Are you looking for the perfect social media scheduling tool for your business?
Whether you’re a social media pro or just getting started, maintaining an active social media presence and getting your content in front of the right audience is a challenging task. with so many social networks you need to be a part of, it’s nearly impossible to manage all of those accounts manually.
Plus, if you post regularly on major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter, one of the things you’ll notice is every platform has different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to get your content read and engage with more people, you need to post at these peak times.
This is where a social media scheduling tool comes into play. Social media scheduling tools make it easier to effectively plan and schedule multiple social media posts on one platform. In this article, we’ll be comparing the top 5 social media scheduling tools so you can choose the right one for your business.
Let’s get started!
OneUp
Pricing: Plans start at $18 per month with 7 days free trial.
OneUp also has a free-forever plan so you can test it out for as long as you’d like.
OneUp provides an affordable social media scheduling and management tool for small to large businesses. It allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest at all plan levels.
In addition, OneUp is one of the few social media schedulers that works with Google My Business. Simply connect your Google My Business account with OneUp and you’re all set to schedule your Google post, optionally adding links, call-to-action buttons and images to the photos section.
Another useful feature of OneUp is its ability to set posts to repeat automatically. When you upgrade to the Starter Plan, you have the option to post content once or have it automatically recycled at the interval and frequency you choose. This feature comes in handy when posting on GMB wherein your posts expire after 7 days. Use OneUp to set your GMB posts to automatically repeat at set intervals , such as once a week or once a month.
If you’re managing social media for multiple clients, OneUp has the ability to sort posts into categories. For example, if you are managing the social accounts for Business A and Business B, simply create two categories called “Business A“ and “Business B“. Then place all the social media accounts for both businesses into their respective category. This helps keep your posts organised and separated across different clients.
Buffer
Pricing: Buffer offers a free plan which gives users access to its basic publishing tools. Plans start at $5 per month per social channel and access to the full toolkit with a 14-day free trial.
Buffer is an all-you-need social media toolkit for small businesses and is trusted by over 75,000 businesses all over the world to build their brand on social media. It works well with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok and Pinterest.
The platform provides you with useful tools to easily plan and publish content, get in-depth analytics and increase engagement on social media.
Buffer has great collaboration features so you can work seamlessly with your clients and team. Buffer enables you and your team to create, manage and approve draft posts before hitting publish.
Buffer also provides detailed analytics showing how successful your posts were. It also tells you the best time to post, the best type of post and the best posting frequency.
If you want to increase your engagement and turn followers into loyal fans, Buffer is the perfect tool. It includes a simple dashboard where you can see unanswered comments and quickly jump from post to post. It also has smart alerts that let you know if a post has questions, negative sentiment, or comments about a purchase.
Finally, one of its star features is the mobile app and Chrome extension, which make it easy to share links, images, and videos without having to go back to your Buffer dashboard.
Overall, Buffer is a great tool for scheduling posts across different platforms, but the only drawback is that you can use it to schedule posts for Google My Business.
Later
Pricing: Plans start at $6.67 per month (billed annually) with a free 14-day trial. Later also offers a Free Plan for individuals getting started with social media marketing.
Although Later works on a variety of social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and TikTok, it has a strong emphasis on Instagram.
Later focus on visual content. Unlike most social media scheduling tools, you begin each post in Later with an image, rather than text. Upload your image and then create the accompanying caption.
The simple to use drag and drop calendar makes it easier and faster to schedule a week’s worth of content on Instagram. Later tells you your unique best time to post and offers hashtag suggestions, so you can reach more audience and increase engagement.
You can also make the most of your Instagram profile’s most valuable real estate with Later’s Linkin.bio Block feature. It helps highlight your most important content, promotions, news or YouTube link so your followers can easily find them.
Recently, Later has offered text post scheduling for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn which is available to all users.
Canva
Pricing: Plans start at $12.99 per month for up to 5 people.
Canva is a graphic design platform for creating social media graphics, presentations, documents, print products and other marketing collaterals. It has attracted millions of businesses due to its easy to use drag-and-drop feature and layouts. Whether you’re a small or large business, Canva helps you create and share amazing graphic design.
With Canva Pro’s Content Planner, you can design posts and schedule them all in one app. No need to manually download your designs and pay for a separate social media scheduling tool.
After creating your social media images on Canva, you can post social media content directly from Canva Editor to a range of social networking platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Pinterest and Tumblr.
For more details about this tool, click here.
Hootsuite
Pricing: Hootsuite offers a limited free plan. Plans start at $49 per month with a free 30-day trial.
Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics platform. It’s one of the most popular and established social media management platforms in the market.
Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts to publish at your preferred time in the future. Depending on your plan, you can post to a wide range of social channels including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.
One top of Hootsuite’s publishing features, it also comes complete with a powerful engagement tool where you can access incoming messages across your social networks in one inbox. Hootsuite’s Inbox allows you to filter out messages that require action, dismiss the ones that don’t, and respond to the message.
Hootsuite also helps you get your brand in front of the right people using targeted paid efforts like ads and boosted posts. Then use Hootsuite’s multi-channel analytics and reporting for both organic and boosted posts to see a complete picture of your performance. Based on the results, you can bolster your weak spots, play to your strengths and pivot your social media marketing strategy.
In a nutshell, Hootsuite has everything you need to plan, publish, advertise and monitor your social media posts. Hootsuite is on the pricey side, so it’s not often recommended for small businesses. Hence, we recommend checking out other social media scheduling tools like OneUp or Buffer.
Next Steps
Now that you’ve discovered the top five social media scheduling tools in 2022. Your next step is to test and see if it’s the right fit for your business. Most of these tools offer a free trial and/or a free-forever version, so you can first get a hands-on experience of using them before signing up for a subscription.
More Tools for Business Success
If you’re looking for more tools to save time and improve your productivity, check out some of the top tech tools that we love using in our business here.
