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.
Jennifer Johnson
Jaye Bonser
✓ Sprout Social
After testing and trying a variety of different platforms over the last 18 months, Sprout Social’s easy to use platform stood out for me. Before, I was using various different tools for different channels. It was hard to manage and confusing.
Sprout gave me the ability to manage our 4 main social media platforms in one, this included posting, scheduling and reporting. It was easy to get started and you’re provided with a very helpful Sprout expert who you can chat with to ask any questions.
The tool has a wide variety of features that you can use to help manage your social media. Teams are able to collaborate on tasks or work individually on work assigned to them, you’re able to view all mentions and messages in one place and it has numerous listening features. These include seeing posts from specific keywords or hashtags you follow.
Personally, some of my favourite and most used features are that you’re able to see all scheduled posts in a clear calendar where you can make any changes instantly. I also like that sprout offers an optimal posting schedule to enable you to get the maximum reach from your posts.
For a tool that includes such a high range of features, Sprout Social is also very competitively priced which for me sealed the deal.
Malte Scholz
✓ Sprout Social
One tool that we love using for our social media management is Sprout Social. It has all the bells and whistles of a great social media tool, but one thing that sets it apart for us is the ability to work with your team. You can see from the app who created which post, who left a comment and which of your team members is managing a certain profile. Moreover, the ability to add tags to your posts within the app is useful because it lets you compare campaigns. For example, we added a tag “featurelaunchQ1” and “featurelaunchQ2” so we can compare our performance and find ways for improvement.
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.
Catherine Campbell
✓ CoSchedule
Because we’re an agency that provides social media management to multiple clients, we need a tool that allows us to quickly toggle back and forth between client accounts and marketing calendars. Fortunately, CoSchedule does just that.
They have plans that allow us to scale up or down with project growth at a moment’s notice, and they include integrations such as WordPress, Mailchimp and more, making it easy for us to visually plan, move, and track social media posts associated with any campaign. They also provide automated and manually generated social media reports that you can break down by platform and send to your clients.
✓ Agency Analytics
Agency Analytics is an all-in-one analytics tool so you can pull all of your analytics into one place, including local sources, reputation platforms, call trackers, search consoles, SEO tools, and social media platforms.
They just added Instagram reporting, which makes it easy now for us to provide a monthly comprehensive performance report to our clients rather than having to send them 10 reports from 10 difference sources.
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.
Andrew Maff
✓ Sprout Social
Our team uses Sprout Social. It’s not the least expensive option, but after years of research and trying several other platforms, we’re very happy with where we landed. A majority of social media growth comes from outreach, not so much just posting, Sprout makes this very simple with some great social listening tools.
Shagun Chauhan
Those days have gone when the door to door marketing used to make you gain your audience’s attention. Due to an increase in the number of social media users, you need to use more than one social media platform to grow your business. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are the household terms today and majorly used by the users.
Hence these free platforms provide you wide opportunity to spread your brands and converts the user and visitors to your customers but to market, your brand to all the social media platform you will be requiring few social media tools.
Even to compete to an extra edge against your competitors you should use some social medial tools to promote your business. Here’s a list of social media tools that will boost your business.
✓ UnboxSocial
– To grow effectively, one should analyze the performance. The same goes for social media.
– It is an asocial media analytical tool that gives you an in-depth analysis of your all social media handles. It is easy to use and can track various metrics to measure performance. It bifurcates the audiences, stories, and posts.
– It helps to generate social media reports for your activities performed on several social media platforms.
– 2020 is a time of Instagram stories as a form of content. This platform offer insight into the stories as well. Engagement rates, views, likes and replies to stories are on an average recorded by this tool. It has the Newsfeed to know about your industries.
✓ Buffer Reply
– BufferReply is a tool to drive a campaign by involving several other social media platforms. For Driving Traction, Buffer reply is highly used.
– The key feature in this tool is to manage the conversations happening in social media inboxes through one platform.
– You can engage with your audience through this platform very smoothly. You will receive a complete overview of the conversations with customers.
– It offers a feature called Analyze which helps you to track performance through stats and facts on your SMM and get relevant insights.
✓ Hootsuite
– Hootsuite is a multifaceted social media tool to drive a campaign and promote business. It covers all social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
– Automated scheduling tool to maintain your social media presence. It helps you to schedule your posts into the content calendar and reminds you when to post the content.
– It also offers a feature for Team Management which makes teamwork a smooth process. In addition to that, it protects your brand from social media risks.
As you can see, the social media tools market is much more diverse than someone would think, offering various solutions that differ in their functionality and price ranges. I hope this article will help you define what you need and choose the best tool for your business.
Manny Hernandez
✓ Buffer
Buffer is one social media management tool that has been around for quite some time, and they are a respectable platform that allows you to manage multiple social profiles with ease.
Some of the features that thrills me about Buffer is the ability to easily schedule content while browsing the web with their Chrome extensions. Buffer also suggests the perfect moments to post based on follower activity which is pretty awesome.
William Taylor
✓ Tailwind
Our social media team uses Tailwind. It’s the best social media management tool for managing Pinterest accounts. You can even use it to schedule your Instagram posts.
The reason I like Tailwind is that it provides really detailed insights into your Pinterest account. Obviously Pinterest analytics are available for free, but Tailwind allows you to see your daily follower growth, how many repins you have altogether, and the engagement rate of your pins (so the percentage of pins you have shared that have also been repinned). It also offers a great feature: Tailwind Tribes. These tribes are similar to group boards, as you can share pins for other pinners to possibly schedule.
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.
Aliza Sherman
✓ Buffer
I can manage messaging going out to multiple accounts including more than one Twitter account, LinkedIn profiles, LinkedIn pages and also easily add posts and articles to a queue to publish over time. NOTE: I don’t use Buffer for Facebook or Instagram.
✓ Planoly
I’m able to not only prepare and schedule posts with graphics and text for Instagram using this tool, but I can drag and drop posts around to find the right placement to create a better aesthetic for each Instagram account I manage.
✓ Hootsuite
I tend to use Hootsuite more as a listening post although it also has post creation and scheduling features and the ability to manage multiple accounts with your team.
✓ Sprout Social
For more robust client social media management needs, I manage post creation, scheduling, monitoring and social conversations using this tool. It’s more of a Swiss Army Knife for social media management.
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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.