Social media management tools: your complete guide

From scheduling to analytics, every social media management tool you need to ace your social media marketing
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Table of Contents

If you’re marketing something on social media – whether it’s yourself, your brand, or both – you’ll no doubt be aware that there’s a huge range of social media management tools out there. 

These handy tools can help you with everything from scheduling posts to assessing ad performance. With so many to choose from, it can be tricky to assess which ones will work best for you. Which tools you choose to use will depend on what you’re trying to achieve and how much you want to spend.

What are the best social media management tools? How much do they cost? And what exactly do they do? We’ll answer all these questions (and many more) in this all-in-one guide.

What is a social media management tool?

Social media management tools (also known as social media management software, social media marketing tools, or social media management platforms) can be anything from a simple photo editing app, to a one-stop, do-it-all dashboard for planning, posting, and reporting on your content. 

The best social media management tools help marketers, business owners, and content creators spend more time on creative and strategic work, and less time on the operational aspects of managing social media accounts. 

Some tools focus on very specific functions related to social media marketing. For example, they’re incredible for creating and scheduling posts. Other tools are all-rounders that do everything – creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analysing, engaging, and collaborating. But they may not do all these things equally well.

What are the main types of social media tools?

While there are social media management tools out there to do almost any social media-related job imaginable, generally speaking, the tools fall into five main categories:

  1. Content creation – helping you create engaging content
  2. Content curation – helping you to find great content to share and talk about
  3. Content planning, scheduling, and publishing – helping you plan, schedule, and post your content to different social platforms
  4. Analytics and social listening – helping you track your social media performance, brand mentions, and more 
  5. Influencer management – helping you manage your relationship with social influencers

What tools do social media managers need?

Managing social media accounts can feel incredibly overwhelming, especially when you’re dealing with multiple accounts across multiple platforms. Having access to at least one or two good social media management tools is vital – not just to ensure your social media marketing is effective, but also to save your own sanity.

If you’re just starting out and trying to grow your presence, then a tool (or tools) with scheduling, publishing, and reporting functionality is the bare minimum you should aim for. Why? Scheduling and publishing because it’ll help you streamline posting and be more efficient. Reporting, because if you don’t know what’s worked and what hasn’t, it’s impossible to improve your feed.

If you’re managing a bigger presence, then having tools to help with all of the functions listed in the section above will bring added efficiencies.

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Social media management tool prices

How much do social media management platforms cost? This is the big question. A tool could be all-singing and all-dancing, but if you can’t afford it, then it’s of no use to you. 

We’ve highlighted the prices of individual tools in our rundown of the best social media management tools below. The majority of these tools are available as SaaS (software as a service) platforms. That means if you want to go beyond using the free version available, there’s usually a subscription fee to pay monthly or yearly. The costs will increase depending on the number of users, the number of social media platforms or accounts you want to connect, or both.

Are there any free social media management tools?

You can access some social media management platforms for free in what’s known as a ‘freemium’ model. In other words, it’s a paid-for tool that offers a free version. We’ve highlighted the best one (in our opinion), and it’s worth bearing in mind that using free tools (or free versions of paid-for tools) may limit the functionality you’ll have access to. This might be OK if you’re only managing a small presence.

If you’ve got a large social media presence with multiple accounts on multiple platforms, you may find it’s worth paying to simplify your day-to-day job.

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The best social media management tools – from content creation to analytics

So you’re convinced you need the tools, but which ones should you choose? We’ve scoured the web to bring you the best tools across all the main categories:

  1. Best all-rounder social media management tools
  2. Best free social media management tool
  3. Best tools for social media content creation
  4. Best tools for social media content curation 
  5. Best social media scheduling and posting tools
  6. Best social media analytics tools
  7. Best social media influencer tool


1. Best all-rounder social media management tools

Want a tool that manages as much of the social media work as possible? These are the ones to try:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the biggest and most well-established social media management platforms. And with good reason. Its host of tools allows you to work seamlessly across multiple accounts and platforms, making it a good choice for medium-to-large companies and agencies that manage multiple profiles for clients.

Features:

  • Publish and schedule social media posts to a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and more
  • Manage incoming messages and mentions, and respond to them in a single inbox
  • Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to gather audience sentiment and stay on top of trending topics
  • Access analytics functionality that will help you to keep track of performance

Price: From £39 per month for their ‘Professional’ subscription. They also offer a 30-day free trial.

Buffer

Great for individuals and small businesses, Buffer is another all-rounder platform that comes with powerful scheduling functionality as well as some great analytics – e.g. Google Analytics integration. It also has some nifty functionality to create landing pages for lead generation.

Features:

  • Publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule all the social media content you’ve created for each channel
  • A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
  • Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s-eye-view of how your social media efforts are performing
  • The ability to create landing pages for lead generation, sales, and more



Price: 
From FREE (yep, that’s right). But it’s worth bearing in mind that you’ll only get the basic features in the free plan. The ‘Essentials’ and ‘Team’ plans are reasonably priced at $5 per month, and $10 per month respectively.


