You’ve decided that social media marketing is a worthwhile endeavor to build your business. But spending hours a day slaving over Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn doesn’t feel like a good use of your time.
If you’re going to invest in social media marketing, you want more ROI and less wasted time.
Social media scheduling tools are the answer. Save time, push more content, and see more results.
What do Social Media Scheduling Tools Do?
In general, social media scheduling tools allow you to create posts and pre-schedule them for delivery across multiple social media networks.
The ability to schedule and post across multiple networks is a huge time-saver.
You don’t have to spend all day trying to distribute content across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Instead, you can dedicate a block of time to schedule all of your posts for the week, bi-weekly, a month, or even a quarter.
And be done with it.
Which Social Media Scheduling Tools Should You Use?
While the features and pricing can differ between the many social media scheduling tools available to you, the benefits of all are similar: they help save you valuable time.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the “grand-daddies” of social media scheduling tools, which allows you to:
- Schedule posts across multiple networks at once, or bulk schedule
- Easily find content and images to share
- Monitor trending topics, events, and #hashtags
- Get analytics and reports
Hootsuite is free for individuals who want to connect with 3 social profiles, but also offers paid Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans for businesses, agencies, and enterprises who need more robust capabilities.
Buffer
Another tried-and-true social media scheduling platform with several beneficial features and a free, basic plan, Buffer allows you to:
- Plan and schedule social posts
- Engage and respond to social conversations from within Buffer
- Analyze the performance of your posts
Buffer offers a basic free plan with 3 connected social accounts and 10 scheduled posts for 1 user. If you want to connect more social accounts or schedule more posts, Buffer offers paid plans start at $15/ mo for Pro, and go up for Small Business, Medium Business, Large Business, and Enterprise operations.
Later
Later is the ideal social media scheduling tool for Instagrammers.
Later is an official Instagram partner. You’ll love the drag-and-drop calendar that lets you see how posts will look in your feed, and easily rearrange or swap out photos to get the look you want.
Later allows for:
- True automated publishing on single-image posts
- Text-message notification Posting and bulk scheduling
- Real-time post previews
- Hashtag curation
- Post optimization opportunities
- Basic analytics.
Later also allows you to publish to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Later is “free forever” for individuals with 1 profile who want to schedule 30 photo-posts to Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest (50 for Twitter). Paid plans start at $9 per month for Plus, users who want to schedule single-photos, videos, Instagram stories, multi-photos, tag locations and users, and schedule 100 posts. Premium, Starter, and Brand plans top out at $49 a month, making Later’s paid plans some of the most cost effective available.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a seriously simple solution if you only want to schedule to Twitter.
Tweetdeck is made by Twitter for Twitter. Tweetdeck offers a dashboard displaying separate columns of activity for your Twitter account, including notifications, direct messages, and your post activity.
Pre-schedule Twitter posts, and post/ schedule to several Twitter accounts at once.
Tweetdeck is free to use. You don’t have to even create an account if you already have a Twitter account. Simply go to Tweetdeck and you’ll see your default columns. Customize using the left-hand menu and start scheduling and organizing your tweets.
Feedly
Feedly stands apart as a content curation tool, helping you find the trending topics and content your audience wants to see.
Feedly automatically curates content to fill your social media calendar.
If you struggle to find relevant content or feel like curating content is taking too much time, Feedly is the answer.
Feedly offers a basic free plan that will get you up to 100 sources and 3 feeds. A paid Feedly Pro plan will get you unlimited sources and feeds, and allow you to integrate with other social media scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite for $7/ month.
Post Planner
Post Planner takes the guesswork out of your audience for you.
In addition to scheduling posts, Post Planner picks the best times to post based on audience data. You can repeat and recycle top-performing posts.
Post Planner curates content for you based on hashtags and keywords, and assigns star-ratings based on how relevant they’d be to you audience.
Post Planner has a low-cost starter plan of $3/ month for 3 accounts, 30 posts per day, and 300 posts planned for a single user. Love and Guru plans are available for $9/ month and $19/month if you need more accounts, more posts, or to add team members to your account.
Which Tool Will YOU Use?
There’s no one right social media scheduling tool - there’s only the one that’s right for you. Check out all of the tools on our list and find the one that offers the most benefits - at the right price point - for you and your business. You can’t go wrong; any tool you choose will help you save valuable time in your social media marketing.