The 9 best social media scheduling tools to help you stay visible
Social Media can be so overwhelming.
Having a schedule can help you escape the overwhelm
You want to save time and make more money in your business right? I mean who doesn’t. That’s why we are in business to begin with.
You want to spend more hours doing the things you love, like working with your clients, providing or making products for your customers and less time on activities that are not these things.
Many people find the idea of managing their online content or message ( whatever you want to call it) and doing their business quite overwhelming.
What happens when you get busy is the first thing to go is the stuff you don’t like. If that’s getting your content online then one day you look up and discover you have no more work coming in because you disappeared from sight.
Having a Content Management Strategy helps us stay visible. It helps us stay present in the mind of our customers and potential customers.
Once we have our online content strategy done we need to find an easy way to deliver it to our audience.
That’s where scheduling tools can save the day.
Now a quick note here. Scheduling tools are not about “set and forget”. They are a part of your overall strategy to get your message in front of your audience.
You will still have to make sure you are seen as the person behind the posts. Your customers buy from you, not your scheduling tool!
That’s why it’s so important to stay visible, using scheduling tools helps you with that.
First question: What are scheduling tools?
One definition of “scheduling tools” is: a tool that helps organise and manage appointments or reservations.
But today we are talking about scheduling your online content and in particular your social media posts
A social media scheduling tool is a tool that helps organise and manage the delivery of your social media posts to your audience.
My focus is mainly on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. So this article will focus on the best scheduling tools ( in my opinion) for those platforms
Second question: Why should you even use a scheduling tool for your online content?
If you are like me, you will have felt the pull of quickly checking a post on Facebook only to look up and see two hours have somehow disappeared from your life. Now it may not be that for you extreme but social media can suck your time away.
If you want to have a regular, consistent presence on social media, maybe across 2-3 platforms, and post something entertaining, informative or ask for a sale every day…
And you want to have a life that includes family, friends, exercise and generally staying healthy then it would be near impossible for you to make all of your posts "live."
Going Live for each and every post, would be a highly inefficient use of your time and severely disrupt your life.
Scheduling tools can help you get your life back. And give you time to do the other more important things for you and your business.
That brings us to your third question: Which is the best Scheduling tool for me?
Ah the $64 million-dollar question
The answer (as often is the case in these situations) is that depends.
It depends on a number of things: including but not limited to, where you are in your business journey,
which platforms do you use and what interface do you like best?
It doesn’t matter where you are right now there will be a scheduling tool that you can use that helps you free up some of your time to focus on other things.
Here are my recommendations for the 9 best options for social media scheduling tools.
The first 5 are tools that I have personally used or have done in the past.
The second 4 are tools that I know other colleagues have used and are very happy with them.
Top 5 scheduling tools that I use or have used in the past
#1 Facebook creator studio
Creator Studio brings together all the tools you need to effectively post, manage, monetise and measure content across all your Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts. It’s free and “the algorithms” like it because it’s from their platform.
Anyone who manages a Page can use Creator Studio, though your Page role determines the specific information you see and the actions you can take.
You can schedule videos as well as text posts.
#2 Buffer
Buffer operates a “freemium model”. You can schedule 10 social updates for free, . This gives you a great opportunity to see if you like using a scheduling tool. You can upgrade if you wish to a paid plan where you can undertake unlimited scheduling. I still use the free version.
As its name indicates, Buffer allows you to build up a selection of relevant posts you want to share, which can then schedule to go out at more suitable, appropriate times for your audience.
It allows you to customise your messages for each social network.
The Buffer mobile app and the web browser extension make it easy to add webpage links, titles and images quickly to your Buffer schedule.
It suggests the most suitable times for you to post to each of your networks. Buffer also provides analytics showing how successful your posts were.
#3 Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts to publish at your preferred time in the future. Depending on the plan you choose, you can post to a wide range of social accounts. You can both create posts yourself for future (or indeed current) publishing, or you can select existing posts to post in the future.
Hootsuite supports a wide range of platforms, including personal accounts, business pages, and other types of social activity.
It does offer a free plan which limits you to scheduling 30 messages across three social profiles.
The $30 / month Professional plan is more usable, allowing you unlimited scheduling across 10 social profiles. At this level, you can set up bulk scheduling as well.
#4 Recurpost
RecurPost is a social media scheduler with repeating schedules. It lets you categorise your updates into categories, such as blogs, videos, other people's content, memes and quotes etc.
