Between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, TikTok, Snapchat and more, keeping track of all of your brand’s social media accounts can feel like herding cats (and it’s not nearly as cute).

But you don’t have to go at it alone. There are lots of apps, platforms and websites out there for properly managing multiple social accounts. This includes schedulers, reporting tools, and software that ensures you’re engaging with your followers regularly (and that no post, comment or direct message is missed) — and more. With these tools, you can gather up those kitties in no time. Let’s start right meow.

Bonus: Read the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

What is social media management?

Social media management involves properly handling your presence on all of the social platforms your brand (whether that’s a big corporation, small business or just you) uses on a daily basis.

Managing social media includes planning and scheduling posts, interacting with followers, answering queries, keeping up with current trends, and analyzing your performance.

If that sounds like a lot — that’s because it is! Using technology (a.k.a. social media management tools) to manage social media can help you:

• Create and schedule content in advance
• Answer comments and DMs from multiple profiles in a single inbox
• Track your analytics across accounts and platforms from one place
• Generate and share comprehensive performance reports
• Automate audience and industry research (through social listening and brand monitoring)
• Keep your creative assets organized and available to your whole team
• Improve your social customer service processes, response times, and customer satisfaction scores

A social media management tool can be anything from a simple photo editing app to a one-stop, do-it-all dashboard (*cough* like Hootsuite).

The big takeaway here is that social media management tools help marketers, business owners and content creators spend less time on the operational aspects of managing social media (i.e. clicking through countless tabs to keep up with profiles on different networks), and more time on creative and strategic work. They’re also an essential component of maintaining a healthy work-life balance while handling social media.

21 of the best social media management tools for 2022

Here are the greatest tools out there for managing your social media.

Social media management tools for scheduling and publishing

Ask any social media manager, and they’ll say the hardest part of the job is not being online 24/7. Scheduling apps that automatically post content, even when you’re not online, are essential for an uninterrupted workflow (and that much-needed unplugged time).

1. Hootsuite’s Planner

We’re a big fan of Hootsuite’s content planner (shocker). The calendar-like tech allows you to schedule posts and provides insights into the optimal time to do so—when your audience will be most active (and most likely to interact with your content).

Hootsuite plans start at $49 per month.

2. RSS Autopublisher

This platform will automatically publish RSS feeds to your social (so, for example, you can set it up to automatically share a blog post to Facebook and LinkedIn the moment it’s published on your blog).

Source: Synaptive

It’s about $7 a month, but free with Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan.

3. Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish

Best Time to Publish is a feature that lives within Hootsuite Analytics. It shows you personalized suggestions for the optimal days and times to publish your posts (on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn) based on a detailed analysis of your past performance.

The Best Time to Publish feature is quite granular. The times suggested will differ based on your specific goal: building awareness, increasing engagement, or driving traffic.

Hootsuite plans start at $49 per month.

Social media management tools for analytics and social listening

It’s all about the numbers: tracking your analytics and using the data to improve your social performance is a game changer. Here are the apps to help you do it.

4. Hootsuite’s Analytics

Surprise, it’s Hootsuite again! Our analytics technology gets you stats on all of your social accounts in one place. The platform also provides users with ways to optimize the data—to build awareness, boost engagement, drive traffic, etc.

Hootsuite plans start at $49 per month.

5. Panoramiq Watch

This Instagram monitoring tool is ideal for businesses looking to take their socials to the next level—it’s all about keeping an eye on your competitors. You can use it to watch specific hashtags, compare analytics and manage posts.

Source: Synaptive

Panoramiq Watch has a standard plan that’s $8 a month (with it, you can monitor up to 10 hashtags and 10 competitors) and a standard plan that’s $15 a month (that includes 20 hashtags and 20 competitors). The tool is free with Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan.

6. Panoramiq Insights

This platform gives you an in-depth look at your Instagram analytics, including stats on your followers, activity, posts and stories. There’s downloadable reports available in PDF and CSV files if you really want to geek out.

Source: Synaptive

This platform has a standard $8 a month plan that includes insights for two Instagram accounts, and each additional account is an extra $4 a month. The tool is free with Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a digital consumer intelligence platform that gives both historical and real-time data that’s relevant to you and your brand. It analyzes images to recognize figures that you might care about, and can compare interests of different groups in your audience.

Source: Brandwatch

Brandwatch starts at $1000 per month, and it’s ideal for folks who are all about the numbers—it’s very data-heavy, as opposed to visual. Hootsuite offers a free Brandwatch integration for all Enterprise and Business plan users.

8. Hootsuite’s Streams

With Hootsuite, you can create streams (custom feeds that show up in your dashboard) to track all the important conversations in your field. Stay on top of your own business—and one step ahead of the competition. You can filter by keyword, hashtag, and location. Streams are laser-targeted to your needs.

Hootsuite plans start at $49 per month.

9. Cloohawk

Cloohawk monitors your Twitter, then suggests “hacks” for better engagement and growth plus tips on how to get you there. It’s like a Tweet doctor: diagnosing issues and prescribing fixes. A fix might be using the right hashtags, posting trending stories or reposting your old posts (bonus: there’s a bot included that with auto-retweet anything that’s deemed relevant to your brand).

