Best Social Media Management Tools To Grow Your Business

 

Are you looking for the best social media management tools that may help you save time, increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and ultimately get more conversions?

The answer should always be ‘Yes’ if you’re really serious about ensuring your content reaches the maximum amount of people at the right time.

The study says that over 50% of the global population is on social media, i.e., more than 3.8 billion people, and this number will only go up from here.

So, my friends, to reach out to this massive audience, your business needs to be on social media.

And, for making your digital presence felt and managing your accounts across multiple social networks, you need to have the right marketing strategy and use the right tools.

Social media management tools help you establish your brand online and take your business to the next level.

But out of thousands of social media tools, choosing the best one is always a challenge.

That’s why this post focuses on the best social media management tools that you should be using in 2020 – including the key features of each one and their pricing plans.

Related: What is Social Media Marketing?

Best social media management tools:

#1. AgoraPulse

#2. Sendible

#3. Buffer

#4. SocialPilot

#5. Sprout Social

#6. e-Clincher

#7. Hootsuite

 

Let’s get started.

 

#1. AgoraPulse

 

 

One of the best social media management tools, Agorapulse was launched in 2011 with a focus on full social media management for individuals and businesses. The headquarter is in Paris and has 60+ highly skilled members from all over the world.

As per their website, over 23000 social media managers use this tool daily to scale up their efforts in social media marketing.

An easy-to-use social media management tool, Agorapulse provides numerous power-packed features for agencies and large teams.

It integrates with all the main social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing

Agorapulse provides access to all the publishing needs such as Schedule posts, Queue posts, Categorize queued posts, Bulk upload posts, or Delegate posts.

With its “Schedule again” feature, you can republish your content as many times as you wish by designating a frequency and interval that you want your content to be published.

For scheduling Instagram carousels and stories, you can use its push notifications.

Its “queue function” allows you to add your content to the queue line to publish your evergreen content again and again.

To collaborate on social content with those people who are not on your Agorapulse plan, you can purchase its shared calendar. This calendar helps your clients to easily review, accept, reject, and give feedback on your scheduled content.

You can also take advantage of its bitly integration and built-in UTM code generator. This lets you see which social content is driving traffic to your website.

• Engagement

You can easily manage all your messages using its amazing inbox. All the conversations for all the profiles of yours are combined in this inbox making it easy for you to reply, review, assign, or label them.

Its inbox assistant lets you set up automated moderation rules to send spam to its rightful place and assign items to the right teammate.

• Collaboration

With its real-time collision detection, you have the opportunity to see which of your colleagues or clients is reviewing and responding to inbox and monitored items.

Assign roles to each of your teammates and just by clicking on any inbox item, you can see when they took action.

It also lets you delegate incoming items to your colleague or clients who have better skills to answer.

You can also share custom notes about a particular user of your social media audience by clicking on the tab “Fans & Followers”.

• Reporting

Agorapulse offers reports to all its users, regardless of the plan.

The reports help you to know what content works and what doesn’t on each social network so that you can improve your social content strategy.

It also recommends the best day and time to post based on how your content performed in the past. And hashtags report helps you to determine which tags derive the most engagement.

 

Pricing

 

Agorapulse offers four pricing plans with a 28-day free trial. Just choose the plan according to the needs of your business types.

• Medium (for small business: 10 social profiles, 2 users) – $79 per month, billed annually
• Large (for agencies: 25 social profiles, 4 users) – $159 per month, billed annually
• X-Large (for large organizations: 40 social profiles, 8 users) – $239 per month, billed annually
• Enterprise (for large teams with many profiles: 60 social profiles, 20 users) – $399 per month, billed annually

 

#2. Sendible

 

 

Founded in 2009 by Gavin Hammer, Sendible is one of the leading social media management tools, specially designed for agencies and brands.

Its dashboard allows you to engage with your clients’ audience, monitor their brand, and track results.

From the same dashboard, you can also measure the ROI of your social media efforts to impress your clients. You don’t need to flip multiple times to perform these tasks.

