Thursday, 28 December 2023

Facebook automation: The ultimate guide for your brand

Juggling multiple social platforms is now a staple for brands. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram—the list never ends.

Marketers need shortcuts. Managing different networks is demanding and it’s no surprise putting your social media channels on autopilot seems like a tempting offer. Especially for your Facebook marketing strategy—the platform giant with almost 3 billion monthly users.

But is it as good as it sounds? Could automation be more than just a passing trend?

Below we’ve combed through the fine details of Facebook automation and suggested ten tools to help you get started.

What is Facebook automation & how does it work?

Facebook automation involves using tools to manage and streamline Facebook activities, automating tasks such as:

  • Leaving comments on statuses, images or pages
  • Liking and sharing statuses, images or pages across your account(s)
  • Inviting friends to specific pages or events en masse
  • Accepting or rejecting all pending friend requests

But here’s the truth about social media automation: not everything can go on autopilot. It exists to make things easier and not to replace your personal touch.

Instead, strike a balance.

Use automation to manage routine tasks, but keep your brand’s personality alive through authentic engagement. Respond personally to complex queries and comments and share unique, humanized content that reflects your brand’s voice.

Remember, your audience values real connections. They want to interact with a brand that listens and responds genuinely, not just automated responses. Use automation smartly to enhance your presence by reducing repetitive tasks and leaving more room to make real human connections.

Benefits of Facebook automation

While social media marketers manage more responsibilities today, core tasks like scheduling posts remain the same. Automation tools are necessary to keep up with the pace of social and reduce the energy spent on these routine tasks. Here are the potential benefits of using Facebook automation:

  • Boosts efficiency and productivity: While liking posts and leaving relevant comments are key to a well-functioning social presence, they’re not always considered the most important marketing tactics. Facebook automation takes care of routine messages and comments so you can focus your attention on more high-value tasks like promoting content or conducting outreach.
  • Always on brand engagement: The idea of automated responses is appealing to marketers who want their business to be “on” 24/7. In The 2023 Sprout Social Index ™, 51% of consumers said that the most memorable brands responded to customers.
Infographic highlighting results from The Sprout Social Index highlighting what most memorable brands on social do based on customer results

Automation enables you to respond to questions, comments and inquiries in a timely manner, regardless of industry or time zone, to increase engagement, reliability and customer satisfaction.

  • Helps maintain a consistent presence: Batch content creation and auto-posting tools keep the ideas flowing and the updates steady. It’s much easier to stay on track when low-impact tasks, like posting, happen in the background. A consistent posting schedule keeps your brand top of mind and your audience engaged.
  • Gives better targeting insights: When you automate Facebook tasks, you’re able to gather and analyze KPIs such as audience behavior, what content they interact with, etc. more easily. And since there is a lesser chance of human error, you get deeper and more precise insight. This allows you to deliver better personalized content, offers and deals to your customers and followers.

How to use Facebook automation for your brand

Think of Facebook automation, whether for chatbot marketing or customer care, as a skilled sous-chef in your brand’s social media kitchen. This prep work enables you to focus on creating the perfect dish for your audience. Let’s break down how Facebook automation improves three key areas.

Facebook publishing automation

Facebook publishing automation is like setting up a smart, self-operating calendar for your posts. It lets you schedule Facebook posts in advance to make sure your page stays active, even when you’re not available.

You pick the time and content and the automation does the posting. It’s great for maintaining consistency in your posting schedule.

But it’s not just about quantity—quality matters. Mix in live, timely posts to keep your feed dynamic and engaging. This way, you strike the right balance between automated efficiency and authentic, real-time interaction.

Facebook response automation

Facebook response automation chatbots instantly reply to common questions—think “opening hours” or “location queries.” This feature keeps your audience engaged and shows them you’re responsive whenever they need you.

The key is to identify which inquiries or comments need human attention and which ones chatbots can handle.

Quick, routine questions are perfect for bots. They offer instant help and keep your audience happy with speedy responses. But complex or sensitive topics? That’s your cue to step in. These moments need your brand’s personalized attention.

Blending automation with human interaction creates a responsive and authentic experience for your audience.

Facebook ads automation

Your Facebook advertising strategy benefits from automation too. With Facebook ads automation, you set the parameters for your target audience and budget, then let the algorithm do its magic.

It analyzes data and adjusts targeting, bidding and placement in real-time. This means your ads are always in the right place at the right time while staying within budget.

The best part? You’re still in charge. Regular check-ins and a clear understanding of your objectives ensure you maintain control over the brand message and overall campaign direction.

10 Facebook automation tools to use in 2024

So where do you even start with Facebook automation? Tools make it easier and there are plenty to choose from, including:

1. Sprout Social

At Sprout, we understand the importance of combining a holistic social media strategy with automation and AI. Our tool inherits your manual tasks in publishing, listening, analytics and customer care so your team can focus on the strategic decisions that require human insight and creativity.

Data fragmentation across multiple tools also causes communication breakdowns, resulting in a disjointed customer experience and potential loss of crucial customer information. That’s what we’ve eliminated with Sprout’s Facebook integration. Publishing features, response management, approval workflows, reputation control and even scheduling posts across multiple pages and accounts—everything comes under one roof.

A preview of Sprout Social’s publishing dashboard showing a new post and a content calendar.

Tool-switching also leads to reduced efficiency and increased response times due to constant shifts between different platforms. Sprout gives you a unified inbox to simplify your workflow so you can view all your customer interactions across your other social channels as well in a single source of truth. This ensures you never miss a time-sensitive comment or message and have a holistic view of your social process.

A preview of Sprout’s Smart Inbox where you can search for messages, filter by date and view threads.

Our AI Assist tool generates options for your post text and tone. Create posts in bulk to speed up content creation and never fall behind schedule.

Sprout’s Optimal Send Times in Compose also identifies the best send times for posting content on a specific day.

A preview of Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature.

This helping hand eliminates guesswork by offering a list of suggested times based on engagement factors, enabling you to optimize your content’s reach.

Then, Sprout brings it together with detailed Facebook analytics that provide insights into post, page and tag performance.

A screenshot of Sprout’s Facebook page analytics dashboard showing performance metrics such as impressions, engagements and clicks.

Track these metrics to see how your social strategy measures up against quarterly goals and pivot accordingly.

Dive deeper with competitive Facebook insights on fan growth and top posts from other pages for a comparative overview of how your presence is doing. Identify content gaps and opportunities to capture specific audiences.

A combination of all these features allows you to automate your social media marketing from start to finish and your social media marketing from start to finish and focus your efforts on creative and strategic tasks that build your brand and engagement with customers.

2. Meta for Business

Meta for Business is a native Facebook and Instagram automation tool.

Features like automated responses based on pre-set keywords and phrases make it convenient for businesses to engage with their audience without constantly monitoring their social media pages. Plus, connected scheduling for posts across both platforms saves time and effort in content distribution.

