Social media marketing sounds like an easy thing to do until you get down to the nitty-gritty. That’s when you realize just how much time and effort goes into it.
Imagine juggling Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts simultaneously. It’s a recipe for burnout.
The good thing is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are plenty of social media management tools designed to help small businesses reach their goals.
From scheduling posts to tracking engagement, these tools can streamline your workflow and make managing multiple accounts a breeze.
But with dozens of options out there, it can be hard to decide which one to use and which one to ignore. That’s what propelled us to curate a list of the top 16 social media management tools for small businesses in 2023.
What’s a Social Media Management Tool to Begin With?
Simply put, a social media management tool is an online platform that simplifies different parts of running and managing a social media campaign, whether it’s to information on the latest trend, share your content across various social media platforms, schedule posts, or track metrics.
It’s like having a team of virtual social media marketing assistants in one place. Your choice of tools will depend on your business goals, budget, and other factors.
The Key Features of a Good Social Media Management Tool
Social media management tools are meant to help you execute your campaigns more efficiently and with less effort. Here are some features you should look out for:
- Ease of use: You don’t want to spend hours figuring out how the software works. Look for a tool that is intuitive and user-friendly.
- •Analytics & Reporting: You’ll want to track your performance over time and understand your campaigns’ performance. Make sure the tool has analytics and reporting features to help you do just that
- Scheduling: Automate the posting process by scheduling your content ahead of time. That way, you can focus on creating great content instead of worrying about when it should go out.
- Publishing Automation: Publish your content across multiple social media platforms with just a few clicks.
- Time-Saving Qualities: Look for tools with time-saving features like AI support or automation. It will help you maximize your productivity and get more done in less time.
- Detailed Data Analysis: Evaluate performance metrics, such as reach, engagement, and impressions.
Some tools even allow you to compare your results against competitors. Regardless of your choice, the goal is always to make your social media management smoother and more effective.
19 of the Best Social Media Management Tools of 2023
Here are some of the most popular social media management tools that small businesses can use to better manage their social media accounts in 2023:
#1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best-known social media management tools. It’s a comprehensive platform that allows you to manage, track and measure your performance across all the major social media platforms.
It has all the features you might need to get the most out of your social media activities, all rolled out into a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
From scheduling to analytics, Hootsuite offers powerful features to help you manage your social media accounts efficiently.
Key Features
- Publish and Schedule Social Media Posts on Various Platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
- Manage Incoming Mentions and Messages and Respond to them in One Centralized Inbox.
- Analytics to Monitor Performance of Social Media Campaigns with Detailed Reporting.
- Engagement Reports to Track Audience Engagement and View Key Statistics.
- Monitor Online Conversations around Your Brand and the Entire Industry.
- Securely Collaborate with Team Members and Clients in one place.
Unique Value
It’s one of the most comprehensive social media management platforms on the internet. You can use it to monitor your social media presence across multiple accounts and keyword phrases.
It can also connect with over 35 social media accounts, allowing you to bulk-schedule your posts, track key performance metrics, and much more.
Price: Their paid plans start at $99/month, with a 30-day free trial available
#2. Buffer
Buffer is another great social media management tool specifically designed for small businesses. It’s a straightforward and easy-to-use platform that allows you to schedule posts, track key performance metrics, and more.
They have a free plan for the first three social media accounts, making it the perfect choice for starting businesses.
Key Features
- Schedule and post to multiple social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Respond to mentions and message requests from one place.
- Analyse performance with detailed analytics and reporting.
- Create landing pages in just a few clicks.
Unique Value
Buffer allows you to schedule posts and track performance from one central dashboard. It has one of the cleanest and most intuitive user interfaces out there.
They’re also lauded for their timely customer support.
Price
They have a free plan for the first three social media accounts, and their paid plans start at $6/month, with a 14-day free trial.
#3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is almost similar to Hootsuite in terms of features, though it has a few unique capabilities of its own. It’s very user-friendly, allowing you to schedule posts and track key performance metrics from one central dashboard.
It’s also among the few social media management platforms that provide customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, allowing you to better understand and engage with customers.
