Our Top 5 Social Media Schedulers + Choosing the Right One for Your Business
When it comes to your social media marketing strategy, there are many ways to add efficiencies into your brainstorm, creation, and publishing processes. This includes social media schedulers, which allow you to write and schedule your social media content all in one place. But there are many scheduling options available, and what works for one business or organization doesn’t necessarily work for another.
We’re breaking down our top five social media scheduling platforms to help you decide which one best fits your business—after all, it’s hard to run with ill-fitting shoes.
Why we use social media schedulers
There are three main reasons why we use social media schedulers: batching content, accessing analytics, and responding to messages across platforms.
Batching
When you batch content, you’re essentially creating a group of social media posts to post incrementally over a period of time. Whether you’re batching for two weeks, a month, or a whole quarter at a time, it allows you to stay in the social media marketing mindset for a longer period of time, rather than creating one post at a time. Think of it like you’re making a batch of cookies: it’s going to take a little longer to scoop a whole tray of cookie dough, but in the end you’ll be more efficient than baking one cookie at a time. Social media schedulers make it easy to batch because you can see which posts are scheduled for which days, and you can adjust them to post at the times your audience is most likely to engage, which brings us to the importance of analytics.
Analytics
Social media schedulers offer important analytics to help you determine your most popular types of content, when audience members engage online, and which platforms outperform others. Analytics are also a fantastic way to test what types of messaging approaches work best on various platforms; then, you can use that data to further refine your messaging to best reach your audience. Although you can see these metrics on individual social media platforms, the schedulers bring them all together in one place in an often more digestible format.
Responding to Messages
Many social media schedulers offer a feature where you can manually or automatically respond to messages from all your platforms in one place. Using them, it becomes easier to manage customer service requests and stay engaged with your online community.
Our top 5 social media schedulers
Compare these five social media scheduling tools—Later, Hootsuite, Sprout, SEMSocial, and Cloud Campaign—to determine which one would work best for your strategy and goals.
Later
Later is one of the most straightforward and intuitive social media schedulers, making it one of the easiest ones to learn quickly. It offers a “Linkin.bio” integration, a great tool for attaching specific links to individual posts. This is especially helpful for platforms like Instagram and TikTok, which don’t permit clickable links in posts. On your “Linkin.bio” page, you can add buttons to allow people to explore different areas of your site; this is especially helpful for promoting the pages in which you want to drive the most traffic.
Later offers opportunities to add many profiles from a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, X, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, but it is best structured for photo content, and many find its features are tailored toward Instagram.
The platforms’s prominent features include:
- A “Conversations” tab where you can respond to comments across platforms.
- An “Analytics” tab that provides an overview of your metrics for each platform, giving you insights about your audience, post performance, reel performance, story performance, industry-specific hashtag trends, and Linkin.bio clicks.
- AI integrations to help you brainstorm and write posts.
Later has a range of pricing options, largely depending on the number of social sets and users you need. For those who only need one social set and one user, it makes sense to choose the “Starter” package, which comes in at $16.67 per month. Later is also available for businesses of any size, enterprises included.
Who should use Later?
This platform has one of the lowest monthly pricing options, making it ideal for entrepreneurs and small businesses who are looking to streamline their social media marketing strategy. Like we mentioned before, Later is best for companies that post a significant amount of visual content, specifically on Instagram. Although it’s still usable for posts on text-based platforms, like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn, there are better options available if you exclusively use them.
Although Later is great for a range of business sizes, we recommend it for small to mid-sized businesses. It has many valuable functionalities but doesn’t include all the bells-and-whistles that a large business or enterprise might require from their social media schedulers. It also works well for agencies who need to switch between multiple sets of social platforms.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media schedulers across industries, known for its powerful automations that save time in the social media marketing process. Many users value its “OwlyWriter AI,” a content-generation tool helping you create and test various social media captions. This rapid content generation will develop engaging and relevant posts based on your previous posts and audience. In addition, Hootsuite provides instant insights on every post, letting you see and repurpose top-performing content without the hassle of going through a manual review process. In addition to these automations, Hootsuite offers several other other valuable features, including:
- Best Time to Publish: Review insights providing details about your specific audience to help you identify the best times to post.
- Analytics: See the most important data at-a-glance with custom boards that show the metrics you care about.
- Social Advertising: Test Meta ads and set automations to reallocate your budget to push funds toward top-performers.
- Inbox: Manage direct-message conversations and mentions on all of your platforms in one unified inbox to streamline the response process, real-time engagement, and customer feedback strategies.
Hootsuite’s pricing starts at $99 per month for one user and 10 social accounts, including features like a competitive benchmarking tool and Canva integration. Get even more powerful with the “Team” package, which adds automatic link tracking, team roles and permissions, a custom-branded URL, and more.
