The Best Social Media Management Tools for 2021

Sprout Social provides a well-balanced suite of social media tools with an intuitive set-up process and plentiful support options. For businesses that need more than a social media scheduler, this is a highly accomplished and reliable option.

In particular, Sprout Social excels as a social listening platform. You can set up the topics you want to follow, and Sprout Social will start gathering Twitter data, or you can use one of the handy social listening reporting templates. These cover everything from competitor analysis to brand health monitoring.

The social listening templates on Sprout Social are designed for a range of user-friendly scenarios.

Sprout Social also boasts a growing list of automation tools to make teams more efficient and effective.

Some of these are futuristic, such as the Facebook chatbot creator that requires no coding expertise. Others are a little more prosaic, like the option to assign tasks automatically to different team members based on their specific responsibilities. Overall, Sprout Social maintains a healthy balance between the innovative and the everyday in its newer features.

In fact, the most-used feature in Sprout Social remains the trusty Smart Inbox, which collates all of a brand’s incoming messages across multiple social networks in one feed. This can integrate with Zendesk and HubSpot Service Hub, too, making Sprout Social an all-in-one customer service center. The Sprout Social apps for iOS and Android are among the best social media management apps, so your team can also deal with these queries on the go.

Although Sprout Social takes the top spot in our review of social media management tools, we would still stop short of recommending it universally. The cost of a subscription can rise quickly for larger account teams, and you’ll need to opt for the Advanced package ($249/month per user) to get the most out of what is an undeniably impressive piece of technology.

The free, 30-day trial requires no credit card details, so it’s worth giving Sprout Social a try before you go all-in on a subscription.

MeetEdgar is ideal if you already have a blog, curate content, and manage at least 3-5 social profiles for your brand. It’s also a good fit for managing the social media of an inbound marketing strategy.

Serious community managers in charge of marketing for a small business will appreciate the productivity gains and the import capabilities of the tools. MeetEdgar focuses on getting the most out of your content without using advertising, and doesn’t provide functionality for managing social media ad campaigns.

When MeetEdgar connects to your social accounts, it doesn’t just sit passively and wait for you to give instructions. It crawls your accounts to identify content and suggests additions to your content library.

After connecting MeetEdgar with your social media profiles, it scans your website and looks for existing content to post.

MeetEdgar allows you to import more content from your website, or from external sources, such as a blog where you often find interesting articles you would like to share on your social profiles.

MeetEdgar helps you get the most mileage out of your posts by repurposing them. The auto variation feature crawls your content and suggests variations of the original post using extracts from the post.

MeetEdgar’s main benefit is the time it saves you. Its automation features handle many of the tedious tasks required to schedule posts. Maximizing content usage, repurposing, and pre-scheduling are keys to social media content strategy success.

In addition to helping you recycle and repeat content usage, it also helps you optimize your publication schedule and keep track of your social media calendar in one clear overview.

What Gain does, it does very well indeed.

The reason it’s not higher on our list is that it has a restricted list of features. Gain opts to focus on a set of challenges that big businesses and marketing agencies often face when creating and implementing an integrated marketing campaign.

With so many levels of sign-off required from so many parties, it can sometimes take too long to get content live. Social media is immediate, but businesses can be slow to move.

Gain tackles this reality directly by offering a suite of superb and inventive tools that simplify otherwise laborious processes.

The content approval tool is the best on the market by some distance, so if this is a pain point at your organization, Gain is well worth a look. You can store files within the platform, and there’s an automated workflow system to keep content moving toward publication.

The content approval tools on Gain are peerless, moving the process out of Microsoft Excel and into an intuitive interface.

That’s not to say Gain only offers these functionalities. The social media content calendar is fantastic, and the social media post scheduler stacks up well against the competition.

However, it does not have social listening capabilities or performance reporting, which may mean supplementing your monthly $99 subscription to Gain with another social media tool subscription.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on Gain in case it decides to add those extra features that would make it an excellent all-in-one social media management solution.