Sprout Social

By far the priciest of our recommended all-rounder social media management tools, Sprout Social has powerful scheduling and analytics tools bigger businesses may need.

As well as working across all major social platforms, with the ability to handle multiple accounts and profiles, it also offers brand listening and content curation. It’s great for managing customer service responses too, thanks to its ‘Smart Inbox’ feature.

Features:

  • Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting, and more in one dashboard
  • The ability to boost posts with ad spend on Meta platforms
  • A ‘ViralPost’ feature to ensure you publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage – boosting visibility and reach automatically
  • Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms – giving you a complete view of all your social interactions
  • Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing

Price: From $249 per month


2. Best free social media management tool

Want the benefits of social media management software without the cost? This is our top pick:

Postly

Postly is available on a ‘freemium’ model (it also has paid-for options). But the reason we’ve picked this as the best free social media management tool, is because it offers the most comprehensive set of features on its free plan. 

Features (available for free):

  • Lets you schedule to a whole host of platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Telegram
  • AI writer and hashtag generator that speeds up writing captions and descriptions
  • Content calendar and curated suggestions to help you plan content
  • Unlimited team members and team collaboration

     

The free plan has almost all the features of the paid plans (the only one missing is recurring posts), but it has usage limits. On the free plan, you only get one workspace, 10 social accounts, and the ability to schedule 20 posts at a time.

Price: FREE (paid plans also available)


3. Best social media content creation tools

Want beautiful images and engaging videos, but don’t have a multimedia team on tap? These handy tools will help you create some truly killer content.

Canva

Even complete design novices can create gorgeous content using Canva. With simple-to-use templates, the ability to upload images, lots of free graphics and icons, and plenty of font choices, it makes designing stand-out image and video posts for social media an absolute breeze. (Warning: it’s a bit addictive…)

What’s more –  and this is a big bonus – many of its core features are available for free. 

Features:

  • Drag and drop editor that allows you to design engaging content for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in minutes
  • Post your creations to social directly from Canva (or download them if you prefer)
  • Over 250,000 free templates for any need
  • An extensive media library of free stock photos, videos, graphics, audio tracks, and more (plus additional options in the paid plans)
  • Team collaboration tools

     

Price: From FREE


Ripl

Ripl is similar to Canva in that it allows you to create multimedia content even if you’re a multimedia novice. Built squarely with video posts and ads in mind, it’ll help you create video content from static photos, and offers posting and tracking functionality too.

Features:

  • Easily create videos from static photos, no experience needed
  • 1000s of trending and seasonal templates included in their social media calendar
  • Automatically apply your brand’s logo, font, and colours to any template
  • Free access to 1M+ professional stock images & videos
  • Share to all your social channels at once
  • Track social engagements by channel
  • Schedule posts in advance

Price: From $8.33 per month for their ‘base’ plan (which doesn’t include scheduling posts)


4. Best tools for social media content curation 

It’s important to mix up your social media posts by sharing interesting content from other sources, and that means curating content. This could entail spending hours sifting through countless sites, but it doesn’t have to with these time-saving tools.

Pocket

If you’re guilty of emailing yourself interesting articles or keeping a million tabs open so you don’t ‘lose’ some great content, Pocket is for you. It helps you save and categorise content, and makes curated recommendations based on your preferences so you don’t have to go trawling the internet for stories.

Features

  • Save interesting stories with ease using the Pocket button in your browser or with the Pocket app
  • Categorise saved content with tags
  • Highlight the sections of a piece of content that most interest you
  • Receive curated recommendations based on your saves

     

Price: From FREE (and it’s likely you’ll only need the free version).


Feedly

Feedly bills itself as ‘the cure for information overload’. Its smart AI features can help you track content and insights from across the web without having to read everything. Not only can you save articles to share later, but you can share content immediately to Twitter, send to Buffer to post, and save it to your Pocket account, among other things.

Features:

  • Smart news aggregation – powered by ‘Leo’, Feedly’s AI
  • AI prioritisation of your news feed
  • Sharing tools
  • A range of market intelligence tools (enterprise version)

Price: From FREE. The paid-for versions include more features and no ads.


5. Best social media schedulers and publishing tools

Some of our recommended all-rounder tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, are great options for social media scheduling and posting. If having access to powerful scheduling functionality that saves you time is your number one priority, here are a couple more worth checking out:

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar stands out from the crowd with its impressive automated scheduling tools. For it to work, you need to provide it with ‘evergreen content’ (content that doesn’t go out of date). It then automatically pulls posts from your content library to keep your social feed fresh every day.

Features:

  • AI-powered content scheduling based on evergreen content
  • A ‘bottomless’ library of categorised content
  • AI-powered post writing, including auto-generated variations on every post
  • Analytics and A/B testing

     

Price: From $24.91 per month, but that’s only for limited functionality. For entrepreneurs and small businesses, you’re better off choosing their full plan at $41.58 per month.


