As we stand at the precipice of 2024, it's evident: managing a social presence in today's fast-paced digital sphere feels like trying to command the winds. Solopreneurs, nascent brands, and the ever-active agencies know the challenge all too well. And in the heart of this tempest? Social media schedulers. They aren’t just the backstage technicians; they're the maestros orchestrating a digital symphony. These schedulers transform the frantic digital pulse into a harmonious rhythm, empowering brands to stand tall in the clamor. Think of them as your digital compass, navigating the time-pressured waters of online engagement. That said, there are so many social media schedulers in the market. This makes it challenging to pick one that’ll work best for you and your team. Read on for some tips on how to choose the best social media scheduler. We’ve even narrowed down 10 of the best options that you should consider using.
Personal Experience with Social Media Schedulers
As I delved into this vast sea of digital tools, a few caught my attention. Buffer, with its sheer simplicity, felt like a breath of fresh air. Hootsuite's analytics? It was like diving into a data treasure trove. No longer were my posts mere echoes in the abyss; they became potent dialogues. The scheduler transformed from a mere instrument to an ally, enhancing each post’s potential. The allure lay in the insights - discerning the pulse of engagement. And witnessing the surge of interactions during prime time? It was like watching a meteor shower in the digital sky!
Benefits of Using Social Media Schedulers
The clock ticks, but your posts tick better with social media schedulers. They are your silent digital comrades, shaving hours off your schedule, lining up your posts in a neat, timely row. Remember the time when a post missed the peak engagement window? Schedulers ensure your content hits the digital waves when your audience is online and receptive. They are not just time-savers but engagement amplifiers, wrapping your workflow in a cloak of efficiency. Take the tale of a local bakery that skyrocketed its reach by scheduling posts during the community’s coffee breaks, resonating with the local ethos. Schedulers are not just about when; they are about hitting the 'when' right.
Top Social Media Schedulers
The stage is set, the digital actors many. But who truly commands the spotlight? Allow me to guide you through the crème de la crème of the schedulers, evaluating their offerings, user experience, and value proposition. Be it the multifaceted solopreneur or the agency choreographing a brand masterpiece, there's a scheduler in sync with your digital tempo. From Buffer’s intuitive design to Hootsuite’s unparalleled insights, each platform sings its distinctive note in the vast social media ensemble. It’s not about blindly following the current; it’s about understanding and choosing the right stream.
1. Loomly
Price: Starts at $35/mo.
Loomly is a brand success platform that offers publishing and scheduling capabilities for leading social networks. It supports automated publishing for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can even get reminders to manually publish on channels such as Snapchat and TikTok.
Loomly also automatically pushes your Facebook and Instagram ads, assisting you with your paid social strategy. The analytics feature provides you with performance insights for your posts, accounts, and URLs so you can keep fine-tuning your strategy for better results.
2. Sendible
Price: Starts at $29/mo.
Sendible is another powerful publishing tool that supports scheduling for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. One of the main highlights of this scheduler is the ability to tailor your posts for each social network. It allows you to easily switch up the hashtags, emojis, and attachments for each network.
The scheduler even comes with a built-in Canva integration so you can design stunning graphics for your social media posts. Sendible also provides you with content suggestions to fill up your content calendar, allowing you to share engaging and relevant content on a regular basis.
3. Agorapulse
Price: Paid plans start at $99/mo.
Agorapulse is another leading option that supports scheduling for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Built for collaboration, the scheduler allows you to easily communicate with your team and co-create content for different social networks. You can even store and manage your media from a single location.
While Agorapulse is a free social media scheduler, it only gives you access to some basic features and lets you manage up to three social profiles. For more advanced features and to manage more social profiles, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans.
4. Planoly
Price: Paid plans start at $11.25/mo.
Planoly is a content planning tool that offers scheduling and automated publishing for Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. You can also plan your content ahead for Twitter and set a reminder so you know when it’s time to post.
The scheduler makes it easy to plan your content by letting you fill up your calendar grids with content from Canva or user-generated content. Planoly also comes with powerful analytics features so you can better understand your audience, know what’s working, and how you can optimize your existing strategy.
5. Later
Price: Pain plans start from $16.67/mo.
