When managing a social media presence for your brand or your client, there’s an entire library of tools you’re going to need, from content creation tools and social media monitoring tools to social media scheduling tools and more.

But with so many options, how do you determine the best tools for your needs and your brand?

To help you find the perfect social media scheduling tool for your brand, we’ve put together a list of the 11 best tools we recommend using for scheduling out and automatically posting your social media content.

Jump Links:

Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?

The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
1. Sprout Social
2. Buffer
3. Agorapulse
4. HeyOrca
5. MeetEdgar
6. Oktopost
7. Later
8. CoSchedule
9. Planable
10. Sked Social
11. Hootsuite
BONUS: Keyhole

Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?

Do you want your entire job to consist of sitting at your computer or on your smartphone, creating and posting new content to social media?

Let me answer that for you – no, you don’t! There are so many other tasks that a social media manager needs to attend to, and content creation can’t be the only one.

That’s why you need a social media scheduling tool to help you create and schedule content in batches, so that you can also focus on monitoring, analytics, customer service and more.

Not only that, but social media schedulers are helpful tools for planning out your social media content and ensuring your content calendar is filled with content that helps your bottom line. Create patterns and themes and keep everything in check, all with your scheduling tool.

Improve efficiency in your day-to-day tasks by taking advantage of a social media scheduler and improving your social media management processes.

The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools

Now that you know how important social media scheduling tools are for your social media content curation, it’s time to dive into the real reason you’re here – learning more about our top 11 best social media schedulers for social teams and managers.

Each of these tools offers a different set of features at different price points so that you can pinpoint the right option for you.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a well known social media management tool, and that includes their social media scheduler.

While their price point is a bit more enterprise, their plethora of features does help even it out.

Sprout Social offers a social media scheduling calendar that also includes a tool that helps users to find optimal posting times for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Users also gain access to social listening and monitoring tools, social media team collaboration, community management and more.

Sprout offers a free trial for new users so they can take the software for a test run and see if its processes and interface are the right choice for their brand.

Pricing: Sprout Social’s plans start at $99 per user per month.

2. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that has been around for years, starting as a small publishing tool with daily curated content suggestions, but adding on more and more facets to their brand until they became a full-scale social media software.

Users are able to use Buffer for scheduling and analyzing content, planning out Instagram stories, creating a shoppable feed, adding tags to your posts and more.

Buffer offers two different options at different monthly plans – Buffer Publish and Buffer Analyze – or the ability to sign up for both for $85/month.

Based on your needs, you can take a look at their pricing options and even get a 14-day free trial to check out their pro options.

For smaller brands or public figures, Buffer also offers a completely free plan with 3 social accounts and 10 scheduled posts per account.

Pricing: Buffer’s plans start at $15 per month.

3. Agorapulse

Another useful social media scheduler is Agorapulse, offering features that allow users to schedule content, pull social media reports, interact with followers and more.

Agorapulse is also really helpful for teams, allowing users to create content, send it through the pipeline and give team leads the chance to approve or reject content before it’s published on a brand page.

Starting at $79/mo after a free trial, Agorapulse also gives your brand the power to monitor various hashtags and conversations directly through your social management platform.

Browse their plan options to see if you can find one that fits your budget and your social media scheduling needs.

Pricing: Agorapulse’s plans start at $79 per month.

4. HeyOrca

HeyOrca is a great tool for managing, planning and scheduling your social media content all in one place. You get access to an easy-to-use social media calendar that also shows you mockup previews of your social content before it goes live.

This tool is more heavily focused on your social media content calendar, showcasing where you’ve scheduled content, what types of content and for what days.

In fact, their pricing model also follows this same focus, requiring that users pay per social media calendar with unlimited accounts, users, and post previews.

This is a great way to get a feel for your posting patterns and ensure you’re sharing the best content at the most ideal times.

Pricing: HeyOrca’s plans start at $99 per month.

5. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar brands itself as a social media automation and scheduling tool that helps businesses spend less time doing mundane social media tasks by automating them.

This includes tasks like writing captions based on quotes in your articles, regularly reposting old scheduled posts, and automatically importing newly published content that needs to be shared on social media.

While users will help MeetEdgar get set up on all of these tasks, it can certainly help a one man show do more for a brand by automating several content creation jobs.

Because MeetEdgar’s features are ideal for freelancers and solopreneurs, their pricing matches their target customer with plans starting at only $19/month.

If you want to have more of a hand on your social media content, this may not be the best tool for you, but if you’re looking for something that can really make social media content creation easy and automatic, MeetEdgar can be a great option.

