn more about our audience and serve them better. Our business couldn’t do what we do without Sprout Social.
✓ Grammarly
Also, for any marketing role you need to have Grammarly. Grammarly checks your text as you’re writing on so many platforms. Whether you are in your email, scheduling social posts, responding to a comment – Grammarly is there to make suggestions. Unlike spell check that only works in a document, Grammarly is with you throughout the internet and keeps your writing looking good. I constantly encourage all of my coworkers to install Grammarly. Grammarly catches so many mistakes that I would have sent to clients.
Cameron Pullano
For our social media management team, the first consideration when choosing a social media management tool is what type of business it’ll be for. Our clients are not limited to one type of business, so we’ve had to learn which social media platforms work best for each type of business. We do a lot of work with retail businesses, and for retail we find that Instagram is a more effective platform than others.
✓ Later
Our Instagram management strategy focuses on consistent posting throughout the day to keep followers engaged, so we use the tool Later to help us organize our scheduling. We prefer Later to other tools because it also allows us to post images to Facebook and Twitter for our clients that are on multiple networks. As a smaller marketing agency, we also like to use Later because it allows us to schedule many posts in advance at one time so there’s no slowdown. It’s also great that we can access it from mobile if we need to make some last minute changes or to make a time sensitive post when we’re away from the office.
Erica Johnson
The tools we use and recommend to others are Planoly, Smarterqueue, and Tailwind. These tools save us so much time posting on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
✓ Planoly
Planoly is a great tool for Instagram. We recommend it because you can see exactly what your Instagram feed will look like before you share posts with their calendar drag-and-drop grid preview features. You can move posts around until you get the exact look you are going for. With Planoly, you can schedule static and video posts for Instagram and Instagram Stories.
✓ Smarterqueue
Smarterqueue is a great all-in-one tool. We use it because we can pre-schedule all our Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and Pinterest posts at the same time in one place. Personally, we use it for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn posts. With Smarterqueue, you can schedule months’worth of content at a time. You can also schedule posts to be cross-promoted between accounts and re-shared again and again.
✓ Tailwind
Tailwind is a great tool for Pinterest. With Pinterest being the 3rd largest search engine in the world, we use it to drive traffic to our offers and blog. Tailwind lets us schedule Pinterest pins ahead of time. My favorite feature of Tailwind is actually Tailwind Tribes. It helps me find popular pins fast and quickly fill my queue and reach more people with my content when I share it in tribes.
Rameez Ghayas Usmani
✓ IFTTT
Being a Digital Marketer, I spend half of my day managing the company’s social media platforms and scheduling tweets.
I use social media tools like IFTTT, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite for scheduling posts, engaging with followers and developing monthly reports.
I use many social media tools but IFTTT (If This Then That) most frequently. IFTTT is a simple marketing automation tool that creates automated tasks based on an “if this, then that” concept. You would need to create applets to connect social media platforms together in order to auto-post one piece to any number of social sites – IFTTT links them all using your credentials and does so automatically.
There are also public applets created by other users that can be used to connect different social media platforms or you can create new ones with this powerful tool. IFTTT enables a business to connect any two services with a single applet. You can also create and manage your IFTTT applets with the IFTTT mobile application. Any applet created in IFTTT first goes in for a test and then becomes live after a while.
You may have seen on Twitter or Facebook that some posts are published via IFTTT. Many bloggers or website administrators set up extensive IFTTT schedules to publish or collect data from their social media accounts using IFTTT.
Stacy Caprio
✓ Buffer
One social media tool I use to boost engagement is the platform Buffer which has allowed me to post at one time to schedule social posts across multiple platforms that go live at future times. It is a huge timesaver and allows for posts to go across all of social without much effort to boost engagement and views.
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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.