15 Social Media Scheduling Tools to Save Tons of Time in 2023

The best scheduling tools make social media marketers’ work lives easier in multiple ways. They:

• Free up time by allowing you to create and schedule content in designated blocks of time rather than as disruptive one-offs throughout the day
• Reduce the risk of mistakes by setting up approval workflows and allowing time for reviewing content before it goes live
• Help you save even more time by allowing you to customize and adapt posts for multiple social media accounts, all on one screen
• Ensure you post at the best time to engage your audience
• Help you collaborate effectively with team members and other stakeholders
• Allow you to easily plan, review, and edit an integrated schedule of social content across platforms and social media campaigns

We’re not too shy to say we think Hootsuite is the best social media management tool and social media scheduling tool around. It’s suitable for teams of all sizes, with options ranging from affordable basic social media scheduling tools all the way up to enterprise-level solutions for complex organizations and very large teams.

Hootsuite supports all the scheduling functions you could need, from straightforward auto-posting, through bulk scheduling to custom recommendations on the best time to post based on your own social media analytics and results.

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You can also customize and schedule one post for various social platforms, all from one screen. This approach is much more effective than simply cross-posting the same content across multiple accounts.

Hootsuite supports scheduling to the following social networks. (Click on each link for more specific details on how to schedule content for each platform.)

Hootsuite has the added bonus of offering detailed analytics that help inform your social media scheduling, as well as powerful content creation tools (including an AI post writer) and a simple calendar view that allows you to see and edit all your social content across accounts on one screen.

Hootsuite plans start at $99 per month.

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2. Later

Later is a social media management platform similar to Hootsuite (you can compare Later and Hootsuite here). It comes with a variety of features, from analytics to scheduling tools, but it really shines through as a platform for smaller brands and creators who like to visualize and preview social media content before they post.

Source: Later

If you want to give your Instagram feed a little razzle-dazzle, Later has some neat extras. They offer an Instagram feed planner that lets you visualize exactly how your Instagram grid will look after you post. It’s a nice way to give your grid a quick rebrand and make it stand out.

Sprout Social is another top contender in the battle of social media management tools, and it may be worth your consideration. Offering scheduling and analytics for all the major social media platforms, Sprout can help you plan and execute your social strategy.

Source: Sprout Social

Like Hootsuite, Sprout offers a unified social media inbox that allows you to respond to messages across social media channels in one place. Easily prioritize messages, save time with auto-responders, and tag your messages to keep things tidy.

You’ll also appreciate Sprout’s full-featured analytics dashboard, which provides details on both your paid and organic posts and helps you decide when to publish content for the best results. You can also easily white-label and download reports from the Sprout dashboard.

Sprout is quite a bit more expensive than Hootsuite, but Hootsuite offers more features and integrations. Compare Hootsuite and Sprout to see which one works best for you.

4. Canva

You already know Canva is the design-savvy social media manager’s best friend. The easy-to-use graphic design tool has revolutionized the way we create content, which is why we permanently added Canva to the Hootsuite dashboard. (No joke, there are Canva templates built right into Hootsuite Composer).

Source: Canva

But did you know that Canva Pro also includes a social media scheduler and planner? It currently comes with posting capabilities for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin. Within the Canva Pro dashboard, you can also track engagement, likes, clicks, impressions, and more to see how you’re performing.

Although it’s perhaps best known as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, HubSpot also offers its own social media management software that may serve your needs.

Like many of the aforementioned tools, HubSpot’s social media scheduler is designed to help you manage all your campaigns from one place. It allows you to publish content to LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and schedule your content to go live at the best possible time.

Source: Hubspot

Buffer is another social media scheduler that comes with tools to help you build your presence on social media. It allows you to schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Mastodon. You can also use it to reply to comments on Facebook Pages and Instagram business accounts.

Source: Buffer

When it comes to all-in-one platforms, Buffer is relatively light on features. It doesn’t offer analytics for all platforms and doesn’t come with any social listening capabilities. However, Buffer’s user-friendly dashboard is simple and straightforward, making it great for social media managers who just want to get in, schedule, and get out.

Be sure to read our guide to Hootsuite vs. Buffer for more on how these platforms compare.

Meta Business Suite is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to schedule content on Facebook and Instagram (posts, Stories, and ads). It’s available either on desktop or as a mobile app.

Even though this is a native tool, you won’t be able to access all the content creation features of Facebook and Instagram when scheduling Stories through Meta Business Suite. However, you can access text, image cropping, and some stickers.

Tailwind is a social media scheduling instrument that helps scheduling on Pinterest, Instagram, and Fb.

Initially Tailwind was a scheduler particularly for Pinterest. It stays one of the most effective options particularly for Pinterest scheduling, providing a customized posting schedule, interval planning, and the flexibility to schedule to a number of boards.

Word that even for those who simply need to use Tailwind for Fb, you’ll want an Instagram account to join.

Tailwind additionally integrates with Hootsuite by means of the Tailwind for Pinterest app in the Hootsuite App Listing.

RSS Autopublisher is a scheduling instrument that routinely posts content material from RSS feeds to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Fb.