Pricing: MeetEdgar’s plans start at $19 per month for Edgar Lite and go up to $49 per month for the full service.

6. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media scheduling tool that focuses more on the B2B industry, helping big businesses to manage their online presence in a way that really engages their audience.

Not only does Oktopost integrate with tons of great B2B CRMs and other tools, it offers features like social media publishing, listening, analytics and even social governance for managing global teams.

Oktopost’s social media publishing calendar gives you a great overview of all of the social content you have scheduled over the month so you can easily rearrange, edit, remove, or manually publish your content.

Their website offers tons of information about their various features, but in order to learn more about their plans and pricing, you’ll have to book a demo.

However, with a tool aimed specifically at B2B customers, it can be worth it for those businesses to find a social media management platform that’s so industry specific.

Pricing: Oktopost requires potential users to book a demo to learn more about pricing options.

7. Later

Later focuses more on Instagram publishing than any other platform, although their tool does allow users to connect Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts as well.

Their Instagram features include previewing your grid, placing a link in your bio to lead to your website, blog posts, and product pages, finding and sharing user-generated content, and working with Instagram influencers.

Being a very visual platform, Later’s Pinterest scheduling and planning is a great add-on to this tool.

If your brand focuses heavily on imagery, Later might be the perfect social media scheduler for you, with incredibly affordable plan prices.

Choose a free forever plan for basic account management or check out one of their higher tier plans for more features and users.

Pricing: Later offers a free forever plan, but premium plans start at $12.50 per month, paid annually.

8. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is more than just a social media scheduling tool – it’s also a great tool for scheduling out your blog’s editorial calendar, integrating with WordPress and automatically publishing both social media and blog content.

This is great for brands and social media teams who are looking to reduce the number of tools they’re using and manage both social and content marketing all from one place.

Plans start at $14/month per user for the blog calendar and increase from there, based on the features you need for your brand.

Create blog content and social media content at the same time, making your job as social media manager much more seamless.

Pricing: CoSchedule’s plans start at $14 per user per month.

9. Planable

Planable is another great social media scheduling tool that lets you get a sneak peek at exactly what your social post will look like once it’s been publishing on the platform of your choice.

Not only that, but your team can easily make comments on the posts asking for various edits to copy, visuals, and more before approving them to be scheduled and automatically posted.

Plan your content from beginning to end with Planable’s social media management tool and create tags based on the content category or campaign of the content you’re sharing.

Planable gives you a chance to try the platform free for your first 50 posts, then brands are able to choose from a selection of affordable subscriptions when signing up for the service.

Easily collaborate with your social media team on content creation by taking advantage of Planable’s social media scheduling platform.

Pricing: Planable offers a free plan for users, but premium plans start at $33 per month.

10. Sked Social

Our tenth best social media scheduler is Sked Social, another tool that focuses heavily on helping brands with their Instagram content. 

Like Later, though, their platform still does work across a variety of platforms, so users can schedule to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all from the same tool.

Sked Social’s Instagram management features include scheduling and auto-posting Instagram stories, analytics, adding a link in user bios, and a visual Instagram planner. This makes it easy for social media managers to get a glimpse at what their Instagram feed will look like pre-publication.

Interested users are able to take advantage of a 7-day free trial to see what the software is all about, with the lowest plan starting at $25/month.

With a focus on media brands, eCommerce shops, retail brands, and freelancers, Sked Social could be a great option if your business fits in one of those industries.

Pricing: Sked Social offers a 7-day free trial, then plans start at $25 per month.

11. Hootsuite

Hootsuite, the last social media scheduler on our list, has also been in the social media marketing landscape for years, evolving and adapting to fit the needs of social media teams across the board.

Users can view monthly calendars to help schedule out content and ensure they’re sharing posts on the most optimal days and times. Hootsuite also gives managers access to direct messages from social media in their dashboard to manage customer communication all in one place.

With more collaborative tools, social media teams can take advantage of the opportunity to work together on social content, even when working from home, all around the world. Team leads can assign various tasks to team members and approve content before it’s live.

Hootsuite users can also create streams in their dashboards to get a quick view at recent notifications, user feeds, and more for easy community management.

Plans start at $39/month for a professional plan with 10 social accounts for a single user, after a 30-day trial that lets potential customers get an idea of what to expect from the platform and if it’s the right tool for them.

Plan prices increase quickly based on your business needs, but the collaboration and features that come with it could be well worth it depending on how your team runs social media.

