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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
It’s no secret that social media favors visual content. Because of that, Instagram remains a critical medium for marketers. Instagram allows you to share engaging photos of your business and connect with costumes while pursuing new audiences. Whatever your business...
Aug 12, 2025
Social media engagement tools centralize cross-channel comments, mentions, and DMs within unified inboxes. Some platforms also include social listening and sentiment analysis capabilities to help social media teams summarize the audience’s opinion on particular topics and prioritize feedback properly.
With the increase of AI-generated content across socials, meaningful two-way conversations now matter more than anything else — both users and social algorithms agree.
That said, in this article, I’ll walk you through some of the best engagement tools currently available, as well as introduce you to Planable’s new engagement features that top off its renowned planning and approval capabilities, delivering an all-in-one solution for the ultimate social media workflow.
Social media engagement tools are solutions that collect and centralize social media communications across multiple platforms, comments, private messages, DMs, and reviews.
Some tools also include sentiment analysis capabilities to monitor social conversations and summarize the audience’s opinion around particular topics and brands.
As such, these tools help social media managers maintain active communication with audiences and address critical feedback.
Social media engagement tools include loads of advantages, with some of the most notable ones being:
Given the rise of AI-generated content, algorithms now favor content that generates engagement. Actively getting involved in your comments section helps you do so, while engagement tools let you do it at scale.
People are much more likely to purchase products or services from companies that regularly engage with their audience than from businesses that push advertisements. Besides this, maintaining conversations with audiences requires less ongoing costs than large-scale ad campaigns and generates a more meaningful impact.
A tightly-knit community built around your brand is probably the best form of marketing. It generates repeat purchases, while loyal followers are likely to recommend your brand to other people.
Although fostering meaningful connections with their audience alone can make companies stand out from the competition, some engagement tools also allow you to zoom in on audience conversations covering your competitors, which is perfect for spotting any pain points you can capitalize on.
The engagement tools I’ll list below are part of larger social media management solutions. I’ll cover what each tool is best for, its top features, and any drawbacks you should look out for.
Known and highly appreciated for its social media planning and approval workflow tools, Planable offers engagement features.
Manage and reply to social media conversations from one collaborative inbox.
With content planning and approval, as well as engagement features in one neat package, managing multiple social networks is that much easier. Using Planable, you can monitor, organize, collaborate on, and reply to comments across your social media accounts, all in the exact same place where you schedule and work on your content.
This marks Planable’s transition from an already solid content scheduling and collaboration solution to an even better all-around social media management platform.
With Planable, you can:
Social media posts, approve or leave feedback on content from team members, and reply to comments on already-published posts — all without third-party tools or tab switching.
By using the platform’s Reply with AI feature that generates instant draft responses you can tweak or post as-is, making it possible to reply literally in seconds.
The feature automatically categorizes comments into Negative, Questions, and Positive buckets. This helps you quickly identify concerns or questions that require prompt responses and keep your community feel heard and valued.
This is ideal for establishing seamless end-to-end social media workflows, from content creation to audience interaction.
Bonus: Having access to both planning and engagement features in the same place is particularly useful for creating feedback loops where engagement insights directly contribute to future posts. If you get a large volume of similar questions, it might be worth answering them through an individual post, for example.
Planable lets you set up client or project-specific workspaces where you can assign custom user roles and permissions to team members — perfect if you want to organize dedicated social media customer support teams.
Customize team roles and collaboration permissions across your workspace.
Each workspace has its own social inbox. Team members can organize messages based on their status: Open, Later, Resolved, to better track incoming messages.
Filter and manage user comments to streamline response workflows.
On top of this, Planable includes strong team collaboration tools that allow for super precise feedback.
In contrast to most other social media collaboration tools, Planable lets you leave feedback on texts through annotations, suggestions, and regular comments.
The option to mark feedback as resolved and view activity history ensures organized and confusion-free review processes.
Collaborate with teammates by leaving internal comments on content drafts.
Internal comments and posts are also a very nice touch. Clients won’t be able to see them, even if they’re invited to your workspace.
Planable also includes analytics as an extra add-on to the core platform. You can pinpoint your top-performing posts and your competitor’s in terms of engagement, interactions, and comments.
