When managing a social media presence for your brand or your client, there’s an entire library of tools you’re going to need, from content creation tools and social media monitoring tools to social media scheduling tools and more.
But with so many options, how do you determine the best tools for your needs and your brand?
To help you find the perfect social media scheduling tool for your brand, we’ve put together a list of the 11 best tools we recommend using for scheduling out and automatically posting your social media content.
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Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?
The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
1. Sprout Social
2. Buffer
3. Agorapulse
4. HeyOrca
5. MeetEdgar
6. Oktopost
7. Later
8. CoSchedule
9. Planable
10. Sked Social
11. Hootsuite
BONUS: Keyhole
Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?
Do you want your entire job to consist of sitting at your computer or on your smartphone, creating and posting new content to social media?
Let me answer that for you – no, you don’t! There are so many other tasks that a social media manager needs to attend to, and content creation can’t be the only one.
That’s why you need a social media scheduling tool to help you create and schedule content in batches, so that you can also focus on monitoring, analytics, customer service and more.
Not only that, but social media schedulers are helpful tools for planning out your social media content and ensuring your content calendar is filled with content that helps your bottom line. Create patterns and themes and keep everything in check, all with your scheduling tool.
Improve efficiency in your day-to-day tasks by taking advantage of a social media scheduler and improving your social media management processes.
The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
Now that you know how important social media scheduling tools are for your social media content curation, it’s time to dive into the real reason you’re here – learning more about our top 11 best social media schedulers for social teams and managers.
Each of these tools offers a different set of features at different price points so that you can pinpoint the right option for you.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a well known social media management tool, and that includes their social media scheduler.
While their price point is a bit more enterprise, their plethora of features does help even it out.
Sprout Social offers a social media scheduling calendar that also includes a tool that helps users to find optimal posting times for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Users also gain access to social listening and monitoring tools, social media team collaboration, community management and more.
Sprout offers a free trial for new users so they can take the software for a test run and see if its processes and interface are the right choice for their brand.
Pricing: Sprout Social’s plans start at $99 per user per month.
2. Buffer
Buffer is another social media management tool that has been around for years, starting as a small publishing tool with daily curated content suggestions, but adding on more and more facets to their brand until they became a full-scale social media software.
Users are able to use Buffer for scheduling and analyzing content, planning out Instagram stories, creating a shoppable feed, adding tags to your posts and more.
Buffer offers two different options at different monthly plans – Buffer Publish and Buffer Analyze – or the ability to sign up for both for $85/month.
Based on your needs, you can take a look at their pricing options and even get a 14-day free trial to check out their pro options.
For smaller brands or public figures, Buffer also offers a completely free plan with 3 social accounts and 10 scheduled posts per account.
Pricing: Buffer’s plans start at $15 per month.
3. Agorapulse
Another useful social media scheduler is Agorapulse, offering features that allow users to schedule content, pull social media reports, interact with followers and more.
Agorapulse is also really helpful for teams, allowing users to create content, send it through the pipeline and give team leads the chance to approve or reject content before it’s published on a brand page.
Starting at $79/mo after a free trial, Agorapulse also gives your brand the power to monitor various hashtags and conversations directly through your social management platform.
Browse their plan options to see if you can find one that fits your budget and your social media scheduling needs.
Pricing: Agorapulse’s plans start at $79 per month.
4. HeyOrca
HeyOrca is a great tool for managing, planning and scheduling your social media content all in one place. You get access to an easy-to-use social media calendar that also shows you mockup previews of your social content before it goes live.
This tool is more heavily focused on your social media content calendar, showcasing where you’ve scheduled content, what types of content and for what days.
In fact, their pricing model also follows this same focus, requiring that users pay per social media calendar with unlimited accounts, users, and post previews.
This is a great way to get a feel for your posting patterns and ensure you’re sharing the best content at the most ideal times.
Pricing: HeyOrca’s plans start at $99 per month.
5. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar brands itself as a social media automation and scheduling tool that helps businesses spend less time doing mundane social media tasks by automating them.
This includes tasks like writing captions based on quotes in your articles, regularly reposting old scheduled posts, and automatically importing newly published content that needs to be shared on social media.
While users will help MeetEdgar get set up on all of these tasks, it can certainly help a one man show do more for a brand by automating several content creation jobs.
Because MeetEdgar’s features are ideal for freelancers and solopreneurs, their pricing matches their target customer with plans starting at only $19/month.
If you want to have more of a hand on your social media content, this may not be the best tool for you, but if you’re looking for something that can really make social media content creation easy and automatic, MeetEdgar can be a great option.
Pricing: MeetEdgar’s plans start at $19 per month for Edgar Lite and go up to $49 per month for the full service.
6. Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media scheduling tool that focuses more on the B2B industry, helping big businesses to manage their online presence in a way that really engages their audience.
Not only does Oktopost integrate with tons of great B2B CRMs and other tools, it offers features like social media publishing, listening, analytics and even social governance for managing global teams.
Oktopost’s social media publishing calendar gives you a great overview of all of the social content you have scheduled over the month so you can easily rearrange, edit, remove, or manually publish your content.
Their website offers tons of information about their various features, but in order to learn more about their plans and pricing, you’ll have to book a demo.
