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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we’ve ever used and we’ve used a lot.
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A social media scheduler is the greatest time-saver ever. This marketers’ little helper ensures teams stay consistent and efficient and have enough time to do what they do best — develop new creative ways to engage with the audience.
So say goodbye to scheduling social media posts manually! There are several social media scheduling tools available online: from simple social media calendars to planners and organizers that do anything but read the audience’s mind. To help you find your way around social media scheduling, we highlighted four key features to watch for and gathered the 11 best social media scheduling tools for any team and budget (spoiler: there are FREE options, too).
Although many platforms, like Facebook or Linkedin, allow social media teams to schedule posts using native content planners, doing it manually for each platform is far from an efficient scenario, especially when working with multiple platforms and accounts.
If you’re already gravitating toward choosing a social media scheduling tool for your team, here are four points you should scout for:
Basic but true: a visual, straightforward posting calendar is the backbone of social media scheduling tools. Visual planning helps social media marketers gain a holistic overview of their social posts and keep track of what’s coming next. Scheduling content on a timeline also ensures no overlapping or gaps in posting.
In addition, some tools provide labels or tags to differentiate types of content or its purposes.
Collaboration is a vital part of working on social media strategy. Your perfect multi-purpose social media scheduler would let you create content with your team, internally or externally. Marketing teams can save time by working simultaneously on the same dashboard, sharing feedback, and suggesting edits right next to the asset in question.
Another valuable thing to keep an eye out for is external sharing — if you’re an agency, this is a must for your clients. Most social media management software for agencies should have this essential feature.
Social media managers can ditch emailing posts and visuals back and forth and opt for a customizable approval workflow. Approvals greatly complement any content workflow, whether in-house approval on a social media post from brand and legal teams or an external greenlight from the client. Bonus points if the social media planning tool has multi-layered approvals and auto-publishing mode after the final one.
Last but not least — the integrations. For small business owners who target most social media platforms, a couple of basic integrations with their major resources could be enough. However, you’ll need as many options as possible if you’re a big company with multiple social media accounts or a social media management marketing agency.
Save some room for growth: even if you don’t need these channels now, your perfect social media scheduling tool has to have TikTok or Pinterest, should you decide to explore them later.
Managing social media without a dedicated scheduling tool is like trying to juggle with one hand tied behind your back: messy and unsustainable. While some platforms offer native planners, they’re no match for the flexibility and efficiency of these specialized tools we handpicked for you.
Do you want to tackle your content strategy in a breeze alongside your teammates? One word: Planable, the best social media planner for batch posting and content scheduling.
Social media scheduled posts in Planable’s calendar
Constantly switching between social networks can be a significant drain on your time. Besides, most brands nowadays create content for multiple social platforms, which only adds to the workload.
With Planable, you can plan, approve, and schedule content 6x faster. For busy social marketers, Planable has the sync on/off feature to save time on preparing your Instagram post, LinkedIn update, or Pinterest pin all at once.
Grid view in social media scheduler app Planable
The content calendar has multiple views: grid, feed, calendar, and list. Teams can organize any written content using labels and filters. So label your posts by topic, campaign, brand, client’s favorite color, or anything else of matter to your team.
Social media post scheduler with multi-approval options
Social media posts analytics in Planable
What do you like best about Planable?
We looked at and even signed up for a few other highly rated platforms. Planable was the next one on the list, and before we knew it we had 5 of our pages scheduled for the year. THIS was what we were looking for, something easy to navigate and simple to schedule. The price was a no-brainer.
Verified Planable review on G2
Planable integrates with 9 social media platforms:
With the free plan, you can test all the platforms’ features to create up to 50 posts. After that, paid plans start at $33 per month.
Even though Planable offers analytics for social media, the platform has no social media listening or monitoring.
Scheduling the same social media post to Instagram and LinkedIn from the Planable app
Using Planable AI when scheduling a social media post
Creating and adding labels for scheduled posts in Planable
Scheduling a post on the Planable mobile app
Schedule a recurring social media post in Planable
Planable suits teams of all sizes and shapes who love to work together efficiently. The platform has extensive collaboration features, enabling marketing teams to build custom workflows and automate social media scheduling. Try Planable for free, here.
Hootsuite, a market pioneer in social media management, allows users to manage their social media presence from a single dashboard. The interface provides an in-depth breakdown of marketing activities. It enables you to respond quickly to mentions with the help of a social inbox feature.
Hootsuite supports scheduling and posting to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube. Its social media calendar, though not the most modern-looking one, comprehensively overlooks all the posts planned across multiple platforms.
