Managing your social media accounts can be quite tasking and time-consuming. To maintain your presence on your socials, you must create relevant content and post regularly.
Besides that, you should engage with your customer/audience regularly – reply to messages, comment/like posts.
Also, each social media platform has times when your audience is most active. If you want to get the maximum engagement on your posts, they should be scheduled for those periods.
How can you manage all these tasks without getting overwhelmed?
Social media scheduling tools!
No-one expects you to manage all your social media activities yourself. Moreover, it is almost an impossible feat to be online every time to post. And if you somehow manage that, it may become an inefficient use of your time.
This is where scheduling tools come in handy for you.
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Scheduling tools are automation tools that help you schedule your social media posts ahead of time. With a social media scheduling tool, you can create multiple posts together at once. You can then save and schedule them to go live at specific periods in the week.
That way, you can manage your account better and free up time to create new content. Besides, most social media scheduling tools are loaded with features like team collaboration and analytics/reporting.
All these features are designed to help you manage your social media accounts efficiently and save time.
Scheduled posts help you create a consistent routine and form an aesthetic for your account.
Over time, you’d create a pattern of posts on your social media – a cohesive aesthetic. With scheduled posts, you can create an artistic effect with the way your posts appear on your page.
You can play around with the colours/patterns that appear on your pages. Scheduling your posts makes it easy to create this aesthetic effect on your page.
Scheduling posts ahead of time can free up time for you to focus on other business activities.
Now you can create content at the most convenient time and simply schedule it to post at the right time. With that, you can avoid worrying about manual posting.
You can decide to use that time to dive into analytics and create new strategies for your social media marketing. You can also spend more time engaging with your customers.
Scheduling your posts can also improve your customer engagement. Not only does it create more time for you to reply to your message, it can also help achieve a sort of balanced pattern for your posts.
Let’s say you post motivational quotes every Monday, product pictures on Tuesdays, and funny memes on Fridays.
Your audience will know what type of post to expect and when to expect it. It gives them something to look forward to and you can drive up your engagement with that.
With scheduled posts, it is easier to plan and manage your marketing campaigns. When you put effort into planning and scheduling your post, you can be intentional about your post.
You can determine the relevant content to post and the best time to post. That way, it is easy to stick to your content strategy and measure your results.
You also get some free time. When all your posts are planned and scheduled ahead, you can take some time off because your social media posts are covered.
No moment of panic rush during your time off because you need to post content. You can use this free time to relax and come up with more creative ideas for your post.
With scheduled posts, you’ll never run out of what to post. Because you’ve scheduled your posts, you know where the holes are in your schedules already.
You can plan around and create a variety of content from old posts to fill in that space.
At this point, you understand the need to schedule your posts. But are social media scheduling tools worth your money and time? Why should you use a social media scheduling tool?
Most social media scheduling tools offer your customer relationship management feature. With this feature, you can reply to all messages across all your profiles from a single dashboard.
You can quickly reply to your messages without having to switch between profiles. Additionally, you can manage and track your conversation efficiently because they are in one place.
With your scheduling tool, you can manage all your social media accounts from one place. Most businesses rely on several channels and profiles for their marketing. It can be quite tasking to shuffle between these several profiles.
A social media scheduling tool can save you all that stress. It put all your social profiles information together in a spot, including your messages. So, you can schedule your posts, reply to your messages, and all your accounts from your dashboard.
Most scheduling tools are loaded with advanced analytic and reporting tools to help you track your performance. From your dashboard, you can follow and measure the progress of your marketing strategies.
Some tools offer listening tools to help you understand your customers and competitors better. These listening tools let you see how your customers/competitors respond to new trends and development in your industry.
The content library and social media calendar are tools that help you manage and simplify your content management process.
On most scheduling tools, you can create and save variations of content. Others have features to help you create variations of the same content for your different profiles.
To decide if a social media scheduling tool is perfect for you, you must be sure it can handle your needs. Here are the key factors to consider when choosing a scheduling tool:
Before you settle on a scheduling tool, you should be sure it fits your needs. And to do that, you have to review the different scheduling tools.
To make that easier for you, we have reviewed several tools and created a list of the best social media scheduling tools for you.
Sprout Social’s social media management tool is one-in-all scheduling and posting tool. It offers content scheduling and publishing with advanced analytics and social listening features.
The interface is clean, intuitive, and clean to use. You can easily use the content calendar to plan, schedule, and add notes about your activities during the week.
The social media tool is designed for agencies and businesses of all sizes to help them get the best social media results. The analytics and reporting feature is also pretty straightforward. The reports are easy to understand even if you are not well versed in social media.
