Long gone are the days of spontaneous, in-the-moment social media posts. Platforms that were originally developed to help people keep in touch with one another have since been co-opted by advertisers to help sell their products and services, meaning that new ways to utilize social media needed to be developed to adapt to these needs. Among these changing needs were the ability to schedule content in advance, to visually plan out how future content will look on a feed, and a way to unify content across multiple social media channels. Our prayers were answered with the advent of software specifically designed to cater to these needs. Here are some of our top picks.
The Good: Sprout Social offers a feature-rich platform with tools to help with scheduling, publishing, increasing engagement, advanced analytics and social listening. Among some of its most impressive features are its advanced analytics reporting, offering in-depth performance metrics for multiple social media platforms and its ability to promote customer engagement through its unified inbox and task manager. It offers collaboration tools for teams working on the same account, including custom workflows and approval systems as well as advanced CRM integration which is particularly helpful for businesses that use their socials as customer service outlets. While it may not be the most intuitive, it does offer user resources like guides, webinars and more.
The Bad: Due to its large range of features, some users may experience a steeper learning curve on Sprout Social when compared with some of its simpler competitors. Some may even find it too in-depth of a platform, particularly if they aren’t interested in advanced analytics or social listening. With so much to offer, it comes priced accordingly as one of the most expensive social media planning tools available.
Final Verdict: It’s a great, robust platform, whose strengths lie in its automation, integration and collaboration capabilities. If you do actually need all the advanced features Sprout Social offers, it’s well worth the investment.
Explore the platform: https://sproutsocial.com/
The Good: Self-described as “the best social media management platform for marketing, commerce, and care,” its user experience definitely reflects that. It uses AI to track customer experiences and analyze social media performance across multiple platforms. Its unified CX platform focuses on customer care and content strategy in addition to social media management, offering sophisticated tools for social listening, content scheduling, and influencer marketing. It offers advanced audience insights with deep data on demographics and engagement patterns and comprehensive social listening tools to monitor brand mentions and sentiments across multiple platforms. It integrates seamlessly with popular social platforms and CRM systems to give strong reporting. It has an impressive roster of big-name clients and user resources that include webinars, guide documents and real-time updates for technical support.
The Bad: Emplifi’s pricing model reflects its target audience (enterprises), which can place it out of budget for startups or smaller companies.
Final Verdict: As a platform tailored towards larger enterprises, Emplifi incorporates AI effectively in terms of analytics. Using AI-driven insights, Emplifi’s strengths lie in its ability to provide robust analytics, social listening and customer engagement tools.
Explore the platform: https://emplifi.io/
The Good: Hootsuite is the ideal social planning software for teams of any size that need reliable, comprehensive social content scheduling and monitoring. Similar to Sprout Social, it includes features like
content planning and bulk scheduling across multiple popular social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more), social monitoring for brand mentions, hashtags and conversations in real-time and reporting and tracking of audience growth, engagement and performance trends. It boasts over 150 integrations with popular apps and CRMs (like Salesforce and Mailchimp). It has a fairly straightforward user interface and great additional resources like tutorials, courses, and useful templates for strategies, reports and proposals. Its real strengths, however, lie in its collaborative features. With Hootsuite, your whole team can collaborate easily on content creation, approvals, comments and more.
The Bad: Based on its tiered plan system, it seems better suited to larger teams and enterprises rather than individuals. While the introductory “Professional” plan is definitely the most budget-friendly, it does lack several benefits that are included in the higher tiers.
Final Verdict: Hootsuite is a great general-use software, especially for social scheduling, team management and reporting.
Explore the platform: https://www.hootsuite.com/
The Good: Greatly Social includes all the scheduling and analytics that you would expect from a social planning tool, plus it uses AI to automatically generate and suggest content from blogs, podcasts, or videos to maximize output and engagement. It specializes in content repurposing by breaking down long-form content (such as blog posts, and podcasts) into multiple different snippets that can be used across various social media platforms. Similar to Hootsuite, it also offers team collaboration features to help streamline content approval processes and integrates well with most major social media platforms, some CRM tools and Canva to easily import your designs. It is very user-friendly with various user resources with live interviews that include tips and tricks from top marketers and a variety of “How-To” guides. In terms of pricing it falls somewhere in the middle of its competitors, making it accessible for smaller teams or businesses needing content automation.
The Bad: Like Hootsuite, Greatly Social also offers a tiered plan system that excludes certain features as the pricing goes down, however, it’s worth noting that the price point still comes in lower than Hootsuite and many of its other competitors.
Final Verdict: Overall, Greatly Social is a well-rounded social content management and planning tool for small to medium-sized businesses, with strengths in content repurposing and creation at a large scale at a moderate price point.
Explore the platform: https://greatlysocial.com/
The Good: As a free tool, Meta Business Suite attracts smaller companies and lower-budget projects. Its strength lies in its social media scheduler being part of a larger tool, making it easier to plan social media content (on Facebook and Instagram) as part of a larger, holistic campaign. It includes data integrations with CRM tools (like HubSpot), email marketing platforms (like MailChimp), e-commerce solutions (like Shopify) and project management tools. These integrations allow for automations such as lead collection from ads, communications and order management. It also includes native partner integrations to create seamless connections within its own ecosystem with features like Facebook’s Events Manager.
The Bad: In terms of social media, it only integrates with the platforms that Meta owns (Facebook and Instagram) rather than an outside platform. Its social planning capabilities are a bit limited, especially when compared with other tools that work with the majority of popular social media platforms.
Final Verdict: If you’re looking for a more traditional social media planning tool that includes a variety of different social platforms, Meta Business Suite is probably not for you. But if you’re focused on mainly Facebook and Instagram marketing as a part of a larger campaign that may include events, emails and e-commerce then this is a great free tool.
Explore the platform: https://www.facebook.com/business/m/meta-business-suite
In summary, if you’re looking for a tool that is best for…
We would also like to reiterate that this list is not exhaustive. We still recommend taking the time to evaluate your or your client's needs and doing some of your own research before deciding on one platform.