However, with a tool aimed specifically at B2B customers, it can be worth it for those businesses to find a social media management platform that’s so industry specific.
Pricing: Oktopost requires potential users to book a demo to learn more about pricing options.
7. Later
Later focuses more on Instagram publishing than any other platform, although their tool does allow users to connect Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts as well.
Their Instagram features include previewing your grid, placing a link in your bio to lead to your website, blog posts, and product pages, finding and sharing user-generated content, and working with Instagram influencers.
Being a very visual platform, Later’s Pinterest scheduling and planning is a great add-on to this tool.
If your brand focuses heavily on imagery, Later might be the perfect social media scheduler for you, with incredibly affordable plan prices.
Choose a free forever plan for basic account management or check out one of their higher tier plans for more features and users.
Pricing: Later offers a free forever plan, but premium plans start at $12.50 per month, paid annually.
8. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is more than just a social media scheduling tool – it’s also a great tool for scheduling out your blog’s editorial calendar, integrating with WordPress and automatically publishing both social media and blog content.
This is great for brands and social media teams who are looking to reduce the number of tools they’re using and manage both social and content marketing all from one place.
Plans start at $14/month per user for the blog calendar and increase from there, based on the features you need for your brand.
Create blog content and social media content at the same time, making your job as social media manager much more seamless.
Pricing: CoSchedule’s plans start at $14 per user per month.
9. Planable
Planable is another great social media scheduling tool that lets you get a sneak peek at exactly what your social post will look like once it’s been publishing on the platform of your choice.
Not only that, but your team can easily make comments on the posts asking for various edits to copy, visuals, and more before approving them to be scheduled and automatically posted.
Plan your content from beginning to end with Planable’s social media management tool and create tags based on the content category or campaign of the content you’re sharing.
Planable gives you a chance to try the platform free for your first 50 posts, then brands are able to choose from a selection of affordable subscriptions when signing up for the service.
Easily collaborate with your social media team on content creation by taking advantage of Planable’s social media scheduling platform.
Pricing: Planable offers a free plan for users, but premium plans start at $33 per month.
10. Sked Social
Our tenth best social media scheduler is Sked Social, another tool that focuses heavily on helping brands with their Instagram content.
Like Later, though, their platform still does work across a variety of platforms, so users can schedule to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all from the same tool.
Sked Social’s Instagram management features include scheduling and auto-posting Instagram stories, analytics, adding a link in user bios, and a visual Instagram planner. This makes it easy for social media managers to get a glimpse at what their Instagram feed will look like pre-publication.
Interested users are able to take advantage of a 7-day free trial to see what the software is all about, with the lowest plan starting at $25/month.
With a focus on media brands, eCommerce shops, retail brands, and freelancers, Sked Social could be a great option if your business fits in one of those industries.
Pricing: Sked Social offers a 7-day free trial, then plans start at $25 per month.
11. Hootsuite
Hootsuite, the last social media scheduler on our list, has also been in the social media marketing landscape for years, evolving and adapting to fit the needs of social media teams across the board.
Users can view monthly calendars to help schedule out content and ensure they’re sharing posts on the most optimal days and times. Hootsuite also gives managers access to direct messages from social media in their dashboard to manage customer communication all in one place.
With more collaborative tools, social media teams can take advantage of the opportunity to work together on social content, even when working from home, all around the world. Team leads can assign various tasks to team members and approve content before it’s live.
Hootsuite users can also create streams in their dashboards to get a quick view at recent notifications, user feeds, and more for easy community management.
Plans start at $39/month for a professional plan with 10 social accounts for a single user, after a 30-day trial that lets potential customers get an idea of what to expect from the platform and if it’s the right tool for them.
Plan prices increase quickly based on your business needs, but the collaboration and features that come with it could be well worth it depending on how your team runs social media.
Pricing: Hootsuite’s plans start at $39 per month after a 30-day free trial.
BONUS: Keyhole
While Keyhole isn’t necessarily a social media scheduling tool, it fits perfectly as a complementary analytics tool that can help you measure your social media success.
Once you’ve scheduled out your content using your social media scheduler, you can easily track performance, pull detailed reports, monitor accounts and more with Keyhole.
Keyhole is also the perfect tool for tracking how your hashtag choices perform so you can determine if you’re using the best options for your content or if you could increase your reach with different hashtags.
You can also pull real-time data from your social media platforms to easily track conversations and user behavior.
Plans start at $49/month depending on the features you need for your business and the amount of posts you need to measure and report on each month.
Start with a free trial to test run Keyhole’s software before diving in with a full account for your brand and your social media team.
Pricing: Keyhole’s plans start at $49/mo after a free trial. View more pricing options here.
Start Scheduling and Measuring Your Social Content
It’s not enough to just create and send social media content out into the world. You want to make sure the content you’re creating is helping your business’s bottom line.
By using analyzing and reporting tools, you can be sure you’re creating the best content for your brand and for your audience, all while generating the best ROI possible.
Related Articles:
16 Content Creation Tools to Make Life as a Marketer Easier
The Free Social Media Reporting Template for Marketers
The post The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Businesses appeared first on Keyhole.