12 Stunning Social Media Automation Tools To Use In 2021

Marketing has evolved a lot in the last two decades. Businesses now are expected to think on their feet, to gain consumer loyalty. Social media statistics show that automation of digital marketing practices especially social media is the key.

This will allow you to utilize your time to focus on what matters the most – your business. Incidentally, you can choose from the many social media tools available to make your marketing efforts seamless.

We shall talk about 12 such social media automation tools in this post that will enhance your marketing and take your business to the next level.

Top 12 Social Media Automation Tools You Should Know About

1. SocialPilot
2. HootSuite
3. ShareIt
4. Buzzsumo
5. Sprout Social
6. Buffer
7. CoSchedule
8. Scoop.it
9. Sendible
10. Meet Edgar
11. Zoho Social
12. Agorapulse

1. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media automation and analytics tool for businesses – from small to medium and even large companies. With this social media automation tool, you can expect to enjoy a ton of features such as social media scheduling, calendar management, client management, and more.

Additionally, it doesn’t matter what social media channel you are using because SocialPilot has your needs covered. That said, you can integrate SocialPilot with social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram (Direct Publishing), and TikTok simultaneously.

The best of all is that SocialPilot offers users a social media calendar feature, which will help you monitor your social media campaigns. You can incorporate filters into your calendars and monitor your social media campaigns by groups and accounts. Even more, the calendar functionality allows users to drag and drop their social media posts and reschedule them, depending on what has changed.

Finally, SocialPilot users can analyze their social media post-performance basis how engaged their audience, influencers, demographics, and competitors are.

Core Features of SocialPilot

Now that you know what SocialPilot can do for you, let’s discuss the core features of SocialPilot below:

• SocialPilot gives you the freedom to schedule your posts as you want with advanced social media publishing capabilities and audience targeting.
• You will get helpful analytics of your automated social posts and know where to adjust with downloadable PDF social media reports.
• Set access levels to your team to maintain the content flow in your company. With its team collaboration feature, you can add your team members and assign accounts and access levels.
• You can use your Social Inbox to moderate conversations on Facebook pages.
• You have control of your Facebook ad campaigns by using Lead Ads or Boost Post.
• Excellent customer service available 24×5 to help you whenever you need assistance via chat/email/call.

Pros

• Enhanced team & client collaboration for hassle-free social media management.
• You can bulk upload up to 500 posts in one go.
• Facebook and LinkedIn audience targeting available.
• Top-notch browser extension.
• Publish native videos, add GIFS, create carousel or album posts for interactive social media posts.
• Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box integration for easy access to your media
• Create marvelous social media images on the spot with the Canva integration.
• They offer 5 ways to automate your social media posts – immediately, schedule according to the said time-slots, schedule at a specific time, repeat posts in time intervals, and share it after the first post in your queue.

Brian W.

I had been using another company to facilitate all of my social media posts, however, the number of accounts I needed took me out of the search for the free products and jumped up pretty quickly to some prohibitive pricing. SocialPilot fit a perfect price point and got me connected to all of my social media accounts very quickly. I can make my posts and schedule them as I like. Thank you!

Palak J.

Software is very easy to use and user friendly. I can easily post creatives and videos over all social media platforms and I can get the analytics respectively. It also connects to the Facebook ads, which helps me manage my ads and posting on a single platform. It also connects with remote storage platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive, which reduces my pain of downloading and uploading. Overall It’s a very useful and handy software.

SocialPilot Pricing

They offer a 14-day free trial and a SocialPilot walkthrough as you sign-up (no credit card required)

• Professional Plan – $30/ month
• Small Team Plan – 50/ month
• Studio Plan – $100/ month
• Agency Plan – $150/ month
• Enterprise Plan – you will have to contact them for a quote

2. ShareIt by SocialPilot

Ever stuck in a thought loop as to what to post next? Is the designer on leave, or does your team need a break? Well, now ShareIt has your back. It is a free content curation tool by SocialPilot that will continue to replenish your content queue with best-curated pieces.

The process is straightforward. All you need to do is enter a keyword of your choice that pertains to your niche. And voila! You get a curated list of articles and profiles of notable influencers.

You can directly share these across Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In addition, if you have a SocialPilot account already, you can post to all linked accounts from the “Share with SocialPilot” button.

Pros

• Get access to trending articles for free.
• Access to relevant influencer handles and their popular content posts.
• Sorting of results as per relevance and time.
• Unlimited searches when logged in with Twitter.