Sprout social offers 3 pricing plans starting from $99 per user monthly.
There is currently no free plan on Sprout Social. However, the platform offers a 30 days free trial period for you to test run the tool.
To get started with a free trial, you’ll need to create an account. This process is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t require your credit card details.
After signing up, you only need to connect your social profiles to start using the features.
For now, the platform supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+. It also integrates with Google Analytics, Bitly, Zendesk, UserVoice, and Feedly.
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Here is a scheduling tool designed especially for visual platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, and Pinterest. Later is a visual social marketing platform that makes it easier to plan and schedule posts, videos, and Instagram stories.
The tool can be used by businesses of any size to manage and grow their social profile, especially on Instagram. With the automatic Instagram scheduling tool, you can schedule content directly to your Instagram page and story.
With the conversation management tool, you can respond to all your comments and messages from your dashboard.
Later offers a free plan with 3 paid plans. Besides that, you can customise your plan to meet your social media needs.
Creating and setting up your account is easy; you only need your email to sign up and can upgrade your plan at any point.
Connect your social profiles to get started. The tool asks some questions during the integration process to properly set up your account.
When you are all set up, your dashboard should look like this:
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CoSchedule is an editorial and marketing calendar that integrates with WordPress, Google Calendar, social media, analytics. It is not only meant for social media management; you can also use it to handle other parts of your marketing and projects.
Apart from that, the collaborative editorial Calendar makes it easy for you to manage your team and collaborate on projects.
Furthermore, the free headline analyser tool can help you craft creative and attention-grabbing headlines for your posts.
With the CoSchedule marketing suite tools, you can schedule content for both your blog and social profile from one place. You can also manage your paid ads campaign from your dashboard.
CoSchedule offers a 14-day free trial for both their marketing calendar and marketing suite feature.
To get started with a marketing calendar, all you need to do is create an account. However, it is a bit different for the marketing suite.
The platform requires you to provide a work email and your website URL to start using the marketing suite tools.
After you have created an account, you get access to your dashboard.
You can plan all your activities, including your posting schedule, with the calendar tool. The calendar is quite flexible. If you want to change the schedule, you can simply drag/drop the calendar event.
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Buffer is a simple yet comprehensive social media management tool. It offers you scheduling, publishing, analytics, and engagement features.
On Buffer, you can schedule and publish directly to Instagram stories. With its Analyse tool, you can easily measure your social media performance, gain insights and even get recommendations from the platform.
One of its outstanding features is Pablo – an easy-to-use graphic creation tool. With Pablo, you can easily create graphics for your social media posts without leaving the platform.
Buffer’s clean and straightforward interface makes it one of the easiest social media management tools for your scheduling.
Buffer offers 3 pricing plans and a free version of their tool.
There is a free 14-day trial on each of the paid plans.
It is super easy to create an account on Buffer. You can decide to start with the free plan if it can handle your social media scheduling needs. Or you can opt-in for the free trial period on the paid plans to check out the features.
After signing up, you have to connect your social profile to start using the scheduling tool. Buffer supports Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can plan and schedule posts for all your profiles from your dashboard. The CRM Buffer Reply allows you to reply to all your messages from your dashboard.
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With over 18 million users worldwide, Hootsuite is one of the most widely used social media management tools. It is focused on Enterprise and Small to Medium businesses.
It offers team management, collaboration functions, and third-party integration. With Hootsuite, you can schedule and publish content across all your social media channels.
With an intuitive and clean interface, all its features are pretty easy to use. Besides, the Hootsuite academy offers certifications in different areas of social media marketing.
Hootsuite offers a free limited plan with access to 3 social profiles, 1 user, and 30 scheduled posts monthly.
Additionally, all the paid plans have a 30-day trial period to test-run the features.
Creating a Hootsuite account is relatively easy. You only need an email account. Alternatively, you can sign up with a social media profile.
The dashboard and other features are pretty easy to use and understand. From your dashboard, you can control, create, schedule, and publish content across your profile. You can also reply and send messages to your customers.
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Tweetdeck is the social management tool for Twitter only. The scheduling tool was acquired by Twitter and integrated into their interface in 2011.
The tool allows you to create and schedule tweets that get published even if you are not online at that time. You can also edit a tweet before it gets published.
You can manage all your Twitter activities from a single dashboard. The tool also makes it possible to manage multiple accounts at once.
From your dashboard, you can get a visual timeline of all your scheduled tweets. Besides that, you can add images, videos, and GIFs to your tweets with TweetDeck.
TweetDeck is free.