Pricing: Hootsuite’s plans start at $39 per month after a 30-day free trial.

BONUS: Keyhole

While Keyhole isn’t necessarily a social media scheduling tool, it fits perfectly as a complementary analytics tool that can help you measure your social media success.

Once you’ve scheduled out your content using your social media scheduler, you can easily track performance, pull detailed reports, monitor accounts and more with Keyhole.

Keyhole is also the perfect tool for tracking how your hashtag choices perform so you can determine if you’re using the best options for your content or if you could increase your reach with different hashtags.

You can also pull real-time data from your social media platforms to easily track conversations and user behavior.

Plans start at $49/month depending on the features you need for your business and the amount of posts you need to measure and report on each month.

Start with a free trial to test run Keyhole’s software before diving in with a full account for your brand and your social media team.

Pricing: Keyhole’s plans start at $49/mo after a free trial. View more pricing options here.

Start Scheduling and Measuring Your Social Content

It’s not enough to just create and send social media content out into the world. You want to make sure the content you’re creating is helping your business’s bottom line.

By using analyzing and reporting tools, you can be sure you’re creating the best content for your brand and for your audience, all while generating the best ROI possible.

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The Free Social Media Reporting Template for Marketers

Unless you have a data-driven social media reporting strategy, posting on social can feel like a black hole.

But whether you’re running social for your employer, as a marketing agency, or as a freelancer, you will be asked to report on the results of your campaigns.

Figuring out what’s working and what’s not is challenging enough on its own. Having to communicate and prove that value to other people is an even bigger challenge.

We’ve made your life easier by creating a free social media reporting template.

This free-to-download resource makes it simple to:

• Summarize your social strategy
  
  
• Highlight your wins
  
  
• Communicate key metrics
  
  
• Focus on next steps

But before you start building out your report, we’ll share some tips on how to make social media reports that really get your point across.

Jump Links:

Before You Start: 8 Social Media Reporting Tips

What’s in Our Social Media Reporting Template?

Get Started On Your Social Media Report

Before You Start: 8 Social Media Reporting Tips

What data you choose to put in your report is obviously important (and we’ll get to that), but how you present your social media data is going to make or break your social media reporting strategy.

Here’s the thing: people are emotional creatures.

We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear—especially when it comes to data. So the more you can effectively and accurately frame the data you’re presenting, the more everyone will get out of your report (yourself included).

Ultimately, the goal of a social media report is to assess your successes and failures, communicate the results effectively to key stakeholders, and then make smart, data-driven choices for what comes next.

Here are eight tips for creating a showstopper report.

1. Define Clear Goals & KPIs

Goals matter because they hold you accountable, guide your decision making, and keep your social strategy focused on outcomes.

Start by clearly defining your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media campaigns. These goals should be quantifiable and easily measurable, and they should align with your overall marketing and company objectives.

For example, if your high-level marketing goal is to grow brand awareness, your social goal may be to increase impressions by 20% over last quarter. Or if your goal is to build an audience, you may set a goal of earning 1,000 new followers this month.

The key here is to determine which social media metrics will help you measure your success. For example, common social KPIs include:

• Brand awareness: Impressions, views, and clicks
  
  
• Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and engagement rate
  
  
• Building an audience: Fan or follower count
  
  
• Website traffic: Clicks and page views
  
  
• Leads and sales: Form submissions, revenue generated

When creating your report, stay relentlessly focused on these goals and KPIs. If a piece of data doesn’t explain how you got closer (or further) from your company or campaign goals, consider removing it.

Not only will this impress your key stakeholders that you’re aligned with the business’s goals, it will also help you stay focused on the desired outcome, allowing you to make smarter decisions.

2. Determine Your Audience

Speaking of stakeholders, you also have to figure out who this report is for.

Is this a report you’re putting together for your data-savvy marketing team? Will it be presented to a manager who may be less familiar with social media analytics? Or are you just creating this report for yourself?

Determining your reporting audience will help you determine what elements to focus on and the level of detail to include.

For example, if you’re presenting to a marketing team, you may want to focus more on tactics and new things you learned.

But if you’re presenting to a business higher-up, you may want to skip the fine details and stay focused on how you’ve supported the company’s business goals.

3. Determine Your Reporting Frequency

What time frame are you going to use for your reports? 

You can choose to report on your social media metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly, or a combination of any of the above.

Your reporting frequency will affect how much time you spend on the report and the level of detail you include.

