The Best Social Media Management Tools of 2020 (Free & Paid)

Your brand needs to be engaging, posting and sharing constantly—but who has time for that?

Social media management tools allow you to manage your entire social media presence from a single interface. These services simplify every aspect of managing social media, from scheduling updates to generating reports and engaging with your audience. You can even isolate the most influential members of your community or industry and keep tabs on competitors.

We’ve gathered a list of tools that you can use for social management to help save time and save money:

Buffer:

for straightforward social media scheduling

Buffer is one of the longest-running social media tools aimed primarily at scheduling posts. The service supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and Pro users can schedule Pinterest updates too. Free users can connect up to three social accounts, including Facebook pages and groups.

Price: Free plan includes one user, three accounts, and 10 queued posts per profile; from $15/month for the Pro plan that includes one user, eight accounts, and 100 queued posts per profile.

Hootsuite:

for all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics

Hootsuite includes a full scheduler for queuing posts at times of your choosing. You can create your own schedule or use the AutoSchedule function to schedule your updates at optimal engagement times. By uploading a CSV file with pre-prepared updates, you can fill your queue for days, weeks, months, or the duration of an entire social campaign. Once you’ve filled up your queue, it’s easy to view your outgoing posts from the Content Calendar and re-order your update schedule with a simple drag and drop.

Price: Free plan includes one user, three social profiles, and 30 scheduled updates; from $29/month (billed annually) for the Professional plan that includes one user, 10 social profiles, and unlimited scheduling; team plans start at $129/month (billed annually).

Sprout Social:

best social media management tool for team-based social media management *

It includes the full gamut of scheduling tools, including the ability to post to multiple networks at once. You can stick to your own schedule or have Queue automatically schedule posts at the best time for you.

One notable publishing feature is the ability to tag updates so that you can easily recall them later for analytics purposes. This allows you to tag and track entire campaigns, post types, subject matters, and any other content you may be trialing.

A large number of metrics can be tracked to generate reports, from measuring Facebook page impressions and fan growth to finding your best Twitter content, measuring Instagram trends, and more. These reports can be exported to PDF and CSV, branded with your company’s logo, then shared with clients and team members.

Price: From $99/user/month for the Standard plan, which includes five social profiles.

*Currently Testing.

Iconosquare:

best social media management tool for managing Instagram business accounts

Few services offer such deep management of Instagram accounts as Iconosquare. Aimed entirely at those with Instagram business accounts and Facebook Pages, Iconosquare helps you monitor, publish, and analyze visual content on the social web. The service uses a modern, responsive dashboard that feels like it has been designed with the Instagram generation in mind. Navigation is simple using the pop-out menu to the left of the screen, with clean white backgrounds, bold typography, and sparing use of eye-catching colors.

Price: From $39/month for the Pro plan that includes two team members, three social profiles, and limited features; from $79/month for three team members, five social profiles, and a full set of features.

Flick:

find, manage and analyze Instagram hashtags

They promote offering a better way to find, manage, and optimize your Instagram hashtags. Which, for a gal often asked to produce the right ones and gauge their impact on content performance metrics, sounds like music to my ears.

The functionality they provide is fairly straightforward — search, manage and optimize.

Flick’s hashtag search allows you to surface other tags relevant to the ones you’re already using. So when you search #blessed, for example, you’ll pull other tags often used in conjunction with it across posts that rank high in engagement.

Price: Starting at £4.99/mo lite plan with 7 days free trial.

Relevant Mentions:

Tools that we haven’t tested yet, but we heard great things:

Sendible: for lead generation
Tailwind: for managing Pinterest accounts
Post Planner: for curating content
MeetEdgar: for automating your posts
MavSocial: for adding images to social media posts

Which Social Media Management Tool Is Best for You?:

Your own business needs will dictate which of these services is best for you.

Hootsuite, Sprout Social, MavSocial, and Sendible all offer complete social media management options at various price points. Hootsuite is the masterful all-arounder, with an ever-expanding list of compatible networks. Sprout Social has the best collaborative features of the bunch at a premium price point. Sendible can be configured to find and reach out to potential leads for you, which will suit some businesses better than others. MavSocial comes with 20 million royalty-free images, ready to go.

For no-frills social media management, Buffer is easy to use and well priced. Post Planner and MeetEdgar each provide more budget-friendly options for curating and composing updates, at the expense of analytics and engagement tools. And for the visual networks, you have Iconosquare and Tailwind.

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