Here is the roundup of our top social media management platforms that you should consider in 2022 to boost your marketing workflow.

Using social media is a powerful way for businesses to find new customers, increase traffic to their websites, and maintain relationships with existing customers.

Even though existing social media tools can be helpful, you have to use them strategically. Managing multiple inboxes, posting on multiple platforms, and maintaining consistency is nearly impossible across all the apps.

Social media management apps allow you to manage all your social media accounts in one place. By performing easy automation, analyzing, and controlling all your accounts, you will be able to create content your audience will love.

After hours of research and using each app as they are designed to be used, we put together our top picks from dozens of social media management apps.

1.Buffer

Buffer is an easy to use, intuitive, streamlined social media management tool. With Buffer, brands, businesses, and individuals can easily manage social media and drive engagement and results to their social media channels.

Your Instagram Stories can be scheduled ahead of time with Buffer, so everything is ready to go at the moment a push notification is sent. You can plan, preview, and schedule your Instagram posts with Buffer, so they are ready to publish at the right time.

The Buffer for Instagram app lets you storyboard your posts, create draft captions, and schedule single-image and video posts right from desktop, tablet, or phone.

With Buffer, you can:

• Plan, collaborate, and publish thumb-stopping content,
• Analyze social media performance and create reports,
• Quickly navigate your comments and engage with your audience, and
• Build a customized landing page in minutes

Buffer's Social Media Analytics and Reporting Tool helps you measure the results of your social media marketing strategies and make better decisions. If you would like to get analytics, you could give Buffer for Enterprises plan a go.

Pricing : Buffer’s pricing is based on the number of social channels. Free plan is $0/mo per social channel billed at $0/year but limited to managing up to three channels, 10 scheduled posts per social channel and 1 user who can access and contribute content. The Essentials plan starts at $6/mo per social channel billed monthly and offers access to add unlimited social channels.

Social Networks : Instagram Business, Facebook Pages and Groups, Twitter, LinkedIn Profiles and pages, Pinterest.

🐻 Things to consider :

❌ There are no analytics, insights & reporting on the free plan.

❌ No provisions for social media ad management

❌ Buffer free plan only lets you schedule 10 posts per social channel. You’ll need to pay for Buffer to get the most out of this social media tool.

2. Later

Later offers large media storage and schedulability features that marketers love. Using Later's features you can optimize your social media strategy for greater sales and success. Later focuses on visual scheduling, media management, marketing, and analytics.

The platform is ideal for marketing teams that need to create complex Instagram content calendars. Most importantly, Later offers a Chrome extension that makes it easier to find Instagram content.

Later has robust features:

• Linkin.bio turns your Instagram profile into a mini website, complete with analytics.
• Scheduling
• Instagram Analytics helps you understand what works for your business, and gives you unique suggestions to optimize your social strategy.
• User Generated Content helps you find on-brand content, add your own personal touch, and share to your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest social channels in just a few clicks.
• Instagram Stories Scheduling
• Instagram Hashtags
• Pinterest Scheduling

Later operates with social sets to help you organize your social profiles based on brand or identity. A Social Set is a set of social profiles that Later supports. It includes one of each social profile (1 Instagram, 1 Facebook, 1 Twitter, 1 Pinterest, 1 TikTok, and 1 LinkedIn profile).

Pricing: You can create a free account with Later for access to 1 Social Set and 10 posts per social profile for only 1 user. Alternativley, at $ 15 /mo billed monthly, you can get access the starter plan for 1 Social Set and 60 posts per social profile for only 1 user. For a larger team, you can try the Growth or Advanced plans, which includes 150 posts per social profile for 3 users and unlimited posts for 6 users respectively.

You can try any of the paid plans 100% free for 14 days!

🐻 Things to consider :

❌ Later free plan is changing as of March 31 2022 to decrease the number of posts from 30 posts per month, per social profile, to 10 posts per month, per social profile

❌ Better analytics available to Growth and Advanced plans only

❌ 1:1 live chat with support team only available to Advanced plans

3. Hootsuite

Like Later and Buffer, you can create content and share it across multiple social channels from one easy-to-use platform.

It’s easy to create, schedule, publish, and manage your social content and ad campaigns from a single Hootsuite dashboard. Track real-time metrics and insights across social networks to maximize your social marketing efforts.

With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple accounts—such as five Instagram accounts, three Twitter accounts, and two Facebook Pages—from one dashboard.