It comes with over 20 integrations with the most popular social networks and blogs.

And its integration with one of the top communication software solutions like Slack makes it so easy to communicate with other members of your content marketing team.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing

You have the option to schedule your social media posts, images, and videos either individually or in bulk. Just group the social media posts into campaigns and schedule them on specific days and at optimal times.

They also suggest what content will generate higher follower engagement once you choose the topics.

And then just keep sharing and engaging content for your clients.

Their ‘RSS Auto Posting’ feature allows you to publish relevant content to social networks at regular intervals throughout the day to boost engagement.

Sendible also lets you plan an entire campaign in bulk and then import it into their platform for scheduling later.

• Collaboration

You can collaborate with others and allow them to contribute to your Content Library and produce great content for your clients.

Before you publish content to social media networks you can send it to your clients for their approval. You can do this by creating user workflows for clients and team members.

The best part? You decide who gets access to what.

Their custom user hierarchies and permission groups let you limit access to certain users.

• Engagement

The ‘Social Inbox’ of Sendible allows you to respond to comments and direct messages from all the platforms in one place.

You have the opportunity to be the first to engage with your clients’ prospects by monitoring hashtags, relevant keywords, and their competitors.

Whenever your clients’ customers mention their brand online, Sendible sends you notifications so that you could respond quickly.

• Reporting

Sendible has a powerful Social Media Reporting feature. With their ready-to-go social media reports, you get an instant snapshot of your social data.

Or, using their drag-and-drop report builder, you can build presentation-ready reports tailored for each client by choosing from over 250 modules.

Once you’re ready with your beautiful reports, you can send them by email to your team members and clients on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

 

Pricing:

 

It offers four pricing plans and all plans include a 14-day free trial.

• Starter (1 user, 12 services, 8 quick reports): $29/month or $24/month if billed annually
• Traction (3 users, 48 services, build 15 reports): $99/month or $84/month if billed annually
• Growth (7 users, 105 services, build 35 reports): $199/month or $169/month if billed annually
• Large (12 users, 192 services, build 60 reports): $299/month or $254/month if billed annually

 

#3. Buffer

 

 

Launched in 2010 and having more than 75000 customers, Buffer is one of the best social media management tools to consistently schedule your posts to your different social media accounts.

You can schedule your content to multiple platforms at predetermined times.

It also lets you schedule automated posts for weekdays or weekends.

And its follow-up tool allows you to assess the performance of past posts so that you can plan your future updates.

There is also a mobile app for iOS and Android to collaborate with your team members on the go.

The best part? Buffer offers a free plan for up to 3 social media accounts.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing and Scheduling

Yun can publish or schedule your content to publish on all major social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn from one simple dashboard.

Or, you can also draft your posts to finish later, collaborate with your team, and plan a more effective social media marketing campaign. This way you’ll end up creating remarkable content.

• Collaboration

With this tool, you have a great opportunity to work with your team to create high-quality content that your audience is surely going to love.

You can create drafts, get your team members’ feedback, review the posts for quality and brand.

And, great and engaging content is ready for you before you hit ‘Publish’.

It also allows you to share and manage access to each social media account.

With the ‘Premium’ and ‘Business’ plans, you can invite additional users to contribute to the content and create workflows for more streamlined collaboration.

• Integrations

Buffer offers 60+ third-party integrations with some of the major apps like Zapier, IFTTT, Quuu, Pocket, Feedly, etc.

You can also install a Chrome extension to share your content even more quickly and easily. Just open the composer on any webpage and add posts right to your queue. No need to go to your dashboard.

• Image Creation Tool

With the help of its free in-built image creation tool, ‘Pablo’, you can instantly create images for different social media platforms.

• Analytics and Reporting

From its Analytics dashboard, you can track your performance, access multiple accounts, and create beautiful reports for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The Analytics tool helps you in tracking key engagement metrics for each social media account and measuring stories, individual posts, and hashtags.