SocialBee

Another all-rounder, SocialBee is a social media marketing tool that can manage all your social media output. We’ve chosen it as one of the best scheduling tools specifically, because on top of the typical post creation, scheduling, and analytics, it also offers similar functionality to MeetEdgar – i.e. allowing you to create an evergreen content queue. In addition, its calendar and planning dashboard are super easy to use.

Features:

  • Schedule and publish posts to all major social media platforms
  • Organise your posts in diverse content categories and schedule them to post on multiple social networks at different times during the week
  • Re-queue your posts to create an evergreen content cycle and maintain a consistent social media posting schedule
  • Expire posts after a specific date and/or a certain number of shares
  • Integrates with content creation and curation tools, like Canva and Pocket


Price: 
From $19 per month.


6. Best social media analytics tools

Knowing how your content is performing is vital if you want to grow your social media presence and see a return on your investment (ROI). In fact, it’s so important that we’ve written a whole post about the best social media analytics tools

Many of the tools we’ve already covered above, like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, SocialBee, and Postly have great analytics functions that can help you understand how your content is performing. But another worth mentioning is…

Google Analytics

But isn’t Google Analytics for websites? Well, yes it is. But it’s also a really important tool to help you understand how your social media work is driving traffic (and hopefully conversions) on your website. 

With relevant quantitative data, Google Analytics can help you identify which social media platforms drive the maximum, targeted traffic to your site. And it’s possible to find out how these social media users interact with your website once they arrive. This is crucial for helping you determine your social media ROI.

It’s worth bearing in mind that many of the tools we’ve already discussed have integrations with Google Analytics, so keep an eye out for this functionality.

Features

  • Incredibly detailed tracking of website traffic, user interactions with your website, conversions, and so on
  • Integrates with various social media management tools
  • Can give you the details to understand the true ROI of your social media work – not just how many people clicked your post, but whether they did something (for example, bought something) as a result.

     

Price: From FREE. And the free version is suitable for businesses of all sizes, however you may need to get some support setting it up if you’re not a tech whizz.


7. Best social media influencer tool

Influencer campaigns are incredibly effective tools for social media managers to see real ROI and return on ad spend (ROAS) from their work. Influencer tools are the new kid on the block when it comes to social media management platforms. They’re designed to help both influencers and the brands that work with them to manage their relationships with ease. 

So, whether you’re a talented creator who’s managing multiple sponsorship opportunities or a company wanting to work with the most influential social media creators, this could be the tool for you…

Vamp

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot here, right? In fact, we take the only spot as our software is entirely unique. We help brands manage creator marketing campaigns with an end-to-end suite of marketing tools. And we help talented creators find exciting new collaborations, manage their sponsorship opportunities, and get paid.

Features

For brands:

  • Consolidates all your creator interactions into a single console
  • Campaign calculator that estimates the outcomes you can expect to achieve
  • CAST tool that identifies the right creators for your campaign
  • Campaign workflow management – including team collaboration, campaign calendar, content approvals, and direct messaging with creators
  • Easily boost your visibility with paid media

     

For creators:

  • Become part of a hand-selected community of talented creators
  • Discover brand collab opportunities on our app
  • Get notified and receive briefs from your favourite brands whenever they go live, wherever you are in the world 
  • If you’re picked for a campaign, you get paid – no chasing, no stress
 

To get a better idea of how it works, take a look at our case studies.

Price: FREE for creators and from FREE for brands. Find out more.

FAQs

How do social media management tools integrate with other marketing platforms or CRM systems?

Many social media management tools offer integrations with various marketing platforms and CRM systems. For instance, tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social can integrate with CRM systems such as Salesforce and HubSpot, allowing businesses to sync customer data and track interactions across channels. These integrations enable marketers to streamline workflows, enhance customer insights, and improve the overall efficiency of their marketing strategies by consolidating data and leveraging automated processes.

What are some advanced features that distinguish high-end social media management tools from basic ones?

High-end social media management tools distinguish themselves with advanced features like AI-driven analytics, social listening, automated reporting, and enhanced team collaboration capabilities. These tools may offer robust sentiment analysis, detailed audience segmentation, and predictive analytics to help businesses fine-tune their strategies. Additionally, they might include more extensive integration options, advanced scheduling features, and customizable dashboards that cater to the unique needs of larger enterprises or more complex marketing campaigns.

How can businesses effectively measure the ROI of using social media management tools?

To effectively measure the ROI of social media management tools, businesses should track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and overall reach. Comparing these metrics before and after implementing the tools can provide insights into their impact. Additionally, businesses should consider the time and cost savings achieved through automation and improved workflow efficiency. Advanced analytics provided by these tools can help quantify the value of social media efforts by linking them directly to revenue growth and customer acquisition metrics.

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