12+ Best Social Media Management Tool for 2024 – features, pricing, pros and cons

The social media management tool you use for your business is very crucial to your growth. Starting from the creation of message templates, scheduling, and monitoring engagement analytics, a social media management software does it all. In this post, I ranked the best social media management tools.

Online marketing has stood out as the best marketing method that takes businesses to greater heights. 

According to statistics, 59% of the world’s population use social media – that stands at 4.70 billion people around the globe with 2hours 29minutes being the average daily time spent on social media by each user. 

Without a doubt, social media takes the first position in online marketing. 

If your business is able to reach a fraction of these users, you can be assured of increased sales, more profit, and business growth. 

67% of marketers say social listening is a useful way to track and understand changing customer needs

59% of social marketers find managing all messages in one place their biggest challenge

However, you need social media management tools to achieve this. A Social media management tool will manage your many social media accounts to ensure quality information, a good flow of information at the right time, good interaction with clients, and security for your data. 

Do not worry! I have taken the time to go through different social media management tools just for you and here are my top. 

What is a Social Media Management Tool?

Social media management tools help the user to monitor and manage all the social media accounts on one platform. In addition, they aim to make work easier for social media marketers to generate information/create content, engage with clients, generate reports, analyze reports, and many more.

What are the Best Social Media Management Tools?

After learning more about social media management tools, it’s essential you look at some of the social media management tools we have reviewed for you.

1. Eclincher 

Overall best 

Eclincher is one of my top picks for the best social media management tools for small businesses, medium, agencies, and franchises. It can be used on multiple social media platforms like YouTube, Blogger, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

It’s used by social media managers, digital marketers, professionals, businesses, and teams. This tool will help you schedule, report, network, and increase engagement.

Key Features

• Reputation Management and Brand Monitoring – grants instant access to brand mention across social media, forums, blogs, news, and reviews
• Cross-network social publishing, editing, and filtering
• Post planning – Visually plan your posts with drag-and-drop functionality
• Easy to maintain brand identity through quick, simple, and easy ways to edit, color-code, reuse, and delete content, as well as for workflows and team collaboration
• Allows you to prioritize conversations, boost post engagement and collaborate with your team 
• Recycles your best-performing evergreen content 

• Post bulk upload – significantly increase engagement by setting post, copy and shuffle queues  
• Post automation using RSS feeds 
• Advanced analytics dashboard that allows you to monitor campaigns and hashtag performance, evaluate impressions, reach, likes and comments 

Never miss a social communication, prioritize conversations, and collaborate with your team

Eclincher Pricing

Eclincher provides a 14-free trial. Paid plans include

• Basic – $65 per month 
• Premier – $175 per month
• Agency – $425 per month 
• Enterprise and Franchise – Schedule a meeting with the team 

Pros

• 24/7 customer support
• Can support almost all social media networks
• Offers a free trial period
• Outstanding analytics dashboard
• Chrome extension boost users’ productivity 

Cons

•  Pop-ups ads
•  The app is still new and additional features will be more helpful
• A longer free-trial period would be good

2. Planable

Best for hierarchical teams 

Planable is one of the social media management tools that help in collaborating teams and clients under a single roof. It makes it easy for social media managers to interact well with clients, assign duties, and manage discussions with their junior colleagues.

The “approval” functionality makes sure that social media content is properly scrutinized before it is posted. This makes for solid brand integrity. In addition, it helps in planning, scheduling, or publishing content.