What makes Meta for Business stand out is its Advantage+ feature, which uses machine learning to optimize sales campaigns and target the most likely converters within your advertising budget.

A preview of Facebook Ads Manager while setting up a new campaign.

Say goodbye to manual ad targeting and hello to a smarter, more efficient way of reaching potential customers.

3. Loomly

Loomly’s Facebook automation features are quite straightforward and make it easy to schedule and publish your posts with minimal effort.
A screenshot of Loomly’s different dashboards.

Loomly also has approval workflows to keep your team in sync. Complementary features like commenting systems, version logs and post mockups ensure everyone approves content before it goes live.

Beyond that, Loomly also offers audience targeting and post ideas. These features work together to ensure you create content your audience enjoys. Plus, advanced analytics make pivoting your strategy that much easier.

4. Tailwind

Tailwind is primarily a Pinterest and Instagram automation tool that now extends to Facebook as well. It uses generative AI tools called Ghostwriter and Tailwind Create to generate copy and design that matches your brand.

A screenshot of Tailwind's tool that enables you to write copy, schedule and distribute your posts across networks and channels from one integrated dashboard.

With automation and scheduling capabilities, Tailwind takes care of posting for you at the best times for maximum engagement from your audience.

Tailwind also has a powerful hashtag finder that pinpoints popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to ensure posts receive the visibility they deserve.

Plus, with one calendar for all your social networks, streamline and organize your content across platforms to maintain a consistent brand image.

5. NapoleonCat

NapoleanCat incorporates automation at several levels.

Image of NapoleanCat's dashboard where you can moderate all comments and messages across multiple social media platforms and accounts.

The tool includes an AI assistant that helps with content ideation and creates engaging post captions.

NapoleonCat also recognizes how important responsiveness is and has built-in features to automatically reply to simple questions and comments and redirect issues to relevant consultants.

Overall, NapoleonCat is a conversational tool that simplifies managing social media for businesses.

6. Agorapulse

Another tool for Facebook automation is Agorapulse.

A preview of Agorapulse’s scheduling feature.

This platform offers a variety of features that streamline your workflow and have a special focus on protecting your brand’s reputation on Facebook.

Features like automatically assigning, hiding, labeling and deleting content make social media monitoring simple and fast. Like other Facebook automation tools, Agorapulse has a Writing Assistant to help improve your content.

And for those messy inbox situations, the Inbox Assistant steps in to organize and manage your incoming messages. It detects questions and assigns them to the right person, saving you time and hassle.

7. IFTTT

IFTTT is a handy tool for automating tasks on Facebook. You’ll find it user-friendly, especially if you’re not tech-savvy. It connects different apps and services (like Sprout!), so you can create custom ‘recipes.’ Sync posts, manage content and trigger actions based on your page’s activity on Facebook.

A screenshot of IFTTT that shows all your apps and services in one place.

IFTTT is a bit of a generalist tool, so you need to play around with it to find the recipes that are useful for you. Plus, you need to connect different apps and workflows to squeeze the most value out of it.

8. Planly

Planly is a scheduling and automation tool that streamlines content ideation and planning for businesses and creators on Facebook.

An overview of Planly’s different social scheduling features like analytics, content calendar and audience insights.

With its intuitive interface, Planly makes it easy to create and schedule posts in advance. Then, view and manage all your content in one convenient calendar.

Planly includes features for sending auto-responses and keeping your audience engaged with pre-written comments on Facebook, although the number of auto-responses is limited.

An integrated hashtag research tool and audience insights boost content optimization. These features save time with planning and maintaining consistency with your posts on the world’s largest social media platform.

9. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo specializes in content research, analysis and monitoring.

Image of BuzzSumo's content analyzer feature that lets you explore the best headlines and engagement on social media, across days, weeks, months, and years

Find trending topics, track brand and competitor performance and identify influential content creators and publications from one platform.

While Buzzsumo doesn’t offer a wide breadth of Facebook automation features, it makes up for it by providing an in-depth analysis of your page’s performance. From monitoring engagement metrics to identifying top-performing content, Buzzsumo offers valuable insights to guide future posts.

10. CoSchedule

Plan, organize and execute marketing strategies with CoSchedule.

CoSchedule's calendar that provides global visibility of your projects and campaigns in a cross-functional view.

Features include content calendar management, social media scheduling, project workflow coordination and campaign analytics. AI Social and Project Assistants speed up content ideation and generation to make sure you’re never stuck for ideas.

A highlight of CoSchedule’s automation features is its ReQueue function, which automatically republishes your evergreen content on social media and adjusts the schedule according to when your audience is most active. Automating repeating promotions like Motivation Monday also supports brand consistency and frees up time for more creative tasks.

Overall, CoSchedule is a valuable tool for streamlining and optimizing your social content efforts on Facebook and beyond.

How can your brand use Facebook automation?

As a social platform, Facebook is nowhere near a thing of the past. Your audience is very much there and very much active.

Through scheduling, analytics and content suggestions, Facebook automation tools speed up the process without sacrificing creativity.

See how Sprout compares to other social media management platforms and how it can amplify your brand’s presence across social networks.

The post Facebook automation: The ultimate guide for your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.



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Friday, 22 December 2023

The social media customer service metrics that experts measure

When you think about social media customer service, there are probably two encounters that come to mind: the best experience a brand ever provided…and the worst.

For example, maybe you’re completely loyal to the airline whose customer service rep magically found you the perfect flight. Even in the face of price increases and flight cancellations, you’ll never book with another airline again.

On the other hand, you might still be furious at the furniture company that delivered the wrong items to your home and refused to refund you. Even after five years, nothing can persuade you to end your boycott of the brand.

Many of us know firsthand that poor social customer service has consequences, but we also remember those positive moments that create a lasting impression and the data agrees. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers agree they notice and appreciate when companies prioritize customer support.

Only the brands that go above and beyond for their customers receive enviable brand loyalty. In this article, we’re breaking down the essential social media customer service metrics you need to track to ensure you provide exceptional service and care on social. As customer service inquiries continue to increase on the channel, up-leveling your efforts will help you future-proof your business and stand out from your competition.

What are social media customer service metrics?

Social media customer service metrics are data points that help you tell the story of how well your customer care efforts are satisfying your customers. These metrics uncover what your social customer care team is doing well, where there are opportunities to improve and what tools are needed to fill those gaps. Social customer service metrics can be grouped into three categories: speed and efficiency, volume and team productivity, and sentiment.

A graphic that reads: What are social media customer service metrics? Data points that enable your team to tell the story of how well your customer care efforts are satisfying your customers. These metrics help you learn vital insights that translate to organization-wide goals.

Social customer support data also reveals how your support strategy on social fits into the omnichannel customer experience your brand provides. Using data empowers you to answer questions like:

  • Where are our customers most likely to make service inquiries?
  • How satisfied are our customers with the support we provide on social? How does it compare to other channels?
  • What are our customers’ most common questions?
  • Where in the funnel are our customers most likely to get stuck?

