The 5 best social media management tools in 2022

Social media is one of the most powerful tools available to little and middle businesses. You can use it to search new clients, drive traffic to your social site, and keep in touch with existing customers. But as though many powerful tools, you have to be watchful with how you use it. Trying to control multiple inboxes, post on all the different platforms, and keep things consistent is next to impossible using the regular user apps. To do it properly, you need a social media management app.

Use automation to share, engage, and cross-post without lifting a finger.

The best social media management platforms allow you to take manage of your social media presence in a single place. You're able to simply automate, analyze, and manage all your accounts, so you can focus on?generate the kind of?content?your audience loves.

We put almost 60 public network management apps to the test, and here are the five best.

Once you've picked a social media management app, you can make it even more powerful and efficient by automating it. Take a look at how you can?How to Automate Your Social Media Marketing Like the Pros

Or, if you're focused mostly on Instagram, here are.12 Tools to Automate Instagram Posts and DMs So You Can Boost ROI (And Get Your Life Back)

The best social media management tools

• Buffer?for on the level social media scheduling
• Hootsuite?for all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics
• MeetEdgar?for manually your social media posts
• SocialPilot?for small groups
• Sendible?for an affordable option with all the features

What makes a great social media management tool?

How we evaluate and test apps

All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using every app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the classification. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer original comparisons of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of?The 7 best apps to help you focus and block distractions in 2022

Social media management apps have one resolve: to make leading your business's social media presence easy and well organized. Most little businesses don't have the staff or the time to waste posting individual updates and surveying in on every site a few times every day. With this in mind, we set out some pretty firm criteria on what we felt made a best social media management tools:

• Every app had to help multiple social media: at the good least, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. help for other networks or services was a bonus but not essential for incorporation.
• It's easy to waste time on social network—whether you're posting for yourself or your business. It shouldn't be a hands-on job that takes time every day. This meant we required apps to ?enable you to schedule future posts and updates?so you could batch your social network work into a couple of blocks every week. Also, it was ideal if apps offered access to your social network inboxes away from the distraction of the feed, so you could reply to customers without getting sucked in.?
• Social media shouldn't be a crapshoot. ?non-identical audiences will engage otherwise with different kinds of content. To make it easier for you to identify what content works for your audience, the best social media management tools will offer?detailed analytics?on how your posts do. (sadly for marketers, not all social media allow the same kind of analytics, which means you won't necessarily get the same features for every social network you use.)
• Finally, all the apps had to be?cost-effective for small and medium businesses. There are plenty of enterprise- or influencer-focused apps out there that charge a serious premium for features you'll never use. Price wasn't as much the issue as value for money.

It's also worth not that every app has a free trial or even a?completely free plan. Don't decide on one based just on our observations; try the two or three that sound like they might suit you good, and go from there.

Best social media management tool for straightforward social network scheduling

Buffer?(Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Safari , website)

Buffer?is one of the longest-running social network tools aimed firstly at scheduling posts, although it's gone through multiple updates, shifts, and iterations. It helps Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. Free users can connect up to three social media accounts, including Facebook Pages and groups.

When you first connect a social media account, Buffer will create a schedule for you. By non-remittance, Buffer creates four slots every day: in the morning, around noon, late-afternoon, and later in the evening for the time zone you've selected. Head to?Settings??Posting Schedule?to tweak this at any time, delete or add time slots, or disable an entire day. The more slots you have, the more updates you'll need to schedule, but scheduling updates is easy with Buffer's intuitive dashboard, mobile apps, and browser extensions.

For scheduling content from the web, Buffer offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Click the Buffer icon in your toolbar (or use a keyboard shortcut), compose your update, and click?add to queue?to schedule. There are also mobile apps available for both iOS and Android, so you can schedule on the go.

While Buffer's free plan is good enough to get started, if you want a more complete social media management solution or to control more than three social media accounts at once,?you'll need to pay $6/month per social channel for the Essentials plan. This gives you access to detailed analytics and engagement features, which let you interact with your audience directly from Buffer. (Also, if you want to bring team members on board, Buffer goes up to $12/month per social channel.)

