Knowing the best tools for social media management is crucial to remain on top of client work, complete tasks on time, plan material, and connect effectively with your clients. All social media managers rely heavily on tools. There is a multitude of programs and applications available, both paid and free.
If you are an entry-level employee, it’s expected that you spend valuable time experimenting with a range of social media management tools. This can be time-consuming, and the software can or may not ultimately work in your favor.
To save you time and stress, here is a compilation of the 15 best tools for social media managers you can use to work effectively. These tools are easy to use, even for freelancers with no experience.
Best tools for social media managers
1. Asana
Asana logo from Asana
This is one of the best project management tools for social media administrators. Although it can be used as a client-facing tool, it is also ideal for keeping track of your own personal tasks within your business. It allows you to create tasks, set due dates for project submission, create calendars, set recurring tasks to reschedule themselves, and also assign different tasks to different projects you’re working on.
Asana is one of the best tools for social media managers, especially if you don’t work alone and have other professionals on your team; you can easily assign tasks to different contracts you may be working with.
2. Later
This is one of the best tools for social media managers that happen to be very popular. Although it can be quite costly and could amount to about $25 for only one social set, many managers would recommend this tool for planning Instagram activities, particularly when it comes to the visual outlook of your client’s Instagram feed.
Later also provides analytic insights, which helps you know how well your posts are performing and to help you plan for future posts. However, the free version doesn’t offer much analytics information, so you may want to consider trying out the paid version for a month.
Conclusively, Later can only schedule up to four different platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
3. ClickUp
ClickUp is one of the best tools for social media managers that’s highly recommendable for sharing content calendars with clients, and it’s fairly simple to learn how to use as a beginner.
Although there is a free version, you’d prefer to use the paid version, which costs around $19 per month. The paid version allows you to invite up to 10 guests (clients) to leave comments and feedback on the content you’re creating for them. The more clients you have, the cheaper ClickUp is for you!
ClickUp allows you to arrange any information provided by clients on their onboarding questionnaire in one place, which makes it easily accessible. You can also create a special task in the calendar view for every single post so that clients can see it easily laid out and visualize what the month is going to look like.
Whenever you have content ready for review, clients can log into ClickUp and leave all of their reviews, approvals, and revisions in one place.
4. Facebook creator studio
Image from Social Singam
One of the best free social media management software available is Facebook Creator Studio. To be honest, not many people are aware of it. Anyone who has a Facebook Business Page linked to an Instagram Business account can use it to schedule posts and track analytics at any time.
It’s great for planning all your client’s Facebook and Instagram updates. Plus, it’s totally free to use, so it’s one less monthly cost for me. You can also use the scheduler to make carousel posts, which are very trendy and common on Instagram right now.
Additionally, you can tag places, people and write alt text on your Instagram posts using Facebook Creator Studio. Both of these features usually come as paid plans in other schedulers.
5. Post Planner
Post Planner is one of the best tools for social media managers with three fundamental jobs: find high-quality content, plan the perfect publishing calendar, and post consistently. It curates and rates content suggestions and allows you to create a content-type-based schedule.
With the Find tool feature, Post Planner makes it super easy to find content that is proven to engage people. You can also choose the content type for each time slot instead of just picking your time slots in your schedule to shape your sharing plan, and Post Planner will fill the slots with your chosen content.
6. Adobe Photoshop
Consider investing in Adobe Photoshop if you want more flexibility when making graphics that aren’t present in Canva. You can use Photoshop to edit photos, warp text, and even create animated GIFs to share on your clients’ accounts every month.
Photoshop requires you to make something from scratch, which can be a disadvantage if you aren’t skilled at creating post ideas. However, some clients prefer more exclusive and personalized posts, so I continue to use Photoshop on a monthly basis.