Francis Josiah O.

I like the ease of use and the platforms supported by SocialPilot. The content discovery tool also helps us post great stuff regularly!

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular social media automation tool for marketers. Its robust features make it compatible with a variety of social media platforms. It mainly focuses on large enterprise and big-sized agencies because of the complex features and pricing range.

Additionally, Hootsuite enables you to monitor multiple social media platforms at once with its social media streams. And yes, you can also use it to keep an eye on all your brands with its real-time updates. Because it keeps track of your brands, you’ll be updated upon mentioning your brand, and as such, know what consumers are saying about it.

Pros

• You can view social media streams in one place with automated social media posting.
• Hootsuite makes you understand how your social media strategy is performing by availing reports whenever you need them.

Aacini H.

Hootsuite’s great feature is the streams, you can get any important activity from any and all platforms on all accounts with a quick glance, if somebody retweets or mentions you, you will know ASAP and be able to respond accordingly.

Cons

• The interface isn’t very much user-friendly. It comes with a learning curve.
• Costs can accumulate and empty pockets for small businesses and agencies.
• They aren’t very responsive to the emails/posts if someone is facing issues.
• You need to pay extra to get the social media reports.

Verified Hootsuite User

Its interface is not so appealing and you have to spend much time to figure out the features, it is necessary to get to it through learning videos, only then you can create effective plans. Adding team members is more expensive and also you need training expensive as well.

SocialPilot stands out as a perfect Hootsuite alternative. Here is a comparison of both the tools in detail.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an essential social media search tool if you want to have a greater understanding of your content marketing strategies. So instead of wasting time on guessing the content topics , use BuzzSumo that will help you discover some of the popular keywords in your industry and the publishers.

Over the years, BuzzSumo has grown into a popular social media marketing tool because of its ability to provide in-depth insights into what your competition is doing.

If you want to become a savvy content marketer and stay ahead of your competition, BuzzSumo will help you discover the most popular content by entering either a keyword or a domain name on the search bar.

You have the option to filter your results, depending on what you want – from duration to location. BuzzSumo can also collect analytics from popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter, among others.

Pros

• It’s a great tool to identify the most popular or widely shared content in your niche.
• You can identify influencers within your niche and build stellar relationships with them using BuzzSumo.
• It helps with link-building strategies by identifying the most suitable content topics.

Sujata S.

BuzzSumo helped me a lot to find the content which was most shared on social media channels. Using this, we can find influencers related to particular topics. By entering, we can find what is shared socially.

Cons

• It is limited to specific mediums.
• It does not have enough backlink data to help content marketers build links.

Paul K.

Some of the team members have had trouble using it. Mainly on the resource for brand names that include near ties to the title of our business. Maybe it’s because Buzzsumo lacks good data for some domains, which makes it inadequate for new sites.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is yet another social media engagement tool that you can use to ace social media marketing.

Sprout Social allows users to organize and assign tasks to members. This tool also helps run ads on limited social platforms.

With the tool you can schedule your posts or campaigns and it also provides analytics and social listening features. What’s more? Sprout Social serves all tiers of businesses – small or large enterprises.

Pros

• The analytics features by Sprout Social helps you track followers, link clicks, the number of posts, change in your social media engagement, etc.
• Sprout Social has a smart inbox where you can monitor and reply to all your brand mentions.
• You can monitor campaigns across social media and search for posts mentioning you or your brand.

Rachel P.

The Smart Inbox in Sprout is my favorite feature. It allows us to see what’s happening on all of our platforms at once and is so convenient to react and reply to customer messages.

Cons

• Sprout Social is not at its best yet when it comes to scheduling campaigns on Instagram.
• Some users also encounter issues with LinkedIn posting. They say that when they schedule a post on LinkedIn, the image often looks smaller than what they thought had been scheduled.

Kendall D.

Its pricing is very high. It has limited social media platforms to be integrated with. You can only have four social media accounts at a time. If you need more apps, it will cost more fees. It is very expensive for teams because the more people you need to interact with, the more you have to pay.

Sprout Social is a bit more expensive as compared to SocialPilot. Its cheapest plan costs $99 a month and is limited to only one user. Here’s the detailed comparison of SocialPilot as a cost-effective Sprout Social alternative.

6. Buffer

Buffer is one of the popular social media marketing automation tools that offer users scheduling functionality. This tool comes in handy for LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook users. Even more, customers on the pro package can enjoy the Pinterest feature, too. However, those on a lower package will have a limited number of social media accounts connected.