You can then create schedules for each library. For instance, you can have one blog post go out on your Facebook pages in the afternoon and one meme go out on your Twitter every 4 hours. Once an update goes out it goes and sits at the end of the library to be posted again once everything else has gone out once.
This is a great tool for your Evergreen content. I use it for a client’s blog posts which have information that can be shared more than once! Which is what we should all be aiming for with our content.
Another feature I really like is being able to pause and reconnect individual libraries. This means my clients’ Christmas posts related posts can be turned on in November, and then turned off in January!
They also have a Free plan
#5 Later
Later lets you post to a variety of social networks, but its main emphasis is on Instagram.
Like Instagram, you begin a post in Later with an image, rather than text. You upload the image to Later and then create the accompanying caption.
At the heart of Later you have a Media Library. You begin each post by uploading images to your Media Library, and they remain available for future posts. This makes Later a great place to store your content
You can add notes and labels to your media items and add a star to any image you wish to highlight. You can filter your images in many ways.
You can also upload and share videos if you have one of Later’s paid plans. Later also helps you to upload and create Stories.
With Later’s Quick Schedule, you can drag and drop posts into time slots in your schedule. This is Later’s equivalent of a queue ( which you will find in Buffer). Later populates your next available time slot with your media content.
The top 4 scheduling tools people I know have used
These next five scheduling tools come with more bells and whistles than the previous five.
If you are looking at posting your content across multiple platforms then these are definitely worth taking a look at.
#6 Sprout Social
Is a more expensive option. It is an all-in-one social media posting/scheduling tool. It allows you to both schedule and post across multiple networks. Great for marketing teams.
Sprout Social's calendar feature provides a team with a bird’s eye view of what’s being published and promoted on a daily basis.
This may be something to work towards if you are planning on growing your team.
The package also includes a variety of social media analytics so you can see how well different pieces of content perform.
Plans range from $99 to $249 per month, after a free 30-day trial.
#7 Meet Edgar
MeetEdgar offers most of the usual tools allowing you to schedule content across a range of platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They expect to add Instagram and Pinterest soon. Technically the tool is called Edgar – and the webpage/app is where you “meet” Edgar.
You can use it to “queue” as much as your content as possible with minimal involvement on your part. You can create multiple categories for different types of content, such as blog posts, promotional materials, quotes, and questions. You use the social media calendar to add post categories at set times you want them to go out.
It makes reposting evergreen content particularly easy. As Edgar automatically re-shares your content over time, it becomes visible to more people and different audiences, without you doing any extra work.
MeetEdgar offers a single clear pricing plan - $49 per month.
There are no free versions
#8 Co-schedule
CoSchedule provides a way for you to schedule and organise your marketing.
For a solopreneur or influencer, this may just involve coordinating your blog and social posts.
If you are a business, you may have other marketing activities that need to be centrally organised. It even allows agencies to organise all of their projects for every client.
Social media scheduling, therefore, is just one part of CoSchedule’s offering. And because of that the price is higher than most other options in this article.
Plans start at $60 per month.
You can easily schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.
#9 Tailwind
Tailwind’s focus on assisting you with your visual marketing. It describes itself as being “your end-to-end solution for winning on Pinterest and Instagram.”
It is an all-in-one tool that allows you to discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify reach, and analyse results.
It features drag-and-drop functionality that makes it easy for marketers to upload, tag and publish their Pinterest and Instagram posts in bulk. Users can shuffle their post queue, to ensure that they keep variety in their posts.
You can also use Tailwind to automatically recommend the times for you to pin / post your content. Tailwind bases these suggestions on when your audience is most active on the relevant platform.
Again here there is no free plan
Tailwind offers three very different pricing plans. The cheapest one is for bloggers and small businesses with fewer than 25 employees, Plus plan at $9.99 per account per month.
Where to next?
Scheduling tools can be a great way to jump off the social media hamster wheel or stop you going down the infamous “Rabbit Hole” thus giving you more time to spend on your business with clients and therefore making more money.
Most of these tools have a free trial or a free version which you can use to see if they are a good fit for you.
Remember these are tools.
They are not to be used as a set and forget option for getting your content online. You will still need to add to and update your content.
Make sure to use them as part of your overall content management strategy to deliver your message to your audience consistently.
If you are struggling to get your content under control and would like some help with creating your very own content strategy then let’s chat.
Book a FREE call with me today.
Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash
