If you’re new to social media marketing, it can be hard to determine which tools are necessary and which ones you can safely cut. With so many tools out there, it’s tempting to keep adding tools in the hope that they’ll all improve your presence.
The truth is, not all social media marketing tools are created equal. Some of them do an excellent job of helping you accomplish your goals, while others just waste time and money. To help you determine which are worth using and which ones aren’t, we’ve reviewed and ranked the best social media marketing tools for small businesses.
Table of Contents
Best Social Media Marketing Tools For Small Business
Sprout Social
Trusted by over 30,000 world-class brands, Sprout Social allows its customers to embrace social media as an essential part of their overall business strategies. Designed keeping the whole business in mind, Sprout Social strives to decrease time spent doing manual tasks. It helps and allocates more time to reach out to audiences through relevant content and personalized experiences.
Features
| Function | Feature | Plan |
| Monitor and engage | Smart Inbox – use a unified inbox to monitor messages for all social media platforms | All plans |
| Conversation history – view complete conversation history of social media users and customers s | All plans | |
| Message tagging – keep your unified inbox organized by creating and applying custom tags | Professional and advanced | |
| Plan and publish | Unified content calendar – manage posts across all social platforms via one collaborative calendar | All plans |
| Sprout queue – make a queue system for automated scheduling and posting | All plans | |
| Bulk scheduling – create and plan up to 350 messages at once | Professional and advanced | |
| Report and analyze | Group, Profile, and Post-Level reporting – report across all social media platforms simultaneously | All plans |
| Google analytics report – integrate your social media account with google analytics and understand how to drive traffic to your site | All plans | |
| Instagram competitor report – benchmark your Instagram growth against other competitive brands | Professional and advanced | |
| Listen and inform | Query builder – build queries to track search results | Available as add-ons |
| Listener dashboards – facilitate real-time and ongoing social listening by analyzing specific topics and trends | Available as add-ons | |
| Share and amplify | Amplification – gain exposure to new audiences by connecting your brand with social media accounts of your employees | Available as add-ons |
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/month |
| Standard | $89 |
| Professional | $149 |
| Advanced | $249 |
Buffer
Buffer provides some of the finest social media tools in marketing to drive meaningful engagement and results. With Buffer, businesses can manage multiple social media platforms simultaneously and efficiently.
Additionally, Buffer continues to periodically introduce new features for its customers like suggested media, direct scheduling, and much more. It also allows you to work flexibly on the go through its Android and iOS mobile apps.
Features
| Function | Feature | Plan |
| Publishing | Direct scheduling – plan and schedule your posts directly to Instagram | Free |
| Reminders – plan a post and set a reminder for posting | Free | |
| Shop grid – use Instagram bio to drive traffic and sales | Free | |
| Analytics | Boosted post insights – compare paid vs organic results of boosted posts | Free |
| Audience demographics – check whether you are reaching the right audience | Free | |
| White-label reports – add your logo, title, and description to each report | Essential | |
| Engagement | Prioritize important conversations – know immediately if a post questions, negative response, positive comments, etc. | Free |
| Simple dashboard – view all unanswered comments in one simple dashboard which can be added to your desktop | Free | |
| Apps, Extensions and Extras | Canva – create and import images directly from Canva | Free |
| Zapier – push content from more than 400 apps to buffer automatically | ||
| WordPress – publish posts directly from WordPress blog | ||
| Microsoft – streamline regular tasks with Microsoft power automate |
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/month/channel |
| Free | $0 |
| Essential | $5 |
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an amazingly useful application and provides some of the best social media tools for marketing. It enables users to view and manage multiple social media platforms together. With its excellent social media listening tools, you can connect with your customer base instantly and cater to their needs appropriately.
Features
| Function | Feature | Plan |
| Publish | Schedule posts – schedule your content in advance across all social platforms | All plans |
| Seamless collaboration – get insights and edits from team members before drafts go live | All plans | |
| Monitor | Assign posts and comments – for better monitoring assign posts and comments to team members | Team, business, and enterprise |
| Team performance report – monitor the performance of your team members and employees through monthly reports | Enterprise | |
| Advertise | Multi-channel analytics – see a complete picture of your performance across all social media platforms | All plans |
| Deeper organic engagement – let the audience know your brand at every stage of their customer journey | All plans | |
| Hootsuite social advertising – analyze performance and engagement metrics for individual ads and campaigns | Enterprise | |
| Support | Get 24/7 priority support | Business and enterprise |
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/ month |
| Professional | $49 (10 social accounts) |
| Team | $129 (20 social accounts) |
| Business | $739 (35 social accounts) |
| Enterprise | Contact for pricing (50+ social accounts) |
Agorapulse
Agorapulse provides some of the best social media tools to easily manage your social media platforms for social media marketing. Some of the top features of Agorapulse are a unified social inbox, insightful analytics report, intuitive publishing, and much more. It is available at affordable prices and comes with the added benefit of availing of a free demo and trial.
