Alfred Lua, a product marketer at Buffer, recently compiled a list of the top social media management tools with full details about each platform along with an easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet that compares the platforms. He breaks his list into two groups: the top 15 small-to-medium businesses, and the top 10 tools for enterprise-level companies. Here are Lua’s platform choices for small-to-medium businesses and what he finds unique about each:
1. Buffer buffer.com Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
2. Hootsuite hootsuite.com Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
3. Sprout Social sproutsocial.com Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
4. Agora Pulse agorapulse.com Unique value: Unlike the rest, Agora Pulse has several unique features such as competitor analysis and Facebook contest apps at a very affordable price point.
5. Sendible sendible.com Unique value: Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
6. eClincher eclincher.com Unique value: What makes eClincher different from other tools is that it enables you to auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds, has a media library for your images, and lets you search for social media influencers.
7. Social Pilot socialpilot.co Unique value: Social Pilot curates and suggests content from several industries (such as tech, education, and health and fitness), which is great if you want to find relevant content easily. Another valuable feature is its white label reports, which are especially handy for agencies.
8. CoSchedule coschedule.com Unique value: CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place. Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.
9. MavSocial mavsocial.com Unique value: On top of the common features (such as scheduling, monitoring and reporting), MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use and edit your multimedia for your social media posts and a search engine where you can browse through millions of stock photos. If you wish, MavSocial can also help you repeat your social media posts for a specified duration.
10. Friends+Me friendsplus.me Unique value: Friends+Me supports scheduling for Google+ profiles, collections, communities, pages, and even GSuite Google+ and allows you to set up automations to re-post your Google+ posts onto your other social media accounts, which is great for marketers who focus on Google+.
11. Crowdfire crowdfireapp.com Unique value: Crowdfire stands out from most social media management tools in that it lets you connect your blogs, YouTube channel, and online shops and will create social media posts for every update you have on your sites.
12. Edgar meetedgar.com Unique Value: What people like about Edgar is that it automates social media post creation and scheduling in a clever way. Instead of simply posting your social media posts several times, it recycles your library of content according to categories.
13. Post Planner postplanner.com Unique value: With its Find tool, Post Planner makes it super easy to find content that has proven to engage people. Also, instead of just picking your time slots in your schedule (to form your sharing plan), you can select the content type for each time slot and Post Planner will fill the slots with your chosen content accordingly. You can also schedule posts outside of this plan if you prefer.
14. Tailwind tailwindapp.com Unique value: Tailwind is great for Pinterest and Instagram marketers, as it provides a range of features that are specific to these visual platforms, such as Pinterest content promotion and Instagram UGC content management.
15. Later later.com Unique value: The strength of Later is its visual content calendar, where you can easily drag-and-drop images to schedule them. It also has a free link tool that you can use on your Instagram profile to link to a shoppable Instagram feed or various websites and blog posts.
