The best social media tools aren’t single-purpose — they’re multifunctional. A quality tool can streamline your workflow, enhance content creation, facilitate team collaboration, provide analytics, and aid future planning. Essentially, the right tool can significantly ease your workload.
Whether you’re a solo creator, part of a small marketing team, or managing social media at the enterprise level, there are numerous tools available to enrich your tech stack.
Below, I’ll explore the features to look for in a social media tool and highlight some top choices.
What to Look for in a Good Social Media Tool
Social media tools can assist with content creation and scheduling, monitoring online conversations, running ad campaigns, and analysing data. To build an effective toolkit, consider your specific needs and goals.
For instance, if you’re a solo-preneur, you juggle multiple roles daily. Your social media tools should be multifunctional, simplifying and speeding up content creation.
If you’re a freelance social media manager working with various clients, you’ll need a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from one platform, eliminating the need to constantly switch between accounts.
Key Benefits of a Good Social Media Tool
Saves You Time
This is crucial if you’re part of a small team with many responsibilities. As a solo-preneur or a member of a small social team, you need tools that help you schedule content in advance, write captions quickly, or create attractive visuals without needing a graphic designer.
Analyses and Understands Your Performance
A successful social media strategy hinges on understanding how your content performs. The best tools help you monitor engagement and offer insights into what works and what doesn’t. Look for a tool that tracks your content’s performance and provides in-depth analytics.
Proves ROI
Social media is an essential part of any marketing strategy, but you need data to validate your efforts. Top tools for marketing teams, especially at the enterprise level, should demonstrate how social campaigns contribute to the bottom line, helping you justify your social media budget and strategy.
Protects Your Brand’s Reputation
Conversations about your brand, both on and off your pages, can impact your reputation. Monitoring every comment, mention, tag, or message is a full-time job. However, staying informed about these conversations is crucial for timely responses and actions. A social media monitoring tool helps you stay updated without being glued to your phone.
Top Social Media Tools to Consider
If you’re searching for tools to enhance your social media management, here are some of the top options to consider for your social stack.
1. SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an accessible and user-friendly social media management solution, perfect for beginners who are just starting their social media journey. It encompasses all the essential publishing and scheduling features that a robust social media tool should offer, making it an ideal choice for those looking to streamline their content management processes.
One of the standout features of SocialPilot is its AI Assistant, which significantly simplifies content creation. This tool aids in generating engaging and relevant captions by leveraging the latest trends and understanding audience preferences, ensuring your posts resonate with your target audience.
In addition to its powerful publishing tools, SocialPilot provides comprehensive analytics reports. These in-depth insights are invaluable for crafting more effective social media strategies. By examining content performance and audience engagement metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of what resonates with your followers. Moreover, the platform allows you to Analyse growth patterns, helping you refine your content to maintain and boost audience engagement.
Key Features:
Integration with Major Social Media Platforms: SocialPilot supports seamless integration with several prominent social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. This broad compatibility allows you to manage all your social media accounts from a single platform.
Customisable and Optimisable Posts: With SocialPilot, you can customise and optimise your posts for various social networks using a single composer. This feature ensures that your content is perfectly tailored for each platform, enhancing its effectiveness and reach.
Bulk Scheduling: To save time and improve efficiency, SocialPilot enables bulk scheduling of up to 500 posts. This feature is particularly useful for those who need to manage multiple accounts and maintain a consistent posting schedule without the hassle of manual scheduling.
Overall, SocialPilot stands out as a comprehensive tool for social media management, offering essential features that cater to both novice and seasoned users. Its blend of user-friendly design, powerful content creation tools, and detailed analytics makes it a valuable asset for anyone looking to enhance their social media presence.
2. Buffer
Buffer is a versatile social media management tool designed specifically for small businesses and startups. One of its standout features is the completely free plan it offers for managing up to three social media channels. This makes Buffer an excellent choice for businesses looking to establish their presence on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter without incurring initial costs.
The platform excels in simplifying content creation with its AI Assistant, which generates fresh ideas to keep your social media feeds dynamic and engaging. Additionally, Buffer allows you to store these ideas, making it easy to revisit and build upon them later. The direct integration with popular tools like Canva, Dropbox, and OneDrive further enhances the content creation process, enabling seamless import, editing, and sharing of visual and written content across your social networks.
Key Features:
Social Media Publishing Tools: Buffer’s robust publishing tools enable you to schedule and manage your social media content effortlessly across various channels. This feature ensures that your posts are published at optimal times, maximising reach and engagement.
Social Media Engagement Dashboard: With Buffer’s engagement dashboard, you can streamline your social media interactions by responding to all mentions and messages from one centralised location. This simplifies community management and helps maintain consistent engagement with your audience.