Key Features

• Post scheduling features – Plan posts ahead of time and watch them engage your choice audience 
• Multi-account management – Manage as many accounts as you want to produce “killer” content
• Automated publishing – Automate the posting process while you focus on other tasks to boost productivity
• User collaboration – Collaborate with other users and merge ideas in the most brilliant way possible
• Content management – Tweak your content for different platforms all in one place 

Planable Pricing

You can try out Planable for free for the first 50 posts. When billed annually, paid plans go thus 

• Basic – $11/month
• Pro – $22/month
• Enterprise – Contact the Sales team

Pros

• It’s affordable
• It applies to many social media networks and provides an option for sharing with other social media accounts.
• Provides an option for tagging.
• Easy to use

Cons

• Doesn’t have many pricing options, especially for individual users.
• It doesn’t support Pinterest

3. Agorapulse

Best for Third-Party Agencies 

With Agorapulse, you can track your performance, keep your accounts up-to-date and retrieve information. Since you need to stay up-to-date all the time for your clients to love your content, you need this software to keep your accounts updated. 

You can be sure no information will be lost with this software since all your information will be saved, and you can retrieve it when needed. You can apply it on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google plus.

Key Features

• Social media inbox – Organize, manage, assign and label all incoming messages in a single inbox 
• Social Media publishing – Enjoy multiple publishing options from just one tool that allows you to optimize your posts for the best results, collaborate with your team in real time, and organize your scheduled post 
• Social Media Monitoring – Follow all social media conversations about your brand, respond quickly to urgent conversations, and take action with retweets, quick replies, and DMs
• Social Reporting Metrics – Discover the organic reach, paid reach, total reach, clicks, and the number of engaged users for your content.
• Social Media ROI – Evaluate your social media campaign success by  posts and conversations that are driving sales, leads, and traffic

Agorapulse Pricing

You can get a free trial on all plans for 30 days. There is a free plan for individuals just starting up. Other paid plans when billed annually include

• Pro – $79 per month
• Premium – $199 per month
• Enterprise – Contact the Sales team 

Pros

• It has a comprehensive reporting tool
• You can monitor all the activities of your social media accounts in one centralized dashboard.
• Easy to manage conversations within less than 15 minutes
• It has a calendar function to help you schedule your posts in a queue to be published at the right time.

Cons

•  Limited supported networks

4. Rebrandly

Best for large brands

Rebrandly tool helps you create and manage branded links. So far, Rebrandly has created 1 billion links, tracks 2 billion links monthly, and manages over 1 million happy customers. Rebrandly is used by the world’s smartest brands such as Paypal, Volvo, Heineken, Santander, etc.

The software allows users to create a branded link on your website or Facebook page. It allows you to enhance brand visibility and trust by putting your brand name on every link you share. You can also share links on your blog using this tool. 

Key Features

•  Links shortening – Shorten links into customized URLs you can brand and track 
• Intuitive Workspace – Set up folders where members of your team can connect to view and manage branded links collaboratively 
• Retargeting link feature – Use retargeting pixels directly on your branded links and add users to your retargeting links on Facebook, Twitter, Quora Adwords, and other social media platforms
•  Multiple Domain Names – Link and manage several domain names that reflects your identity; manage 404 traffic and SSL directly from your dashboard
• Advanced Links analytics – Build, schedule, and send custom reports of your branded link performance 

Rebrandly Pricing

Monthly pricing goes thus

• Starter– $24
• Pro– $75
• Premium– $419
• Enterprise – Request a quote 

Pros

• Helps to redirect branded links
• Good presentation of content
• It is user friendly
• Good customer support

Cons

• API interactions for some domains are not available
• It doesn’t support all operating systems

5. Crowdfire

Best for small businesses

Crowdfire is a tool that helps users to schedule and curate content on time. You don’t have to log in to all your social media accounts daily to share content; with this tool, you can schedule your content to be published at a particular time and day. It helps social media markers or planners up their games regarding social media engagement.

