Best Social Media Tools to Use in 2024

Social media tools can pave the way for marketers to run successful marketing campaigns, and monitor the results and create a stellar brand image online.

Exclusive Social Media Tools

Social media is the space for most brand activities. It’s the hotspot of the latest trends to lionize the promotion of small businesses to affluent brands.

But the only problem with social media posting is that it is demanding!

That’s why marketers have ditched the traditional posting drill for the next best approach- social media tools.

What Are Social Media Tools?

Social media tools are versatile platforms that assist marketers in all social media activities, including content creation, post-scheduling, analytics, reporting, and social monitoring. These tools save a lot of manual effort using automation. They let users run numerous social media accounts from different social channels from the same dashboard.

And the good thing is that the best tools for social media management are really affordable.

That’s why social media tools assist not just enterprises but also growing businesses to create a social impact. Here are some of the mentionable benefits a good social media tool bears for its user:

  • Social media tools can help small businesses reach a larger audience and increase their online visibility.
  • These tools facilitate effective management of audience engagement, creating a better public image for your business.
  • eCommerce businesses can reach specific tiers of the target audience by delivering the right message at the right time.

In this blog, we have listed the best social media tools with various strengths which are indispensable when it comes to kickstarting your social media marketing efforts.

How we analyze and select Social media tools:

​​We have meticulously curated this list of premier social media tools through detailed research and hands-on testing. We considered various factors such as user satisfaction, G2 ratings and reviews, pricing structure, and scalability. We also actively analyzed the abilities of these tools in automation, developing content, visualization, analytics, and collaborative workflows. We have assembled this list to provide marketers with essential insights, enabling them to make well-informed decisions on the best tools to expand their businesses.

Top Social Media Tools for Agencies

SocialPilot

$30

for 1 user

If you are running a social media marketing agency and have a whole gaggle of clients to handle, your work can get very chaotic. It would be best if you had an easy social media tool to work with and make things easy for you and your team. None of us have the patience to climb a steep learning curve.

SocialPilot is one of the best social media tools that aims to do this for you. It has multiple features, and the setup of all your social media profiles is quick.

SocialPilot can fulfill all the demands of a social media marketing agency with its rich feature set. You can do everything from multiple post creation to scheduling at different hours for multiple clients with this one tool.

You can even post content or schedule it on hundreds of accounts in just one click. Using this social media tool will keep you on top of your audience’s mind and their social media feed at all times.

And the best thing about this tool is that you can invite all your team members and clients on board. The team and client workflow capabilities help you streamline all of your activities and function as an efficient unit.

  • Schedule and publish social media content on 10 social media platforms like Instagram (direct posting), YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, VK, Tumblr, and Google My Business.
  • Curate content that is popular with your target audience.
  • Use bulk scheduling to schedule and publish up to 500 posts at once for better time management.
  • Schedule first comment to your Instagram posts and add hashtags for amplified reach.
  • Add alt text to your image posts and use custom fields to insert account-specific details to your posts.
  • Converse with social media audience in real-time using Social Inbox.
  • Win the attention that your brand deserves with White Label features.
  • Team collaboration features for seamless social media marketing.
  • Efficient management of multiple social media accounts for your clients.
  • Report on content performance, audience engagement, optimum posting time, and more with social media analytics.
  • Automate shareable links to your favorite blog posts via SocialPilot’s browser extension.

Why Should You Use SocialPilot as a Social Media Tool for Business?

  • The tool is extremely intuitive and easy to work with, designed to keep small businesses’ needs in mind with little idea about social media marketing.
  • The tool makes the work easy by ensuring smooth team collaboration and management. You can give admin access to team members working on social media marketing. You can also provide them selective access to Social Inbox and analytics reporting for brand engagement.

Wondering whether you can find a free social media scheduling tool?

There are some free social media scheduling tools like Coschedule, but they lack many essential functionalities you need from a social media management tool. Instead, you can try a feature-rich social media tool like SocialPilot, which is a budget-friendly and cheaper tool than most other established as well as new social media tools.

Want to know more from our users? Here’s what they have to say about SocialPilot on Twitter and other credible sources.

What People Say About Us

L

Luis Ignacio C.

SocialPilot is the main tool for the content management of the accounts for which I work. SocialPilot is truly amazing. Apart from all that, they also offer you a complete section of analytics, which allows you to show the orderly evolution of your work.

B

Brian W.

I had been using another company to facilitate all of my social media posts; however, the number of accounts I needed took me out of the search for the free products and jumped up pretty quickly to some prohibitive pricing. SocialPilot fit a perfect price point and got me connected to all of my social media accounts very quickly. I can make my posts and schedule them as I like. Thank you!


Hootsuite

$739

for 5 users

hootsuite cover

Best for:

Professionals, Small teams, Small-medium businesses, and Enterprises.

About Hootsuite

Hootsuite has made it to many lists when searching for effective tools for business. It is a veritable all-rounder on social media activities, with customizable and scalable solutions for fast-growing companies.

This software accommodates a varied user demographic, ranging from individual influencers and bloggers to global corporations. Small businesses and startups leverage Hootsuite to connect with their audience, even without dedicated social media teams.