Who should use Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is one of the most powerful social media schedulers, making it a fantastic option for many businesses. However, it has more of a learning curve than other platforms and works best for people who are tech-savvy and have worked in other schedulers. That said, Hootsuite has a plethora of thought leadership resources online, providing many tutorials for both using the platform and creating valuable content for your audience.
The cost of Hootsuite is often a barrier, making it not as preferable for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Although, the upfront cost can be worth it because it saves a significant amount of billable hours for tech savvy individuals.
We recommend Hootsuite for large businesses and enterprises. Hootsuite will allow them to take their social media posting and interaction to the next level. It’s also valuable for agencies who need to manage multiple accounts in one place.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social aims to deliver actionable insights that make a real difference for your business’ impact. It supports the typical social media platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, X, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn, as well as Google My Business, Google Analytics, TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and other similar platforms. Prominent features of Sprout include:
- Smart Inbox: An all-in-one place for you to see mentions and messages from your different platforms.
- Cases: “Cases” manages your interactions, letting you track and resolve issues or conversations with customers.
- Listening: Browse hot topics of conversation within your industry to create more applicable social media content.
- Reports: Compare your insights and performance with competitors and analyze customer care and team performance.
- Reviews: Monitor your online reviews across a plethora of platforms and sort them by response priority.
The lowest package cost for Sprout Social is $249 per seat per month and includes five social profiles, keyword and location monitoring, and AI-generated alt text. More expensive packages include more abilities, like helpdeck integrations and message spike alerts.
Who should use Sprout Social?
Sprout Social is great for businesses who have a strong focus on customer service and support. It gives your team a way to manage these online conversations in one place so you can create a positive customer experience for all. Similar to Hootsuite, the pricing may be a turn off for some businesses and organizations, but it’s an extremely valuable resource for those who prioritize analytics and post performance.
Semrush Social
Semrush Social claims that it gives users a “360º view of your and competitors' strategies” and can “boost any brand’s visibility and reputation.” Like other social media schedulers, it connects with major social platforms and acts as a place to manage and track your content; but its integration with Semrush’s other tools is what makes it truly valuable. This lets you connect website SEO data and your social media strategy, opening up new insights and opportunities. Other features include:
- Tracking and analyzing your competitors’ accounts and comparing them to your social media performance.
- Managing the internal approval process.
- Finding trending content ideas based on your industry.
- AI integrations that help you generate photos, captions, videos, and more.
Semrush Social’s pricing starts at $139.95 per month, giving you 5 projects, 500 keywords to track, 10,000 results per report, and research tools.
Who should use Semrush Social?
Current Semrush loyalists will love Semrush Social. It helps you better integrate multiple parts of the digital marketing ecosystem. The pricing may be an obstacle for smaller businesses and organizations, but mid- to large-level businesses—especially those with strong digital marketing strategies in place—will thrive on Semrush Social.
Cloud Campaign
Cloud Campaign calls itself the “Agency-Friendly Social Media Management Platform.” It’s an AI-powered, brandable, and scalable software that integrates well with all significant social media platforms. On top of that, you can connect it with Google Suite, Canva, Google Analytics, and more. Other interesting features include:
- Free white-labeling
- An integrated client-approval process
- An unlimited number of users
- A content library with category tags
- Message responding all in one accessible place
- Hashtag performance analytics
The lowest-priced package on Cloud Campaign is the “Freelancer” at $41 per month. This includes one brand workspace, seven social accounts, and chat support.
Who should use Cloud Campaign?
Cloud Campaign is designed for marketing agencies and social media marketing freelancers. Although you can use it for businesses in other industries, it’s specifically built to best serve a marketing agency with multiple social media clients. The price point makes it more accessible for smaller businesses and organizations, however, in order to get the most powerful tools, you have to pay a higher price.
Why we choose “Later”
Although we’re well-versed in all of these schedulers, we often use Later to support our client base. It’s one of the lowest price options, making it accessible for our entrepreneur, small business, and nonprofit clients, while still having optimal tools for social media management. There aren’t as many automations available as platforms like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, but it’s still an extremely valuable tool that streamlines the social media process.
Still can’t decide? Consider your social media goals
You just received a lot of information, but the most important thing to consider is how each of these schedulers will best support your social media marketing goals. Ask yourself how your goals align with each tool using these guiding questions:
- Does your social media strategy include social listening?
- Does your social media strategy include interacting with users on social media?
- What does your budget look like?
- How often will you use this tool?
- Are you experienced with other social media scheduling tools?
If you still can’t decide, we recommend trying the free trial opportunities for each one to see which one works best.
Choosing the right social media scheduler is like selecting any other business tool; it needs to align with your specific needs, goals, and resources. Remember, the most expensive option isn’t always the best for your situation, nor is the most feature-rich platform necessarily what you need. Take advantage of free trials, assess your current social media workflow, and consider your growth trajectory before making a decision. The right scheduler should feel less like another task to manage and more like a valuable team member helping you achieve your social media goals.