Having a complete profile of your customers can help you more effectively target them with relevant content.
Key Features:
- Schedule, review, and post to multiple social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Manage customer relationships with a comprehensive CRM system.
- Their ViralPost feature lets you publish content optimally to maximize engagement.
- Analyze performance with detailed reporting and analytics features.
- Their smart inbox consolidates all your messages from social media in one place.
- You can identify the most relevant hashtags to improve your posts’ visibility.
- Custom URL tracking and UTM tagging can help you get a more in-depth insight into your posts’ performance.
Price
Plans start at $89/month, with a 30-day free trial.
#4. Social Pilot
Social Pilot is another great social media management platform for small businesses. It’s especially popular for its simple, user-friendly interface and effective automation capabilities.
In addition to scheduling publishing, the tool provides a curated content list, allowing you to quickly and easily find relevant content to share on your social media channels.
The tool can even share this content automatically to your feed.
What’s more? It offers an in-depth analytics dashboard, which allows you to track the performance of your posts and campaigns. It will help you understand what content your target audience is engaging with and even help you analyze their growth patterns to continue producing great content.
Key Features
- It can integrate with all the major social media networks, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- Allows you to customize and optimize your post images for each platform.
- Provides detailed reporting and analytics to help you track performance.
- The content curation feature helps you easily find relevant content to share.
Price: Plans start at $30/month, with a 14-day free trial.
#5. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is more of a social media calendar than a dedicated social media management platform.
Even better, it’s free for basic access to this calendar!
The tool offers many features, including scheduling and collaboration tools. That makes it easy for teams to work together on creating content and ensuring that all content is published on time.
Their overall goal is to help small businesses optimize their teams and streamline collaboration efforts.
Key Features
- Provides a comprehensive social media calendar view
- It allows you to manage all your content creation efforts in one place
- Includes a range of collaboration tools for teams
- Integrates with other popular software, including WordPress, Hootsuite, and more
- It has a headline studio that helps you create eye-catching headlines
Price: CoSchedule has a free plan offering basic social media calendar access. The plan starts at $19/month, with a 14-day free trial
#6. Sendible
Sendible is the number one social media management tool for agencies.
It’s specifically built for agencies and marketers, allowing you to manage multiple accounts and clients in one place.
The platform is designed to make monitoring, engaging, and reporting on your social media efforts easy.
On top of all that, they allow users to create a customizable dashboard with their own branding.
It also has an impressive integration list, with over 20 third-party tools, including Canva, Royalty-free search images, YouTube Search, and more.
Key Features:
- Manage multiple accounts and clients all in one place
- Easy to monitor, engage and report on your social media efforts
- Create a customizable dashboard with your own branding
- Integrates with over 20 third-party tools
Price: Sendible offers a 14-day free trial. After that, pricing starts at $29/month
#7. Agora Pulse
Agora Pulse is a simplified social media management tool with many powerful features.
It lets you easily monitor, analyse and engage with your audiences across multiple channels from one unified platform.
It’s an all-in-one scheduling platform with scheduling, monitoring, responding, and reporting features.
You can also collaborate with your team members and use it to measure the performance of your initiatives.
Key Features:
- Monitor, analyse, and engage with your audiences
- One unified platform to manage multiple channels
- Easy scheduling, monitoring, responding, and reporting features
- Collaborate with your team members
- Measure the performance of your initiatives
Price: Agora Pulse has a free plan, with paid plans starting at $99/month.
#8. eClincher
eClincher is the best-in-class social media management tool for small businesses.
It allows you to schedule and publish posts across multiple social networks and measure the performance of your campaigns.
You can also respond to messages and mentions, manage and monitor keywords, perform sentiment analysis, and more.
The Unique Value: You can auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds.
It also has a media library for your images.
What’s more? You can search for social media influencers who can help you promote your brand.
key Features
- Provides 24/7 customer support
- Auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds
- Media library for images
- Search for social media influencers
- Team collaboration with comments, drafts, tagging, notifications, and assigning messages
Price
- Their plan starts at $59/month, with a 14-day free trial.
#9. Later
“Later” is the number one marketing platform for Instagram.
Unlike the rest of the social media management tools on the list, Later only focuses on Instagram, although you can also connect it with Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
With Later, you can schedule posts, respond to comments and DMs, create shoppable posts, and analyse your performance.
It lets you easily plan and curate your Instagram feed with a drag-and-drop feature.
Key Features:
- Later is a social media scheduling tool that lets you plan and schedule Instagram posts
- Easy to use drag-and-drop visual content calendar
- Create shoppable posts
- Analyse your content performance
- It helps you find and curate user-generated content
Price
- Later plans start at $15/month with a 14-day free trial.
#10. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is social media scheduling and automation tool for individuals and small business owners.
It’s designed to help its users streamline their social media marketing efforts by enabling them to schedule, curate, automate, and analyse their posts.
The Unique Value: MeetEdgar stands out from the rest with its ability to repurpose and reuse evergreen content.
It also offers smart analytics and insights to track performance and engagement rates, helping users optimize their strategies.
key Features
- Repurpose old posts: MeetEdgar allows you to give old content a new life by automatically republishing them.
- Their scheduling tools allow you to set the optimal times to post or schedule your posts.
- A/B testing Smart analytics and insights to track performance and engagement
Price: MeetEdgar offers plans from $29.99/month with a 7-day free trial.
#11. Zoho Social
Zoho is one of the best collaboration platforms for social media marketing. It helps small businesses manage their social media accounts from one dashboard, saving time and giving them better control over their posts.
The Unique Value: Zoho simplifies social media management with its unified platform and tools for monitoring engagement, scheduling posts, and analysing performance.
It provides features like social media analytics, monitoring, scheduling, team collaboration, and post automation.
Key Features:
- Instant integration with Zoho CRM
- Real-time post scheduling
- Insightful analytics and reports
- Social listening dashboards
- Ability to collaborate with team members on posts
Price: Zoho offers plans from $15/month with a 15-day free trial.
#12. Tailwind
Tailwind is a smart visual marketing platform for businesses that want to create, schedule and measure their social media campaigns.
You can also use it to monitor your social media conversations and trends and get targeted insights into your audience.
The Unique Value: Tailwind provides features like hashtag recommendations, a drag-and-drop calendar, automated post scheduling, and integration with Pinterest and Instagram.
Key Features:
- Comprehensive analytics and insights
- Ability to customize post schedules
- In-depth hashtag research tool
- Drag and drop post scheduler
- Social media monitoring and insights
Price: Tailwind has a free plan with their paid plans starting at $19.99/month
#13. SmarterQueue
SmarterQueue is an advanced social media management tool that helps small businesses manage their content across multiple channels.
It allows you to plan, schedule and automate your content for social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
The Unique Value: SmarterQueue is one of the smartest all-in-one social media management tools for small businesses.
Key Features:
- Content calendar and scheduler
- Customizable templates for posts
- Evergreen recycling
- Cross-platform analytics
- Competitors analysis
- Social media monitoring
- Instagram scheduling
Price: SmarterQueue offers plans from $19/month, with a free trial on all plans.
#14. Post Planner
Post planner is a smart social media marketing tool that helps you create, curate, and schedule content for your social media channels.
The tool is designed to help its users with three things:
- Find high-quality content to publish
- Plan the perfect content publishing calendar
- Schedule posts
- It curates content and rates its suggestions based on performance.
The Unique Value: Post Planner provides an intuitive content curation system that allows small businesses to find and post relevant content easily.
Unlike other content calendars that randomly pick time slots, Post Planner allows you to select the content for each time slot. It will then curate and suggests content based on each time slot.
- Price Plans: Post Planner offers plans from $7/month with a 7-day free trial on all plans.
#15. SocialBee
SocialBee is a seamless social media posting tool for all social media platforms. It helps businesses design, automate and schedule their posts on all social media platforms.
It also has one of the friendliest user interfaces compared to its competitors.
You can add, organize, share, and schedule content with a few clicks, saving time and energy when managing your social media presence.