With Zapier, it's easy to?link any other service you use to Buffer. For example, you can automatically add new blog posts to your schedule, either directly from WordPress or through an RSS feed.

Buffer new items in an RSS feed

Buffer + RSS by Zapier

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Best social media management tool for automating your posts

MeetEdgar?(Web, iOS, Chrome)

MeetEdgar?is like an autopilot for your social media accounts. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This isn't an analytics tool—just a scheduling one.

What makes MeetEdgar so different is its automation. The app can find quote-worthy text from links, and then compose updates to go along with them. After pasting your link, easyly click?Suggest Variations, and MeetEdgar will create four another updates based on the contents of your link. You can edit them, forget them, or add your own manual variations, and then click?Save to Library. This is the only tool we came across while researching that even creates your content for you. Well still, it can generate variations on past updates that have performed Best, making it easy to recycle updates without duplicating content.

Another standout feature is the ability to categorize your updates. Add different types of content to different categories, so you can better space out content types over the course of your schedule. You may want to create one category for blog posts, another for how-to posts, and another for promotional material. Color-coded categories make it easy to ensure your schedule contains a good range of content that will appeal to different users. You can also automatically add content from sources like your blog or your Medium, WordPress, or YouTube accounts with a quick import.

There's little in the way of analytics tools in MeetEdgar, but the app does implement A/B testing to isolate best practices; plus, you can use the built-in ed.gr link shortener to track clicks. You can schedule content via the web, via the Chrome extension, or using a bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox.

MeetEdgar integrates with Zapier?so you can, for example, automatically add your and other folks' articles to your Edgar library for posting.

Create new Edgar content items from your new Wordpress blog posts

MeetEdgar + WordPress

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Create from scratch?or?learn more

MeetEdgar Price:?From?$19/month?for Edgar Lite with 3 social network accounts, ?limitless media library, 4 categories, and ?limitless support.

There are a couple of other apps that also automate your social media in different ways. We loved Meet Edgar's approach, but both ContentCal?and SociakBee?were firmly in contention for inclusion on this list.

Best affordable social media management tool with all the features

Sendible?(Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)

Sendible?is a complete social media management package, with one big feature that makes it stand out: its price. It offers more advanced features at a lower price point than almost any other app we tested.?

As you've likely come to expect, a full set of scheduling tools is included. You can queue up posts for all connected social media, article, and mailing lists. Smart Queues make it very easy to maximize engagement by adjusting publication times for you, with the option of setting your best-performing evergreen content to be automatically recycled in the future.

These scheduling tools are as good as any in the business. A shared calendar displays all of your pending updates across any networks you have connected, with the option of connecting RSS feeds to curate and automatically schedule future content.?

Unlike many of the more affordable social media management apps, Sendible enables you to monitor social media for mentions of your brand, competitors, or other terms of interest. It's just a matter of setting up an appropriate keyword alert. You can pick which keywords you want to target, optional inclusions and words you want to exclude, and where the posts were made. You can then browse the list of relevant keyword results from your dashboard or have them automatically emailed to you on a daily or weekly basis. You can even choose to just receive the positive or negative alerts.

Similarly, Sendible offers eight pre-built reports (including integration with Google Analytics) even on its cheapest plan, so you can see how well your social campaigns work. You can also see any new comments, mentions, or direct messages sent to your social media channels and address them from within the app. While common with enterprise social media management apps, few other options in this price range offer all that.???

Sendible Price:?From $29/month for the?Creator plan?that includes 1 user, 6 services, and 100 posts per day.

Which social media management tool is best for you?

As with most things, there's no one good social media network management app—just the most appropriate for your business needs. We suggest you check out the free trials for any of the apps that look like they could work for you and go from there.?

While we've focused on complete social media network management apps, there are also some apps that are designed to work good with one network—like?TweetAminul for Twitter or?Later?for Instagram—that are worth considering if you want to prioritize your marketing efforts on a single platform. You can also use Zapier to automatically post to your social media accounts, if you want an even more hands-off solution.?