This way you’ll get to know whether you’re targeting the right audience which is important for better marketing.

Buffer gives you an option to create customized reports with all the plans.

You can build fully customized reports and share them with your team members, managers, and stakeholders.

But adding a custom logo to each of your reports is available only with its ‘Premium’ plan.

 

Pricing:

 

For ‘Publish’, Buffer has three pricing plans:

• Pro (8 social accounts, 100 scheduled posts, 1 user): $15 /month billed monthly
• Premium (8 social accounts, 2000 scheduled posts, 2 users): $65/month billed monthly
• Business (25 social accounts, 2000 scheduled posts, 6 users): $99/month billed monthly

For ‘Analyze’, it has two pricing plans:

• Pro (8 social accounts): $35/month billed monthly
• Premium (10 social accounts): $50/month billed monthly

For each plan, Buffer offers a 14-day free trial.

 

#4. SocialPilot

 

 

Having the trust of more than 115000 businesses worldwide for managing social media, scheduling social media posts, boosting engagement, and detailed analytical insights, SocialPilot is one of the leading social media management tools.

It is the most cost-effective and user-friendly tool with multiple features.

You can add all your social media accounts and post unlimited updates.

You don’t need to worry about running out of limits.

With the help of its in-built content curation platform, you can share the trending content or schedule them directly to your account.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing and Scheduling

Using SocialPilot’s social media scheduler, you can schedule and publish your content on all major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. This helps you expand your brand reach, save time, and generate more leads.

The ‘Bulk Upload’ feature enables you to bulk upload article posts as well as image posts. You can bulk schedule up to 500 posts in advance.

It allows you to add the RSS Feed URL of a particular site and the RSS Automation tool will automatically share your favorite blogs on your social media accounts.

• Collaboration

SocialPilot has an extensive collaboration tool.

Your clients can securely connect their social media accounts without sharing their credentials with the client account management.

It also lets you to onboard your social media clients by using your branded invitation links.

Or, you can distribute the link by email or embed it on a website to automatically onboard them.

Assign different roles to your team members such as Admin, Manager, and Content Creator.

Managers and content creators can create workflows. When content creators create posts and schedule them, they can get managers’ approval before they hit ‘Publish’.

• Social Inbox

Using this tool, you can view and respond to all the comments, messages, and posts across Facebook pages in real-time.

You also have the option to give access to Social Inbox to the right people of your team. And thus you can ensure that conversations are replied to faster and you don’t keep your fans and customers waiting.

Note: This feature is available only for ‘Agency’ and ‘Small Team’ plans.

• Analytics and Reporting

SocialPilot offers detailed and comprehensive Analytics Reports for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business.

You can understand your top-performing content, get audience insights to create an engagement strategy, discover top social media influencers, and also the optimal time to post.

 

Pricing:

 

There are three pricing plans with a 14-day free trial for each plan.

• Agency (100 social media accounts, 1000 posts per day, 10000 posts in the queue, 10 team members): $83.33/month, billed annually
• Small Team (50 social media accounts, 500 posts per day, 5000 posts in the queue, 5 team members): $41.66/month, billed annually
• Professional (25 social media accounts, 200 posts per day, 2500 posts in the queue, 3 team members): $25/month, billed annually

 

#5. Sprout Social

 

 

Trusted by over 20000 world-class brands and organizations, Sprout Social aims to be one of the top all-in-one social media management tools.

It works with a goal to “understand and reach your audience, engage your community, and measure performance”. And, you build and grow stronger relationships with your audience on social platforms.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing and Scheduling

Sprout Social allows you to queue up various social posts in advance to schedule and publish them across different social networks simultaneously.

You can use the scheduling and monitoring tools to automatically publish content at optimal times, maximize engagement, and get real-time engagement updates.

It gives you easy access to the central library of multimedia assets. This makes it easy to create, optimize, and publish engaging content across multiple social networks.

