Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Small Businesses, Agencies and Individuals

As a social scheduling tool ourselves, we know that there’s no such thing as one-size-fits all. You have different needs when you’re looking for a social media scheduler for your own small business, as a VA who needs to report to your clients, or as a big agency/ enterprise. We have dissected the different social media tools that in our opinion, will be best for your business depending on its business model and size — so you can make an informed choice on what you need! Dig in!

Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Individuals and Startups

When it comes to smaller businesses, startups and one-man/women armies — price is often the biggest factor when choosing a social media scheduling tool. Postfity comes as the best value for money in the price comparison:

Postfity

Let’s take it off the table — apart from being the simplest to use, Postfity is by far the cheapest social media tool we’ve found. While it doesn’t boast advanced analytics or reporting functionality, it’s a great tool for seamlessly managing different social media networks. You can posts photos to all the main social media and video content supports to Twitter accounts. Just enough for a small business to meet all of their social media marketing needs. 

Postfity offers an intuitive user-interface which is a delight to use, especially for a busy solopreneur. Also, Postfity offers a unique feature — out-of-the-box ideas for your posts as well as ready-to-use post templates. Users can also add watermarks to their posts and thus protect their work. Postfity superior social media scheduling features help you save time and effectively manage traffic and ensure engagement. It is the engagement which drives social media marketing out there.

SocialBee:

A relatively new tool in the social media scheduling domain, SocialBee has made quite a buzz in the market. SocialBee hasn’t limited its features until posts scheduling, but you can also do competitor research through it. SocialBee has a dedicated product roadmap with tons of free features rolling out down the line. Coming back to social media scheduling, SocialBee provides dedicated categories for posts scheduling. You can create an evergreen, balanced campaign for various types of content. In simpler terms, users can mark and schedule their posts in custom categories such as curated content, news, promotional, customer engagement and more.

SocialBee moves one step ahead than its competitors and lets you set a time to live (TTL) counter on your posts. This means, your posts will automatically expire on the desired date and time. Social media managers can save a lot of time with SocialBee’s evergreen posting, category-based scheduling, calendar visualization and more. There is a dedicated concierge service to help users with their social management needs. SocialBee has emerged as an effective place to manage all your social profiles while performing competitor research to generate insights. You can analyse which content has performed well and can schedule it again in a matter of a few clicks.

Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for VAs and Small Agencies

As a VA or a small agency, you still look at the price tag but at the same time, you need some reporting and analytics functionalities (so you can justify your existence to your clients ;)) that the cheapest tools may not have. Here are the best options for you:

MeetEdgar:

MeetEdgar is another customized social media scheduling tool. The tool lets you schedule, share and recycle the posts whenever you want. You can publish your content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter etc. The tool utilized category based scheduling such as Motivation Monday, Blog Post Tuesdays, Inspiration Fridays etc. You can customize these categories as per your requirement and also colour code them for ease of access. Thus, you can have a bird’s eye view on the content which is scheduled to be published. MeetEdgar rescheduling algorithm automatically puts the published content at the end of the queue so that it can be published again.

Some of the popular features of MeetEdgar are bulk content upload, schedule different categories as per days/time. You can also schedule content according to the time zone of a country. This helps to put your content out at the right time. You can also import articles or blogs through RSS feed integration. Your business can grow affordably when you optimize resources at hand and create effective social media campaigns. You can get a lot of value for your dollar and achieve a higher return on investment (ROI). Social media is now an integral part of any business, managing social media shouldn’t be a hassle for anyone.

Sendible:

Sendible is one of the most popular social media scheduling tools in the market. The tool is the first choice for entrepreneurs and media agencies looking for an all-in-one solution. Sendible comes with an array of rich features which provide unlimited scheduling functionality to users. Here you can schedule your social media posts for multiple platforms individually, through queues or in bulk as well. Moreover, Sendible provides a ‘Smart Posts’ feature which helps you trim your posts according to the desired social network. The feature also helps in selecting relevant captions, emojis and hashtags.

Social media managers would love the upcoming feature. You can create an entire social media campaign offline, craft your content, images and everything, and then schedule it by uploading it to Sendible in bulk. You can easily keep a track of activities on Sendible since every activity can be viewed and managed in the dashboard’s calendar. Sendible helps you tailor specific content for a specific social media network in order to ensure maximum organic reach. You can also reuse your old posts with repeating schedules. RSS auto-posting feature is also supported through which you can create, curate and share quality newsletter content with your audience.

Best Social media Scheduling Tools for Large Agencies and Enterprises

As a big agency or enterprise you need very sophisticated analytics and collaboration/teamwork functionalities. Here are some of the best (although more expensive) tools for you:

Buffer:

One of the longest-running social media tools, Buffer supports Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter etc. for scheduling posts. Buffer provides a comprehensive social media scheduling approach to users. You can even connect to multiple accounts of a single social network as well. For instance, if you’re running a social media campaign on Facebook, you can manage Facebook pages, groups and accounts parallelly. The moment you connect a social media account on Buffer, the tool will create a default schedule for you. Generally, there are 4 slots every day in the default schedule. You can schedule your posts for the morning, noon, mid-noon and late at night.

The scheduling preferences can be altered and edited according to the requirement. Buffer provides an intuitive user-interface through a dedicated dashboard. There are several mobile applications and browser extensions available too. Both iOS and Android users can install Buffer on their smartphones and keep a track of their social media engagement on the move. Moreover, Buffer also provides limited insights into the performance of your campaign. Users can see how many impressions the post gets. You can also get insights about clicks on links, comments, shares, organic impressions etc. Therefore, you can have an overall idea about how your social media campaign is doing out there. You can input these insights into a social media report template and create an outstanding social media marketing presence.

Hootsuite:

With over 35 social media networks under its radar, Hootsuite is one of the best social media management and scheduling tools. You can choose the social medium by simply clicking on social media icons. Hootsuite also comes with dedicated post monitoring and analytics features. Hootsuite also provides a user-maintained database for storing details about user connections. Popular social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest etc. are all supported. What distinguishes Hootsuite from rest is its full scheduler feature. You can queue your posts together at the time of selecting from the gallery. Further, you can create custom schedules or you can also leverage Hootsuite’s AutoSchedule feature to publish posts at engagement slots.

You can plan a campaign and schedule it for weeks and even months by inputting a CSV containing updates. It’s a treat to eyes to view your scheduled posts from the central dashboard. You can also drag and drop these scheduled entries as per your wish. Another great area of Hootsuite is its Analytics feature. There are over 200 metrics available on Hootsuite which can help you measure the performance of your social media outreach program. You can also generate these metrics and export them in Excel, PDF, CSV and other formats. Social media can also be monitored for custom hashtags, mentions and search terms. The tool comes for smartphone users as well. You can create, schedule and manage your social media posts through Web, iOS and Android.

Conclusion

All in all, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media scheduling tools. To find the best one, you need to consider your needs, and find one that offers just enough functionality to meet them. There’s no point in paying extra for features you don’t need. Hope we helped you made the decision — let us know in the comments!