As a new user, you can choose to go with the default scheduling functionality offered by Buffer or use your automation to match your needs. This social media automation tool provides users four slots per day by default. You have the freedom to either delete or add slots depending on the number of campaigns you have to post daily. The more campaign slots you have, the more posts you’ll have to schedule.

Buffer browser extension is available for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. With these extensions, you can schedule your posts by clicking on the Buffer icon to add to your queue. Additionally, there are mobile applications – both for Android and iOS.

Pros

• Buffer gives users the ability to customize every post, depending on which social media account you will be scheduling.
• This automation tool gives you insights into the best times to send out your campaigns.
• They have a great engaged community you can interact with.

Jose Luis A.

Buffer is a social network monitoring and management program, it is a tool that allows you to keep constant track of your social networks, as well as keeping your contact space completely up-to-date.

Cons

• To get the analytics, you will have to pay way more, even when you can get the same functionality at a fair price with other tools like SocialPilot.
• The downside with Buffer is that they don’t have the media library feature, which most social media automation tools have.
• They have different pricing plans if you need to have Analytics and Social Inbox. You need to buy subscriptions to all of these plans to have a complete social media automation tool that can be way more expensive.

Verified Buffer User

Team collaboration features are lacking some functionality that would help the team be more productive in suggesting, curating, editing, and approving content for distribution. Costs prohibit us from increasing to larger team packages

Check out how and why SocialPilot proves to be the best Buffer alternative.

7. CoSchedule

The primary goal of CoSchedule is to achieve efficiency for both solopreneurs and marketing companies. This social media automation tool integrates with WordPress and helps with pushing content to your preferred social media account whenever you hit “publish” for every post.

The best of all is that CoSchedule offers users a “Top Content Report,” which gives users insights into the social engagement of the campaigns you send out on social media. This feature is useful for content marketers who are curious to know how their marketing campaigns are fairing to help them adjust whenever necessary.

Unlike other social media tools, CoSchedule focuses on content and social performance. It offers features such as “ReQueue,” which allows users to reschedule their best content. This will help your audience see more fresh content in their feeds.

Pros

• The tool allows users to visualize their content in one place. You can create a read-only calendar using CoSchedule, and your team members can view what is coming up next.
• You can easily tweak your calendar settings to match your preferences.
• CoSchedule will enable you to implement approval procedures.

Karen C.

I love being able to plan all my social media in one place. Even if one of my children gets strep throat, my social media strategy keeps going without missing a beat. Having it connected to my blog makes it indispensable.

Cons

• The tool has become sluggish suddenly, probably because of the massive amount of data users are entering.
• The tool indeed offers scheduling functionalities, but people experience publishing errors regularly.
• You will have to change your templates manually if you change your mind about scheduling posts.

Carissa W.

Dislike the pricing and not enough integrations with other applications or workflows. Dislike the photo upload feature and no short link feature for websites being shared in content posts.

Have a look at this comparison of SocialPilot with Coschedule to get detailed insights.

8. Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a social network and content curation tool for content marketers. It is also one of the best free social media automation tools, offering users a free plan. With Scoop.it, you can create specific topics, share your ideas, and connect with like-minded individuals.

Using the Scoop.it content director, users can curate content from any other source. You can also share your idea across your most preferred social media platforms with just a click of a button.

This social media automation tool also enables users to generate ideas using specific terms called keywords. So, if you are a content marketer, Scoop.it will help you stay updated and know what to always share with your audience.

Pros

• Scoop.it regularly updates its users on trending topics, depending on the keywords you choose.
• You can share your content to various social media channels with just a click.
• Your front page provides you with all the relevant information you need – from curator profiles to topics.

Mark A.

I can publish a page from my blog to ScoopIt, and then share it to other social media platforms very quickly and easily.

Cons

• Social media marketers haven’t leveraged this tool because they are muddled about whether or not it is worth an investment.
• It’s pretty expensive – $79/month, which most beginner writers can’t afford to “lose” every month.

Verified Scoop.it User

When compared to other curation services that we’ve tested Scoop.it was more difficult to manage, and the suggestions overall included less reputable sources. Pricing is too expensive with the feature of posting on wordpress.

9. Sendible

Sendible is another great social media automation tool, helping you manage and automate social media channels. Sendible, not only lets you do one-by-one campaign scheduling on different social media accounts but also manage how your campaigns go out right from your dashboard.