Hootsuite’s newest update, OwlyAI, helps avoid writer’s block and generate new relevant ideas for social media posts to fill in the gaps in the social media calendar.
Hootsuite has a free trial period and three paid plans starting from $99/month.
Hootsuite doesn’t have a free plan and is relatively expensive for small businesses or individual creators.
If you’re looking for a time-proven solution to maintain your social media posting schedule and manage your social media accounts, Hootsuite will do just fine.
Sprout Social is an all-in-one tool loaded with features. Its impressive toolset includes scheduling and planning, social listening, social analytics, social inbox, mentions, and even employee advocacy. Marketing managers choose Sprout Social when they want to bring in the heavy ammo of the social media world.
Sprout’s social media scheduler tool makes scheduling posts across multiple accounts much easier with batch planning and a visual calendar. It supports scheduling and publishing to all major social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Business Profile.
The platform has a free trial period, and its paid plans start at $249/month, with each additional user costing $199/month.
Sprout Social is expensive and doesn’t have a free plan. In most small to medium business cases, it’s an overkill. Besides, many users mention that its customer support quality doesn’t fit the price.
Sprout Social is a good choice for enterprise companies that want to keep a close eye on their social media performance and have the budget to do so.
Buffer is designed to optimize social media publishing and scheduling. The platform strongly emphasizes building an organic audience, with its key features like social inbox and comments sentiment analysis reflecting this approach. Its integration with Shopify also makes it a solid choice for eCommerce businesses.
Buffer supports Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, TikTok, Google Business, Pinterest, Twitter, Mastodon, and Shopify. The post planner allows tailoring posts for each social media platform, so your Instagram posts can have different captions than Facebook ones. You can schedule content automatically or choose your own custom time for posting.
Buffer offers a free plan with up to 30 monthly scheduled posts per channel. To upgrade, there are three paid plans starting from $6/month per channel.
The platform can’t automatically publish TikToks and Instagram Stories — only through reminders. The pricing is a little confusing, as users pay per channel, so if you decide to explore another social platform, you would need to pay extra.
Buffer is one of the simple yet effective social media management tools that ticks all of the boxes for small teams focusing on particular channels. It’s a neat platform for content curation to ensure you execute your social strategy at its best.
CoSchedule is a project management tool that prioritizes efficient workflows for all marketing activities, including the brand’s social media schedule. It offers a marketing calendar to help social media professionals streamline content curation across social channels and save time scheduling content.
CoSchedule’s marketing calendar is more of a post planner than a full-scale social media tool. Users can schedule one-time social media posts or create a social campaign consisting of several messages. CoSchedule integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, WordPress, MailChimp, and other marketing platforms.
CoSchedule also has analytical tools to track social media campaigns, like the Top Content report. This report gathers content that gained the most engagement on one page, making it easy for social marketers to identify the top-performing formats.
CoSchedule has a free version of the marketing calendar and a pro version for $29/month per user.
The publishing tool only allows Business profiles to publish directly on Instagram. Features like collaboration and content templates are only available in the pro version.
CoSchedule is among those nifty and simple publishing tools that suit teams aiming to ease their processes and make them more transparent. It works great as a free tool with basic functionality as long as you don’t need some spectacular toolbox.
Later started as Instagram-only social media scheduling tool. In the meantime, it expanded to other networks, including Facebook, TikTok, Linkedin, Pinterest, and YouTube. Later has a visual content calendar that allows marketers to manage multiple social media accounts across different channels.
Being somewhat Instagram and TikTok-oriented, Later has recently joined forces with Mavrck — an influencer marketing platform. This partnership complements Later’s collab features, allowing social marketers to collaborate with creators and influencers through one social media management tool.
Later doesn’t have flashy content features but offers straightforward content creation and scheduling in just a few clicks. It has built-in content creation tools such as a media library, cropper, hashtag suggestions, and, most importantly — a UGC finder to source content generated by your target audience.
Later has a free plan, and its paid plans begin at $18/month.
The free plan is a bit tight on features: for instance, social media analytics is only available in paid plans.
Later is a great tool to schedule your posts and stay on track for small teams and solo creators. If you prioritize Instagram or another platform for visual content like Pinterest or TikTok, consider giving Later a try.
Zoho Social is a nifty tool for businesses and agencies to enhance social media marketing. This comprehensive platform offers many features to help you effectively reach and engage with your target audience. If you need a less extreme version of Sprout’s feature list and reporting, Zoho Social is your candidate.