Key features

• Article and Image Curation – Curate articles from multiple sources on the web and always show up as an expert in your niche of influence. Receive suggestions of the best image that expressly depicts the message you’re trying to share
• Blog link-up – For blog owners, you can link up your blog and curate articles based on blog posts you already published 
• Multi-platform publishing – Schedule and publish content to your Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram just from one platform 
• It’s a 3-in-1 scheduling tool – Pick a day and time to post your content in a way that best suites each social media platform 
• Content Queue Meter – This feature gauges the busyness of your timeline with your scheduled content for the next 7 days 
• Advanced Analytics – Gain insight into your content performance and constantly refine your strategies through statistics and diagram that helps evaluate your ROI
• Report Building Features – Build daily, weekly, and monthly performance reports for your clients or yourself. 
• Engagement tracking – Track every mention, relevant hashtags, and competitor analysis of trending topics, etc 

Crowdfire Pricing

When billed annually, the pricing goes thus 

• Free – $0
• Plus – $7.48 per month
• Premium – $37.48 per month 
• VIP – $78.98

Pros

• It offers a comprehensive set of tools for social media management. You can learn more about inactive followers.
• The clean-engage –grow feature helps the user to reach the right audience hence you can eliminate the accounts that are no longer beneficial to you.
•  Content curation

Cons

•  It supports minimal social media platforms.

6. Sendible

Best for influencers 

Sendible software helps to increase brand awareness. This is the right software for you if you want to inform as many people as possible about your business. Besides reaching out to new clients, the tool also helps you engage your target audience and keeps them informed.

Expand your reach, attract new customers and achieve your social media goals with an all-in-one platform that gives you the flexibility of optimizing communication with your audience. 

Key features

• Easy-to-use Inbox – Easily manage direct messages and comments in individual feeds, use your inbox to see all incoming engagements, and filter them by profiles
• Quick Reports Generation – Generate presentation-ready progress reports to prove the ROI of your social media efforts. 
• Post Scheduling – Schedule social media posts, images, and videos individually or in bulk as far in the future as you need
• Collaboration Feature – Manage tasks and collaborate with ease when creating posts for your client’s social media calendar
• In-depth Analytics – With over 200 modules to explore, gain insight into every brand’s combined audience and post engagements across all channels with the Engagement report
• Social Listening – Stay on top of conversations, respond quickly to prompts, and improve your social media strategy by tracking brand, competitor, and key industry terms
• Work on the go – Enjoy two standalone mobile apps on iOS and Android for publishing, engagement, reporting, and approvals.

Sendible Pricing 

There is monthly and annual billing. An annual subscription helps you save 15% of the monthly subscription. When billed annually, Sendible pricing goes thus 

• Creator – $25
• Traction- $76
• Scale – $170

All the plans have a 14-day free trial

Pros

• It supports many users and clients
• It has a 14-day free trial for every package
• You can monitor your reputation depending on what the clients are commenting on.
• Easy to use

Cons 

Some social media accounts like Pinterest aren’t supported

7. Buffer

Best for small teams

Buffer happens to be one of the best social media managing tools in the market hence making it into this list. This tool allows you to publish content, engage with clients and other team members through the comment section, and monitor your social media performance. Buffer does this in 4 simple steps – Analyse, publish, engage, and celebrate.

Buffer wants to help your small business spend less time achieving excellent social media engagement with your audience.

With Buffer, you can measure your social media performance in a few clicks, plan and publish your content, respond to comments faster, and celebrate the limitless growth of your brand. 

Key Features

Buffer offers features such as Multi-media format sharing, team collaboration, RSS feeds connectivity, and social profile sharing. Other major features include 

• Analyze – Measure social media performance, create gorgeous reports, and get recommendations to grow reach, engagement & sales. Analyze studies your data and tells you when what, and how often to post to maximize your results. For your Instagram profiles, your best time to post is predicted using your followers’ activity and your previous posts
• Publish – You will be able to plan and publish your content for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, all from one simple dashboard.
• Active Engagement – Turn followers into fans when you respond to them as fast as possible. Stay on top of conversations and never miss a comment on all your social media platform 
• Start Page – Enjoy a digital jumpstart with a free, simple, beautiful, flexible link-in-bio start page that brings all your best content in one place. 