Analytics and Reporting: Buffer provides comprehensive analytics and reporting features that give you a bird’s eye view of your social media performance. These insights are crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve your strategy.
Landing Page Builder: The landing page builder feature allows you to create customised landing pages tailored to your campaigns. This tool helps enhance your online presence and provides a unique and engaging experience for your audience.
Overall, Buffer is an ideal social media management tool for small businesses and startups. Its combination of a user-friendly interface, powerful content creation and scheduling tools, integrated engagement dashboard, and insightful analytics makes it a valuable resource for businesses looking to optimise their social media efforts and drive growth.
3. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a comprehensive social media management tool designed to cater to the needs of diverse social media feeds. The platform offers an array of features that facilitate seamless discussions, detailed reporting, team role creation, and active feedback collection. These capabilities ensure that everyone in your team stays informed and engaged with the latest updates, strategic plans, and performance insights.
In addition to its robust scheduling capabilities, Zoho Social provides optimised timing features akin to those found in Sprout Social. This allows you to customise your content for each social network and schedule posts to be published at the most effective times, enhancing reach and engagement.
A notable feature of Zoho Social is its unified Inbox, which consolidates all your social media conversations into one place. This means you no longer need to switch between multiple platforms to manage customer interactions, streamlining your workflow and improving response times.
Key Features:
Instant Integration with Zoho CRM: Zoho Social seamlessly integrates with Zoho CRM, allowing you to monitor customer interactions directly within the platform. This integration enhances your ability to manage customer relationships and track social media engagement in one cohesive system.
Social Listening Dashboards: The platform’s social listening capabilities enable you to track brand reviews, social mentions, and branded keywords. These insights help you stay on top of public perception and respond proactively to feedback or emerging trends.
Team Collaboration Tools: Zoho Social supports collaboration with teammates through integrated chat, audio, and video calls. This feature facilitates real-time communication and coordination within your team, making it easier to work together on social media strategies and content creation.
Optimised Content Scheduling: The scheduling tools in Zoho Social allow you to tailor your posts for different social media networks and publish them at optimal times. This ensures that your content reaches your audience when they are most active and likely to engage.
Overall, Zoho Social stands out as a versatile and powerful social media management solution. Its integration with Zoho CRM, advanced social listening tools, and robust collaboration features make it an excellent choice for teams looking to streamline their social media management and enhance their online presence. The platform’s emphasis on optimised scheduling and unified communication further ensures that your social media strategy is both effective and efficient.
4. Sendible
Sendible has successfully positioned itself as a premier social media management solution tailored specifically for agencies and large brands. It offers a suite of features designed to meet the unique needs of these users, including client dashboards and automated client reporting tools, which streamline the process of managing and showcasing social media performance to clients. The platform’s robust collaboration tools and user management capabilities further enhance its suitability for teams, allowing multiple users to work together seamlessly.
Sendible also stands out for its numerous integrations, which simplify social media management and enhance the overall user experience. These integrations allow users to connect various tools and platforms, making the process of content creation, scheduling, and reporting more efficient.
Key Features:
All-in-One Dashboard: Sendible’s comprehensive dashboard provides a clear, at-a-glance view of your overall social media performance. This centralised interface makes it easy to track key metrics and manage multiple accounts from one place.
Collaboration Tools: The platform offers advanced collaboration features that enable your team to create content collaboratively. Team members can send content to clients or team leaders for approval, ensuring a streamlined workflow and maintaining high content standards.
Presentation-Ready Reports: Sendible generates professional, presentation-ready reports that highlight social media ROI. These reports are ideal for showcasing the effectiveness of social media strategies to clients, providing clear insights and justifying investment in social media marketing.
Mobile App: The Sendible mobile app allows you to monitor and manage your social media accounts on the go. This flexibility ensures that you can stay on top of your social media activities and respond to engagements in real-time, regardless of your location.
Overall, Sendible excels as a social media management tool for agencies and large brands. Its focus on client-oriented features, comprehensive dashboards, and robust collaboration tools make it an excellent choice for managing multiple users and accounts. The integration capabilities and mobile app further enhance its usability, making it a versatile and efficient solution for social media management.
5. Tailwind
Tailwind began as a specialized tool designed to fill a gap in the market for Pinterest scheduling. Initially focused on automating Pinterest marketing for brands, Tailwind has since expanded its capabilities to include Instagram and Facebook. Despite this expansion, the platform remains particularly effective for managing Pinterest activities.
One of Tailwind’s standout features is its visual calendar, which allows users to plan and organise all their social media posts in one centralised location. This calendar includes filters that enable you to view only your Pins, providing a clear preview of how your Pinterest Page will appear. Tailwind also auto-publishes Pins at optimal times to maximise audience engagement.