Using the shared content calendar and automated workflows, your team members can collaborate with each other and increase productivity.

Also, with message approval features, you can make sure that content is always approved by team leaders or managers before publishing.

• Engagement

You can manage all the incoming messages and provide quick responses from one place, i.e., its ‘Smart Inbox’. Here, you also have the option to categorize the messages based on your workflow and focus on what needs your attention.

You can manage Facebook, Google My Business, and Trip Advisor reviews for your business and build a strong online reputation.

With Advanced plans, you can create automated Chatbots to respond to messages quickly and share information.

And because of its integration with helpdesks such as Zendesk, HubSpot, and UserVoice, you don’t need to leave Sprout Social dashboard for tracking and managing support issues. But this feature is available only with ‘Professional’ and ‘Advanced’ plans and not with ‘Standard’ plans.

• Analytics and Reporting

Sprout Social offers an in-depth and powerful Analytics and Reporting tool.

You have access to an overview of performance on all your connected social media platforms and also to your inbound and outbound tagged messages.

You can compare your performance to your competitors which will make it easier for you to identify new opportunities in your industry.

The ‘Professional’ and ‘Advanced’ plans provide ‘Paid Social Reporting’ for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This will help you identify top-performing campaigns and optimize future ad spend.

There are also some additional features available with ‘Professional’ and ‘Advanced’ plans such as Response Rate and Time Analysis Reports, Trend Analysis for Twitter keywords, and hashtags.

 

Pricing:

 

Sprout Social offers four pricing plans. All plans include a 30-day free trial and you have to pay for the number of users you require. For example, if you require 5 users for the Standard plan which is $99 per user, per month, you have to pay $396 per month.

• Standard (5 social profiles): $99 per user, per month
• Professional (10 social profiles): $149 per user, per month
• Advanced (10 social profiles): $249 per user, per month
• Enterprise: This is a custom pricing plan where the number of profiles is customizable

 

#6. e-clincher

 

 

Launched in 2012, e-clincher is another all-in-one social media management tool. It provides a complete and user-friendly solution to engage, monitor, and grow your audience across multiple social media platforms.

The ‘Suggested Content’ feature never lets you be short of ideas to create fresh new content and share it with your audiences.

This tool offers integrations with all the top social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Blogger.

Integrations are also available for some leading third-party applications like Google Analytics, Canva, Bitly, Zendesk CRM, and more.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing and Scheduling

Like other social media tools, e-clincher also allows you to plan ahead and schedule your posts, tweets, and pins to multiple social media networks.

Using the ‘Smart Calendar’ feature, you can easily schedule and post your content. You can also reschedule old posts and view your future posting schedule.

The URL Shortener feature automatically shortens all the URLs using Google URL Shortener. All you need to do is simply paste a link into the publisher.

Its integration with ‘Canva’ allows you to easily make beautiful and eye-catching images.

• Auto Post

You can automatically publish your posts by recycling them with queues.

Yeah! This feature gives you three options to recycle your posts with queues:

1. Recycle Queue – Recycle evergreen content
2. One-Time Queue – Publish your posts once
3. End-Date Queue – Recycle your queue content until a specified end date (great for campaigns)

• Engagement

You can engage with your audience, followers, users, and leads across multiple social media accounts.

It gives you access to all the feeds from your different social networks so that you can engage with your followers and grow your audience.

Also, the ‘Favorite Feed’ feature allows you to add the most important social feeds to it, and no need to navigate one by one.

The ‘Social Media Inbox’ tool lets you interact with your audiences across different social accounts from one place. You can easily engage and respond to your audiences.

• Analytics Reports

The combination of e-clincher’s powerful analytics with Google Analytics helps you to get complete social analytics for each profile as well as your posts and tweets.

It enables you to track key metrics such as traffic sources, how much time your audiences spend on your site, the number of visitors to your site, and much more.

With Social Analytics, you can analyze your social accounts and understand follower trends, brand mentions, the performance of your posts, and more.