How to use customer service metrics to improve performance

Tapping into customer service metrics will help evolve your approach to customer care. With these findings, you will be on track to cultivate an emotional connection with your audience, build brand loyalty and foster customer retention and advocacy.

But the use of these metrics goes beyond improving customer satisfaction and experience. Social media customer service metrics have the power to transform the way you do business—from refining product development to building your company-wide strategy. For example, the team at Grammarly uses incoming customer support messages to surface valuable user stories for their product and user experience teams, as well as company leadership.

And they’re not alone. The 2023 State of Social Media reports that 62% of customer service strategy is informed by social media data.  Customer insights gleaned from service interactions on social are your “secret sauce” for building cross-functional collaboration at your company. Let’s get into the 10 social customer service metrics you need to monitor, and how you can track them with Sprout Social.

Speed and efficiency customer service metrics

How quickly your brand responds on social media contributes to your reputation for providing good customer service. According to our Index data, 69% of consumers expect a response from brands on social within 24 hours or less.

Measuring your team’s response rate efficiency is imperative. Look to the following metrics to help benchmark and improve your response time and overall performance.

1. Average first reply time

Average first reply time refers to the time it takes for your team to send out the first reply to an inbound customer message within business hours.

2. Average reply wait time

Measuring the time to your first response is just the beginning. Average reply time reveals how long customers wait in between responses until their issues are resolved, which is equally important.

For example, if it took five minutes for you to reply to their first message, and 10 minutes to reply to their second, the average reply wait time would be seven minutes.

3. Service level agreement (SLA) adherence

A social media service level agreement outlines terms of service, responsibilities and expectations between a company, its social team and their clients regarding quality of service. Departments within the same organization can also have SLAs. Regardless of the parties involved, SLAs establish commitments and guidelines for standards, protocols and key performance indicators. Guidelines will vary by company, but social media SLAs can include response time guidelines, issue resolution protocols and a crisis communication plan.

SLA adherence refers to the percentage of customer queries resolved within the agreed-upon time frame specified in the SLA. For example, let’s say a SLA sets a goal of responding to inbound inquiries within three hours or less. If the company responds within that timeframe for every inquiry, the SLA adherence would be 100%.

4. Customer abandonment rate

Customer abandonment rate refers to the percentage of customers who abandon their support requests before receiving a resolution. High abandonment rate can indicate poor customer support, leading to unsatisfied customers and lost business. Tracking customer abandonment rate can help you identify areas of improvement.

How to track these in Sprout Social

In Sprout Social, the Smart Inbox unifies all your incoming messages into a single stream, enabling you to monitor incoming messages, foster conversations and respond to your audience quickly. The Inbox also creates multiple reports that visualize and contextualize your team’s customer service performance.

Sprout Social's Smart Inbox, an inbox within the platform that consolidates all incoming messages and mentions into one place.

The Inbox Team Report enables you to evaluate your brand’s reply times at a team level and distill the metrics down by team member. The report also demonstrates median first reply times, slowest reply times, unique messages replied to and total replies listed by team members.

Use these insights to evaluate agent response performance more accurately, identify bottlenecks within your team’s workflows and closely monitor each agent’s activity for quality assurance or training purposes.

Sprout's Inbox Team Report that displays overall average wait and reply times, as well as social customer service metrics by team member.

By using features like this in Sprout, MeUndies reduced their average response time to less than 20 minutes.

Volume and team productivity customer service metrics

High-quality customer service isn’t just about response times. Measuring customer support requires demonstrating you’re resolving all customers’ problems, questions and inquiries that require comprehensive solutions. To do this, compare your productivity data to your overall volume and social media customer service stats in your industry.

5. Total received messages

The number of total received messages indicates how many total customer messages landed in your inbox.

6. Total replies or response volume

This figure represents the total number of responses your team sends to customers.

7. Reply or response rate

Response rate is the rate that brands respond to messages or comments that they receive on a daily basis. Not every single comment or message will need a response, and the amount you need to respond depends on the needs of your customers. Social media response rates vary by industry.

8.  Resolution rate

Resolution rate—the percentage of customer inquiries that are fully resolved—reveals how equipped your entire company is to address customer inquiries. This data illustrates how well your internal teams collaborate to find solutions for customers in a timely manner. It’s calculated by dividing the number of total actioned messages by the total number of messages.

9. Average Handling Time (AHT)

Average handling time (AHT) refers to the average time it takes for a customer service representative to handle a customer inquiry from start to finish. Calculating AHT can help teams ensure inquiries are addressed and resolved in a timely manner. It can also illuminate opportunities to streamline workflows and identify which support scenarios require more attention.

How to track these in Sprout Social

Maintaining customer satisfaction requires an all-hands-on-deck approach because customer service is a team sport. Index data shows 36% of businesses say social customer care will be shared between marketing or customer service teams in the future. Measuring customer service productivity across teams is made easy with Sprout—here’s how you can do it.

Data visualization from The Sprout Social Index™ illustrating which teams will own social customer care in 2024. Some 36% of businesses say social customer care will be shared between marketing and customer service teams in the future. Another 22% say marketing will own social customer care, 17% say customer service will own it with the help. of marketing, 16% say exclusively marketing and 8% say exclusively customer service.

The Inbox Activity Report provides a holistic view of your team’s social care efforts by presenting trends of incoming message volume and identifying the rate and speed of actions taken on messages by your teams. This report answers how much your team is accomplishing in the Smart Inbox.

Sprout's Inbox Activity Report. In the report, you can see a summary of all key performance metrics for received messages and inbox actions and a change over time in inbox volume.

You can also use the Case Performance Report to measure your team’s productivity and efficiency based on case management. The report compares the number of assigned cases with the total completed cases. AI can save your agents time and effort with auto-generated replies that elevate an agent’s quality of response. For example, Sprout’s Enhance by AI Assist helps customer care teams tailor their messages faster.A graph from Sprout's Case Performance Report featuring the number of assigned cases plotted against the number of total cases for a support team.

Sentiment customer service metrics

With so much valuable performance data, it might be tempting to zero in on ways you can optimize your social customer care strategy. But don’t forget about the big picture. The insights you gain from your customer interactions are integral to your entire company’s strategy. Maximize the impact of your direct access to the customer by sharing sentiment analysis data companywide.

10. Positive, neutral and negative sentiment

Through sentiment analysis, you can learn a lot about what your customers think about your brand, products and services. Overall, sentiment can be described as generally positive, neutral or negative. Although that doesn’t encompass the full context of a customer’s experience or opinion, monitoring sentiment trends helps you track and maintain a healthy ratio of positive sentiment. Be on the lookout for changes over time.

11. Most used quick replies

If you use a chatbot to optimize customer interactions on social, most used quick replies refer to the most commonly selected options. Use this data point to identify customer support trends, and optimize your customer service process to address these common requests quickly.

12. Most received topics and subtopics

The keywords or themes that pop up in your inbox often are your most received topics and subtopics. Tracking these topics and subtopics is challenging without the use of a tagging system or machine learning capabilities—however, tuning into them is essential for learning about your audience.

13. Voice of the customer data

Social media could be described as the world’s largest focus group. It unlocks an unprecedented amount of voice of the customer data, which helps you get to know your customers’ behavior, pain points, preferences and needs on a deeper level. This customer service metric is less quantifiable, but nonetheless rich in value.

14. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)  vs. workload 

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures satisfaction with a company’s product, service or interaction on social media platforms. CSAT is measured individually through surveys with questions like “How satisfied are you with your experience today?” and “How would you rate our product/service?”

CSAT is a powerful customer support metric because it enables businesses to gauge customer satisfaction while gathering actionable data to further improve the customer experience. CSAT vs. workload refers to the comparison of customer satisfaction scores with the overall workload of the customer service team.

How to track these in Sprout Social

When you receive incoming messages in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you are able to add tags that indicate the content of the messages. For example, you can tag for audience type or service issue. Tagging your messages will enable you to visualize trends and report findings. Sprout users on the Advanced Plan can tap into AI-powered sentiment in the Smart Inbox and Reviews Feed. Posts will automatically be assigned a positive, neutral, negative or unclassified value, making it seamless to isolate messages and even assign Automated Rules according to sentiment.

Sprout's Smart Inbox filtered for the tags coffee and latte. Only messages with those tags appear in the inbox.

You can use Sprout’s artificial intelligence-powered listening tools to uncover sentiment trends from the Inbox. Listening tools make it easy to track changes in sentiment, which empower you to share reports in a timely manner—and act on negative sentiment before it’s too late. You can also bolster your listening queries with our Queries by AI Assist feature, which uses OpenAI’s GPT model to serve up a vast range of suggested terms to include in your tracking.

A Listening Performance Sentiment Summary in Sprout. It depicts the percentage of positive sentiment and changes in sentiment trends over time.

And you can use the customer feedback tool to build custom surveys for X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram and Facebook. Then view and analyze your results in the Customer Feedback Report.

Sprout's Customer Feedback settings, which feature a functionality to enable feedback for profiles. There are also settings and forms for feedback type, privacy policy URL and net promoter score.

Provide your customers with an unforgettable social customer service experience

Whether you’re part of a social media team handling social support or a customer care professional on a dedicated support team, ground yourself in your goals for customer service. Then, as you measure performance and social media customer service metrics, you can adjust and better cater to your customers.

Try Sprout Social free for 30 days to start gathering these insights and get to know your customers on a deeper level.

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Thursday, 21 December 2023

19 top Hootsuite alternatives for your brand in 2024

As social media becomes more influential, impactful and involved, having robust tools with the latest and greatest features is becoming increasingly important.

Take the introduction of new AI tools recently. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 81% of marketers already say AI has had a positive impact on their work. The takeaway? Teams who don’t have tools with up-to-speed AI features are already falling behind.

Between new platforms and new innovations, there’s a lot keeping marketers on their toes—and their schedules full. You need the best tool for the job. Hootsuite is a major player in the social media marketing platform space. And whether you want an option with different pricing, more specialized or just want to try something new, we’re here to help you do your research.

Use this list to brush up on Hootsuite alternatives in a few categories to kickstart your search:

  1. Best overall Hootsuite alternative
  2. Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing
  3. Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics
  4. Hootsuite alternatives for social listening
  5. Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service
  6. Hootsuite alternatives for influencer platforms
  7. Free Hootsuite alternatives

Areas to focus on when comparing tools and Hootsuite alternatives

Social teams should regularly evaluate whether their current tools are hitting the mark, or if it’s time to try something new. A social team can only be as agile as their tech stack enables them to be.

Whether you’re curious about Hootsuite alternatives or you just want to see what’s out there before you make a decision, it’s always beneficial to see what other platforms have to offer.

Here are some key areas to look for when researching a new tools for your team.

Quality customer support

Customer support is everything. And it’s two-fold for social media tools—on the one hand, you need a tool that enables you to enact timely quality support. On the other, your team needs to receive quality customer support too.

When sourcing a tool, pay attention to whether they have readily available customer service to help your team. You need to be able to get help quickly to ensure your tool never slows you down.

According to the Index, 58% of marketing teams say they either share social customer care with their customer service team, or they own it but sometimes customer service will step in. Which means you need a tool that enables collaboration between your teams—ideally with AI capabilities to speed you up too.

Strong innovation

Marketers move at the speed of social. And tools must also follow this fast pace to help teams do their best work.

But making these changes and evolving to keep pace with the digital space takes time. The tools that will most benefit marketing teams are those that prioritize innovation by constantly looking for ways to enhance their roadmap and evolve.

Proven ROI

Proving social media ROI is a key success indicator that social teams must demonstrate. It also happens to be the most difficult.

A robust social media analytics and reporting tool enables social teams to demonstrate and prove ROI, and understand the full impact of their efforts. This means offering different kinds of reports that span channels, individual post breakdowns and paid vs. organic metrics.

A robust reporting tool also enables you to demonstrate ROI to leadership and other teams. Your platform should have sharable reports for stakeholders and clear, easy-to-understand data visualizations like charts and graphs.

Best overall Hootsuite alternative

Before we dive into the full list, let’s start with Hootsuite competitors that encompass every category on this list.

1. Sprout Social

We have to toot our own horn a little. Sprout Social is a stand-out all-in-one alternative on this list—especially for mid-size, large and enterprise businesses.

But don’t take our word for it—from AI-powered capabilities that fuel your social strategy end-to-end to high-level integrations with tools like Salesforce and Zendesk that unify your tech stack, check out what makes Sprout the best tool below.

Then try it free for 30 days yourself to compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite for yourself.

Start your free Sprout trial

Scheduling and publishing

Efficiently plan, schedule and publish social posts from a centralized social media calendar. Features like the campaign planner and tags take the guesswork out of reporting on content and campaign success.

The calendar also enables seamless collaboration with in-calendar notes, content placeholders, drag-and-drop functionality and Approval Workflows that enable internal and external stakeholder reviews.

Sprout’s AI and automation features also act as a virtual data or copy assistant. Suggestions by AI Assist generate captions with tone options in seconds. And Optimal Send Times uses 16 weeks’ of audience data to suggest seven “best times to post” as you schedule.

From our “SproutLink” link-in-bio tool, to URL tracking to measure success in Google Analytics, an Asset library and more, Sprout’s publishing capabilities simplify your scheduling process.

A screenshot of Sprout's publishing calendar and drag and drop capabilities.

Analytics and reporting

Sprout’s analytics and out-of-the-box reports do the heavy lifting of gathering and synthesizing your data for you. This frees you up to focus on the higher-level thinking that requires a creative human behind the wheel, like strategic and creative planning.