Buffer Pricing 

Buffer offers a free package limited to managing 3 channels for individuals and startups. Paid plans can be bought annually (cheaper) and monthly. Buffer pricing plans when bought annually include

• Free – $0 per user per month
• Essential – $5 per month per channel 
• Team – $10 per month per channel 
• Agency – $100 per month per 10 channels 

Pros

• The collaboration functionality is lovely 
• Individuals can use this tool for free
• Easy to share content with a single click
• Excellently manages Google Business Profile 
• You can know the posts that are performing well and those that are performing poorly.
• 24/7 support 

Cons

• Filtering messages by location is not possible

8. Sprout Social

Best for medium-sized companies

Sprout Social is a powerful solution for social media management giving you a complete overview of how the online community is interacting with your business. It is trusted by 30 thousand world-class brands and organizations of different sizes.

Sprout Social SMM platform unlocks the full potential of social interaction to transform not just your marketing strategy—but every area of your organization. Enjoy a seamless publishing system to create content for your social media platforms easily. In addition, you can check whether you are meeting your objectives on social media or not.

Sprout Social is the leading platform to extract business value from social media platforms. As reviewed by top customer review sites, Sprout Social is deemed the best in usability, customer support and satisfaction, ROI, and user adoption.

Key Features

• Digital Engagement machine – From community management to customer support, Sprout gives you the tools you need to boost efficiency, speed up response times and personalize responses.
• Team collaboration – Foster effective teamwork with communication and collaboration tools. Assign tasks, prevent redundancies, approve content and prioritize messages using processes tailored to your team.
• Post Publishing Strategy – Plan your publishing strategy and maintain oversight from a central hub. Organize posts across profiles, networks, and campaigns using a visualized calendar to support long-term strategy
• Sprout Employee Advocacy – This allows you to put all your shareable content in one place so employees can quickly and easily post approved content to their social networks.
• Analytics tool – Maintain complete oversight of all connected social profiles from one location. Save time with a suite of user-friendly, customizable reporting options that scale with your business.
• Social Listening tool – Access and utilize industry, brand and competitive insights. Track and analyze conversations around relevant topics to understand consumer sentiment and brand health.

Sprout Social Pricing

Sprout Social offers a 30-day free trial period to evaluate the tool for your business. Pricing plan includes

• Standard– $89/month (billed annually)
• Professional – 149/month (billed annually)
• Advanced – $249/month (billed annually)

Pros

• Enjoy Presentation-ready premium analytics 
• Employee Advocacy initiative helps your business have real faces behind your brand
• With many integrations, especially Whatsapp, you can easily establish a relationship with your customers/audience

Cons

• Pricing is not friendly to startups 

9. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools in the market. If you are a small business person and don’t want to spend more on marketing processes, this tool might be the best for you.

Schedule and publish content to all of your social profiles, track effectiveness in real time, and crank the volume on your top-performing content. It will make your work easier for it will allow you to monitor and run the activities of your social media accounts in one place.

Key Features

• Content Planner and Publisher – Save time with content libraries, image editing tools, and our easy video publishing. Easily create and preview engaging, on-brand posts using Composer. Get access to social media planner tools that make content development a breeze.
• Content Scrutiny and Approval – Reduce your risk and ensure all your posts are good to go with an easy-to-use approval process requiring content to be reviewed by team members before it’s published.
• Content Curation – Easily curate and share great content across your networks by creating search streams for hashtags, keywords, and locations.
• Quality Audience Engagement – Manage messages efficiently. Continually improve your customer service by tracking and analyzing your team metrics. Optimize your response and resolution times for incoming messages on social media to score with your audience.
• Analytics tool – Get actionable insights on the best times to post without the heavy data crunching. Whether your goal is building awareness, boosting engagement, or driving traffic, set yourself up for success.

Hootsuite Pricing 

Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial for Professional and Team packages. Paid plans include

• Professional – $49 per month
• Team – $179 per month
• Enterprise – Request for a quote 

Pros

• Easy to use
• Can save information to be posted later
• Offers free services for managing three social media accounts
• Employee Advocacy initiative helps your business have real faces behind your brand
• Manage account on the go through iOS and Android mobile

Cons

• It only supports a few social media platforms

10. Meet Edgar

Best for refreshing evergreen content

Meet Edgar is best for keeping your readers active all the time with fresh content while removing repetition. With Meet Edgar, you give a second life to your best-performing content especially those that are not time-bound.

