Best Social Media Scheduling & Posting Tools

Having multiple social media accounts is key to spreading your brand’s exposure across different audiences at the same time. With the internet increasing the accessibility for users to find even the most newly established brand, you’ll need to start developing ways to design your online persona into one that resonates with your target audience.

Because each social media platform works differently, it can be a bit difficult to have each platform work in conjunction with the other. Social media scheduling tools can help you with that by planning your content ahead of time and seeing which posts are delivered to which platform and at what time. You can also use these tools to post something instantly. This way, you don't have to log in to the respective accounts over and over again but can do everything from the dashboard of your software.

What Makes the Best Social Media Management Tool for Scheduling & Posting

Creating a post from scratch is easier said than done. Often the thought put into each new caption, photo, and video can create headaches even for the most seasoned social media manager. Through social media management tools, the time to post can be cut down significantly as much of the work can be front-loaded during the content creation phase, in which the posting can simply be scheduled on specific days or periods.

This transforms the manual process of content management into one that can be routinized and fit within a larger marketing strategy. As part of the research on the different social media management tools in the market today, we’ve established the following features as criteria for good posting and scheduling capabilities

No. of Social Accounts

The number of social accounts that a specific social media management tool can manage at any given time is extremely important, especially for companies that might have multiple brands under their portfolio.

To reduce the amount of redundancy of posting across different accounts, a good social media scheduling tool will be able to let you manage as many accounts as you need. However, most of the time, you’ll need to pay for the amount of social media accounts that you require to manage. In our evaluation, we have captured how accounts are included with regard to the pricing.

Schedule Posts

Beyond just the ability to synchronize and manage different social media accounts under one main platform, scheduling posts to be executed at a specific time can be incredibly helpful in matching specific marketing initiatives with real-world events. This can also help you create timed marketing strategies in relation to other activities, such as limited promotional events.

As mentioned previously, the ability to schedule posts also reduces the amount of work over a period of time as you’ll be able to essentially front load work early and schedule it when its appropriate to be posted, such as during peak user times or at regular intervals to keep your brand active in the same space.

No. of Scheduled Posts

While scheduling posts in itself is an extremely useful tool, the number of how many of these you can set up beforehand is also something worth looking at when analyzing which social media scheduling tool might be best for you. Less active brands may get away with less than 5 scheduled posts a month, but brands that need to actively stay on their audience’s radars will need a lot more on a consistent basis.

Approval Workflows

When working in teams and scheduling posts to be executed once certain conditions are met, you’ll want to have a social media management tool that provides you with what is known as approval workflows. These are essentially administrative processes that you can set up internally so that specific content will only be posted once it gets approval from key decision-makers on your team.

For example, agency teams might have a strategist, a designer, a copywriter, and even a project lead, all working together to get content developed and ready for different social media spaces. With approval workflows, each of these members has their part in the content development process and, with some tools, can even be aligned by having a process that goes from one person and task to another until the content is ready to be scheduled or published.

Calendar View

A good social media scheduling tool should provide a calendar view to better organize when certain posts go live. When mapping out different scheduled posts over any given time, something as simple as a calendar can be of immense benefit. It allows for better visualization and structure to make the planning process more smooth.

Special Features

To stay ahead of the competition, certain social media scheduling and posting tools have developed channel-specific features, such as machine learning functionalities to schedule posts at times when it’s more likely to have a higher reach.

Since special features are very individual for each software, we have counted those that bring real added value and then additionally measured them depending on their value.

Link Shortening

A simple yet surprisingly useful tool that gets overlooked is the “link shortening” function. Website URLs already look like a mess at the best of times as they act as direct addresses towards specific pages. As these text links bring users closer to more specific posts online, they have the tendency to get longer and longer in length.

Robust social media management tools use “link shortening” to provide their users with shorter and more efficient URL links that appear better on promotional materials. It also makes it easier to track these links because your software can capture data around it.

Post Boosting

Much of a brand’s activity on social media can be split into either organic or paid efforts. Organic refers to standard posts that you are likely familiar with being a private user on these platforms. These are posts that appear on your feed just like the ones from your friends and allow brands to be just like one of the voices in the crowd.

But to differentiate themselves at times, brands also have the ability to “boost” their posts in an effort to get more eyes on the content they make. These are known as paid posts, and effective social media management tools have the ability to manage and set budgets for your advertising across different social media platforms. This allows you to essentially set up your social media campaign, including your paid promotions, all under one profile.

Image Editor

An integrated image editor in a social media management tool is specifically helpful for modifying visuals before scheduling or directly posting them. With tools for cropping, resizing, and adding text or filters, you can make final adjustments without leaving the platform. Some editors are so powerful that you can create your post from scratch with them. However, they are most often used to save time by adapting images to the needs of different platforms in terms of their aspect ratio.

10 Best Social Media Scheduling & Posting Tools

How to Choose a Great Social Media Scheduling & Posting Tool

Deciding which social media scheduling and posting tool works best for you is not always straightforward. Not every user needs a wide array of scheduling and posting capabilities, especially if you only have a few accounts and posts that you’d like to publish per month.

While social media agencies should have their eyes on the number of accounts they can manage and the scheduled posts they can set up, smaller businesses should focus on their priorities and needs.

For anyone, we recommend checking our overall Best Picks to get a better idea of which social media management tools stand out as one of the better options in the whole market and to then use our Comparison Tool to help you compare and contrast different services if you happen to be stuck between two options. We also have a dedicated Finder Tool to help you locate software based on your personal requirements.