Short-term, weekly reports tend to focus more on quickly getting across the key metrics and top-performing content. But because they’re over a smaller time frame, it’s harder to make meaningful takeaways.

Long-term, quarterly reports offer a larger sample size for true data analysis and meaningful takeaways, but take longer to put together and typically require a full presentation.

Overall, it’s good to have a balance of short-term and long-term reporting. For example, a quick weekly report for the marketing team and a quarterly report for leadership.

4. Add Context to Your Data

You should provide as much context as possible when presenting your social media data. Most data points are fairly meaningless on their own unless there’s an explanation or comparison.

For example, instead of presenting raw impression numbers of your Facebook posts, it’s much more meaningful to compare those numbers to your previous week, previous year, your competitors, or your benchmark data.

Or if there’s a sudden spike in followers on a certain day, add an explanation of why that happened. This will be especially helpful in your quarterly reports where your audience may have not looked at any social metrics for three months.

5. Say What You Did and What You’ll Do Next

Too many social media reports leave out what you actually did. Focusing only on the results takes away from what earned you those results.

In your report, summarize your strategy, what content you posted, and what may have changed since your last report. 

Use plenty of examples where you can, and include what you plan on doing next based on what you’ve learned from this report.

6. Keep it Visual

Your audience’s eyes may start to glaze over if you just present slide after slide of data tables. 

Try to make your report as visually appealing as possible. Here are some easy ways to make your report stand out:

• Use screenshots of graphs, top-performing content, and stand-out comments
  
  
• Stay on-brand with your company’s colours and fonts
  
  
• Don’t visually overload a page or slide with tons of text or stats
  
  
• Use lots of whitespace

It’s recommended that you create your report in slideshow or PDF format rather than in a spreadsheet—our template makes that easy!

For an easy way to instantly create beautiful charts and graphs of your data, try a free trial of Keyhole.

7. Stay Objective and Analytical

If you’re new to presenting data, it’s tempting to manipulate the data to prove a point, or to try to see things in the data that aren’t there. But it’s crucial to be as objective as possible when analyzing your social media metrics. 

For example, if your impression count was 1% higher than normal, you don’t have to “sell” it as a rising trend.

Avoid drawing conclusions or making dramatic changes in your strategy due to small sample sizes. Week-over-week data fluctuations are totally normal.

Remember: your goal is to learn from the data, not to make the data work for you.

8. Present Before You Email (If Possible!)

Lastly, your social media report is going to have a far greater effect if you present the data before you email it.

When you present the data—either in person or over a video call—you control the messaging and the pacing. You can also more easily field questions and key into what generates interest from the stakeholders.

When you email the data, it greatly increases the odds of the person on the other end just skimming through the data or just skip out on reading it altogether.

If you view data reporting as a nuisance, that may sound like a blessing, but we highly recommend using your social media reporting to prove your value to your client or your boss.

Therefore, it’s best to present the data and then send an email copy after the fact.

Now that we know how to create a compelling social media report, it’s time to build one!

Download our social media reporting template now.

What’s in Our Social Media Reporting Template?

Before we break down everything that’s in our free social media reporting template, a quick disclaimer:

There is no one-size-fits-all social media report that works for every marketer. As we mentioned above, reports will vary based on your goals, audience, and reporting timeframe. You should liberally edit and add to our report as needed.

That said, we’ve built our reporting template to be as flexible as possible to any social media manager’s needs. Here’s what’s included:

1. Start With a Strong Introduction

After a top-notch title page, start your report with a clear introduction.

In your introduction, include:

• Your high-level goals
  
  
• Your KPIs or success metrics
  
  
• Your current social strategy and what channels you’re using
  
  
• Your tactics and progress
  
  
• The reporting timeframe (weekly, monthly, quarterly)

If you’re reporting quarterly, you may want to quickly recap your major takeaways from the last report to refresh everyone’s mind.

If your report is long, you may want to include an agenda or table of contents.

2. Summarize Your Success

Don’t bury the major takeaways at the end of your report. After the introduction, jump right into your overall campaign performance and summarize your performance on your major KPIs.

For example, this could be:

• Total posts
  
  
• Total reach or engagement
  
  
• Total followers won or lost
  
  
• Website visits or leads

This is a good opportunity to combine metrics across platforms. For example, totalling all of your new followers or fans across every platform.

3. Walk Through Your Key Social Media Metrics 

Next, you should go through your social media performance, platform by platform.

As we mentioned above, don’t just dump a ton of data on your audience. Provide as much context as possible by comparing these metrics to your previous reporting period (or the previous calendar year if that’s more relevant).