In the event you create content material by means of commonly up to date mediums like a weblog or podcast, RSS Autopublisher will autoschedule hyperlinks to your social accounts concurrently you schedule your content material to go dwell.

Airtable is slightly bit completely different from the others on this listing. Somewhat than scheduling content material to submit routinely to social networks, Airtable is primarily used to create workflows for the creation of that content material and triggers to autopost.

You may schedule and monitor objectives, aims, duties, and timelines. Airtable Automations then makes use of triggers to routinely carry out specified actions, together with posting to Twitter or Fb.

To show Airtable into an entire social media scheduling instrument that can routinely schedule content material straight to Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest in addition to Fb and Twitter, set up the Airtable Automatons app for Hootsuite.

KAWO is a social media scheduler particularly for the Chinese language social media platforms WeChat, Weibo, Kuaishou, and Douyin (the Chinese language model of TikTok). It gives a social media calendar view, scheduling instruments, and really helpful greatest instances to submit.

You can even use the KAWO app in Hootsuite to monitor your WeChat and Weibo content material alongside your different social channels in the Hootsuite dashboard.

MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling instrument designed for entrepreneurs and small companies. Its distinctive function is that it’s going to repurpose evergreen content material to fill scheduled time slots for those who don’t add any new content material to the queue.

MeetEdgar can schedule and repurpose content material for Fb, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Nevertheless, it lacks some of the extra superior options required for bigger organizations.

In the event you run a Shopify retailer, the Shopify Fb & Instagram Auto Publish app permits you to create a social media schedule that posts a brand new or random product to your social feeds on the identical time each day, or on chosen days of the week.

It’s a great way to be sure you’re publishing content material persistently, even when you have no new content material concepts.

Regardless of its identify, this social media scheduling app works with Instagram, Fb, Twitter, and Pinterest. It’s nice at what it does, though it actually is supposed to take care of simply this one very particular kind of social media scheduling.

Word: In the event you’d like to combine your ecommerce retailer with Hootsuite to entry extra strong scheduling options, take a look at the Shopview Hootsuite apps for Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, or Magento.

Say what? Isn’t Mailchimp an e mail advertising instrument?

Properly, certain. However for those who already use Mailchimp in your e mail campaigns, it’s additionally an excellent instrument for scheduling social media posts. It integrates with Twitter, Fb, and Instagram, so you may create and schedule content material for these platforms throughout the Mailchimp interface.

One other useful scheduling possibility is the flexibility to create posts for Fb, Instagram, and Twitter which might be connected to a particular e mail throughout the Mailchimp interface, so that they routinely submit on the identical time the e-mail sends. This can be a great way to hold your social schedule and content material constant together with your e mail promotions.

You can even join Mailchimp to Hootsuite to share campaigns to your social channels straight from the dashboard.

How do social media scheduling instruments work?

When you schedule the content material, it’ll submit routinely on the time you select. This implies you may arrange social posts for a day, every week, or perhaps a month or extra suddenly and be assured that the content material will go dwell whether or not or not you’re at your desk (or your telephone).

However how does it truly work behind the scenes?

Scheduling instruments join to every social community by means of that community’s API, or utility programming interface. Which may sound difficult, however basically it’s only a means for the social community and the scheduling instrument to speak to each other.

Luckily, that communication occurs in the background. So that you don’t want to know any code or particular programming languages to make these instruments work. There are often only a couple of steps concerned to submit social content material utilizing a scheduling instrument.

How to submit utilizing a scheduling instrument for social media

Right here’s a fast breakdown of how scheduling instruments for social media typically work on the primary social platforms.

1. Hyperlink your accounts to a social media scheduling instrument.
2. Compose your social content material and select which account(s) you need to submit to. A very good social media scheduling instrument will provide you with the choice to customise one submit for a number of social accounts on varied networks, all from one display.
3. Select the schedule for later possibility and choose your most well-liked time. The most effective social media scheduling platforms will present custom-made suggestions for the most effective time to schedule your submit for essentially the most response.
4. That’s it for posts or Tweets. For Instagram Tales, there’s another step. You’ll get a push notification on the scheduled time to full the method.

While you import your video to your social media scheduling instrument, simply mark the video as personal and use the scheduling possibility to set a time for the video to go public.

For the visible learners, listed here are some extra particular particulars about scheduling content material for Instagram:

And a few particulars for Pinterest:

And, lastly, some particulars for scheduling posts to TikTok:

How to schedule a number of posts without delay utilizing a social media scheduling instrument

One enormous benefit of utilizing a scheduling instrument for social media is the flexibility to schedule a number of posts without delay. That is also referred to as bulk scheduling.

Right here’s the way it works.

1. Add the posting dates and social content material for a number of posts to a CSV file that conforms to the necessities of your social media scheduling instrument. Hootsuite permits you to bulk schedule up to 350 posts.
2. Add the file to your social media scheduling instrument.
3. Evaluation your posts, make any desired additions or tweaks, and click on Schedule.

Use Hootsuite to schedule all of your social media posts, have interaction together with your followers, and monitor the success of your efforts. Join a free trial at this time.