Social media has been in upheaval for the last few years. Twitter is now X, AI is everywhere, Bluesky is a thing, and TikTok may be banned in the near future. Social media remains one of the most effective tools available to modern businesses despite the chaos. You can use it to find new clients, drive traffic to your site, and keep in touch with existing customers so that they stay engaged with your business. But with all the drama, the tools you use to keep on top of things are more important than ever.
Automate sharing, engaging, and cross-posting without having to do anything. Automate your social media accounts. You can waste a lot of valuable time trying to manage multiple inboxes across five different apps, post the same things on each platform, and keep up with everything else on social media, which is even more fragmented than it was before. It’s next to impossible using regular consumer apps. To do it properly, you need a social media management app.
The best social media management tools allow you to control your full social media presence in a single app. You can automate, analyze, and manage social media accounts, so you can focus on creating the kind of content your audience loves. This year, I tested seven of the best social media management apps out of nearly 70 that I tried. The best software for managing social media Buffer for simple scheduling on social media Hootsuite for fully-featured social media management
Vista Social for small teams
Loomly for automating any social media service
Iconosquare for visual content
ideally for social networks based on text Sendible for a low-cost social media management solution Once you’ve picked a social media management app, you can make it even more powerful and efficient by automating it. Examine the ways in which automation can enhance your social marketing. Or, if you’re interested in a particular platform, learn more about automation on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. What makes the best social media management tool?
How we evaluate and test apps
Our roundups of the best apps are written by people who have used, tested, and written about software for a lot of their careers. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We value the trust our readers place in us to provide honest evaluations of the categories and apps we review and are never compensated for app placement in our articles or links to other websites. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
The issue with social media management software is that each app is constrained by the same thing: the features provided by the various social networks. As a result, not only do the majority of social media scheduling tools have features that are very similar to one another, but they also differ depending on the social networks they support. For instance, TikTok provides a completely distinct set of analytics data compared to Facebook, and Instagram is a distinct posting platform compared to YouTube. And that’s before we even talk about X-formerly-Twitter. One of the most permissive APIs existed before Elon Musk purchased it. It was necessary for many social media management apps to provide features like social media listening and competitor monitoring. But those kinds of features now cost around thousands of dollars per month, so they’re only available in some of the most fully-featured enterprise apps or on the most expensive plans.
As a result of all of this, you shouldn’t anticipate a lot of unique social network-specific features from the best social media manager software. There is no social media management platform that can post directly to an individual Instagram profile or respond to comments on the posts of another person’s Facebook Page. Still, there are some key features that the top social media managers have that set them apart. They generally make managing your business’s social media presence easy and efficient. Particularly, they supply: Support for multiple social networks, ideally including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok at the very least, though since things have become more chaotic, I’ve had to relax this criteria a touch. Similarly, support for Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and the other Twitter replacements is increasingly relevant. The goal with any of these apps is to manage as many of your social networks as possible in one app—or at least to manage a more focused bunch of them really well.
Powerful scheduling tools, so you could batch your social media posts at the start of the week or month, and then just let them run. (Access to your social media inboxes so you could reply to customers was a bonus, but not required for more affordable apps.)
Detailed analytics on how your posts do. The more expensive the app, the more powerful the analytics I required—at least until they hit the limit of what the social media apps offer. I wanted more powerful X features, like social monitoring, which lets you look for posts about your company or even your rivals, for enterprise apps, for instance. More basic apps can’t afford the API access these otherwise require.
Cost-effectiveness. With all social media software limited to offering the same kind of features, high prices need to be justified with additional features, stellar customer support, and team and collaboration tools.
AI also looks like it will have a big impact on how businesses manage social media, but for the time being, many of the apps that made a big deal of it didn’t really impress me. The majority of apps that let you schedule posts already use AI to find the best times, and the apps that wrote social media posts for you were all pretty much the same and not much better than ChatGPT. If AI is a priority for you, check out Zapier’s list of the best AI-powered social media managers. While many of the apps on this list have added AI features, they’re all still tools that enable you to post whatever you want to social media—whether you, an AI, or an intern wrote it.
Don’t be afraid to give each of the tools on the list a shot by signing up for a free trial or even a free plan. The social media management app that best suits your requirements and budget will be the best choice for you. I’ve been covering tech for over a decade and updating this list for the past four years, so I’ve spent a lot of time exploring and testing social media marketing software. After putting them through their paces, comparing the features and user experience they offer against other similarly priced apps, and generally assessing how good (or bad) they are to use, these seven social media planning tools are the ones I think will be the best fit for the majority of businesses.
