32 Best Social Media Automation Tools & Practices You Need to Try Out
Table of Contents
Social media are undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools for raising brand awareness and growing your business.
Not having a social media presence and using popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok in today’s digital age is out of the question. Already over 91 percent of companies have a social media strategy in place and use multiple social media channels to achieve their marketing goals.
But while it carries lots of benefits, managing social media can be a time-consuming process without the right tools and technology.
And, this is where social media automation comes in.
What is Social Media Automation?
Social media automation refers to the adoption of tools that help minimize the manual effort required in managing social media-related tasks. Since it takes a lot of time to maintain and grow a professional social media profile, social media automation tools can improve the process, making it easier and more efficient.
Social media automation can help you:
Social media automation tools are a great help especially when you are running a marketing campaign and need to keep posting content for your target audience.
Key Features of Social Media Automation
Any powerful social media automation tool needs to offer the following features:
Before you are ready to choose which tool is best for your business, make sure it comes with these key capabilities. Doing so should help you minimize the expenses of using multiple tools.
Best Practices
If you decide to use social media automation as part of your marketing strategy, you need to know which practices work best.
Try the following to boost the performance of your social media campaigns:
Publish content during peak audience times
When scheduling content on social media, check which are the best times and times to post. For each social media platform, this is different because of audience demographics and characteristics, so it is worth looking into when users are most active online. Don’t forget to use the correct time zones.
Keep scheduling content
If you are planning to schedule social media content regularly, you will need to keep those posts coming. Set up a queue for all your posts and schedule them ahead of time – days, weeks, or even months. This should help you stay up to date with your content calendar and schedule posts outside of business hours or when you are on holiday.
Create automatic responses
Make sure you never miss out on an opportunity to engage with your customers, using automatic responses. With social media automation, you can send out automated replies and messages or use chatbots to answer customer inquiries.
Check your social data regularly
Using automation tools allows you to gain insight into important information like user engagement and conversions, which you can use to improve your results. Find out how these are making sense against key social media metrics and goals you have set for your business.
Best Social Media Automation Tools
Before we start, you should know that there are a plethora of media automation tools out there.
To choose the best one for the needs of your business, research your options and narrow them down in terms of preference by looking into their functionality – features, but also, pricing, and customer support provided.
Let’s look at the best social media automation tools that can help boost the performance of your social media marketing strategy.
1BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the most popular social media marketing tools on the market. Use it as part of your wider content marketing strategy to explore industry-relevant keywords, generate topic ideas, and create content that performs well. With it, you can also identify key influencers and carry out competitor analysis to gain insight into their most effective strategies.
2AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a powerful social media management solution that allows you to organize all your social media-related activities. The tool comes with publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration capabilities and a social inbox that catches every conversation. It works with a range of different platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.
3CoSchedule
CoSchedule allows you to organize all your marketing in one place. The tool comes with a marketing suite and a content calendar that lets you schedule and track your entire social media campaign. It gives you insights into social engagement coming from your campaigns and also integrates with WordPress pushing content to your preferred social media accounts.
4SproutSocial
If you want a powerful toolkit to manage your social media, SproutSocial is your best choice. This tool offers an all-in-one social media management solution that offers social listening, publishing, engagement, analytics, and advocacy features. SproutSocial also allows you to organize and assign tasks to team members and run ads on selected social platforms.
5Buffer
Amongst the top social media scheduling platforms, you will find Buffer. Buffer comes with a friendly user interface that makes post scheduling easy by adding your social media posts in a queue and default time slots for each day. It also comes with a browser extension that is available on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The extension allows you to add your posts to your queue directly by clicking on the Buffer icon.
6SocialPilot
With SocialPilot you can manage all your social media accounts in one place. Not only that, but you can add up to 200 accounts and schedule posts in bulk. This tool comes with a social inbox and allows you to add your entire team, inviting them to collaborate on a project. It also offers powerful analytics, with the ability to download and share PFD reports, as well as schedule content to your account with RSS feeds and content curation.
7SocialBee
SocialBee promises to get you more leads with less effort. Amongst its greatest features is its ability to organize your content in categories, repost evergreen content, add and import content from various sources, or via the Zapier integration. With SocialBee, you can also set up a posting schedule, add custom URLs and analyze performance. The tool is great for authors, coaches, solopreneurs, startups, and small businesses but also freelancers and agencies.
8PostoPlan
Postoplan presents a great alternative choice as it is packed with many features that aim to make your work easier. It offers a simple and easy-to-use social media management platform where you can add an unlimited number of accounts, users, and projects. Also, it has a social inbox, a photo editor and library, integration with Slack and WordPress, post preview, a calendar with over 700 post ideas, and bulk scheduling.
9Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another powerful social media automation tool that you can use to manage your accounts on a single dashboard. It supports over 20 social networks and integrates with even more apps including ReviewTrackers, Trello, and Slack. The tool allows you to plan upcoming campaigns and stay on top of incoming messages with real-time notifications on social activity.
10Statusbrew
Kyriaki is a Content Creator for the LearnWorlds team writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.