Sprout’s analytics provide deep insights that make measuring ROI and benchmarking against competitors to stay ahead a breeze. With Sprout’s ability to plug into your CRM, get a full 360-degree view of your customer, and the customer journey. And our Tableau integration to create dynamic reporting dashboards, further breaking down social data silos.

Sprout’s analytics and reporting enable you to get a full view of your strategy performance, to benchmark against competitors and helps transform your social media intelligence into shareable business intelligence. Find out more about Sprout’s analytics and reporting capabilities here.

Screenshot of Sprout Social Instagram Competitor Report that demonstrates competitors' followers and audience growth.

Social listening

Sprout’s social listening solution and AI-driven technology offers custom topics, or pre-built topic templates that enable you to perform competitor analysis, analyze brand health, uncover industry insights, analyze campaigns and monitor events in a snap.

Our social listening solution empowers you to be proactive by grasping how your audience feels about you and your competitors, uncovering influencers to partner with, identifying trends as they emerge and by getting ahead of crises with custom alerts and granular sentiment analysis.

If you want to try our social listening solution, reach out to us for a personalized demo.

Request a demo

Customer service

Sprout’s social media customer service solution goes beyond responding to comments. Our features enable smooth team collaboration and provide ways to improve the customer experience across platforms.

Manage conversations yourself, or create a Case for other team members to complete. See in real-time when other team members are responding to comments in the inbox to avoid duplicate work and a disjointed customer experience.

Meet customer needs quickly with Sprout’s copy AI features, or with canned FAQ answers stored in the Asset Library. And further free up your team’s time with a customizable SproutBot that can handle the common inquiries for you.

With Sprout’s customer service solutions, directly engage with customers and see the extent of past interactions for more context. And with our Salesforce and Zendesk integrations, effectively bridge the gap between sales and customer service to get a 360-degree view of your customer and their journey with your brand.

A screenshot of the Sprout Social Smart Inbox where several messages are displayed in a single feed from Instagram, Facebook and a post from X (formerly Twitter.)

Influencer marketing

The future of social media marketing involves creators and influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, over half of marketers are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset their primary challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

With Tagger by Sprout Social, we offer a creator and influencer marketing solution to help you ease into the future of social media.

Discover authentic and impactful creators to partner with, and use Tagger to manage your relationships, contracts, campaigns and more in one centralized platform. And Tagger takes the guesswork out of creator partnerships by measuring the success of your collaborations.

Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing

A robust social media scheduling tool is a must to keep your posts timely and accounts consistently active. Yet, 35% of marketers cite their brand’s scheduling tool as their top challenge when planning and scheduling content, according to Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report.

A solid publishing and scheduling tool must be intuitive on top of easing the publishing process. And with 43% of social teams feeling siloed, according to the Index, collaboration features are key, too.

Check out these Hootsuite alternatives for their scheduling and publishing features.

A quick note: Our pricing sections highlight “billed monthly” plans, but most of these tools also offer annual plans.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an end-to-end social media management platform with features that cover inbox and publishing, a unified social inbox, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration needs.

Agorapulse supports publishing and scheduling on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Google My Business and TikTok. And their high “Ease of Use” ranking on G2 is reflected in their intuitive, clean publishing calendar. Communication features enable smooth, real-time collaboration with shared notes, tracked action items and visibility into who is communicating what.

Agorapulse’s calendar offers other staple features as well, including UTMs and an AI assistant. But one unique feature is its grid layout feature to preview upcoming Instagram posts, making Agorapulse an interesting option if you prioritize Instagram.

Pricing: When billed monthly, standard plan at $69/mo, Professional at $99/mo, Advanced at $149/mo and a Custom plan.

A screenshot of Agorapulse's publishing tools.

(Source: Agorapulse)

3. Buffer

Buffer has been around nearly as long as Hootsuite. While Buffer won’t have as many features as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, it’s well-suited to creators, individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Buffer offers a simplified publishing calendar and core team collaboration features, like post reviews and account management. In their analytics, they also offer your best days, types of content and posting frequency to power smarter publishing.

Like many social media management platforms, Buffer has an AI Assistant feature that helps you brainstorm, repurpose and tailor posts to publish across platforms, and will provide suggestions for posts from long-form content. What makes it unique is that, as of the writing of this article, Buffer offers their AI Assistant to all new users, including those on the Free plan. While Hootsuite’s is currently free of charge to its users, that offer is for a limited time while OwlyWriter AI is in beta.

Pricing: When billed monthly,, they have a Free plan, then paid plans start at $6/month, making Buffer an extremely affordable option.

A screenshot of Buffer's publishing calendar.

(Source: Buffer)

4. Oktopost

Oktopost touts itself as a tool best suited for B2B companies looking for a full social engagement suite.

The platform emphasizes its calendar’s focus on managing campaigns, with every cross-channel post published categorized with a specific campaign. The calendar is visually appealing and has color-coding and drag-and-drop functionality for quick adjustments.

Like other platforms, it also offers an asset library, UTM tagging and team collaboration functionality like revision history. Additionally, Oktopost puts an emphasis on their brand safety features. Their “banned keywords” function assures everyone is adhering to brand voice and company standards.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on customer needs.

5. Eclincher

Reviews praise Eclincher for being easy to use for scheduling, and overall, for having supportive customer service.

The platform has many of the key features we’ve talked about for publishing, including an intuitive drag-and-drop calendar for cross-network publishing, link in bio for Instagram, best times to post feature and agencies/team collaboration features. Additionally, it offers a local SEO tool to show how well your business ranks for any keyword, which can help inform content.

Pricing: Eclincher is an affordable solution, with a Basic plan at $65/month, Premier at $175/month, Agency at $425/month (all while billed monthly) and an Enterprise plan at a custom price.

Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics

The way that brands use social media analytics is expanding beyond the marketing team. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.

Here are some Hootsuite competitors who are worth looking into for their analytics and reports.

6. HubSpot

While other platforms on this list are social-specific, HubSpot is a “customer platform” that connects marketing, sales, content and customer service teams and efforts.

HubSpot enables you to see marketing, sales and service data in one place, breaking down silos with out-of-the-box social reports and analytics. HubSpot’s reports give you a holistic view of how your platforms and campaigns perform.

HubSpot’s ability to integrate with your CRM helps you see your social media efforts in the context of your larger business by: tracking leads, new customers and website traffic—a metric 60% of mid-management social media pros track regularly, according to the Index.

Pricing: Their Marketing Hub pricing is broken down by team size.

A screenshot of HubSpot's analytics tools.

(Source: HubSpot)

7. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the more specialized Hootsuite competitors on this list. It’s meant for analyzing competitor content and discovering content and influencers with an emphasis on journalists.

For competitor analysis, BuzzSumo can ID the most-shared content and how it performs by network and format. Their Facebook Page Analyzer helps you benchmark and compare up to 10 Facebook pages for content engagement. And if YouTube is your focus, BuzzSumo’s video marketing feature helps analyze and optimize your videos, surface popular video content by topic, ID gaps on competitor channels and more.

