Between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat and more, following all of your brand’s social media accounts can feel like a herd cat (and it’s not that cute).
But you don’t have to go through this alone. There are many apps, platforms and websites to properly manage multiple social media accounts.
This includes planners, reporting tools, and social media management software that ensures you interact regularly with your followers (and that no post, comment, or direct message is missed) – and more.
With the help of these tools, including some free social media management tools, you can quickly collect these kittens. Let’s start right meow.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of managing your presence on all social media platforms your brand uses. This isn’t just for large corporations – small businesses and solo creators also need to manage their social media.
Social media management includes scheduling and scheduling posts, interacting with followers, answering questions, tracking current trends, and analyzing your performance.
If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is! Using technology (also known as social media management tools) to manage social media can help you:
- Create and schedule social media posts ahead of time
- Reply to comments and private messages from multiple profiles in one inbox.
- Track your analytics across accounts and platforms from one place
- Generate and share detailed performance reports
- Automate audience and industry research (by listening to social networks and monitoring brands)
- Keep your creative assets organized and accessible to your entire team
- Improve social media customer support processes, response times, and customer satisfaction metrics.
A social media management tool can be anything from a simple photo editing app to a versatile control panel (*cough* like Hootsuite).
Big takeaway here? Social media marketing tools help marketers, business owners, and content creators spend less time on the operational aspects of social media management (i.e. navigating through countless tabs to keep up with profiles on different networks) and more time on creative and strategic work.
These tools are also essential for maintaining a healthy work-life balance when working on social media.
21 of the best social media management tools for 2023
Here are the best tools to manage your social networks.
Social media management tools for scheduling and publishing
Ask any social media manager and they will tell you that the hardest part of the job is not being online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Scheduling tools that automatically post content even when you’re offline are essential for a seamless workflow (and much-needed offline time).
1. Hootsuite Scheduler
We are big fans of the Hootsuite content planner (shocker). This intuitive calendar works like a social media planner, but not just for creating a posting schedule.
It also gives you an idea of the optimal time to do this – when your audience will be the most active (and most likely to interact with your content).
2. Auto publisher RSS
This platform will automatically publish RSS feeds to your social network (so, for example, you can set it to automatically share a blog post on Facebook and LinkedIn the moment it is posted on your blog).
Source: Synaptiv
3. Best time to post Hootsuite
The best time to post is a feature found in Hootsuite Analytics.
It shows you personalized suggestions for the best days and times to post your posts (on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn) based on a detailed analysis of your past performance.
The Best Time to Post feature can be customized to your specific goals.
The suggested time will vary depending on whether you want to raise awareness, increase engagement, or drive traffic.
It’s all about the numbers: Tracking your analytics and using data to improve your social engagement is a game-changer.
Here are apps to help you with this.
4. Analytics Hootsuite
Surprise, it’s Hootsuite again! Our analytics tool allows you to view statistics for all your social accounts in one place.
The platform also provides users with ways to optimize data – to increase awareness, increase engagement, drive traffic, and more.
5. Listening to social networks
Although it is one of the most expensive social media management tools, Sprinklr offers some powerful social listening capabilities. However, they are only available to businesses with larger budgets.
Sprinklr customers can eavesdrop on millions of conversations every day using AI-based social network eavesdropping software. Track keywords, phrases, hashtags and more to collect actionable insights about your brand or industry.
Note. You can do many of the same social listening tasks with Hootsuite Streams and Hootsuite Insights (powered by Brandwatch). Plus, Hootsuite costs a lot less than Sprinklr.
6. Panoramic clock
This Instagram monitoring tool is perfect for businesses that want to take their social media to the next level – it’s all about keeping an eye on your competitors.
You can use it to view specific hashtags, compare analytics, and manage posts.
Source: Synaptiv
Panoramiq Watch has two plans. With the standard plan, you can track up to 10 hashtags and 10 competitors for $8 per month. With the professional plan, you pay $15 per month to monitor 20 hashtags and 20 competitors.
The tool comes free with the Hootsuite Enterprise plan.
7. Panoramic ideas
This platform offers a detailed analysis of your Instagram analytics, including statistics on your followers, activity, posts, and stories.
Panoramiq Insights even offers downloadable PDF and CSV reports if you really want to get the hang of it.
Source: Synaptiv
This platform has a standard $8/month plan that includes information for two Instagram accounts. Each additional account costs an additional $4 per month.
The tool comes free with the Hootsuite Enterprise plan.
8. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a digital consumer analytics platform that provides historical and real-time data relevant to you and your brand.
It analyzes images to recognize numbers you might be interested in and can compare the interests of different groups of your audience.
Source: brand watch
Brandwatch starts at $1,000 per month and is perfect for people who are all about numbers – it requires a lot of data, not visual information.
Hootsuite offers free Brandwatch integration for all Enterprise and Business plan users.
9. Hootsuite streams
With Hootsuite, you can create streams (custom feeds that appear in your dashboard) to keep track of all the important conversations in your area.
Stay up to date and stay one step ahead of the competition. You can filter by keyword, hashtag and location. The streams are laser oriented to your needs.
Hootsuite plans start at $99 per month.
9. Klohok
Cloohawk tracks your Twitter and then offers hacks for better engagement and growth, as well as tips on how to get you there.
It’s like a tweet doctor: diagnosing problems and prescribing fixes. The fix might be to use the right hashtags, post popular stories, or repost your old posts.
