Thousands of social media tools exist to help manage all aspects of social media. However, with so many tools, comes the downside of not knowing which ones work the best, or becoming overwhelmed with options. We’ve compiled a list of the best social media tools that you can use to grow your business. Try them for yourself and see how much simpler your life becomes!
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1. SproutSocial
Platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter (and some Instagram)
Great for: Scheduling content, performing engagement, analytics
Perks: Offers 30-Day Free Trial
Summary: SproutSocial is a powerful content management and engagement platform designed for social media marketers. With SproutSocial, you can easily switch between several different accounts, making it the perfect tool if you’re juggling multiple clients.
SproutSocial offers a variety of features, such as a single stream inbox designed to help you never miss a message, a task tool where you can easily collaborate with other account managers or pin posts that require additional follow up, a publishing tool where you can organize your social content and easily push it out to your choice of social platforms, and an array of reports so you can track almost any social effort you can think of.
Schedule your posts, create an album, pick any time in the future.
View your future posts and all of the social media channels you’re posting on.
Room for improvement: SproutSocial is an awesome tool, and they have made quite a few changes to the platform since I began using it.
A few more changes I would like to see are:
- The ability to tag people when using the Facebook scheduling tool
- The ability to delete posts that were posted through SproutSocial directly on the platform (for example, if you mean to schedule a post on LinkedIn, but you accidentally hit “schedule now,” you would need to go to LinkedIn.com to delete it so that it can be rescheduled for the right time.)
- Improvements to the Instagram scheduling tool.
2. Grum.co
Platforms: Instagram
Great for: Scheduling content
Perks: 3-Day Free Trial
Summary: Grum allows Instagram users to seamlessly upload and schedule posts directly online from the Grum dashboard. One key benefit is that you can easily switch between accounts without having to sign in and out. The entire interface is incredibly simple, making it very user-friendly and quick to use. Another key benefit is the price tag…even after the free 3-day trial, the most Grum.co will cost you is $4.95 per account monthly, and the price goes down per account as you add more.
Schedule and edit your Instagram posts right from your desktop.
Room for improvement: Though I love the Grum.co tool, there are just a couple of features that would really take it to the next level. What Grum.co is currently missing is the ability to tag other users in your images (you can tag users in the description by adding their user handle), and the ability to add locations to the image within the scheduling platform.
3. Tailwind
Platforms: Pinterest and Instagram (We currently only use Pinterest)
Great for: Scheduling content, creating pins
Perks: Free Trial – 100 Pinterest pins or 30 Instagram posts, free browser extension
Summary: Tailwind is a great tool for scheduling pins and receiving key metrics for Pinterest engagement. The browser extension is the perfect add on for quickly posting content from your other social platforms, blog posts and even Youtube videos directly to your Pinterest boards.
You can even schedule repins through your Pinterest feed using the extension!
With Tailwind you can set up a custom schedule that you want your saved pins to go live, or you can schedule specific days and times for each individual pin. Tailwind offers some awesome analytics tools as well, like seeing which pins are being pinned from your domain and from what device, which pins have had a high repin activity and also which boards are getting the most repins. You can also track your follower growth for a 7 day period.
You can schedule pins and get everything you need for Pinterest done on Tailwind.
Room for improvement: The Tailwind Plus account only lets you schedule up to 400 pins per month, so depending on your business, this may or may not work for you.
4. MeetEdgar
Platforms: Facebook, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter
Great for: Managing evergreen content
Perks: 30-Day Free Trial
Summary: MeetEdgar is a unique tool that allows you to create a bank of evergreen content and then organize it into categories and set up schedules for each of your categories to post on your chosen social media platforms. After an initial bulk of time spent creating that content, MeetEdgar is a great way to keep your social platforms active without having to constantly create a large amount of new content.
MeetEdgar’s content calendar makes viewing your content simple.
Another great feature is MeetEdgar’s ability for group owners to schedule posts to their groups. With over 10 super active groups, it is a great tool for me to keep everyone engaged with a mix of group specific content and more general questions, prompts, and updates.
5. CrowdFire
Platforms: Twitter, Instagram
Great for: Social follower growth
Perks: Free for single account users, $19.99 for up to 5 linked accounts
Summary: Crowdfire enables you to see all of your followers, un-followers, those that do and don’t follow you back. With Crowdfire you can also see who has engaged the most with your account. If you find users that have unfollowed you or don’t follow back, you can easily unfollow them through the platform.
Crowdfire also helps find relevant users to follow, checks the relationship between two accounts, and helps you keep track of how your posting to these social media sites may affect your follower statistics.
How do These Social Media Tools Work for You?
There are so many social media tools out there that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Choose what works best for you. These are a few of the ones that work best for us.
Have you used any of these social media management tools on your accounts? How do they work for you? Let us know in the comments! Get more social media marketing tips delivered right to your inbox by subscribing to our newsletter.