BuzzSumo also has a robust influencer marketing tool. With a focus on Instagram, X and the web, this tool helps you uncover influencers and creators who post about topics relevant to your brand.

Pricing: When billed monthly vs. annually, BuzzSumo offers a Content Creation plan at $199/mo, PR & Comms plan at $299/mo, Suite at $499/mo and Enterprise at $999/mo.

A screenshot of BuzzSumo's tools.

(Source: BuzzSumo)

8. Rival IQ

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that solely offer analytics, Rival IQ is hyper-focused on analytics and reporting. Its suite of reports and analytics tools includes solutions for competitive analysis, social post analysis, social media audit tools that you can compare directly to competitor performance, hashtag analytics and social listening solutions.

Their tools can surface phrases and topics that drive social engagement in your content, helping you optimize it. The post type analysis feature helps you see engagements by different types of media and posts. And custom dashboards or templates help you present your data the way you want to.

Pricing: They do offer a free analytics plan. For their monthly billed plans, they also offer a Drive plan at $239/mo, Engage at $349/mo and Engage Pro at $559/mo

Screenshots of Rival IQ's analytics tools.

(Source: RivalIQ)

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management tool made for large companies and enterprise. Their Marketing Analytics feature gathers data across 30+ digital channels. And those insights are added to a dynamic, AI-powered dashboard that unifies your cross-channel data and makes it visible to everyone.

Marketing Analytics enables you to look at campaigns, marketing insights and general trends in one source of truth, breaking down silos and streamlining data. These reports can be customized to reflect content performance, for example, to better understand what performs well.

Curious about how Sprout stacks up? Compare Sprout Social vs. Sprinklr here.

Pricing: You can only request a customized quote.

A screenshot of Sprinklr's analytics tools.

(Source: Sprinklr)

Hootsuite alternatives for social listening

As social data becomes more impactful and utilized across whole companies, marketers will also need more sophisticated tools to uncover impactful insights. That’s where social media listening comes in.

Social listening unpacks insights about competitors, products, audience sentiment and more. Here are a few Hootsuite competitors for social listening and some of their features.

10. Brand24

Brand24 is among the specialized Hootsuite alternatives that purely handle social listening—not management or publishing. While it features media monitoring, it’s multi-purpose at what it touts as a lower industry price point.

Brand24 offers many of the core features that marketers look for in a social listening platform. It pulls insights from 25 million digital sources to support social media monitoring (in addition to media monitoring). And it can ID influencers, send alerts for discussion changes, measure customer sentiment and track hashtags. And it supports up to 108 languages, making it widely accessible.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $99, a Team plan at $179, a Pro plan at $249 and an enterprise plan at $499.

A screenshot of Brand24's social listening tools.

(Source: Brand24)

11. Keyhole

Social listening is just one of Keyhole’s products—they also offer solutions for publishing, influencer marketing, analytics and data, and trends. And G2 reviews often highlight its user-friendly design.

Like other social listening solutions we’ll talk about, Keyhole offers many of the core features you would need for industry research, benchmarking, brand monitoring and influencer marketing. And their QuickTrends feature enables you to easily identify opportunities in your industry.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $79/mo, Team at $149/mo, Pro at $249/mo, Advanced at $449/mo and Enterprise at $833/mo (billed annually).

Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service

Social media customer service is an increasingly important piece of the marketing puzzle. It can make or break a brand’s connection with customers, and their loyalty.

According to the Index, 51% of consumers say that the most memorable brands simply respond to them on social. So you must take advantage of every chance to interact.

If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives that are specifically built for customer service, here are a few options to consider, and some of the features they offer.

12. Zendesk

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that only handle customer service, Zendesk is built purely for managing customer relationships, and for helping sales teams.

While not social media specific, Zendesk allows your social and customer service teams to deliver personalized interactions, across multiple touchpoints—from social media channels like Facebook and WhatsApp to Slack, mobile apps and your website.

Zendesk offers robust automation and AI capabilities that enable agents to quickly respond and provide self-service articles that Zendesk suggests for you to share. Zendesk also helps you create new help articles on the fly—write a few bullet points and the platform will help turn it into a customer service hub article. And their Content Cues help you understand what gaps exist in your help center articles.

Pricing: Zendesk comes at a high price point, but has a lot to offer. Their monthly billing plan offers a Suite Team at $69/agent/month, $115/agent/month, $149/agent/month and Suite Enterprise, which is a custom price.

A screenshot of Zendesk's tools.

(Source: Zendesk)

13. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a dedicated customer service tool that emphasizes its solutions for social customer care. They also provide an all-in-one customer service tool vs. offering multiple products that must be purchased separately—a factor that makes LiveAgent an especially budget-friendly option.

LiveAgent also highlights its social media monitoring and customer service platform as part of its software, further bridging the gap between customer service and social team workflows.

Pricing: LiveAgent’s monthly billing plan offers a Small business plan at $15/agent/month, Medium business plan at $35/agent/month, a Large business plan at $59/agent/month and an Enterprise plan at $85/agent/month.

14. Hiver

The factor that makes Hiver one of the unique Hootsuite competitors is that this customer service platform was built for Google Workspaces and as they put it, “transform your Gmail into a multi-channel helpdesk.”

Hiver enables agents to manage support channels, like email, live chat, phone and beyond, directly in their Gmail inbox. Agents can add color-coded tags and automated rules that help categorize business communication emails directly in their inbox to sort by priority.

It promotes itself as easier to use and cheaper than Zendesk. The catch is that Hiver only supports WhatsApp when it comes to social media.

Pricing: Hiver’s billed monthly option offers their Lite plan at $19/user/mo, Pro plan at $49/user/mo and Elite at $69/user/mo. They also offer custom quotes for brands that need over 50 licenses.

Hootsuite alternatives for influencer marketing

According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 300 marketers, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy.

Creator and influencer marketing is only going to become more important. And over half of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms, like Tagger, to help offset their main challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

Here are a few platforms to consider for influencer marketing.

15. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ offers a database of over 17 million creators from all niches. Their platform offers robust search tools to help you unearth the right creators to partner with, including enriched creator profiles that highlight brand affinities, and AI-powered advanced search that helps you search by metrics, keywords, hashtags and more. They also offer creator recommendations that uses a helpful proprietary scoring system that helps automatically and quickly narrow your search.

They also offer an extensive list of 13 solutions that span discovering and managing creators, a creator CRM, competitor benchmarking and team collaboration tools.

Pricing: They prompt you to sign up for a free demo and to request pricing.

16. Heepsy

With a free plan complete with 360 monthly creator search results and core filters that help you surface relevant creators, Heepsy is among the most budget-friendly options.

This platform supports sourcing creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube across all payment plans. Heepsy is more focused on the search element of influencer marketing, including features focused on finding influencers, influencer search, influencer statistics and influencer lists. With features like an authenticity analysis, they make it easy to find quality influencers to partner with.