Though it has been in the market for a long time, Hootsuite is a comparatively complex tool to use. Hence, we recommend other user-friendly Hootsuite alternatives.

Pricing:

Hootsuite offers five pricing tiers after a 30-day trial, ranging from $99/month to $249/month, catering to different social account and user needs.

Key Features:

  • Social Scheduling: The tool lets you plan, create, and schedule social media posts to be automatically published at the designated date and time.
  • Audience Engagement: A unified social inbox that helps monitor, respond, engage with followers, and automate replies with AI chatbots.
  • Social Listening: Keep up with online trends and track brand mentions along with keywords and hashtags to keep an eye on what people think of your brand.
  • Social Media Advertisement: Manage social media ads for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from Hootsuite’s dashboard.
  • Analytical Insights: View the analytics data from connected profiles from multiple platforms in one centralized dashboard.
  • Team Collaboration: Work with your team and involve clients with well-defined roles for seamless collaboration.
  • Employee Advocacy: Hootsuite helps users get an extended reach by enabling employees to share posts of their company to their own social profiles.
  • AI Writer: The tool helps create social media post captions easier and faster using AI assistance.

We went through a hundred user reviews for Hootsuite, gathered from trusted review platforms like G2 and Capterra. After carefully analyzing each of them in respect to all the features of the tool, we have gathered these insights.

Pros

  • 64.71% of users agreed that the visual content editing capabilities of the tool proved to be assets for content creation on the platform.
  • When it came to managing platform-specific limitations, 43.86% users said that Hootsuite does a good job.
  • The content recycling feature of Hootsuite is highly liked among its users, allowing them to repurpose their successful and evergreen content. The recurring opinion was that resharing these posts gets good engagement to their pages.
  • The tool makes KPI monitoring of social profiles for users very easy.
  • 81.25% of users were highly appreciative of the team collaboration capabilities in Hootsuite, which allows them to work seamlessly with all their team members and clients.

Cons

  • 41.56% people faced difficulties in using the tool due to the complex scheduling process involved.
  • Around 9.10% of users have had a difficult time while using the mobile application of Hootsuite to schedule posts.
  • Despite giving accurate data most of the time, nearly two-thirds of all the users found the analytics presentation to be hard to decipher.
  • Many users have not been able to configure the collaboration notifications within Hootsuite, which is important to stay in the loop with team activities.
  • A 100% majority believe that Hootsuite is not able to deliver value for money and charges exaggerated prices. This leads to the tool being unaffordable for medium and small businesses.

Overall Ratings:

Features
4.1/5
Ease of Use
4.2/5
Support
4.0/5

MavSocial

$78

for 3 users

MavSocial is a social media growth tool specifically designed for marketers whose primary focus lies on sharing visual content. It is one of the most sought-after social media tools for business.

It simplifies the process of publishing visual content across multiple social networks by maintaining a centralized database. This social media tools database stores massive content in formats like images, videos, infographics, etc., making them instantly accessible.

Pros

  • MavSocial lets you visually enrich your posts by adding effects and filters to images, making them more shareable.
  • You can join campaign-related conversations by tracking comments and messages received across all networks from a single window.

Jennifer H.

I love the campaign planner and calendar. The ability to move posts around by dragging on the calendar is very helpful.

Cons

  • While reporting is an important feature, MavSocial’s reports lack depth. You cannot customize reports as per specific metrics and might end up missing out on critical details.
  • MavSocial can sometimes throw unexpected errors. The root cause lies in the frequent change of APIs to access different social media networks.

Sandra G.

The idea of a campaign was great, but I had to either let it run forever or set an end date. This was tough. Also, although it’s great to have the cloud library attached to my account, it was horrific to organize. I regularly work with hundreds or thousands of images. Incredibly time-consuming to add metadata to each individual file. They also had to be moved to directories individually.


Sprout Social

$249

for 1 user

With Sprout Social, social media management seems like an easy job. Its team collaboration features are commendable. Opt SproutSocial for businesses to manage customer relationships with a seamless CRM system.

This paid social media tool easily integrates with Zendesk, UserVoice, and Salesforce to enable sales, support, and social media teams to work in collaboration. If you are looking for other options, look at these SproutSocial alternatives.

Pros

  • The tool facilitates communication of sales, social, and support teams. You can even create a Facebook messenger bot to connect with your customers round the clock.
  • The dashboard presents the data in an organized manner.

Charise S.

Reporting is what sold me on Sprout. I love the variations that I can put together to pull custom reporting for my clients.

Cons

  • You can manage fewer social media platforms on Sprout Social. Hence, you can’t reap the benefit of social engagement and social commerce for all platforms in one place.
  • The dashboard isn’t comprehensive. You need to toggle between different pages to retrieve data and insights for every social media platform.

Stephanie M.

I dislike the new layout completely. I don’t like having the navigation bar on the left side; it’s not as intuitive. I wish I could click and drag posts to different days on the month calendar view instead of having to click the post and go in and manually change the date.