Features
| Function | Feature | Plan |
| Social listening | Boolean operators – listen and focus on what is important and drill down on specifics | All plans |
| Label important content – organize content by labeling what is important and on priority | All plans | |
| Insightful analytics | Measure teams’ performance – easily monitor the response time of each time member to ensure customer satisfaction | Enterprise |
| Power reports – create custom reports based on metrics and data range of your choosing across all social media platforms | Premium and enterprise | |
| Intuitive publishing | Easy communication and collaboration – share notes and comments with your team members in real-time | All plans |
| Big picture content overview – share a big picture content overview by accepting, rejecting, or giving feedback on individual posts | All plans | |
| Rescheduling – maximize content potential by rescheduling content more than twice | Premium and enterprise |
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/ month |
| Pro | $79 (10 social profiles) |
| Premium | $159 (20 social profiles) |
| Enterprise | Contact for pricing (40+ social profiles) |
Sendible
Sendible is one of the best social media management platforms which will benefit your business majorly. It will allow you to bring all your social media networks to a centralized hub that is easy to navigate and manage. With its top features and easy user interface, you and your team members will save a lot of valuable time.
Features
| Function | Feature | Plan |
| Publishing | Schedule posts – save time by scheduling posts in advance | All plans |
| Scheduling with queues – schedule with queues to make promoting easy and consistent | All plans | |
| RSS feeds – seamlessly share quality content with RSS feeds | Scale and Expansion | |
| Collaboration | Limit access – you can limit access to certain users with customer hierarchies and permissions | Expansion |
| Approve posts before scheduling – create user workflows for clients and team members to approve content before publishing | All plans | |
| Mobile | One app – manage all your social streams through one mobile app | All plans |
| Respond from anywhere – respond to message from anywhere and anytime and enable message notifications | All plans | |
| Analytics | Email reports – keep your clients in the loop by sending them regular automated reports daily, weekly, or monthly | Expansion |
| Google analytics – get deeper insights by integrating Sendible with google analytics | Expansion |
Pricing
| Plan | Pricing/ month |
| Creator | $29 (6 social profiles) |
| Traction | $89 (24 social profiles) |
| Scale | $199 (49 social profiles) |
| Expansion | $399 (105 social profiles) |
best free social media management tools 2021
1. Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month. Later started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool, but since its inception, they’ve added support for other social networks and are continuously adding new features. The app has a strong focus on visual content. Whether you want to schedule in-feed image or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all of these options. Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but you get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans. Their paid plans start at $9/month.
2. TweetDeck
Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free application that enables you to manage multiple (unlimited) Twitter accounts from a unified interface. You can create your own customizable social media dashboard that allows you to send and receive tweets and manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. You can use TweetDeck as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop app. TweetDeck can be set to post scheduled tweets, build Tweet lists, and more. And the extra special part is that it’s always free.
3. Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. You can use it to schedule posts, receive in-depth reports, and collaborate with your team members, thanks to built-in teamwork features. It enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what your customers are saying. There is a free limited plan available for 3 social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages.
5. Buffer
Buffer is also one of the best apps for managing your social media presence and scheduling your posts. The app also comes with analytics tools that enable you to track your audience’s activity and figure out when it is the best time to post in the future. We especially love its Chrome extension, which integrates itself seamlessly and never gets in the way, yet it is always there when you need it. It is a more straightforward and more effective way of managing your social media, and you are never more than a few clicks away from setting up anything you want. Buffer supports over 7 different platforms – you can add up to 4 on the free plan.
6. Planable
Planable is a social media collaboration tool helping marketers work together better & faster. So, if you care for efficiency, this is the tool to consider. It’s one of the most visual platforms allowing marketers to create, plan, collaborate, review, and schedule social media content. It supports the most popular social media networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Google My Business. Planable is 100% focused on collaboration and approval so it allows you to get feedback on each post, have conversations, request & get approval, and schedule automatically. They’ve got a free plan to get you started — so you can test all the features for the first 50 posts.
Conclusion
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