Hootsuite allows you to:

• Publish - Share and schedule engaging content to your profiles
• Engage - Address incoming messages and deliver timely replies
• Monitor - Stay informed about market trends and competitors
• Advertise - Promote your organic content and manage paid ads
• Analyze - Measure your results across all social networks

Hootsuite lets you create and test different variations of your ads instantly. Facebook displays the ads to your audience automatically, then optimizes for the one that performs best.

If you're looking to connect to other business and marketing tools, then Hootsuite is your best option. With 150+ apps available in the App Directory, you can streamline your processes, access better data, and collaborate more efficiently.

Pricing : The limited Free plan is for 2 social accounts, 5 scheduled messages for 1 user. You'll have a free 30 days to test out Hootsuite. The pricing is tiered based on your plan type. Paid plans start at £39 per month for a Professional plan and range up to £569 per month for a Business plan. You could manage up to 20 different accounts from one dashboard on the Teams plan.

🐻 Things to consider :

❌ Not being able to tag accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

❌ It is a bit pricey for individuals

❌ Only 1 user account provided in the Professional plan

4. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media management tool for scheduling and publishing posts across multiple social networks.

With Agorapulse, you can schedule a post to repeat in custom increments. It’s requeue option allows you to choose how many times you’d like each piece of content to go back in your queue. Setting your posts to be queued once or over time is the best way to send evergreen content to a queue.

The publishing calendar shows published, scheduled, queued, and assigned posts in one view for one or multiple social media profiles.

Here are some Agorapulse features highlighted:

• More publishing options including repost/requeue options, queue categories, and an interactive shared calendar option so you can send a link to others to view upcoming content, accept or reject the content, and leave feedback.
• inbox assistant and saved replies feature on all plans so that you’ll never miss a comment on your Facebook posts — whether they’re organic or paid.
• Complete Facebook ad comments capturing
• Affordable pricing for teams
• Support for YouTube (inbox, monitoring, CRM)
• Support for Facebook Groups (publishing)

Pricing : The pricing starts at €79/mo billed annually for the Pro plan supporting 10 social profiles for 2 users. You can choose to upgrade to the Premium plan at €159/mo billed annually for 20 social profiles for 4 users. You can try Agorapulse for free with a 15-day trial.

🐻 Things to consider :

❌ No ability to draft content

❌ Better suited for small teams and report customization is not free

❌ The basic plan (Pro) costs $99 per month

5. Sprout Social

Sprout provides the ability to queue and schedule your content.

If you want to share scheduled content with teammates or clients not on your plan, Sprout has this option. With Sprout, you can send a link to others for them to view upcoming content.

- Engagement— Streamline and effectively scale monitoring and engagement efforts with a unified social inbox. - Publishing and Scheduling— Effortlessly plan, create, manage and deliver social content and campaigns as a team. - Analytics— Drive strategic decision making across the business with access to rich social data and analytics. - Listening— Uncover trends and actionable insights from social conversations to better inform marketing strategy. - Employee Advocacy— Amplify your social reach and drive better marketing results by empowering your employees to become brand advocates.

Compared to Agorapulse, Sprout only offers inbox assistant and saved replies features for its Advanced ($299/mo/user) plan customers.

Pricing : Sprout Social’s pricing starts at $99 per user per month for the Standard plan. The Professional plan offers additional features for businesses at $169 per user per month, and the Advanced plan offers solutions for businesses at scale at $279 per user per month. Annually, the Standard plan costs $1,068 per user, the Professional plan is $1,788 per user annually, and the Advanced plan is $2,988 per user per year. You have 30 days to try Sprout, risk free. No credit card is required to start a trial.

🐻 Things to consider :

❌ Limited YouTube data available

❌ Pricing is per user/month which can get expensive when working with other members of your team

❌ With a large team, you can incur huge costs

Which social media management tool is best for you?

The goal of social media management apps is to make your social media presence easy and efficient to maintain. Based on our picks, you can try two or three apps that sound like they might be best for you, then pick one based on which fit your needs.

Your needs could vary from whether you need to schedule future posts and updates so that you could batch your social media content into a couple of posts each week or if you need access to your social media inboxes so you could reply to customers without getting distracted by the feed.

With these in mind, you can select a great social media management tool for you.

The typical small business does not have the resources or the time to post personal updates and check over each site several times a day. You shouldn't be spending a lot of time on it every day. With the help of automation, you can maximize the efficiency and power of your social media management software.

Take a look at how you can auto-generate social media content with Integromat and Bannerbear.

This article was originally published on Bannerbear.com on March 31, 2022. Written by: Juliet Edjere

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