The best feature is that you can create content and schedule it for a week, month, or as long as you need. Moreover, you can tailor your content according to different social platforms by leveraging features such as emoji, attachments, and more.

Pros

• Sendible has excellent and dedicated customer support whenever you counter issues.
• Sendible has a unified social inbox that helps you manage all your conversations in one place.
• You can create custom reports as you want with Sendible.

Luke F.

The three things that I like the best about Sendible are the content calendar and its functionality, analytics and customizability with great data charts, and the monitoring aspect.

Cons

• Sendible does not feature a clickable calendar, which is on-demand right now.
• The pricing is way too high for a small business and agency for the features it offers.
• It has a learning curve, not very user-friendly.

Verified Sendible User

Sometimes the integrations don’t work 100%. Instagram often doesn’t pull featured images even when fetched. Hashtags sometimes run together after they’re added to various services. The mobile app seems to have a lot of bugs and the Services concept takes a little bit to get used to.

Check how SocialPilot compares to be a great Sendible alternative.

10. Meetedgar

Meetedgar is different from other social media automation tools existing in the market. It offers better service and helps in uniquely scheduling content with its posting feature.

After your post is scheduled in Meetedgar, it also provides the feature of saving the same in the library for later use. This tool supports and assists you on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Pros

• Meetedgar has a posting queue that allows you to never run out of scheduling your posts, that is, evergreen posting.
• It also has category-based detail scheduling, which enables you to categorize your content and schedule them differently.

Sandra G.

My favorite part of Meet Edgar is how they handle the recurring sharing of content. All the benefits of automation with really granular control over what goes out, when it goes out, and where it goes.

Cons

• With its limited features, it hardly supports 4 networks which might not be sufficient for the marketers.
• Meetedgar doesn’t allow you to shuffle your posts in the queue for rescheduling.
• Features are as stagnant as they could be with only one pricing plan available.
• It doesn’t have any feature of creating a social team or even for in-depth analytics.

Mark G.

You could only set the frequency to daily rather than bi-weekly or on X day every month. Made it difficult to automate our process as we don’t post daily

Here’s a detailed comparison of SocialPilot being a cost-effective Meetedgar alternative.

11. Zoho Social

With businesses growing at breakneck speed, Zoho Social is built to match their needs efficiently. This social media automation tool will help you work with your team and monitor brand mentions and social conversations.

It offers an unlimited social media scheduling feature and creates a custom report to analyze your social media. Zoho Social lets you manage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.

Pros

• Its SmartQ feature comes up with the best time slots to schedule your posts for maximum audience engagement.
• With its CRM integrations, you can interact with prospects and generate potential leads from social media.
• Automated report creation at Zoho Social enables report sharing with clients at any time complemented with a personalized message.

John K.

Post scheduling and smart scheduling feature, which aims to publish your posts at times when your audience is most active.

Cons

• Zoho Social lacks a combined analytics feature that takes it on a low for marketers, especially when some Zoho Social alternatives offer this.
• The most common feature in social media scheduling tools is missing in Zoho Social, i.e., RSS feed integration.
• The number of features it offers is looked at as an expensive tool in the market.

Verified Zoho Social User

I do wish they had content generation options, such as RSS feeds or suggested posts for the field. The user interface unexpectedly becomes a little bit messy and difficult to navigate when uploading a large number of pictures and videos.

We have compared these social media automation tools in detail. Check how SocialPilot is an intuitive alternative to Zoho Social.

12 Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media automation tool that encourages teams to work collaboratively. Whether you are looking to schedule, reschedule, queue, or bulk upload your posts, they have plenty of options to fill your content calendar.

With a social inbox to catch every conversation, it also provides one-click reports to its users. Agorapulse supports social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Instagram.

Pros

• Their social inbox offers you to send reports to your clients within a few clicks directly.
• You can easily label your content for smooth retrievals and analysis.
• With their inbuilt CRM feature, Agorapulse helps you understand your audience better.

Sarah F.

Definitely the all-inclusive inbox that helps me to stay caught up on all of my messages!

Cons

• Their reporting feature is too basic for the ever-growing industry of marketers.
• It’s difficult for users to navigate through the tool, suggesting the tool to have a shift in their interface.
• This social media automation tool doesn’t integrate with any external applications or tools except for bit.ly.
• It is also expensive for all features it offers.

Emily M.

The reports are not as complete as they should be. I do not like the app very much. It’s not intuitive and it’s extremely basic.

That's all for the day!