You can organize your posts into categories, set a posting schedule, import your evergreen content and create variations for your posts. Using Edgar, watch your business grow as Edgar engages your audience, and drives new followers, leads, and sales.

More than 10 thousand businesses worldwide trust Meet Edgar to manage their social media platforms 

Key Features

• Social media scheduler – Queue up posts and schedule them based on developing market situations
• Content Pull – MeetEdgar pulls from a pre-curated library of posts to create a constant flow of content that keeps your followers engaged.
• Content Performer Tracker – You can monitor A/B test variations to see what resonates best with your audience across multiple social networks.

Meet Edgar Pricing

Meet Edgar has monthly and annual pricing for the 2 packages they offer. They are 

• Eddie Annual Plan – $24.91
• Eddie Monthly Plan – $29.99
• Edgar Annual Plan – $41.58
• Edgar Monthly Plan – $49.99

Meet Edgar offers a 7-day free trial that can be canceled anytime 

Pros

• Helps increase brand awareness
• Easy to handle repetitive tasks with the automation feature
• A reliable customer support system

Cons

• Doesn’t support Google+ 

11. Social Pilot

Social Pilot social media management tool ensures you manage your account effectively and makes it easy to choose what is relevant for your clients within a short time. Social Pilot prides itself on seamless collaboration, insightful analytics, and powerful publishing. This tool is used by small businesses, business professionals, marketing agencies, social media managers, and enterprises.

Key features

• Custom feeds
• Bulk scheduling
• Content suggestions
• Scheduling calendar
• URL shortening integration
• Collaboration
• Client management

Social Pilot Pricing

There is a 14-day free trial period available for all plans. Pricing for paid plans include

• Agency – $106.25 per month
• Studio – $85 per month 
• Small Team – $42.50 per month 
• Professional – $25.50 per month

Pros

• It offers a free trial
• Helps manage many clients simultaneously
• Easy to schedule posts across all social networks

Cons

• Doesn’t perform Instagram analytics

What Do You Look for When Choosing the Best Social Media Management Tool?

The fact is that all social media management tools can’t work out for every business since each business is unique. Furthermore, every social media management tool differs from the others with different features, so you must make the right choice.

To make your search for a social media tool easy, we have analyzed some important considerations you need to make.  They are

1. The Social Media Channels

The first thing you need is to know where your target audience is. Then, you should research to understand the social media platforms where you are likely to get more clients. The main aim of creating a social media account for your business is to create awareness and continue reminding your clients you are still in business and offering the best.

For example, if your business is a B2B business, you will need a LinkedIn and Twitter account since this is where you are likely to find more clients than on Snapchat. Therefore, when choosing a social media marketing tool, you need to select a tool that will work well on these social media platforms.

2. Pricing

It is with no doubt that you don’t want to spend more than your budget on a social media management tool. Since you have a budget, you need to go through different social media marketing tool options and choose the one that is within your budget. However, you shouldn’t focus on the pricing and forget that you have an objective to fulfill with the social media management tool.

Some social media management tools like Social Pilot are priced according to the number of social media accounts you can manage with them. You should choose the tool according to your social media accounts. Then, you can select a plan that works for you, and in case you add more accounts, you upgrade to an option that will cover more accounts.

Other tools have a free trial, free plan, or both. Such tools can be a good choice since you will know whether the tool is worth investing in after using the free trial. However, you won’t access all the features when in a free trial, but you will access the basic features.

3. Scheduling Features

One of the main reasons you need a social media management tool is to make your work easier and save time. Your scheduling tool must then be in a position to meet your demands. Since you want to save time by not visiting the accounts every day but still want to engage your audiences, you need to see how long the tool can help you plan your posts. Do you want to schedule your posts for a week or two? Does the tool have the features for that?