The first thing we should note about Buffer is that it now comprises three social media management tools, each requiring its own subscription.

• Buffer Publish hosts the traditional Buffer features we’ve come to know over the years, such as multichannel posting and a social media content calendar.
• Buffer Reply aims to help social media teams manage conversations with their audience and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
• Buffer Analyze is all about reporting and marketing analytics, as you might have guessed from the name. You can set up customized templates to monitor marketing KPIs from within this product.

Because of the way it has separated its products, it’s challenging to give one all-encompassing verdict on Buffer as a whole today.

And yet, we shall endeavor to do precisely that.

Buffer is still a great all-rounder that trumps the competition when it comes to ease of use. It has a free account option, the Pablo tool is superb for editing content, and it integrates with a lengthy list of external technologies.

Buffer stands out as an intuitive platform that will help you publish better content across your social channels.

For smaller businesses or individuals, the Buffer Publish product will cover the bases, and it offers some limited collaboration capabilities. There is a clear and convincing case for recommending Buffer Publish to organizations with these specific requirements.

For larger social media teams that need to add Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze subscriptions to access advanced collaboration tools and reporting, the decision is not as straightforward. Buffer has added features such as social listening and performance insights, but these are not yet as helpful as those on offer from Sprout Social, for example.

Buffer’s pricing is based on a mix-and-match model that will work in favor of some companies. There is also a 14-day free trial, so you can check it out and see which package you’d need to get the results you require to hit your marketing objectives.

Overall, Buffer remains in a transitional phase and shows plenty of signs that it will become a heavyweight contender again soon. In our review, we loved how simple it was to use Buffer Publish to take control of multiple social channels and get better content to followers.

Hootsuite is a social media management tool veteran, but it has received an aesthetic overhaul recently.

With its slick new look, Hootsuite offers an appealing alternative to Sprout Social and Buffer. It integrates with more social networks than its competitors, and its heritage in the industry brings other advantages, too.

For example, the Hootsuite App Directory features over 150 external integrations, most of which are free to download.

Speaking of free, Hootsuite even offers a free account option for light users who just need a tool to help publish their social media marketing campaign content.

Hootsuite’s post preview tool is very helpful for publishing from multiple social media accounts.

As a social media posting tool, Hootsuite is a trustworthy option, and it offers useful analytics capabilities, too.

So, what’s the downside?

Well, you need to go for the Business subscription, at $599 per month for five to 10 users, to have access to all of Hootsuite’s more impressive features. For large, complex social media teams that want to collaborate on campaigns, the subscription fees escalate very quickly.

At that price point, there are alternatives on the market that provide better social listening, automation, and collaboration tools.

Hootsuite still holds the advantage when it comes to its traditional strengths, such as the Streams interface that so many other platforms have imitated. Put simply, it is one of the best free social media scheduling tools available today.

However, Hootsuite is yet to add the advanced features that Sprout Social offers, or those that Buffer has started to build recently.

SocialPilot offers many of the core features you’d expect from a social media management tool without the hefty price tag for large teams.

Where the likes of Sprout Social and Buffer require additional subscription fees to add more team members, SocialPilot has a flat fee. The entry-level package includes access for three account users and costs just $30 a month.

For this price, users gain access to effective social media post scheduling tools, an intuitive social media calendar, and reporting dashboards.

SocialPilot is therefore a great option for marketing agencies and social media teams that need to manage large numbers of social media accounts within one dashboard.

Content curation is made easy on SocialPilot with a range of handy tools to keep the content flowing on your social media profiles.

Of course, SocialPilot must streamline its offerings in other areas to keep its subscriptions affordable. It doesn’t offer advanced social listening capabilities or integration with external analytics platforms, and the interface lacks the gloss of its more expensive rivals.

That’s not to say SocialPilot is lacking in sophisticated technology. The content curation tool is highly useful for finding new content to share and influencers to contact.

Overall, SocialPilot is worthy of consideration as an alternative to Sprout Social, Buffer, or Hootsuite.