Track performance metrics and identify top-performing content at a glance.
Planable covers network-specific metrics. For example, its LinkedIn analytics tools measure company page follower growth, audience job titles and seniority levels, as well as content click-throughs.
Facebook metrics, on the other hand, measure your Facebook pages’ overall reach, impressions, and comments. And of course, you can also generate reports that give you quick breakdowns of your overall social media presence across multiple platforms.
Planable’s iOS and Android apps let you handle most social media management-related tasks even when you’re on the go or outside office hours.
Approve and manage social media posts on the go with Planable’s mobile app.
You can leave feedback on content, and even edit posts through just a few taps. You can also preview your Instagram grid and make any quick changes if necessary.
Planable’s social media calendar is one of the platform’s top features — and the place where you’ll do most of your work.
Visual calendar to plan, organize, and track multi-platform content publishing.
You can leave comments and approve posts directly in the calendar view, while the drag-and-drop interface and color-coded labels make it easy to organize, schedule, and reschedule social posts.
The calendar also includes one-click access to loads of other features, like Planable’s media library, analytics, and, of course, its Engagement tool.
Coupled with the calendar’s ample filter set, you can quickly pinpoint top-performing content types engagement-wise, and preview each post in full to see what made it successful.
Pricing: There’s a free plan available – ideal especially for small businesses – that lets you schedule up to 50 posts. Paid plans start at $33/user/month.
Drawbacks: Planable’s Engagement tool currently doesn’t handle direct messages.
Hootsuite‘s advanced engagement tools include tons of features designed to close the gap between you and your audience.
You can set up automated Instagram DM responses to users who include particular keywords in your comments section. It’s great for answering product-related questions and simultaneously nudging for purchases, for example.
Hootsuite’s engagement tools also help:
Pricing: Pricing plans start at $99 per user per month (paid annually), with a 30-day free trial available.
Drawbacks: The platform’s interface can be slightly overwhelming, while users report that Hootsuite’s Instagram inbox management tools can be problematic — they’re slow and prone to the occasional bug.
Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox centralizes DMs, comments, and brand mentions across multiple social media platforms, while features like its sentiment analysis, message tagging, and built-in contact management system allow for quick and relevant replies.
The platform’s Real-Time Activity chart also includes real-time overviews of all incoming and resolved messages — perfect for synchronizing workflows across social media customer service teams.
Speaking of which, Sprout Social’s features are mainly centered around social customer support, meaning the platform helps:
Pricing: Sprout Social’s Standard plan costs $199 per user per month (paid annually), with a 30-day free trial available.
Drawbacks: The platform’s steep price tag only makes it a viable option for enterprise-level companies and well-established social media marketing agencies.
Buffer, however, is a solid option for small teams and solopreneurs. The platform takes a super straightforward approach to inbox management.
Buffer displays Facebook and Instagram comments in a unified dashboard, while its Smart Alerts automatically prioritize messages based on particular criteria. You can have it focus on comments containing negative sentiments or that include questions about your products, for example.
Plus, Buffer includes loads of social media management tools that help:
Pricing: Buffer starts at $5 per channel per month (paid annually), with a free plan available that allows you to schedule up to 10 posts.
Drawbacks: Buffer’s engagement tools are only available for Facebook and Instagram and are quite basic. They lack canned responses and the option to track brand mentions, for example.
Brandwatch is a product suite that includes solutions dedicated to consumer intelligence, influencer marketing, and social media management. Brandwatch’s engagement features are available in the social media management platform and are quite in-depth.
Most notably, you can set up dedicated customer profiles that summarize demographic data, favorite topics, the social networks they’re most active in, and their latest comments or DMs. It’s ideal for getting the insights necessary to deliver personalized messages to each particular customer.
Brandwatch also includes other engagement features that help:
Pricing: Pricing is not disclosed. You’ll need to reach out to the sales team to get a custom quote.
Drawbacks: Users report that Brandwatch is highly complex and requires extensive training.
Agorapulse includes a handy social inbox that unifies DMs, comments, and reviews across Google Business Profile and all other major social platforms.
The inbox stands out through its automated moderation rules. Agorapulse can automatically delete spam comments that include links or negative keywords, as well as send canned responses based on comment sentiment, for example.