One of the leading social media marketing platforms, Later offers robust scheduling capabilities for leading social networks. The tool lets you schedule posts for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn. It supports auto-publishing for most platforms, which means that Later will automatically publish the post on your profile at the time of your choosing.
For Instagram Stories, the scheduler will send a reminder when it’s time to post so you can manually publish it. It also comes with a visual content planner that makes it extremely easy to plan your content ahead of time. Later is free to use, although you’d need to upgrade to one of the paid plans to access more advanced features such as best time to post suggestions and hashtag suggestions.
6. Hootsuite
Price: Starts at $49/mo.
Hootsuite is another comprehensive scheduler that integrates with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok. The tool offers a visual content calendar so you can get an overview of your publishing schedule and easily make changes. It even recommends the ideal time to post so you can reach your audience at the perfect time.
Hootsuite offers powerful features such as asset libraries, video publishing, and image editing that make it a popular option in social media scheduling tools. It even lets you collaborate seamlessly with team members so you can create on-brand content that delivers results.
7. SocialBee
Price: Starts at $19/mo.
SocialBee is a budget-friendly option for those who need a comprehensive social media scheduler. The tool offers scheduling capabilities for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. It simplifies scheduling by letting you organize your posts based on content categories. You can even pause specific categories with a single click.
SocialBee allows you to customize your posting schedule for each platform. It also lets you create posting sequences to use over and over again, which helps you maintain consistency. The most basic plan lets you manage up to five social accounts.
8. Buffer
Price: Paid plans start from $6/mo. per social channel
Buffer offers powerful publishing capabilities for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can use a single dashboard to plan your content ahead and schedule them to go out at specific dates and times. Buffer even lets you include the first comment when scheduling your Instagram posts.
The scheduler auto-publishes for most social networks, saving you the trouble of having to manually send your posts. For TikTok and Stories, Buffer sends you a notification when it’s time to share the post. The tool supports collaboration and allows you to work with your team in drafting posts and approving them before they’re published. While you can access the basic publishing features for free, you need to upgrade to a paid plan to access more advanced features such as analytics and engagement tools.
9. Sprout Social
Price: Starts at $99 per user/month
Another powerful option in the market, Sprout Social offers robust publishing and scheduling capabilities for leading social networks. It supports scheduling for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and TikTok. This makes it one of the most comprehensive social media schedulers.
Sprout Social offers a shared content calendar so you can easily plan your publishing schedule with your team. It also suggests optimal send times so you can push out your content at a time when it’s most likely to reach your audience and drive engagement. Sprout also offers additional features such as URL tracking, content suggestions, and asset libraries.
10. Meet Edgar
Price: Starts at $29.99/mo.
Meet Edgar allows you to put your social media publishing on autopilot for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It automates your recurring tasks by generating a virtually endless library of evergreen content that’s organized into categories. That means you don’t always have to manually schedule your updates even if you’re pressed for time.
The scheduler automatically generates different variations of each update so you don’t have to brainstorm creative ways to share your content. Meet Edgar also lets you A/B test different variations of your social posts to see what’s working. You can even monitor engagement across leading social networks to get a better sense of your performance.
Get to Scheduling
Using a social media scheduler is a great way to save time and organize your social media content efforts. Make the most of the tips and the suggestions given above to find the best social media scheduler to use for your team.
What is a Social Media Scheduler?
A social media scheduler is a tool that allows you to set a date and time for your social media posts to automatically go out. It lets you draft your post and schedule it to get published across your chosen social networks at the time and date of your choosing. That way, you can schedule multiple social media posts ahead of time so you don’t have to manually create a new post when it’s time to publish.
This is an excellent way to save time and organize your social media posting schedule. You can plan ahead and create several new posts based on your content calendar.
Source: buffer.com
More importantly, using a social media scheduler allows you to reach your audience at a time when they’re most likely to interact with your posts. You can schedule your post to go out at the optimal post timing for each social network, which makes it easy to drive engagement and visibility across all social media channels.
What to Look for in a Social Media Scheduler
One of the easiest ways to identify the best social media scheduler for you is by knowing exactly what to look for. Here are some factors to consider when choosing a social media scheduler.
Social Networks
Start by looking at the social networks it supports. Does it allow scheduling for all the social networks where you want to build a brand presence? This would typically be all major social media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Some may even offer scheduling for TikTok, which is something you’d want to consider if you’re using the platform for marketing.