Buffer

$120

for 10 profiles

Buffer cover

Best for:

Businesses, Publishers, Non-profits, Mid-stage startup teams, Higher education, Solopreneurs, E-commerce, and Sports teams.

About Buffer

Buffer is another popular tool that is used by industries like NGOs, educational institutions, and sports teams. Buffer helps in scheduling and publishing to your accounts.

It adeptly navigates the contemporary digital terrain, emerging as a solution for businesses across the spectrum. Whether it’s a single marketer or part of an agency, a homegrown startup, or a larger enterprise, Buffer is suitable for all of them.

Buffer also guides you through every phase, from strategic inception and execution to oversight of the results your efforts bring. However, Buffer’s pricing model makes it difficult for smaller businesses to manage multiple accounts for a prolonged period of time.

Pricing:

Buffer provides a range of four pricing options along with a 14-day trial period for each. There is a free plan for beginners. Paid plans range from $6 a month for one account to a monthly $120 for 10 accounts.

Key Features:

  • Post Scheduling: Buffer makes the creation of personalized posts possible, and automating their posting using it’s scheduling capabilities.
  • Analytics Insights: Access detailed analytics and generate comprehensive, shareable reports for each linked social profile.
  • Audience Interaction: With Buffer, handle audience messages and comments, giving priority to impactful conversations at the same time.
  • Team Collaboration: The tool makes collaboration with your entire team streamlined, involving clients in the approval process for social media content.
  • Start Page Creator: Leverage the Start Page feature to craft visually appealing, simple landing pages that effectively convert social media traffic into sales.
  • AI-Powered Assistance: Buffer simplifies the process of social media caption creation with its AI Assistant, allowing users to generate content quickly and effectively through guided prompts.

After sifting through numerous user reviews of Buffer sourced from reputable platforms such as G2 and Capterra, we meticulously examined each one, considering all aspects of the tool. From this thorough analysis, we’ve compiled the following insights.

Pros

  • At least 20% of all Buffer users agreed that maintaining consistency on social media became easier with the help of the tool and its content scheduling capabilities.
  • 20% of the reviews pointed out that content tagging was highly effective in categorizing their assets within the storage of the tool.
  • The competitor analysis features in the tool has added value for some users, making it easy for them to keep track of industry trends.
  • Around 10% of the reviews mentioned that message prioritization capability in Buffer’s inbox makes for a more efficient engagement.
  • At least 10% of the reviews mentioned the benefits of real-time collaboration, eliminating the use of any other tool for communication in between.

Cons

  • The scope of improvement in customization capabilities has been singled out by more than 33% of users.
  • A lot of the reviews have mentioned the limited functionality of Buffer publishing and that it could use some improvement.
  • At least 28.5% of the reviews found the analytics insights to be limited, where a lot more comprehensive details could be added.
  • A quarter of the Buffer audience said that they have faced difficulties due to delays in message handling by social inbox of the tool.
  • Around 20% of the reviews have clearly stated that Buffer’s visual design is not engaging or interesting enough.

Overall Ratings:

Features
4.3/5
Ease of Use
4.6/5
Support
4.2/5

SmarterQueue

$29.99

for 4 profiles

Do you often share your blogs on social media? Then SmarterQueue will become your new favorite. This tool schedules your posts on popular platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

This social media growth tool provides top-notch analytics. There is also a methodology for recycling evergreen content. You can also categorize your content for easy accessibility using this social media tool. Another feature of SmartQueue is its custom schedule creation based on your social media profile analytics. Now that’s indeed smart!

Pros

  • Customer support is proactive in solving issues. Customer support is proactive in solving issues.
  • You can search for media like gifs and graphics from the tool itself.
  • RSS feed integration is available.

Walt S.

This program has an excellent capacity and ability to adapt social media programs in your own way and according to your needs. Authorizing the publication of content on social networks is quite simple and without any problem.

Cons

  • Interface and reporting can be improved.
  • Users need time to learn how to leverage this tool better.

Eli R

The biggest issue I found is that it is easy to create posts and a bit more difficult to go back and edit them. So you can create a single post and associate it with several social accounts. Because it creates a separate record for each post on each social profile, if you have to go back and edit them individually, it can be a tedious process to find them all and edit them one by one.


Content Research Tools

Creating social media content that generates a buzz successfully is not that simple. The competition is cutthroat, and fooling the algorithm is not an option. So it is very important that you keep an eagle eye on current market trends to create content that clicks with the audience. To make your task attainable, using content research and planning tools is the smart choice.

But is the best social media planning free?

Unfortunately, most of the social media planning tools that offer value are paid. However, paying for these tools is worth it as they help to streamline all your processes to generate ideas, monitor competitors, and find the types of content that people are siding with.

We have curated a list of some of the best social media planning tools that you can try with 14 days trial period. So, let us compare the best social media planning software for content planning and content research.

Buzzsumo

$119

If you are falling short on content, BuzzSumo can help you right away. It is a data analytics and content research tool that analyzes massive data sets pertaining to social media posts and interactions.

Identify the top-performing posts on any topic or industry. This social media tool figures out what kind of content will suit you or your clients the best. Add a competitive edge to your branding and reach out to your audience effectively.