The Unique Value: With SocialBee, you can recycle evergreen posts while keeping them fresh with post variations and customizations.
You can also easily track your posts’ performance for better future social media marketing decisions.
Price Plans: SocialBee offers plans from $19/month with a 14-day free trial on all plans.
#16. Oktopost
Oktopost is another specialized social media management tool for businesses. It’s designed for B2B companies looking to maximize their visibility and generate leads on social media.
The tool allows users to track, analyse and optimize results in real time. It’s also one of the few social media management platforms offering employee advocacy features, which enables businesses to easily manage their employees’ social media profiles and posts.
The Unique Value: Oktopost has a unique AI-driven messaging assistant to help you craft messages quickly and accurately.
It also has a feature that lets you quickly tag content for easy social media sharing.
Key Features
- The tool lets you plan, schedule, and approve social media content before publication.
- It also allows you to track, analyse, and optimize your results in real time.
- It has reporting and analytics tools to monitor your post-performance, enabling you to make better social media decisions.
- It has a people database that lets you convert your social media following into qualified leads.
Price Plans: Oktopost offers plans from $9/month.
#17. Pallyy
Pallyy is as unique as it gets. Designed for agencies and professional social media marketers, Pallyy includes all the features you need to effectively manage your client’s social media presence.
It also has an appealing dashboard with a Kanban-style workflow that allows you to easily manage multiple accounts and collaborate with your teammates in real time.
The Unique Value: Pallyy has a database of influencers that you can use to find the right people to collaborate with quickly and a feature that allows you to manage multiple accounts at once.
Key Features:
- Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Google Business Profile, and Instagram.
- Post scheduling and content calendars for better organization
- Analytics tools to monitor your post-performance.
- Visual planner to quickly map out your social media strategy
- Easy collaboration with clients and teammates
Price Plans: Pallyy has two pricing plans: Free and Premium.
Their free plan limits you to only one social set, 15 scheduled posts, a feed planner, a performance report, a calendar, and table views.
Their premium versions go for $15/month and unlock more features.
These include complete social sets, unlimited scheduled posts, influencer search, lead generation capabilities, analytics dashboards, and more.
#18. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a Twitter-owned tool with a powerful interface for managing and monitoring multiple Twitter accounts. You can easily create, schedule, and post content to your Twitter feed in just a few clicks.
It also makes it easy to participate in Twitter chats, keep up with Twitter conversations, and engage with your audience.
The Unique Value: Tweetdeck offers a comprehensive view of conversations happening on Twitter in real time, which makes it easier to stay on top of conversations and build relationships with your followers.
Key Features:
- Allows you to view several feeds at once
- Real-time monitoring of conversations
- Schedule tweets in advance
- You can tweet, view, or respond to your tweets and messages.
- Real-time notifications and updates that let you manage your Twitter profiles easily
Price Plans: Tweetdeck is free to use.
#19. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic bills itself as a local social media marketing platform. If you’re targeting a local audience, then PromoRepublic could be a great fit.
It offers an array of content creation features, making it easy to create and curate content for each social media platform.
It’s more of a local SEO than a social media management tool, but it still has the features needed to manage your social media accounts.
Key Features
- Works with small businesses, franchises, and agencies
- They have a media and asset library to help you create content quickly
- You can monitor your competitors’ social media accounts
- You can target the right audience with hyper-localized ads, uncover insights about the local market
Price Plans
PromoRepublic has three pricing options:
Small business (at $49/month): Limits you to 10 social media accounts and one user
Agency (at $79/month): Limits you to 30 social media accounts and ten users
Custom: Unlimited social accounts and users, pricing based on your requirements.
Overall, Promo Republic is a great tool for local businesses who want to manage their social media presence and drive local traffic to their website. It’s easy to use and set up.
The Final Wrap
As you can see, you’re not alone in managing your social media presence. There are plenty of great tools out there to help businesses of all sizes stay on top of their game.
In this article, we’ve presented the best social media management tools for small businesses in 2023.
Whether you’re looking for a free tool or a comprehensive social media platform with all the bells and whistles, there’s something here for everyone. So don’t delay; take control of your social media presence today.