With Zoho Social, social media managers can schedule and manage content across several media channels more efficiently. Users like Zoho for its data-based predictions on the best time to post and other optimization and its detailed reports.
Zoho supports direct posting to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Business Profile.
Zoho Social has a free plan, so it’s suitable for free social media hassle. You also have five paid plans starting from $15/month.
Although Zoho has collaboration features, roles, and approvals, they’re pretty simple and don’t fit more complicated workflows.
Zoho’s strong suit is analytical reports and many data-driven approaches to social media marketing. So if you are looking for a smart post planner, try Zoho.
Agorapulse is an affordable jack-of-all-trades solution among social media tools. The platform ticks all the right boxes: schedule and publish content, engage with the audience through comments and direct messages, listen to brand mentions, and report on content performance. A nice steady package for a nice steady price.
Agorapulse supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, YouTube, and TikTok. Its multi-platform publishing option saves a lot of time regarding content planning and helps you stay consistent across all channels.
Besides, Agorapulse works as a project management tool where teams can collaborate, assign posts to each other, and leave comments to tweak copy or visuals.
Agorapulse doesn’t support Pinterest publishing. Approval workflows, Canva integration, bulk publishing, and some other features are only available in the Professional plan.
Agorapulse is a nice option for those who want to give social media scheduling tools a try in general: it has all the necessary features and suits smaller teams best.
Sendible positions itself as the top social media management tool for agencies and offers a range of plans to cater to different organizations. It supports social media scheduling, offers content recommendations, and provides reporting on campaigns and a social inbox. Being a good fit for the agencies, it allows marketers to manage multiple clients from one platform easily.
With Sendible, you can connect to social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, and Twitter and post directly to your WordPress, Medium, or Tumblr. It also recently added an integration with TikTok, allowing users to post directly to the platform.
Sendible has a 14-day free trial period and three paid plans starting from $24/month.
Sendible currently doesn’t support scheduling for Pinterest. Additionally, its engagement tools are limited to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.
As a social media scheduling tool, Sendible is a steady option with enough functionality to cover the needs of a professional social media team. It is clumsy UX-wise but compensates with a nice list of features for a reasonable price.
Statusbrew is one of the most affordable social listening tools. It enables users to create polished, customizable report templates for a deep dive into social media performance.
The social media scheduler includes tools for benchmarking your performance against competitors, AI-powered sentiment analysis, and advanced comment moderation to refine and enhance your overall social media strategy.
Statusbrew can feel overwhelming for first-time users due to its complex interface, and it offers limited social media scheduling customization options. Editing content already scheduled for multiple posts can be challenging, making adjustments less seamless.
Loomly is a versatile social media scheduling tool designed for marketers wanting efficiency and organization in their workflows. It offers scheduling to most social media platforms, planning, engagement tracking, advanced analytics, and social media reports, making it a well-rounded social scheduler.
Loomly simplifies the user journey with features like the Calendar Wizard, which guides users through connecting social media accounts, setting up preferences, and initiating scheduling workflows for multiple social accounts.
Built with collaboration in mind, the social media scheduling tool has team-based functionalities such as post approvals, commenting, and role assignments. However, some advanced features, like custom workflows and roles, are limited to higher-priced plans, which might not suit smaller teams with tight budgets.
While Loomly provides an intuitive and feature-rich experience, it has limitations for social campaigns. Advanced collaboration tools and custom workflows are only accessible in higher-tier plans, making it less ideal for larger teams with complex needs. The platform lacks social listening capabilities and integrations with tools like Google Analytics. The learning curve for new users may also pose challenges, especially for those unfamiliar with its user interface.
Yes! Planable has a free trial period: you have 50 posts to get familiar with the platform and get a taste of hassle-free social media management.
Although some social platforms have built-in scheduling tools, a third-party social media scheduling tool like Planable is a significantly easier and faster way to keep track of your social media efforts and manage multiple accounts.
If you’re looking for seamless collaboration features and smooth approval workflows, it’s hands down Planable. Try it, and you’ll get what all the buzz is about!
Social media schedulers are a lifesaver if you’re aiming to keep your posts regular and your audience engaged, all without the extra stress. These tools simplify the whole planning process, giving you back those precious hours to focus on creative ideas and strategic moves. And if you’re just getting your feet wet, Planable has got your back with a free plan for your first 50 posts.
Content marketer with a background in journalism; digital nomad, and tech geek. In love with blogs, storytelling, strategies, and old-school Instagram. If it can be written, I probably wrote it.
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