Pros

  • Identify thought leaders and influencers in your niche for marketing campaigns with this social media tool.
  • Create alerts for the latest updates and trends in your industry on BuzzSumo.

Volodymyr B.

Developing good content means you need to do a lot of research, and sometimes that can be a dubious process even if you have all the tools. Hopefully, BuzzSumo is one of those social media tools that make the process of content research much easier and much more insightful in just a couple of clicks.

Cons

  • The learning curve is complicated. Users take time to get used to the tool.
  • BuzzSumo plans are not affordable for all small and medium-sized businesses.

Alina M.

The value is undisputed, but the price of 99$ per month is very high. I think they are just focusing on big companies.


Social Animal

$49

Hailed as the Swiss army knife of content marketing, Social Animal is a social media search tool that comes in handy for content insights, influencers’ data, and robust competitor monitoring capabilities.

This tool’s “Trending” feature helps you search for keyword-specific articles that are the most popular among all the social platforms. If you go to the Articles tab in the tool, you can see platform-specific engagement metrics, which help you gauge their reception and understand which type of content suits what platform.

The niche-specific influencer information Social Animal generates is insane. Search for them using granular filters like location, topics, and amount of followers

Pros

  • Produces real-time data from social media channels on how a piece of content is performing
  • Helps in content ideation through granular filters and extensive keyword-related content insights
  • Excellent competition monitoring skills
  • It helps garner a deeper understanding of influencers by identifying them by niche, location, followers’ number, and many more comprehensive filters

Verified User

We do a lot of research for our content marketing service. Social Animal makes it easy for us to find the data we need and use it competitively. We also use it to find influencers. We are happy with the results.

Cons

  • The user interface can be more comprehensive and easy to use
  • Statistical data produced from social media can not be verified in any way
  • This tool requires a lot of getting used to.

Jane T.

One thing that made me feel uncomfortable while learning this social media software is that the learning curve is too steeper and that may be because it has too many features to offer and does so much. The newcomers may find it a bit difficult to use and work with it.


Content Studio

$25

If you need a content marketing tool that can automate the process of creating and posting on social media, Content Studio might be just the thing for you.

If a comparison is made, only some tools can boast the capabilities of content ideation and scheduling altogether. Content Studio comes in that category. Like many scheduling tools, it helps you create posts, schedule them ahead of time, view and generate post-performance reports and monitor comments through the social inbox.

Along with it, this social media tool allows you to curate content based on topics and keyword searches. You can also create and publish blogs on trending topics directly from this social media tool through WordPress, Medium, Shopify, Tumblr, and Webflow.

Pros

  • Reduces a marketer’s time spent on creating their social media posts by enabling them to schedule posts and generate captions through an AI-powered caption generator.
  • Content discovery is super simplified, as the tool lets you choose from 500 content categories.
  • You can create a custom topic field using Query Builder with a series of AND, OR, and NOT boolean operations.

Darren G

ContentStudio is a content curation tool that generates social media content that is posted automatically on your social media accounts. I used this to make sure my accounts were active and had fresh, relevant content. It’s a great tool for creating an active social media presence and can be used by any size of business.

Cons

  • The mobile app lacks a lot of functionalities that the web version has.
  • The customer support is not up to the mark.

Steven L

Their support is now dreadful and has gotten worse over time. It is a damn shame. A week or two can go by with several emails to them, and all we hear are crickets. There is no response sometimes until the third or fourth email. This is terribly unprofessional and is horrible for our agency and clients.


Ahrefs

$99

There is no digital marketer who doesn’t know and sing the praises of Ahrefs This tool is an absolute must-have for SEO and content research.

It allows users to see the top-performing articles for any given topic or keyword and the backlinks directing back to it. This can provide valuable insights into the type of content resonating with audiences and what strategies are being used by competitors.

The backlink structure of any website is a huge factor in drawing traffic to it. If you are trying to create a strong link profile for your blogs and make them rank, Ahrefs will point you in the right direction.

The tool has a free plan which you can use to monitor your website, but if you want to experience the full productive capabilities of Ahrefs, we say go for a paid plan. It has a diverse use case that no other free social media tools can compete with.

Pros

  • Ahrefs can also provide information on the keywords for which a webpage or website is ranking.
  • It gives a detailed picture of the quality of a particular keyword, the ranking websites for it, and the potential traffic it can attract.
  • It has social listening capabilities, so whenever your brand is mentioned online, you will be notified every single time.
  • Efficient for disclosing your competitors’ content strategies and their collaborators so you can target the same or similar websites for backlinking.

Matt R.

I’ve been using Ahrefs now for about 6 years now. The dashboard is well-designed. The data it gives is phenomenal. Their index is amazing, competing with the computing power and crawling ability of Bing and Yahoo. They are the second most active crawler after Google, outperforming Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and everyone in between. Crawling the web 24/7 allows them to collect petabytes of data in the process, then analyze, and display it in an attractive manner such that they extract insights in record time, for even the most in-depth SEO crawl or question. The breadth and depth of their links, domains, & URL’s are unbelievable. The freshness of the data is impressive, the site audit feature is packed with features. Overall, the tool is easy to use and highly recommended.