Source: Cloohawk

Cloohawk has a free version, Starter ($19 a month) and Plus ($49) options. Hootsuite offers a free Cloohawk integration for all users.

10. Nexalogy

This app is a social media monitoring and discovery platform—in other words, it takes data from social media that can help you develop a marketing strategy. Nexalogy can extract summaries with information including objects, foods, events and people from images, and has an interactive timeline so you can see when folks are most active. It’s useful for identifying crises in both politics and business.

Source: Nexalogy

And it’s free!

11. Archivesocial

Have you ever had a social post just disappear on you? Archivesocial keeps a record of all the action on your platforms, so you’ll never lose a post, like or comment. It’s especially useful for legal reasons—recordkeeping online is notoriously fickle, and apps like these make sure evidence is preserved.

Archivesocial’s most basic plan is $249 a month.

12. Statsocial

Statsocial supports marketing initiatives by providing market data (from a database of 300 million humans) to help inform your strategy. The platform can identify key influencers in your industry, identify your audience’s interests and target specific individuals with surveys.

Source: Statsocial

Statsocial is free through Hootsuite.

Social media management tools for customer service

Okay, so you’ve got your followers’ attention. Now it’s time to keep it. Stay on your audience’s good side by providing first-rate customer service with the help of these tools.

13. Hootsuite’s Inbox

Our platform’s inbox is one of the best (totally unbiased, we promise) tools for social media customer service. It organizes all of your social conversations in one place, so you’ll never miss a question, comment or share. It sure beats clicking in and out of apps all day.

Hootsuite plans start at $49 per month.

14. Heyday

Heyday is an artificial intelligence chatbot for retailers that integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and many retail specific tools (like Shopify, Magento and Salesforce). The smart technology can answer customer inquiries instantly, recommend products, and pass on queries to humans if they’re too complicated for a robot.

Source: Heyday

Heyday starts at $49 per month.

15. Sparkcentral

Sparkcentral gathers all your social conversations in one dashboard, so you can answer inquiries or reply to comments on multiple social platforms from one centralized dashboard — alongside emails, text messages, and other, more traditional, customer service interactions.

You can easily automate, prioritize and delegate using Sparkcentral, and the platform keeps data on your success so you can see how much of a difference it’s making.

Learn more about Sparkcentral and book a demo. 

Social media management tools for content creation

Strategy aside, good quality content goes a long way. Keep your images, text and video up to snuff using these apps.

16. Copysmith

For writing support, Copysmith is your hero. This platform can get your product pages ranked higher online, and your posts a larger audience on social media (after all, SEO and algorithms are technology and so is this software: bot game recognizes bot game). This platform is ideal for brands with big marketing teams.

Copysmith has a Starter plan ($19 a month, comes with 50 credits, 20 plagiarism checks, in-app support, and integrations) and a Professional plan ($59 a month, comes with 400 credits and 100 plagiarism checks).

17. Adobe Creative Cloud Express

Adobe Express’s social-friendly templates make it easy to design eye-catching, engaging posts, videos and stories. Awesome visuals are an essential part of any strategy, and this is one of the best apps out there for photo and video editing.

Source: Adobe Express

The app comes with tons of free stock images, templates and effects. The basic plan is free and premium (which includes more images, branding options, millions of stock images and 100GB of storage space) is about $10 U.S.D monthly.

18. Fastory

Fastory can up your mobile advertising game with templates for short games that you can customize for your brand. Their game catalog includes swipe quizzes, running games, photo contests and polls. This adds an interactive element to your social media, and can increase your follower’s engagement with your posts.

Source: Fastory

Fastory’s pricing starts at $499 a month.

Social media tools for teamwork

Teamwork makes the dream work, right? Social teams typically have a ton of balls in the air at once, and communication technology helps to make sure nothing gets dropped.

19. Slack

If there’s one thing this app doesn’t do, it’s, well… slack. It’s a secure communication tool that’s super useful for teams—you can divide group messages up by topic, send DMs, and even message yourself notes. You can also video chat and collaborate on group documents within the platform (and send GIFs, a requirement in any hip fun workspace).

Source: Slack

Slack’s free version has all the basic features (including 10,000 searchable messages, 10 apps and integrations and video calling) and the paid versions start at about $7 USD per month, per team member.

20. Airtable automations

This tech is like magic—you can program in your workflow and automate certain tasks. Airtable has integrations for Google workspaces, Facebook, Twitter and Slack, so you can do things like automatically email a team member when a certain field of a spreadsheet is updated, and get real-time status reports on every project.

Whilehis software may sound complicated, it’s user-friendly and great for beginners—the automations can grow more complex as you learn more about the technology. The basic plan is free, and the Plus and Pro plans are $10 and $20 per month, respectively.

21. Trello

Trello is the ultimate to-do list. The platform’s boards, lists and cards help to manage and assign tasks and keep your team on track. Checking off items using this app is extremely satisfying.

Source: Trello

Trello is free to use.

Save time on social media with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can manage all your accounts, engage the audience, measure results, and more. Try it free today.

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