Bonus: The Cloohawk bot will automatically retweet anything it deems important to your brand.
Source: Klohok
Hootsuite offers free integration with Cloohawk for all users.
11. Nexology
This app is a social media monitoring and discovery platform. In other words, it takes data from social media that can help you develop a marketing strategy.
Nexalogy can extract summaries of information including objects, food, events, and people from images, and has an interactive timeline so you can see when people are most active. This is useful for identifying crises in both politics and business.
Source: Nexalogy
12. Archive of social media
Have you ever had a post on a social network just disappear? Archivesocial records all activity on your platforms so you never lose a post, like or comment.
This is especially useful for legal reasons—online record keeping is notoriously fickle, and apps like this keep evidence safe.
The basic Archivesocial plan costs $349 per month.
13. Statistical
Statsocial supports marketing initiatives by providing market data (from a database of 300 million people) to help develop your strategy.
The platform can identify key influencers in your industry, identify the interests of your audience, and target surveys to specific people.
Source: Statsotsial.
Social media management tools for customer service
So, you have attracted the attention of your subscribers. Now it’s time to save it.
Stay on the side of your audience by providing top-notch customer service with these tools.
14. Hootsuite mailbox
Our platform’s social inbox is one of the best (totally unbiased, we promise) social media customer service tools.
It organizes all your social conversations in one place so you never miss a question, comment or share. It’s certainly better than clicking in and out of apps all day long.
15. Heyday
Heyday is an AI chatbot for retailers that integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and many retail tools (such as Shopify, Magento, and Salesforce).
Heyday’s intelligent technology can instantly respond to customer inquiries and recommend products. If the request is too complex for the robot, it will automatically go to the human.
Source: Rise
Bloom starts at $49/month.
16. Sparkcentral
Sparkcentral collects all your social conversations in one dashboard. You can respond to requests or comments on multiple social platforms from one centralized dashboard – along with emails, text messages, and other more traditional support interactions.
You can easily automate, prioritize and delegate with Sparkcentral. The platform keeps track of your progress so you can see how important it is.
Learn more about Sparkcentral and book a demo.
Social media management tools for content creation
Aside from strategy, quality content goes a long way. Keep your images, text and videos in perfect condition with these apps.
17. Ouliwriter AI
Let’s start this category with another one from Hootsuite. (What can we say? We are the best at social media management).
OwlyWriter AI is Hootsuite’s built-in social media caption generator and idea generator. Just say a few words to it and it will generate captions, hashtags and content ideas for you in seconds.
18. Xerox
For writing support, Copysmith is your hero. This platform can rank your product pages online and your posts can increase your social media audience. (After all, SEO and algorithms are technologies, and so is this software: a bot game recognizes a bot game). This platform is ideal for brands with large marketing teams.
The Copysmith starter plan costs $19 per month and includes 50 credits, 20 plagiarism checks, in-app support, and integrations. His professional plan costs $59 per month and includes 400 credits and 100 plagiarism checks.
19. Adobe Creative Cloud Express
Adobe Express social templates make it easy to create compelling and compelling posts, videos, and stories.
Stunning visuals are an essential part of any strategy and it’s one of the best photo and video editing apps.
Source: Adobe Express
This social media tool contains tons of free stock images, templates and effects.
The basic plan is free. Premium (which includes more images, branding options, millions of stock images, and 100GB of storage) costs about $10 per month.
20. Fastori
Fastory can complement your mobile ad game with short game templates that you can customize for your brand.
Their catalog of games includes quizzes, running games, photo contests, and polls. This will add an interactive element to your social networks and can increase your followers’ engagement with your posts.
Source: Fastori
Fastory prices start at $499 per month.
21. Later
Later is a social media management platform similar to Hootsuite (you can compare Later and Hootsuite here).
One major difference is that Later has historically focused primarily on Instagram. That’s why Hootsuite is generally the solution of choice for brands that want to manage profiles across multiple networks.
However, if you want your Instagram feed to be a little dazzling, Later has some useful extras. They offer an Instagram Feed Planner that allows you to visualize exactly what your Instagram grid will look like once posted. This is a good way to give your grid a quick rebrand.
Social Collaboration Tools
Teamwork makes a dream come true, right?
Social teams tend to keep a lot of balls in the air at the same time, and communications technology helps ensure nothing falls.
22. Weak
If there’s one thing this app doesn’t do, it’s… sluggish.
Slack is a secure communication tool that is very useful for teams. You can divide group messages into topics, send private messages, and even send yourself notes.
Slack also supports video and audio chats. You can even collaborate on group documents on the platform (and send GIFs, a must in any fancy workspace).
Source: Weak
Slack’s free plan has all the basic features, including 10,000 searchable messages, 10 apps and integrations, and video calls.
Paid versions start at around $7 per team member per month.
23. Automatic Airtable
This technology is like magic – you can program your workflow and automate certain tasks.
Airtable has integration with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Slack workspaces. You can do things like automatically email a team member when a particular spreadsheet field is updated, and get real-time status reports on each project.
Although this software may seem complicated, it is easy to use and great for beginners. Automation can get more complex as you learn more about the technology.
The basic plan is free. The Plus and Pro plans cost $10 and $20 per month, respectively.
24. Trello
Trello is the perfect to-do list.
Platform boards, lists, and cards help you manage and assign tasks, and keep track of your team’s work. Marking items with this application is very nice.
Source: Trello