The exact data you include will depend on your goals, but here are the most common metrics to report on by platform:

Instagram

Your Instagram Analytics can be accessed through Keyhole, or you can view your Insights on the Instagram app.

Key Instagram metrics include:

• Number of posts/stories
  
  
• Story/video views
  
  
• Impressions
  
  
• Total engagements/engagement rate
  
  
• Followers gained/lost
  
  
• Bio link clicks

You should also include a screenshot and link to your top-performing post or video, including key comments or engagements.

Facebook

If you don’t access your Facebook Analytics through Keyhole, you can access your page’s stats directly through Facebook.

Key Facebook metrics include:

• Number of posts/stories
  
  
• Page/video views
  
  
• Page impressions
  
  
• Total engagements/engagement rate
  
  
• Followers gained/lost
  
  
• Link clicks

Again, include a screenshot of your top post!

Twitter

You can conveniently access your Twitter Analytics on Keyhole, otherwise they can be accessed directly from Twitter.

Key Twitter metrics include:

• Number of posts
  
  
• Likes
  
  
• Retweets
  
  
• Total engagements/engagement rate
  
  
• Followers gained/lost
  
  
• Link clicks

Other Platforms

You should continue this for every platform you’re actively posting on, including:

• Youtube
  
  
• LinkedIn
  
  
• Pinterest
  
  
• Snapchat
  
  
• TikTok

If you’re reporting on a platform for the first time, be sure to explain why you’ve adopted this platform and what you hope to gain out of it.

4. Review Your Social Listening Findings

Beyond what you’ve posted, you should also report on what people are posting about you.

Here you can summarize:

• Hashtag analytics: posts, users, engagement, reach, and impressions
  
  
• Brand mentions: Notable mentions, number of mentions, % of mentions responded to
  
  
• Sentiment analysis: positive vs. negative mentions

5. Evaluate Your Influencers

If you’re working with influencers, you should also give an overview of the overall program success.

Here, you can collapse all of your influencers into one report and/or break them down one by one.

You can use Keyhole’s influencer analytics to compare influencers by:

• Engagement
  
  
• Reach
  
  
• Impressions
  
  
• Followers

You can also take this opportunity to highlight any new potential influencers you’ve identified that you may want to work with next.

6. Other Key Categories and Highlights

Here’s where you can get creative. Reflect on your goals and consider if you want to add reporting on any of these categories:

• New influential follows
  
  
• Trending content in your industry
  
  
• Competitor activity or results
  
  
• Channel-to-channel comparisons
  
  
• Customer service response time
  
  
• Video performance
  
  
• Social’s impact on website performance
  
  
• Audience demographics

For example, with respect to audience demographics, you may have a goal of increasing the number of followers in a specific country as you try to enter a new market.

7. Summarize Your Takeaways

Here’s what it all comes together. Based on all the social data you analyzed, summarize some notable takeaways from the reporting period. These should be more observation-focused than KPI-focused.

What stood out in the report? Why do you think it happened? How should you apply this knowledge moving forward?

For example:

• Takeaway 1 – We’re investing a lot of time on Twitter but we’re not seeing as high engagement as we do on Instagram. We should consider shifting more of our time to Instagram.
  
  
• Takeaway 2 – Our competitor is receiving a lot of traction on their weekly video series. Should we consider shifting to video?
  
  
• Takeaway 3 – We gain more followers when we post on trending hashtags, but receive more clicks on our links on branded content. Our strategy should continue to feature a mix of both.
  
  
• Takeaway 4 – We receive the most traction on Facebook when we post in the morning.

8. List Your Next Steps

Finalize your report with your future-facing strategy.

What needs to be adjusted going forward? What new tactics are you going to try? What led you to this conclusion?

For example:

• Next Step 1 – Test a weekly video series for two months to increase our reach.
  
  
• Next Step 2 – Include more original photography to increase engagement.
  
  
• Next Step 3 – Reduce our Facebook posts to once per day with a focus on higher-quality content.

And that’s it! Remember to leave room for questions if you’re presenting in a meeting.

Get Started On Your Social Media Report

If you haven’t already, download our free social media reporting template now.

Our report will make it easier to summarize your key findings, impress key stakeholders, and make smarter decisions moving forward.

If you want to make creating social media reports even easier, you should give Keyhole a try. Our social media reporting features make it easy to track data on the fly, prove your campaign impact, and easily make beautiful, branded reports.

Start your free trial of Keyhole today.

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