Pricing: Free Plan, then their “billed monthly” plans are as follows: Starter Plan at $49/mo, Plus Plan at $169/mo, Advanced Plan at $269/mo and Heepsy services or Enterprise plans that prompt you to talk to their sales team.

A screenshot of Heepsy's creator tools.

(Source: Heepsy)

17. Influencity

Influencity offers a robust community of influencers to choose from at 200 million influencer profiles worldwide to search through in their library. And the emphasis they provide on their site highlighting their high G2 rating makes them a stand-out.

This platform offers an extensive lineup of features and products that span influencer discovery to relationship management and campaign reporting. This makes them a competitive end-to-end solution for finding and managing influencer partnerships.

Pricing: Influencity plans range from Basic at $168/mo, Professional at $348/mo, Business at $698/mo and a custom plan, making them a great option for mid-market and large enterprise businesses who want to expand their influencer marketing strategies.

Free Hootsuite Alternatives

Free tools will always be the most budget-friendly option, including the aforementioned Buffer. However, free tools also have more limited features and options—like limited profiles or no analytics options.

But if you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that are free, here are a few tools to check out.

18. Social Champ

Social Champ is a full social media management platform that provides a calendar, publishing capabilities, analytics and an inbox solution.

Social Champ’s free plan enables one user to connect up to three social accounts and have 15 scheduled posts active in their queue at a time. While you have access to sentiment analysis, you can only use their AI Imaginator and AI content wizard tools three times in total.

Social Champ’s free plan offers a robust lineup of content suggestions, GIFs for content and reports. But your reports only gather data as far as two weeks in the past.

All-in-all, this is a solid option if you want to try Social Champ out, or if you have a handful of social accounts.

A screenshot of Social Champ's publishing calendar.

(Source: Social Champ)

19. SocialBu

SocialBu is an all-in-one social media management solution specifically geared towards small businesses. It’s also a newer tool, having launched in 2018.

SocialBu’s Free plan enables you to connect up to two profiles, with your choice of Facebook, X or Mastadon. You can publish up to 40 static posts per month, and can surface hashtag suggestions, design with Canva and discover content within the platform. However, just note: This tool doesn’t offer an inbox in the Free plan.

When it comes to your tech stack, it pays to do your research

Your tech stack is your lifeline. And in the social media marketing world, it has the power to make or break your workflows, strategy and ability to grow the entire business.

That’s why choosing the right solution for your social media needs—from publishing and engagement to influencer marketing and analytics—is critical.

When it comes to new tools, it always pays to try before you buy. Check out Sprout Social’s different plans to evaluate which is right for you. Then try our platform free for 30 days, or reach out to us for a personalized demo.

The post 19 top Hootsuite alternatives for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.



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19 social media tools for your brand in 2024

Marketing on social media may be effective, but it can be extremely time-consuming. From figuring out what to post and posting at the right time to engaging with your audience–everything takes time. If you’re not managing these tasks efficiently, you’re going to end up overworked and overwhelmed. That’s where social media tools come in, helping you save time and streamline your social media management.

In this guide, we show you some of the best tools to help you with social media. From free social media tools to AI solutions, let’s check out the best social media tools for your brand in 2024.

Table of contents:

What are social media tools?

Social media tools are tools used for performing various activities related to social media. This includes scheduling, publishing, analytics, content creation and even automation. The term “social media tools” encompasses different kinds of tools dedicated to all these aspects of social media.

What you should look for in a social media tool

With so many options available in the market, it can be overwhelming to decide on the right tool. To guide your decision-making, here are a few things to look for in a social media tool.

Boosts your ROI

The tool should be able to positively contribute to your social media ROI. For example, a tool that helps you produce high-performing content at scale will boost your ROI. Similarly, something that helps you drive more engagements and visibility makes a good investment.

Improves efficiency

Saving time and improving social media efficiency are two of the biggest reasons why people turn to social media tools. So you should be looking for tools that let you automate or simplify certain tasks.

Gives you performance insight

Knowing how your existing efforts are performing is vital for building a strategy that delivers results. Social media tools should help you with this by providing vital performance insights to inform your strategy. Look for a tool that comes with robust social media reporting and analytics features to understand your performance.

Best all-in-one social media tool

Let’s face it–it would be so much easier if we could manage all our social media activities in one place. No more confusion, no more switching between multiple tools. That’s why you need an all-in-one social media tool that supports everything from publishing to analytics and monitoring.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media platform that helps you do it all.

It’s more than a social media management platform; it’s an all-in-one solution for your social media needs. This includes features for composing and scheduling posts and engaging your audience. It even supports social media listening, campaign management and performance analytics.

Sprout’s visual calendar helps you plan your social media content and strategically diversify your posts. You can set up posts to go live automatically and even maximize audience engagement with Optimal Send Times. This tells you the best time to publish your posts based on 16 weeks of audience data.

Speaking of engagement, Sprout’s Social Inbox helps you manage all your social comments and messages in one place. From here, get crisis notifications and automatically detect which messages to prioritize. Sprout even helps you enhance your responses using AI Assist,

These comprehensive features make Sprout perfect for businesses and agencies like. With approval workflows for teams and message tagging, Sprout aims to take the difficulties out of your social media workflow. As an added benefit, you get presentation-ready reports without additional work.

Sprout Social publishing calendar monthly view showing content cards for different days of the month

Free social media tools

Sometimes, the additional investment in tools can eat away at your marketing budget. Startups and solopreneurs don’t always have the extra money to spend on expensive platforms to support their social media goals. Fortunately, there are several free social media tools that are just as capable (albeit with a few limitations).

2. CapCut

If you’re looking for a social media tool to create awesome video content, CapCut is the answer. This all-in-one video editor is free to use and comes with effects, filters, music and stickers to turn a generic video into something unique. You can choose from hundreds of templates and customize them to quickly create engaging video ads.

Ideal for creating Reels and TikTok videos, CapCut provides advanced tools to support smart video creation. It lets you convert text to speech and vice versa, remove backgrounds and enhance video quality in just a few clicks.

Capcut editing window previewing a YouTube video of a person in a snowsuit looking at the Northern Lights in a snowy terrain

3. Canva

A personal favorite, Canva is a free social media tool to create original graphics. It lets you create social media visuals in just a few clicks with hundreds of pre-designed templates. These are templates optimized according to each platform’s recommended social media image sizes. So you don’t have to worry about cropping and resizing the graphics after creating them.

What’s great about this tool is that it offers template collections according to the latest social media trends. For example, you can find templates for “camera roll dump” or “#WithMe” social media posts. This helps you create content that’s relevant and on-trend to better engage your audience.

Canva templates page showing options for Facebook Covers, Facebook Ads, Your Stories, TikTok Videos, Pinterest Pins and Featured Collections below

4. Wistia

Another one for video marketers, Wistia is a free platform for creating and editing videos. It lets you record your screen and webcam, making it ideal for creating educational and how-to social videos. You can even add background music and customize the player controls to make videos that are on-brand.

