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.
Amanda Ruth Garcia
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.
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.
John Stevenson
As an entrepreneur whose business revolves on maintaining a large presence online – social media included. To make this possible, I find it important to keep the right tools in hand. Here is a couple of them.
✓ Hootsuite
As far as social media management goes, Hootsuite happens to be on top of my list. They have both an affordable price and it covers a wide range of social media platforms. What I like about it the most would be its analytics feature: Hootsuite gives you a clear view of the optimal times you can schedule your posts, which makes it extremely useful for those who have unpredictable schedules and need to be away from the computer from time to time.
✓ Zoho
Another tool I find handy is Zoho. Its interface is easy to use, making it friendly for new users. The biggest appeal is the engagement reports – Zoho makes it possible to see which of your posts get the most response from your audience. With this in mind, you’ll get an easier idea about what kind of content catches more attention.
Adeel Shabir
Social media is the main source of generating traffic nowadays because of its ability to connect with the audience and customers. This also requires to manage social media in a more creative way.
Following are the best tools to be used by social media managers:
✓ Buffer
Personally my favorite tool for managing all my social media posts. Buffer has the ability to schedule a certain onto the peak times of social media usage. We target different audiences in different regions. Currently, we are working in Canada and the United States. So, there are different time zones. Buffer allows us to schedule our posts, and provide the detailed analytics of the engagements on the post.
Pricing: It has two different pricing plans, it all depends upon the usage of the application. Starter plan and business plan. If you a bigger company, than I suggest you go with the business plan. For a small company, they offer a free version also, with limitations.
✓ Trello
Its task-oriented application on which we gather all the necessary tasks for the day and disperse it towards our employees. It’s a great platform for productivity and being efficient at work.
Pricing: Its a free application for the task manager.
✓ Canva
An online content creation tool, it helps a lot in making those post for social media. If you don’t have any knowledge of hardcore designing skills such as Photoshop or Illustrator. You can create the post on Canva and download it in any quality that pleases you. It allows to integrate with any social media platform, popular ones are Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. It has many free templates and also they provide the paid version for the templates.
Pricing: It’s free to use and comes with a paid version of templates.
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.
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.
Angie Glaser
A few tools that I consider ‘essential’ for social media marketing are:
✓ CoSchedule
A comprehensive social media marketing calendar like CoSchedule. Coschedule syncs up with WordPress and all of our social media accounts to help easily and efficiently plan content and social media messages. It provides crucial help in scheduling messages ahead of time, and it automatically chooses the best time to post on each social account.
✓ Canva
An easy-to-use graphics editor like Canva. With Canva, anyone can become a graphic designer. Featuring a library of stock images, templates, and graphics, it’s a fantastic tool for creating visuals to share on social media.
✓ Unsplash
A high-quality, royalty-free image sourcing site like Unsplash. For contemporary, high-resolution images that are free to use, I rely on Unsplash. The library, which is updated daily, features diverse images for all my marketing needs.
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.
Oksana Chyketa
Social media itself is a very powerful tool for content promotion. But if to add some other complementary tools, you can get the spectacular results. During my career in digital marketing, I’ve tried many tools and I think I could recommend some of them.
Here’s one I like: If you want to reach more leads, you should definitely consider using hashtags in your marketing campaign. Using the right hashtags is key to getting in front of your target audiences.
✓ RiteTag
RiteTag is a Chrome extension and web app that tells you which hashtags to use to be seen now, which will help you be seen over time, and which ones to avoid. This tool is great for getting more leads to your post. The right hashtags can fill the top of the funnel, leading people to specialized content or landing pages that would have otherwise never known about your product or service.
Tommia Hayes
✓ Sprout Social
This tool is great for multiple reasons. It allows users to schedule posts, get in-depth data on social campaigns to create reports, provides competitor analysis, consumer research and trend research. Sprout social is a one-stop shop for digital marketers running social campaigns or just managing social channels.
✓ Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a great tool to manage multiple social media channels at once, measure social results, and provides social listening tools. It also has an integration functionality, which connects apps to the dashboard that provides users tools to streamline processes, access better data and more. Hootsuite also has an academy that helps marketers stay on top of trends. Plus, HootSuite offers affordable plans for any size budget.
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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.