On top of that, Agorapulse’s inbox management tools help:
Pricing: Agorapulse starts at $79 per user per month (paid annually), with a 30-day free trial available.
Drawbacks: Users report Agorapulse’s analytics are quite lackluster in entry and mid-level plans. They lack customization options and only cover basic engagement metrics.
Later lets you monitor and manage comments and DMs across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. In addition, its social listening tools provide quick previews of top social profiles mentioning your account, along with visual overviews of the content they post in their mentions.
You can then zoom in on each post to see the total likes and comments, while Later analyzes audience interactions to gauge sentiment.
Later’s social media listening tools also monitor other creators in your niche to provide personalized influencer collaboration suggestions based on the topics and audiences they cover.
Later’s social media capabilities also help:
Pricing: Later starts at $16.67 per month (paid annually), while the platform’s social listening features are only available in the Enterprise package.
Drawbacks: Later is primarily TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram-centric. Features like inbox management, or hashtag and audience reports are not available for most of the other supported social media platforms — X, YouTube, Pinterest, and so on.
Iconosquare is an analytics-first social media management platform with solid community management and social listening tools.
That means you can monitor social media engagement metrics like total comments and brand mentions. You can cross-reference them with your accounts’ reach and follower growth. Then use these details to engage with your community where it’s most needed.
The platform’s built-in inbox also lets you monitor and respond to all social interactions across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Iconosquare’s engagement tools also let you:
Pricing: Iconosquare starts at $33 per month (paid annually), with a 14-day free trial available.
Drawbacks: Iconosquare’s analytics-centric approach does come with a compromise in the inbox management department — the inbox supports a limited number of social platforms and team collaboration tools.
Pallyy is a social media management tool for small business owners — the platform packs all the essentials into an affordable package.
Pallyy’s inbox pulls in comments, DMs, and user reviews across Facebook and Google Business Profile.
It also includes basic automation capabilities, like the option to automatically assign messages from particular social platforms to specific team members.
Pallyy’s other features also allow you to:
Pricing: Pallyy’s engagement tools are available in the platform’s paid plans. You’ve got two pricing models available: the per social set plan that costs $20 per set per month (paid annually), and the all-in-one plan (also includes add-ons) at a $299 per month (paid annually) price tag.
Drawbacks: Pallyy’s feature sets are inconsistent in the number of platforms they support. The scheduling tools are available for most major social networks, while its inbox is limited to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and GPB. The platform’s analytics handle even fewer networks — Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Each tool listed above fulfills particular needs and use cases — some include simple features for replying to comments and DMs, while others are fully-fledged social customer service solutions.
Still, there are loads of other things to consider when picking the right platform for your needs.
More specifically:
Pay particular attention here. Although most social media management platforms cover all major networks, their engagement tools might only be compatible with a few. Make sure the engagement platform of your choice integrates with the networks you use.
Speaking of which, see if the platform of your choice links to third-party tools within your tool stack. Zero in on CRM and help desk solutions, especially if you want to focus on social customer service.
In case you anticipate large volumes of interactions, sentiment analysis and workflow management features (reply collision detection, conversation routing, etc.) are a must. Otherwise, basic inbox management features should have you covered.
Regularly engaging with your audience humanizes your brand, helps build a loyal community around it, and keeps you a step ahead of your competitors.
For social media managers, this may also sound like their jobs just got a whole lot busier. But that’s not actually the case if they seamlessly merge it into their existing workflows. That’s exactly where Planable comes in.
The platform’s centralized dashboard makes staying in touch with your followers and handling all other social media tasks straightforward — you can write up a quick post one moment, then send over a few replies the next.
Planable makes social media engagement feel more like just a small checkbox to tick off in between tasks, not a huge chore that will leave you staring at comments for hours on end.
Easy access to your inbox not only makes managing conversations easier but also contributes to a more informed content strategy and accelerated business growth. It helps you view common user feedback and act on it in your next posts right away. And Planable allows you to do all this and more.
Why not try it and see for yourself? Try Planable for free!
Digital marketing enthusiast, language nerd, and content writer. Horea loves writing about SaaS and anything that involves boosting online presence – from SEO to social media, web design, and more. His content is allergic to fluff and eats research for breakfast.
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