Wistia recording window showing a sample Chrome screen with "Flower Care 101" and a person with a mustache smiling in a smaller camera window below

Social media tools for scheduling and publishing

Successful social media marketing relies heavily on posting strategically. It’s not just about posting great content; it’s about posting great content at the right time. So you need social media scheduling tools to help you with automated publishing.

5. CoSchedule

CoSchedule offers a social media calendar to help you visualize your social media publishing strategy. You can create predefined social sharing plans and reuse them as templates to simplify your publishing efforts. The ReQueue feature lets you continuously publish your best content to keep your calendar filled.

It supports automated publishing across multiple social networks. Not only that, but the Best Time Scheduler optimizes your send times to reach your audience when they’re most active.

coschedule calendar with an expanded view of a "Social Campaign" and a few content cards below

6. Post Planner

Post Planner simplifies cross-channel publishing by letting you create multiple posts in one go. You can tailor these posts for each network to ensure that they’re optimized according to the platform’s unique best practices. It even lets you save texts such as hashtags and CTAs so it’s easier to reuse them over and over again.

Post Planner supports one-click scheduling and lets you reuse your top-performing posts. It allows you to randomize the order of posts to keep things varied and interesting.

postplanner calendar with a few posts selected and set to recycle 8 times and a smaller window below showing post ideas

7. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar simplifies social media publishing with a limitless content library. The tool saves all your posts so you can repurpose them whenever you run out of ideas. You can automate your publishing strategy with unlimited scheduled posts. So your content goes out at the desired time without you having to post it manually.

MeetEdgar dashboard showing two separate images of smiling women and an expanded calendar below to schedule a post

Social media tools for analytics

Social media analytics tools offer you a variety of data. They show how well your posts, as well as campaigns, are performing, what your competitors are doing and track keywords.

8. Rival IQ

Rival IQ offers the ability to immediately benchmark your own post and profile performance against others. It’s great for tracking what your competitors are doing and what strategies are working for them. This tool highlights where your competitors are focusing their efforts. It even compares profile attributions such as a bio or about statement.

Rival IQ dashboard with a sample analysis of Kiehl's social posts and an overview of posts per day, engagements, top posts, and posts with a hashtag

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the perfect tool for tying your social media efforts to your website performance data. You can use it to track how many visitors you’re attracting from social and from specific campaigns. This helps you figure out how your social media efforts are contributing to your larger business goals. Check out our guide on Google Analytics for social media to get started.

Google Analytics user acquisition report showing acquisitions from different channels

10. Audiense

Audiense is a consumer intelligence platform that gives you a better understanding of your audience. It goes beyond demographic data and uncovers insights about their interests and personality. It even helps you identify the influencers and brands that they follow. This allows you to craft more impactful social campaigns and messages that resonate with your audience.

Audiense showing a sample report of apps your audience is interested in with a list of offline and online channels

Social media tools for content creation

Whether you’re creating videos or original graphics, social media tools can make your content look more attractive. Use the following tools to create high-performing posts no matter the type of content.

11. Animoto

Animoto helps you easily create videos from your phone or desktop. Using your own media or their stock library, adding elements like music and text has never been easier. The company also provides templates, plenty of tutorials and the option to customize for your brand on the paid plans.

sample presentation on animoto titled "how to submit your expense report" and a thumb cursor selecting the option to change text color

12.  Venngage

Venngage turns anyone into an infographic designing pro. It offers plenty of infographic templates that you can customize with a robust editing tool. So you’ll find yourself creating presentations and social media-ready graphics in no time. This is a great tool for those who find themselves in need of business graphics.

venngage editing window showing multiple editing tools and a headline saying "Pricing Model"

13.  Unsplash

Unsplash offers professional photos for free, thanks to a community of photographers who donate their work. With over two million hi-res images and a robust search engine, even the smallest of brands will find something to use here. The Unsplash image license grants both commercial and non-commercial use. And there’s no need for attribution (although it’s appreciated).

Unsplash search window with several sample stock images shown below

Social media tools for content ideas

Finding the best content to share for your brand is a balancing act. The following tools do the heavy lifting on content curation by surfacing trending topics and articles. Trendspotting for social media content curation is an important portion of a marketing strategy.

14. BuzzSumo

Designed with content marketing in mind, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool for discovering content ideas. Its robust research tools provide you with the necessary info for deciding on which content and keywords to focus on. Not only does BuzzSumo share information on how hot a link is, but it also provides details on who shared it and where.

BuzzSumo media database showing different results for journalists and performance metrics

15.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a search engine that focuses on current and recent trending events. Using data from Google’s search engine, it documents keywords that are trending in any particular location. When you enter a keyword, you’ll find historical data and be able to plot them against other keywords.

Google Trends report showing a list of topics in the Trending Now tab including Steelers, Hanukkah 2023, Game Awards 2023 and Bucks

16. Feedly

Feedly helps you read the Internet. Subscribe to any website that has an RSS feed and organize the feeds into different topics. With Leo, the AI research assistant, you can train it to focus on the topics and keywords you want. Paid plans offer the ability to follow newsletters and annotate articles for your fellow team members.

Even better? It’s a Sprout Social integration, which means you can curate and read the article in Sprout and share it as a post, all without leaving the Sprout app.

Sample report on Feedly showing topics trending today in Insurtech

AI social media tools

AI marketing tools add speed and accuracy to your social media efforts. From content creation to brainstorming, these AI tools let you automate different aspects of your social media.

17. FeedHive

FeedHive has an AI Writing Assistant that helps you fine-tune your social media posts for optimal performance. With over 3,000 idea templates, you can easily come up with content ideas in a matter of minutes. The platform’s AI makes predictions on how your post will perform and gives you suggestions on how to improve your posts. Additionally, FeedHive suggests the best times to post based on how active and engaged your followers are at certain times.

expanded view of Feedhive's performance prediction with a bar chart report

18. Flick

Flick uses AI to improve your social media content and scheduling strategy. The AI Assistant generates hundreds of content ideas for you to choose from so you never run out of what to post. A key highlight of this tool is the caption writing feature, which lets you auto-generate unique captions in your brand voice and tone.

Flick AI content lab preview with a window to add a prompt and window to search for content ideas

19. Ocoya

Ocoya speeds up social media content creation with AI-powered writing. The AI Assistant lets you generate social media text posts in 26 languages. You can then use the platform’s pre-designed templates to create eye-catching visuals to accompany your text.

ocoya window inviting you to "create your first post" and a cursor highlighting the button to "Create with AI"

Test out a new social media tool

Being a social media manager involves more than publishing posts. A social media manager is a graphic designer, content creator, salesperson and customer care advocate rolled into one. To keep on top of all these responsibilities and tasks, social media tools are important and necessary.

Finding the right tools that fit within your workflow and proving your investments via ROI is a delicate dance. Make the decision process a little easier by signing up for a Sprout Social trial.

The post 19 social media tools for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.



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