Key Features:
Post Ideas: Tailwind ensures you always have Pinterest content ready to go by offering a continuous stream of post ideas. This feature helps maintain a consistent posting schedule and keeps your content pipeline full.
Automatic Personalised Designs: The platform generates automatic, personalised designs for your posts, ensuring that each one is on-brand and visually appealing. This feature saves time and ensures a cohesive look across all your content.
Hashtag Finder: Tailwind includes a hashtag finder tool that helps you discover popular and highly relevant hashtags. Using the right hashtags can significantly boost your engagement by increasing the visibility of your posts.
Overall, Tailwind is an excellent choice for brands looking to optimise their Pinterest marketing efforts. Its visual calendar, automatic design features, and effective hashtag tool make it easy to create, organise, and publish engaging content. With its strong focus on Pinterest and expanded capabilities for Instagram and Facebook, Tailwind offers a comprehensive solution for social media management.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a robust social media marketing tool renowned for its powerful publishing features. The platform includes a visual calendar that helps you plan and organise your content, ensuring you can easily identify and fill any gaps in your posting schedule. If you find yourself short on content ideas, Hootsuite can generate a continuous stream of suggestions, keeping your social media feeds fresh and engaging. Additionally, the tool provides recommendations on the best times to post, enabling you to schedule your content for maximum engagement.
Key Features:
Publish and Schedule Posts: Hootsuite allows you to publish and schedule social media posts across a variety of platforms. This feature ensures that your content reaches your audience at optimal times, enhancing your social media presence.
Unified Inbox: The platform’s unified inbox enables you to manage all incoming messages and mentions from multiple social media accounts in one place. This centralised approach simplifies communication management and ensures timely responses to your audience.
Social Listening and Monitoring: Hootsuite’s social listening tools allow you to monitor online conversations about your brand and industry. By staying on top of trending topics and discussions, you can engage more effectively with your audience and gain valuable insights into public perception.
Overall, Hootsuite stands out as a comprehensive social media marketing tool, ideal for businesses looking to enhance their online presence. Its combination of a visual content calendar, continuous content idea generation, optimal posting time suggestions, and advanced social listening capabilities makes it a powerful ally in managing and growing your social media strategy.
7. Later
Later is a comprehensive social media management tool designed to streamline publishing and content creation. With its visual planner and media library, Later enables you to organise your social content strategy efficiently. The platform’s Best Time to Post recommendations ensure that your posts reach your audience at the most optimal times on platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Key Features:
User-Generated Content Discovery: Later allows you to discover user-generated content through tags and mentions. This feature helps you find relevant content created by your audience, which can be repurposed to enhance your brand’s authenticity and engagement.
Instagram Hashtag Suggestions: The Instagram Hashtag Suggestions tool helps you generate fresh and relevant hashtags. By using effective hashtags, you can increase the visibility of your posts and boost engagement on Instagram.
Caption Writer Tool: Later’s Caption Writer tool automatically crafts powerful social media captions. This feature saves time and ensures that your captions are engaging and effective, aligning with your brand’s voice.
Overall, Later is an excellent choice for managing and optimising your social media content. Its visual planner, user-generated content discovery, hashtag suggestions, and caption writer tools make it a versatile and efficient solution for enhancing your social media strategy.
8. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive, all-in-one social media management tool designed to handle every aspect of your social media strategy. The platform integrates seamlessly with all major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube, allowing you to manage your entire social media presence from a single, unified dashboard.
In addition to social media management, Sprout Social allows you to handle reviews from sources like Google My Business, Trustpilot, and Facebook. The platform also supports the creation of shop-able posts, integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs, making it easier to drive sales directly from your social media channels.
One of the standout features of Sprout Social is its Employee Advocacy tool, which sets it apart from other social media management platforms. This feature enables you to create a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their own social networks, significantly amplifying your brand’s reach and enhancing your employee advocacy efforts.
Key Features:
Comprehensive Dashboard: Sprout Social offers an easy-to-use dashboard that combines social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, and reporting. This all-in-one solution streamlines the management of your social media strategy.
ViralPost Feature: The ViralPost feature automatically publishes your content at the times when your followers are most likely to engage, maximising the reach and impact of your posts.
Smart Inbox: Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox compiles all incoming messages from your various social media platforms into one place, simplifying communication management and ensuring timely responses.
Hashtag Tracking: The platform includes robust hashtag tracking tools to help you identify the most popular and relevant hashtags, boosting the visibility of your posts and enhancing engagement.
Custom URL Tracking: Sprout Social provides custom URL tracking, offering detailed insights into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions. This feature helps you measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and refine your strategy accordingly.