Some of the features that will help you schedule your posts are;

• Content creation interface – It should make it easy to create content, post, and schedule or save posts.
• Post queue management – After creating posts, you need to arrange them in the order in which you need them published.
• Content curation – It will help you derive information from your past posts, but you must be relevant to the audience.
• Content calendar – This ensures consistency in the manner in which you publish your content.

4. Collaboration

If you are working with a team of social media managers and the team leader, you will need smooth communication with the rest of the team members. Besides, you will also need to communicate will all your clients hence the need for a collaboration feature.

5. Ability to Measure Your Success Rate

To test whether your social media campaigns have some effect on your success, you will need features that will help you analyze your performance. You first need to know the aim of engaging in social media campaigns. Is it to increase social traffic, engagement, or purchases? Ensure the tool can show the following.

•  Reach 
•  Likes 
•  Clicks 
•  Shares
•  Comments

These will help you know how you have performed and hence look for ways to improve your performance if you are performing poorly.

6. Customer Support

They say a man is to error; therefore, even if the tool is the best in the market, it must have its downsides. You hence must ensure there is an excellent supporting team you can reach out to the moment you face problems with your tool. For example, does the social media management tool provider have a call center, email address, live chat, or social media pages, and how effective are they?

7. Lastly, Does the Tool Integrate With Others?

Other than the social media management tool, you will need other tools like Slack, Trello, Bit.ly, etc. You must be sure the tool you choose will integrate with other tools without inconvenience.

Frequently Asked Questions on social media tools

What is the most effective social media tool? 

Ultimately, the most effective social media tool is the one that meets the needs of your business based on the following factors: Number of social media channels, pricing, scheduling features, content curation features, customer support, publishing features, social listening, and analytics. Based on these factors, the most effective social media tools are Eclincher, Planable, Agorapulse, Rebrandly, Sendible, Buffer, Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and Meet Edgar

What tools does a Social media manager use?

To effectively carry out your duties as a social media manager, you need a social media management tool that can help you curate content, schedule, publish, engage your target audience and monitor success. The best social media management tools are Eclincher, Planable, Agorapulse, Rebrandly, Sendible, Buffer, Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and Meet Edgar

How do I manage all my social media in one place? 

Managing your social media in one place is an achievable task that can be made easy with the use of a good social media management tool. The best social media management tools to manage your social media in one place are Eclincher, Planable, Agorapulse, Rebrandly, Sendible, Buffer, Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and Meet Edgar

What is the best Social media scheduling tool in 2022?

There are lots of social media management tools in the market but you need one that helps you schedule your content and publish it at the exact date and time of your choosing. The best social media scheduling tools in 2022 are Eclincher, Planable, Agorapulse, Rebrandly, Sendible, Buffer, Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and Meet Edgar

What are the four types of social media tools? 

The four types of social media tools you need for your business are the ones that have the following features: content curation, scheduling, publishing, and ROI analytics. The best social media tools for these are Eclincher, Planable, Agorapulse, Rebrandly, Sendible, Buffer, Social Sprout, Hootsuite, and Meet Edgar

Conclusion

Social media management is about leading people to a point where they can make a choice. It is about helping people make a purchase decision after gaining the confidence that there is a real human being behind the product or service they want to buy. A good social media management tool helps you do just that. 

“Lead people with what they want. – Lead with what they’ve already said. – Lead people from where they’re at. – Lead them with the things that concern them.” 

Sandi Krakowski

When managing a business, there are a thousand tiny little things you need to pay attention to. Choosing the right tool for every task goes a long way to save you from unnecessary stress that can easily get you burned out. 

Social media management requires ongoing communication, engagement, and social buzz. Even with the best team, you need the best tools. Do well to make the right choice for your business.

Did I miss any of your favorite tools in this post? Let me know in the comment section. I read and reply to each one of them personally.