You create a TweetDeck account with your Twitter account. It shows all your activities on a single dashboard like this:
From your dashboard, you can view your notifications, messages, and trending topics. The scheduling feature is limited, but you can schedule posts and monitor your social engagement.
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Feedly is a feed reader that curates relevant information around the web based on your priority topics and keywords. It uses an AI research assistant, Leo, to help you follow and collect news, trends, and competitors.
The tool can save you all the time you spend reading through several irrelevant materials online. Once you have prioritised your keywords, Leo continues to read articles in your feed to look for relevant materials – blog posts and social media posts. It then stores all suitable material in your feed.
Feedly offers a free plan and 4 paid plans. There is a free trial period for all its paid plans.
To create an account on Feedly, you can sign with your Google account. Alternatively, you can use your iCloud, Microsoft, Twitter, or Facebook profile.
After creating your account, your dashboard will look like this:
You can use the create a feed button to generate a list around your keywords or topics. Connect your feeds from your newsletter, websites, Twitter, and Reddit feed. You can then ask Leo to read all articles and collect the most insightful ones in your Priority tab.
Leo also allows you to mute irrelevant information and remove repetitive news from your feed.
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Plannable is a collaborative end-to-end workflow social media management tool. The tool was designed to help teams collaborate and plan social media posts together.
The commenting and approval system makes it easy to get clients/supervisors’ approval faster. Team members can comment and go back and forth on scheduled posts.
Rather than waiting for approval before scheduling posts, users can schedule the post while waiting for their client’s approval.
Plannable offers a free plan and 3 paid plans. All the paid plans offer a free trial period. And no credit card information is required to sign up.
To start using Plannable, you need to create an account. You can do that by signing up with your Google or Facebook profiles.
You can create, plan, schedule, and approve your posts from your dashboard. The platform is straightforward and easy to use. Your team can add their comments besides each post, as shown below. To approve a post, you only need to click on the approval mark beside the post.
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Meet Edgar is an automated social media tool designed for entrepreneurs and creators. The social management tool is Edgar, and the name of the platform is Meet Edgar.
Edgar offers you unlimited scheduling and flexible automation options. The platform is clean with a simple and intuitive user interface. Everything you need to do is on the dashboard.
What stands out from using this tool is the content management tools. You can queue as many posts as you want without much involvement on your part.
The evergreen posting feature ensures that your queue is never empty. If the tool runs out of what to post, it creates variations of older posts and starts reposting them.
Meet Edgar offers 2 pricing plans starting at $19 per month.
The two plans offer a 7-day free trial period.
To get started, you’ll need to create an account by signing up.
Edgar supports Facebook pages/groups, Instagram feeds and stories, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Company pages.
From the dashboard, you can manage all your social profiles and your content library and categories.
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Post Planner is designed to help improve and increase your social engagement tool. It is designed to do 3 things:
The platform has features that can help you find content with a proven track record of engaging people.
The Find Content tool helps you find top engaging content in your industry with access to post them on your page. Furthermore, the tool uses a 5-star scoring system to rate articles/posts most relevant and engaging.
Apart from that, the Canva integration to the Create Post page is an outstanding feature. You can create compelling graphics for your posts in a matter of minutes. However, this is only available to users on the Solo plan and above.
Post Planner has 4 paid plans starting at $4/monthly. There is also a free plan available.
To sign up on Post Planner, you only need your work email. At the moment, there are no free trials for the paid plans. However, you can sign up for the free version and upgrade later. The only problem is that the free plan is limited.
After signing up, your dashboard will look like this:
From your dashboard, you can create a new post, find top relevant posts in your industry. You also get status ideas and motivational quotes on your dashboard.
The Plan Icon will take you to the content calendar. There you can view and change your schedule. To schedule a popular post directly from your dashboard, click on the post.
The platform will automatically create a new post for you like this:
From here, you can add anything you want to the post before scheduling.
To integrate your social profiles, click on Settings, and activate your profile.
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Social media management can be a lot of work, but with social media scheduling tools, it is much easier.
Social media scheduling tools help you solve the problem of when to post and what to post. Moreover, you get the flexibility to create posts in a large volume when you are free. With the different scheduling features, you can schedule your posts for the best times, even if you are not online!
Most tools offer you reporting and analytics features that help you track the performance of your content. With that, you can determine the success of your content strategy and where to improve.
Don’t forget the purpose of social media scheduling tools is to help you make your content process easier. Take full advantage of that.
Evaluate your needs and go for the best plan that fits!
Interested to find out how else you can improve your social media strategy? Heroes of Digital is the top social media agency in Singapore. With more than 600 clients under our belt and half a decade of experience, we are the go-to Singapore social media marketing agency.
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