Cons

  • The extensive repository of information can be hard to navigate.
  • Some of the data lacks accuracy.
  • It does not provide features to check SERP ranks in bulk for multiple keywords.
  • It does not offer a free trial version which it previously used to do so you can not consider it as free social media tool.

Verified User

Ahrefs is the best tool for SEO, but it stands at zero regarding local SEO. It does not offer a single tool for local SEO professionals. One has to rely on information provided by other means, such as Bright Local for Local Map analysis. Ahrefs does not have a tool to check SERP ranks in bulk for multiple keywords. If one wants to check websites’ SERP ranks for various keywords, it is impossible with it. Ahrefs used to offer a 7-day free trial, which was helpful for potential customers, but it has discontinued that offer.


Audience Intelligence Tools

Anyone into social media marketing would agree that watching audiences’ behavior towards their content is crucial to map out future strategies.

Audience intelligence tools are used to gather information about their target audience and metrics related to their engagement with the content online. This information can be used to create more effective marketing campaigns, target ads, and improve the overall performance of a social media presence.

Here are some tools that prove to be very effective in finding what the audience thinks.

Audiense

$1499

Do you often wish to know more about your leads? Their usual behavior on different social media platforms, the kind of content they like or dislike, what they share, where they share content from and on.

Well, now you can. Tools like Audiense help you dive deeper into such actionable insights. With Audiense Connect, you can create a custom chatbot for Twitter to engage with subscribers and customers via direct messaging. Aid your social media strategy with Audiense to skyrocket engagement.

Pros

  • It’s tough to help clients understand how their campaigns are performing without reports. Audiense makes this complex task relatively easy.
  • You get a complete picture of your target audience’s personality. Valuable insights like these are beneficial, especially to eCommerce merchants, who want to make the best out of consumer likes and dislikes.

Eduardo B.

It provides deep psychographic data powered by IBM Watson’s Artificial Intelligence. No configuration or training is needed. If you are looking to have your entire team make data-driven decisions easily, this is the tool for you.

Cons

  • The free analytical capabilities are limited. Customization capabilities in the free version are also few.
  • The UX is a bit confusing, and so is the in-app navigation. It could have been improved.

Verified Audiense User

There is much more in the application than comes out in the default reports, so we have to manually take application screenshots and copy them into Powerpoint. Also, it would be great if the default PPT reports were able to export the 16:9 format.


Synthesio

Customizable

Synthesio is a tool used for audience analysis and listening. It allows users to track and analyze social media conversations, mentions, and sentiments across multiple platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more.

The excellent data visualization of this social media tool displays all the aspects of a target audience profile’s interests and preferences, which will help you craft your message in your content the right way.

Pros

  • The user-friendliness of Synthesio lets the user experience all of the capabilities to their full scope.
  • You will be able to quantify the ROI on your audience campaigns.
  • Synthesio uses AI-powered monitoring of keywords and key phrases to provide you with customers’ sentiment analysis accurately.
  • Tracks the overall performance of your social media posts regarding how they are performing and what sort of engagements they are garnering.

Verified User.

A good tool for me is a practical tool. The easiness of use of Synthesio is different from other tools on the market, anyone with or without experience in social intelligence and social listening can use this tool and its ready-to-use features.

Cons

  • The setting up of the dashboard is cumbersome for users as they need to activate each feature separately.
  • Sometimes the pre-analyzed data will leave users wanting to see raw and actual data.
  • Not enough clarity on the data collection methods used by Synthesio.

Héctor Nicolas S.

Data coverage instability. Even though Synthesio collects data from an incredible number of sources, I cannot trust in the absolute data coverage. In fact, in the meantime I don’t understand how Synthesio collects data.


Meltwater

Not Public

Meltwater is a media intelligence platform that provides audience insights by analyzing data from various sources such as social media, news articles, and blogs. It has some pretty big brands under its belt, like Google, H&M, Ogilvy, and many more.

Its impressive market research capabilities boast an arsenal of varied features such as social listening, competitors’ analysis, niche-specific trends monitoring, and audience sentiment analysis. You can get to the nerve of every concern and question your audience has with you and address them ASAP.

Pros

  • The tool helps you figure out what your audience needs by AI-powered monitoring of multiple channels, including social media, consumer reviews, comments, forums, blogs, podcasts, and videos.
  • Meltwater has an efficient notification system regarding online brand mentions.
  • Client-ready visual data representations help agencies and brands help interpret their vision and the execution of their strategies.

Ellie B

Meltwater has been incredibly helpful in researching and shaping messaging for our clients. Sentiment analysis very much drives our decision making and client are super happy with the results! It is easy to use and the client ready presentations are so great to have on hand!

Cons

  • There is a lot of scope for improvement in design.
  • Navigating around the software becomes cumbersome and difficult.
  • Response to queries by the support team is slow at times.

Nupur P.

I don’t like the fact that Meltwater is not intuitive, and a substantial amount of time must be devoted to familiarizing it. Additionally, account managers are required for connectivity between lists which can cause an extra hassle when it comes to usage. However, this should be fine if you take the time to learn how the platform works.