After analyzing the social analytics, if you find that one of your posts is doing well, you can repost it directly from your analytics just by clicking on ‘Repost’.

The fully customizable Analytics Dashboard lets you easily customize the reposts. You can drag-and-drop the reports and graphs to see the most crucial data.

 

Pricing:

 

e-clincher offers three pricing plans with a 14-day free trial.

• Basic (10 profiles, 1 user): $59/month
• Premier (20 profiles, 3 users): $119/month
• Agency (40 profiles, unlimited brands, 6 users): $219/month

 

#7. Hootsuite

 

 

Launched in 2008 by Ryan Holmes and one of the oldest and the most popular social media management tools, Hootsuite is the global leader in social media management.

More than 18 million customers and employees of over 80% of the Fortune1000 companies use this platform to manage their social accounts and grow their business online.

This social media tool integrates with all the major social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. It also integrates with other community-based platforms such as Reddit, Tumblr, Storify, etc.

The best part? Hootsuite offers affordable pricing plans if your business has a limited budget for social media management. Even the lowest-priced plan ‘Professional’ has all the essential functionalities such as ‘unlimited scheduling’, ‘auto-scheduling’, ‘bulk scheduling’, ‘publishing calendar’, ‘reporting’, and ‘social inbox’.

Also, you can try out their limited free plan for up to 3 social profiles.

IMPORTANT! Hootsuite Academy offers free online courses to help you master new media skills and the fundamentals of social media marketing.

After completing the free courses, you have the option to take up paid courses with certifications to get advanced training.

 

Key Features:

 

• Publishing and Scheduling

Using the ‘Composure’ feature, you can create engaging, accurate, and on-brand posts, then schedule them and publish them from one place.

You also have access to asset libraries, stock media, image editing, and video publishing. This will automatically adjust the bitrate, height, and width according to the requirements of each social network.

The ‘Auto Scheduler’ feature allows you to schedule your content in advance and automatically publish it across multiple social networks. This helps you save time and stay active on social media 24/7.

Work collaboratively with your team members to get their insights and edits.

Do you think that your content needs to be reviewed by some stakeholders?

Just use their easy-to-use approval process before hitting ‘Publish’.

It also lets you create dashboard streams to curate and share content from across your networks.

Or, just install the ‘Hootlet extension’ to your device and post content from any website without logging into your social accounts.

• Engagement

Using Hootsuite’s ‘Inbox’, you can manage all the incoming messages from different social networks quite easily.

Either you respond to the comments or questions of your audiences yourself or if you’re working in a team, assign this task to the right team member.

By tracking and analyzing your team metrics, you can optimize your response and resolution times for incoming messages. This will improve your customer service.

Hootsuite also integrates with a tool ‘ReviewTrackers’ which captures reviews from other sites. Here, you have the opportunity to see the opinions of your real-time audiences. And then just share positive reviews and increase your brand’s reputation.

• Analyzing and Reporting

You can analyze the results of your performance on multiple social networks using its customizable reports and monitor improvements over time.

You can calculate the ROI using ‘Hootsuite Impact’ and see how your marketing campaigns on different social channels drive leads, conversions, and sales.

And, to monitor Instagram activities like mentions, comments, and tags, Hootsuite allows you to integrate a tool ‘Panoramiq Multiview’ with all its pricing plans.

 

Pricing:

 

Hootsuite offers four pricing plans:

• Professional (10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, 1 user): $29/month
• Team (20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, 3 users): $129/month
• Business (35 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, 5+ users): $599/month
• Enterprise: You need to contact the company for pricing.

There’s a 30-day free trial with two of its plans ‘Professional’ and ‘Team’ and for the other two, you have to request a demo.

Conclusion

 

So, this is the list of the best social media management tools you should be using in 2020 to grow your brand and your business online.

All the tools in this list offer free trials.

Just test them out and see which one suits best for your needs, your budget, and your marketing goals.

Did I miss any other tools that you think I should have included in the list? As always, do let me know in the comments below.