7. Tailwind
One of the most recommended tools for Pinterest’s social network management is Tailwind. It does have an Instagram scheduling option, although it’s best for Pinterest. The monthly fee is about $15, but you can save money if you pay for a year in advance. You can quickly stay on top of your Pinterest scheduling with Tailwind, post in Tailwind Communities, and then build your pins in it.
One of the best Tailwind’s features is it tells you whether or not you’re posting in compliance with Pinterest’s current guidelines, which is incredibly useful because Pinterest’s rules are constantly changing.
Last but not least, you can view all of your Pinterest analytics in one convenient location. Though Fanbooster also shows Pinterest analytics, Tailwind is much more user-friendly and offers a lot more information.
8. Canva
Photo from Local Marketing Institute
Another free social media management tool worth considering is Canva, especially if you’re into vlogging. Although there is a paid version with more stock photos, elements, and template options, the free version is ideal for those who use tools like Unsplash and create their own templates on the platform.
Canva can save you a lot of time and effort if you aren’t very creative when it comes to designing graphics for your clients. It’s quite easy to move elements around in Canva, and it’s also chock-full of social media templates that are precisely sized for each platform, saving you hours of work.
9. Unsplash
As a social media manager, you’ve probably worked with clients who don’t have many branded images to use in their posts. Instead of designing all of the posts as graphics, you can use a free stock photo website. One of the best websites with a more diverse image database is Unsplash.
The photos are top-notch, especially if you have a client who’s in the travel industry. You can also download the images and edit them to fit your feed or use them in various crafted graphics as needed. Pexels, Pixabay, and RawPixel are examples of similar websites to Unsplash.
10. Fanbooster
Fanbooster is excellent for scheduling recurring reports, so if you have a client on a three-month contract, you can avoid the hassle of doing it manually. It will compile all of your social media analytics for you and provide you with valuable insights and data in the form of a written report.
Plus, it automatically converts the report into PDF, making it easier to create a quick loom video of the data that you can attach to the PDF before sending it to your client each month.
Although Fanbooster can be a bit pricey if you only have one or two clients, it becomes very cost-effective once you have at least five. For example, I pay about $50 per month for the smallest package subscription, but because I have so many clients, the cost per client isn’t that high, and I factor the software cost into my management packages.
11. Preview (App)
Preview is a free app that allows you to visually plan out your client’s feed on your phone. If you don’t want to pay for a service like Later, this is a great alternative that you can use. You can drag and drop your different posts in Preview until the feed looks precisely the way you want it to. If your client’s aesthetic relies heavily on visuals, this tool will be extremely useful.
When you’re writing a post that may span multiple pages, you can use Preview to double-check that everything is aligned properly.
12. Adobe Premiere Pro
Although there are free alternatives such as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Premiere Pro is on our list of best tools for social media managers because it has so many special features. Plus, you can add tons of fun transitions and text to your video and export to a variety of formats.
While Adobe Premiere Pro can be expensive on its own, if you know you’ll be using a lot of Adobe’s software for your clients each month, consider purchasing the $50 monthly subscription. You’ll be able to use all of Adobe’s programs and applications this way.
13. Salesforce Social Studio
Salesforce probably has the most comprehensive set of enterprise products. Its Marketing Cloud platform’s Social Studio can help you strengthen customer relationships by coordinating your marketing, customer service, and sales efforts on social media.
14. Sendible
This is a social media management platform tailored for companies with many clients. Sendible helps you customize your dashboard according to your branding to draw new customers, together with most functionality that other social media management software offers.
Sendible’s integrations are impressive, including the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also includes some automation for those looking to save time on time-consuming tasks.
15. SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media management tool that helps to increase your lead generation with less effort. Its core features allow users to add, organize, and distribute content across multiple social media sites from a single location, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google My Company. It’s also compatible with Buffer.
The ability to recycle evergreen content while keeping it fresh through post variations is one of SocialBee’s most popular features. You can use SocialBee to post on a regular basis while maintaining a well-balanced content mix across all categories. More than that, the quality of support and is another valued asset of SocialBee.