Emplifi

Not public

Emplifi is another tool that has cloud-based social media capabilities. The perfect fusion of a commerce, marketing, and customer journey, this tool helps in addressing the underlying needs of the audience.

Emplifi was formed by the union of previously separate tools, Astute and SocialBakers. Their combined features give Emplify the aptitude to gather marketing intelligence and empathize with customer needs. This social media tool enables marketers to create distinct customer personas to target them for your products specifically.

Empifi is a united tool that seamlessly integrates your social shops with e-commerce stores so that you can leverage and manage your inventory better.

Pros

  • It gives a complete outlook on your social media campaigns with real-time data and helps you estimate how and when to optimize them.
  • The data and insights presented to the user are comprehensive and easy to understand, even for a comparatively new user.

Carlos M.

The platform unifies all gathered data and make it simple for us to analyze all of them, being organic or paid. It also helps our coworkers that are not used to analyze some social metrics.

Cons

  • Data accuracy is not 100%.
  • The community management is not well-organized, leading to users sometimes missing some of the comments because of the way they are being displayed.

Esteban C.

As a user in Latin America, sometimes there is a lot of missing information. There is no information in a lot of countries. If you are using the reports, just check first that there is information from the country you are looking for.


Social Media Listening Tools

Social media marketers must be hyperactive about addressing whatever feedback, comments, reviews, or queries their audience puts forth. Social media tools help them to be aware of what and where people are mentioning or talking about them. This is the key to building a positive brand image.

Here are some best tools for comparison that will act as your brand’s eyes and ears online.

Keyhole

$99

per month

Making it simple to manage social media and influencer marketing, Keyhole joins the ranks of the top tools for business. Keyhole provides real-time data giving you regular insight into reach, engagement, and more.

You can even track hashtags and access historical social data to ideate promotional strategies. This social media tool features include AI and machine learning techniques to suggest keywords so you participate in the trend.

Pros

  • The interface has no steep learning curve.
  • The content analysis feature is quite helpful in creating relevant content.
  • You can get campaign reports for effective performance.

Ashia S.

I like how easy it is to use Keyhole. I also really like how easy it is to understand the hashtag engagement reports. It really made that part of the reporting process really seamless.

Cons

  • Information is limited because of API restrictions.
  • If not planned, you run out of credits without reaping any benefit.

Verified User

We work with small to medium-sized businesses, and the cost to benefit ratio makes it difficult to justify using Keyhole for our clients on an ongoing basis.


Brandwatch

Custom

When it comes to social listening tools, Brandwatch is one of the industry leaders with multiple other social media management features. Its capability in consumer intelligence insights makes it eligible to be pitted in our previous category.

But the feature Brandwatch is mainly hailed for is its integrated social inbox for monitoring audience conversations and brand mentions.

It uses natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract insights from the data and provides users with real-time alerts, reports, and data visualization. Additionally, you can use Brandwatch for market research, customer service, and reputation management.

Its extensive inventory of information has 1.7 trillion historical conversations dating back to 2010, and 500 million new ones are being appended daily.

Pros

  • Possess capable scheduling and publishing features.
  • The UI is streamlined and straightforward for users to navigate around.
  • The content-pool feature makes storing and using various content pieces for your social posts easy.

Verified User

The user interface on Brandwatch is incredibly intuitive and delivers a much better experience than our agency has had with other platforms. The content pool feature, in particular, makes it easy to host a repository of assets we can easily use across the entire team.

Cons

  • Customization of social posts for each social media platform is unavailable during scheduling.
  • Their pricing might be on the higher side for smaller businesses.

Nathan O.

The engage dashboard is helpful, but it alone does not justify the massive price tag. Most of the other features exist as part of the native platforms themselves, and in many cases work better on the native platforms. The fact that 4K video can’t be published through Falcon to Facebook but can be published to Facebook directly is beyond me in 2022 for a program that costs $18000.


BrandMentions

$99

Again, one of the most recommended tools for monitoring mentions of your business or brand is BrandMentions It is not as diverse in functions as Brandwatch, but whatever it boasts, few can beat it.

Whenever someone talks about you, the knowledge will be fast-tracked to your inbox as BrandMention keeps scouring millions of sources on the internet. Other than that, there is hashtag tracking, competitor spying, market intelligence, and more to be explored.

Its intuitive social media listening capabilities give you a complete analysis of how many times your keyword was mentioned and how much engagement it received. Also, you can see the context in which it was mentioned, its reach, and the sentiments around it.

And believe it or not, you can see all of this for free on their website!

Pros

  • Way more comprehensive and accurate with its compilation of mentions from various sources online.
  • The dashboard is highly intuitive and manageable.
  • Their customer support is highly efficient and very helpful.

Mark Traphagen

BrandMentions has become an indispensable tool for measuring the success of our marketing campaigns. We work hard to build awareness of our brand online, and no other tool we’ve tested finds as many relevant mentions as BrandMentions. We highly recommend it!

Cons

  • The loading time taken by search results is a bit prolonged at times.
  • The number of keywords tracked has a limit that is a restriction.

Matt B.