Keep in mind that at the time of writing this post, most social media schedulers won’t automatically publish Instagram and Facebook Stories for you. So although you can technically schedule them, you’ll only get a reminder at the set time. You’ll then need to manually publish the Stories yourself from the Instagram or Facebook mobile app.
Built-in Editor
Since you’ll need to draft your post using the social media scheduler, you should look for something that has robust built-in editing features. You should be able to seamlessly add captions, tags, media, and hashtags so you don’t have to go back in and make edits to a published post. Some schedulers even provide you with smart hashtag suggestions so you can strike the perfect balance between highly relevant hashtags and highly popular ones.
With some social media scheduling tools, you can even get access to basic photo editing features. This is a handy tool to have if you want to quickly brighten up a picture or change the overall tone before scheduling it to go out.
Content Calendar
Source: later.com
The whole point of using a social media scheduler is so you can simplify your publishing efforts. This is why you need to look for a tool that comes with a visual content calendar so you can easily organize your publishing schedule. You have to be able to get an overview of how your posts are distributed so you can make necessary changes to further optimize your content plan.
You can find plenty of schedulers that allow you to drag and drop your post ideas/drafts across a visual content calendar. This makes it much easier to plan your content ahead of time and ensure consistency while keeping your feed diverse and engaging.
Collaboration
If you’re in the market for a social media scheduler, chances are that you’re working as a team and not on your own. As such, you should also look for scheduling tools that allow for seamless collaboration between different team members. You should be able to assign tasks and posts to different team members, communicate with each other, and get feedback on post ideas/drafts.
Source: sproutsocial.com
Analytics
When you’re using social media for marketing, you’d want to make sure that your publishing strategy is working. Are people responding to your content the way you anticipated? If not, what could be the reason? Do you need to change your post timing or your content format?
This is why having comprehensive analytics is important in a social media scheduler. You should be able to track all the key metrics that are an indicator of your content or campaign performance. These would typically be metrics such as reach, impressions, and engagement. Some tools may also give you insights into the performance of your paid social media posts.
More importantly, make sure your social media scheduler can analyze the best time to post based on how your audience is interacting with your posts. This will help you optimize your posting schedule for increased engagement and visibility.
Additional Capabilities
Besides the essentials above, there may be some additional good-to-have features that you might want to look for based on your unique needs. Social media listening and monitoring, for example, are some useful capabilities that could inform your posting strategy. You may be able to gain valuable insights into the trends and topics that are shaping conversations in your industry, which can then provide you with content ideas.
If you often post links to your blog, landing page, or product page, the ability to set UTM parameters is another useful feature. Some schedulers will let you set UTM parameters by post, while others might be limited to a per-channel basis.
Pricing
While you may find a social media scheduler that has all the essential features you’re looking for, you also have to make sure that it’s within budget. Many schedulers will set a lower price for plans with basic features and limited access i.e. it may limit access to fewer people. So it’s important to keep in mind your team size and your feature requirements when assessing different pricing plans. Look for something that offers an affordable plan without compromising key features and access limits.
Get to Scheduling
Using a social media scheduler is a great way to save time and organize your social media content efforts. Make the most of the tips and the suggestions given above to find the best social media scheduler to use for your team.
About the Author: Werner Geyser, Social Media Scheduling Expert
Werner Geyser stands as a luminary in the realm of digital marketing, with a specialized focus on Social Media Schedulers. His journey in the digital world is marked by years of hands-on experience, during which he has unraveled the complexities of scheduling content across various social media platforms. Werner's approach ensures that content doesn't merely reach its intended audience but also strikes a chord, resonating deeply with them.
His expertise has been pivotal in shaping successful digital campaigns for illustrious brands, further cementing his reputation as a trusted voice in the Social Media Schedulers domain. Brands like Refersion, Pacvue, Rainmakers, and Helium10 have benefited from his insights, leveraging the power of scheduling to maximize their digital reach.
As the landscape of social media continues its dynamic evolution, Werner remains at the vanguard, guiding marketers through the intricate maze of Social Media Schedulers. His profound understanding of scheduling technologies and strategies ensures that businesses always stay a step ahead in the ever-competitive world of social media.
For those eager to harness the full potential of Social Media Schedulers, Werner Geyser's insights and expertise are indispensable.