Overall, Sprout Social is an exceptional tool for managing and optimising your social media presence. Its comprehensive feature set, including seamless integrations, review management, shop-able posts, and powerful employee advocacy tools, makes it a versatile and efficient solution for businesses looking to enhance their social media strategy and drive growth.
9. Hubspot
HubSpot stands out as a leading customer platform that offers robust social media management features to streamline your marketing efforts. With its centralised social inbox, you can efficiently track and manage all your social interactions from various platforms in one convenient location. Integrating with a CRM provides valuable contextual information on these interactions, empowering you to enhance and personalise the customer experience effectively.
A key organisational feature of HubSpot is its ability to tag marketing assets and content, enabling you to associate your posts with specific campaigns and measure their effectiveness accurately. This ensures that your social media efforts are aligned with your broader marketing objectives, facilitating better decision-making and strategy refinement.
In addition to its organisational capabilities, HubSpot provides essential social media management tools, including publishing and scheduling functionalities. The platform also offers keyword monitoring streams, allowing you to identify important interactions and prioritise conversations that matter most to your business.
Key Features:
Keyword Monitoring Streams: HubSpot’s keyword monitoring streams help you identify important interactions and conversations happening across social media platforms. By prioritising the right conversations, you can engage with your audience more effectively and capitalise on relevant opportunities.
AI-Powered Social Media Post Generator: With its AI-powered social media post generator, HubSpot simplifies the publishing process by automatically generating engaging content ideas. This feature saves time and ensures that your posts are relevant and resonant with your audience.
Best Time to Post Suggestions: HubSpot provides suggestions on the best times to post your content, helping you optimise your scheduling for maximum engagement and reach. By leveraging these insights, you can increase the effectiveness of your social media strategy and drive better results.
Overall, HubSpot offers a comprehensive suite of social media management features designed to streamline your marketing efforts and enhance your customer engagement. Its combination of organisational tools, essential functionalities, and AI-powered capabilities makes it a valuable asset for businesses looking to optimise their social media presence and drive growth.
10. CoSchedule
CoSchedule originated as a content marketing company but has expanded its offerings to include robust social media management and calendar functionalities. With CoSchedule, you can seamlessly organise your social media publishing efforts using a comprehensive social calendar that visualises your entire content plan. The platform’s Best Time Scheduler ensures that your posts are strategically timed to maximise engagement from your audience.
Key Features:
Social Message Optimiser: CoSchedule’s Social Message Optimiser helps you craft powerful and compelling messages for your social media posts. By leveraging this tool, you can ensure that your content resonates with your audience and drives meaningful interactions.
AI Social Assistant: The AI Social Assistant feature generates ideas and social messages instantly, providing valuable inspiration and guidance for your social media content strategy. This helps streamline the content creation process and ensures that you always have fresh and engaging content to share with your audience.
Predefined Social Sharing Templates: CoSchedule offers predefined social sharing templates, eliminating the need to create a publishing plan from scratch. These templates provide a convenient starting point for organising your social media content and help streamline your workflow.
ReQueue: CoSchedule’s ReQueue feature automatically creates recurring social posts from your best-performing content. This ensures that your top-performing content continues to reach your audience over time, maximising its impact and driving sustained engagement.
Overall, CoSchedule provides a comprehensive suite of social media management tools designed to streamline your publishing efforts and maximise the effectiveness of your social media strategy. From optimising social messages to automating recurring posts, CoSchedule empowers you to elevate your social media presence and drive meaningful results.
11. Keyhole
Keyhole stands out among other tools on the list as it not only offers social media management capabilities but also serves as an influencer tracking and marketing software. This unique feature set makes it an invaluable resource for businesses looking to leverage influencer partnerships to enhance their social media strategies. Keyhole provides in-depth analytics to facilitate the vetting and comparison of influencers, allowing you to identify those who consistently drive authentic engagements and align with your brand values.
Once your influencer campaigns are live, Keyhole continues to provide valuable insights by measuring the performance of each influencer and their impact on your campaign goals. This data-driven approach ensures that you can accurately assess the effectiveness of your influencer marketing efforts and make informed decisions for future campaigns.
Key Features:
Automated Social Media Reports: Keyhole offers automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds. This feature streamlines the reporting process, allowing you to quickly access and communicate key insights to stakeholders.
Reporting Features: Keyhole provides several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting, and influencer reporting. These comprehensive reporting capabilities enable you to gain a holistic view of your social media performance and make data-driven decisions to optimise your strategies.
Overall, Keyhole is a powerful tool for businesses seeking to elevate their social media presence through influencer partnerships. Its combination of influencer tracking, analytics, and reporting features empowers brands to identify, collaborate with, and measure the impact of influencers effectively, ultimately driving meaningful results and fostering authentic engagements with their target audience.