The app comes to a hard stop when you’ve reached your mentions limit. Social media mentions can be a bit messy if you receive a lot of interaction. Brand Mentions should probably create a separate display format for social mentions as opposed to web mentions, which are a lot easier to display and analyze through their current user interface.


Digimind

Custom Pricing

Digimind is excellent with market intelligence. Reputation management, an important factor for flourishing agencies and businesses, becomes easy with Digimind and its data-dependent insights.

This social media software for agencies enables you to identify and segment influencers and opinion leaders who have mentioned you based on their niche, location, and engagement. With this social media tools feature, you can leverage and benefit through their presence on social networks.

Its AI-powered sentiment analysis with the application of the 5W model- What, Where, When, Who, and How helps them detect any negative reactions to any new concepts and hashtags you receive.

Pros

  • It has competitor monitoring capabilities which help find your competitors’ strengths and
  • weaknesses making it easier to identify opportunities for your own business.
  • Perfectly manage your risks by anticipating them through brand reputation monitoring.
  • Maximize your ROI by campaign analysis.

Freddy A.

This a friendly and totally intuitive social media software. A very efficient tool to collect information on specific topics and also allows you to have a complete vision of the digital reputation of your company, since you can know information from social networks and digital media.

Cons

  • Better suited for B2C and large B2B organizations.
  • The support for Digimind is slow.

Sophie B.

The tool adds so much that you will spend a lot of time configuring and then discovering information that is not relevant to your organization. Also, among other things that I don’t like about the platform is the difficulty of looking back for information, the limited number of queries. Every now and then, I have trouble with mentions.


Mention

$49

per month

Another ace among social media tools, Mention. Mention is a powerful social media listening and monitoring software for agencies that monitors millions of sources across the internet to filter out your brand’s mentions. This social media tool can listen to 42 languages and go through content such as forums, blogs, news, review websites, and social media channels

The “Alert” feature lets you set customized alerts when a term is mentioned in the selected platforms, languages, and countries on which you’d like to gather data. The mentions are given to you in a comprehensive and clean feed format where you can scroll through all the sources of the terms you track.

Pros

  • Boolean alerts are available to narrow down your searches.
  • Monitor social conversations for multiple platforms from the same space by connecting relevant accounts.
  • Functions as a complete social media management tool by allowing scheduling and publishing content.

Karl P.

In my organization, we use Mention frequently to detect critical mentions of our brand and essential information for our marketing. Its user interface is intuitive, making it easy to use and the dashboard relatively easy to use. Thanks to this tool, we find in record time good and bad reviews from our customers in the vastness of the web and social platforms; it also has good tools that bring good points to the management of social networks.

Cons

  • Configuration of the tracking terms, if not done correctly, can lead to you missing a lot of mentions.
  • The UI can be more aesthetically pleasing.

Agatka J.

Mention does not have an affordable price always and it is not cheap for every business and organization. email website directly from the platform. There is no macOS app available for their features. There must be more social media platforms available for their features. They must add more profiles to monitor


Awario

$49

per month

Awario is one of the popular social media listening tools that gives you the best of both worlds — Enterprise-level features and good value for money. With this tool, you can find instant mentions from all across social media and the Web.

It crawls over 13 billion web pages daily, in addition to the APIs, and immediately notifies about each relevant mention. Awario also lets you monitor your brand and grow brand awareness. By using your brand name as a keyword, you can find discussions on social platforms and join them in real time.

You can identify industry influencers with this tool and connect with them to build impactful relationships, collaborations and market your products through the most influential industry leaders.

Pros

  • Track your every brand mention from multiple social media platforms.
  • Analyze positive and negative mentions and get an understanding of your customers from a top-down perspective.
  • Do competitor analysis and get the data incorporated into a report.

Amir C.

One of the best things about Awario is its 360 social media monitoring. Their technology keeps track of every mention from multiple social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Meta, Etc

Cons

  • Plan prices significantly increase with the increase of social media traffic.
  • Sometimes data traffic data doesn`t properly reflect on Awario.

Verified User in Religious Institutions

I don’t like how much the pricing skyrockets when your social media traffic increases. As much as I like Awario’s value, it’s the kind of product you can outgrow. I get lots of raw data but would like to see it more actionable. I see different stats from Twitter Media Studio than Awario which makes me question the comprehensiveness of the data I’m getting from Aware. As easy and simple as it is, it takes a lot of work to go through comments that are mis-categorized as positive/negative.


What to Look For in a Social Media Tool

We have curated quite a list for you to choose from. However, if you don’t know what to look for in a social media tool for your business, you might go wrong in your selection.

The first step is to account for the needs of your brand. Once thst is done, peruse through the basic features that are must-haves for a good social media tool. These are the checkboxes you have to tick.

Social Media Platforms Supported

A social media marketing tool supports multiple social media platforms. So make sure that the tool you are considering integrates the channels that host the majority of your target audience.

Advanced Content Scheduling Functions

Content is king on social media, so the tool you pick must wer equipped to support the creation and scheduling of all types of content. Along with that, flexibility in scheduling and publishing is also good qualities a scheduler should have.

