Social Media Management Tools - Our Review as a Small Business
More than half of the world is now using social media. 🤯 This might be dating ourselves a bit but we still remember MySpace days so we’ve seen social media come a loooong way. With new updates to platforms popping up left, right and center (hello Instagram Reels!), it’s hard to keep up as a social media manager and especially as an entrepreneur. Luckily, there are so many great social media management tools out there to help us stay on track and take out some of the manual work when it comes to scheduling content on social media… phew!
Need a platform to schedule Instagram posts? You got it.
An app to suggest hashtags or related hashtags? You got it.
Something to show you visually if your Insta posts look cohesive? You got it.
Here is a list of the most popular social media management tools that we’ve tried along with a few key highlights on what we liked about the platform for our small business and as an entrepreneur.
PS. How many of you caught the TikTok reference above? 😂
Image credit: Later.com
Later, www.later.com
Use for: Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest
Available on: Desktop, iOS and Android
Price: Free+
Why we like it:
Easy to use and intuitive social media scheduler for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and will post automatically to the platforms
Later has a visual content calendar so you can plan by dragging & dropping your posts and seeing how cohesive your feed is
We post mostly videos to our Instagram feed and Later allows us to schedule our videos while being able to make edits like choosing the video cover, editing the size of our video, etc on their platform
Easy to understand and visually-appealing analytics so you can see the performance of your channels
Image credit: Planoly
Planoly, www.planoly.com
Use for: Instagram Feed, Instagram Stories and Pinterest
Available on: Desktop, iOS and Android
Price: Free+
Why we like it:
Simple and pretty design and used by some of our fav brands like Glossier and Summer Fridays
We like the placeholder feature for planning campaigns with specific launch dates so while you might not have the asset yet, you can block off that day as a reminder of what needs to go there
Easy to understand and visually-appealing analytics to see your post performance
Image Credit: Buffer
Buffer, www.buffer.com
Use for: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn
Available on: Desktop, iOS and Android
Price: Free+
Why we like it:
Good value with the ability to schedule posts on all of your platforms (note: analytics pricing is separate)
Easy to use and intuitive interface
They’re launching engagement soon so you can respond to comments!
Image credit: Hootsuite
Hootsuite
Use for: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest
Available on: Desktop, iOS and Android
Price: $65+
Why we like it:
Great for managing all of your social media channels, and especially great if you have multiple accounts on each channel. We used this at Clearly Contacts and it was a great all-in-one social media management tool for us. As a small business, it’s more expensive than some of the others so it’s only useful if you schedule content on all of the platforms
Engage with the community by being able to respond to direct messages, monitor topics and engage on trending topics
Image Credit: Tailwind
Tailwind, www.tailwindapp.com
Use for: Pinterest and Instagram
Available on: Desktop, iOS and Android
Price: $9.99+
Why we like it:
We only use this for Pinterest because we like the Tribes feature. You can discover, contribute and repost pins on within tribes (different topics)
Helps you figure out the best times to post your pins and will post them for you automatically
We find Tailwind works best on desktop
We hope you found this helpful! Which one of these social media management tools have you tried? Want to connect with us? Follow us on Instagram @lifelapse_app to learn stop motion and video marketing tips, tricks and see what our community of over 1 million users are creating with Life Lapse.
Ready to make scroll stopping instagram content? try our free stop motion app