Pricing

Usually, there are multiple pricing plans within the same tool, depending on the features and number of users you need access to. So make sure to hash out these variables before looking at the tool prices.

Analytics and Reporting

Before you dive into the analytics, remember that most social media platforms already give you basic stats. But, a good social media tool goes beyond that. It digs deeper, giving you super useful insights to amp up your strategy.

Social Media Inbox

Now, managing and responding to a large influx of messages and comments from multiple platforms is no child’s play. That’s why including a social inbox in your toolkit is crucial for streamlining and keeping an eye on your social media communication. This ensures you stay on top of real-time messages from your audience, allowing you to respond promptly.

Active Customer Support

Last but not least, its always better if the tool you are using comes along with an active support team to promptly respond to your complaint and resolve your issues ASAP.

One of the best ways to determine the pro-activeness of customer support is to read authentic user reviews of that tool on trusted online forums.

Now that you have the basics down pat, you can go ahead and select the social media tool that suites your needs the best.

Over To You

Though there are tons of social media tools for business these days, only the right one can help you perfect your overall strategy. It’s best to opt for tools that support multiple channels so you can manage it all from a single source without much hopping.

And one such tool is SocialPilot which lets you do insight digging at a pocket-friendly price. Take the 14-day free trial to use this social media tool to create a wave on social media.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Social Media tools?

The tools that help you with automating your social media and managing it hassle-free are social media tools. There are many analytics, social media management, content curation, and listening tools. These tools are referred to as social media tools that help you with better social media management.

What is the best social media agency tool?

Here are the 11 best social media softwares for agencies:

  1. SocialPilot: An affordable social media tool for businesses to schedule, plan, publish, and analyze social media posts effortlessly
  2. Hootsuite: A social media tool that gives a bird's eye view of your social media performance
  3. Mavsocial: A social media tool that helps you get the most out of the visual content in your posts
  4. Buzzsumo: A social media tool that allows you to identify and analyze content for engagement
  5. Sprout Social: A social media tool that is best suited for enterprises and large agencies
  6. Leadfuze: A social media tool for business to prospect leads
  7. Taboola: A social media tool for promoting your best content on social media
  8. Audiense: A social media tool for digging out actionable user insights from social media platforms
  9. Buffer: A social media tool for authentic audience engagement
  10. SmarterQueue: A social media software for agencies to drive engagement and lead generation
  11. Keyhole: A social media listening tool for brand mentions to get more engagement

Which social media software is the most affordable?

SocialPilot is the most affordable social media tool for agencies that covers all requirements from content curation, social media analytics, content calendar, team, and client management, bulk scheduling, and advanced social media scheduling for $30/month only.

What are the best social media tools for businesses and why?

Here are the 11 best social media tools for businesses:

  1. SocialPilot
  2. HootSuite
  3. MavSocial
  4. Buzzsumo
  5. SproutSocial
  6. Leadfuze
  7. Taboola
  8. Audiense
  9. Buffer
  10. SmarterQueue
  11. Keyhole

Which social media is best for business?

The best social media for businesses are:

  1. LinkedIn
  2. Facebook
  3. Instagram
  4. TikTok
  5. Twitter
  6. Snapchat
  7. Pinterest

Is social media good for business?

Yes, social media is good for business. Here’s why:

  • Social media presence increases your overall visibility.
  • It also adds credibility and makes you trustworthy.
  • Great for competitive analysis.
  • You can customize and target customers on social media with ad campaigns.

What are the big 4 of social media tools?

The big four social media tools that we all know of include SocialPilot, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, and Agorapulse. However, The "big 4" social media tools sometimes refer to the four most popular social media platforms in terms of user base and overall impact on the social media landscape. These are:

  • Facebook: Founded in 2004, Facebook is the world's largest social media platform, with over 2.9 billion monthly active users. It allows users to connect with friends and family, join groups, and follow pages.
  • YouTube: Founded in 2005, YouTube is a video-sharing platform with over 2.3 billion monthly active users. It allows users to upload, share, and view videos on a wide range of topics.
  • Twitter: Founded in 2006, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform with over 330 million monthly active users. It allows users to post short messages called "tweets" and follow other users to see their tweets.
  • Instagram: Founded in 2010, Instagram is a photo and video-sharing platform with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. It allows users to share photos and videos, follow other users, and discover content through hashtags and the explore page.

What are the best tools for social media?

The best tools for social media are

  • SocialPilot, a social media management
  • Canva, a content creation tool
  • Post planner, to help you plan your content
  • SemRush, to help you with performance monitoring and analytics
  • Adobe Creative Cloud Express, to help you excel in your content quality and stand out from the crowd.

What is the most popular social media tool today?

There are various social media tools available in the market today, but some of the most popular social media tools that you can consider using are SocialPilot, SproutSocial, Hootsuite, Agorapulse, Canva, and Lightroom.

social media marketing using socialpilot

About the Author

Picture of Jimit Bagadiya

Jimit Bagadiya

Manage social media effortlessly.

  • Trial Begins Immediately
  • No CC Required
  • Change Plans Anytime
  • Cancel Anytime

Start Your 14-Day Free Trial