Social media has been on the rise for 18 months. Twitter is X now, AI is everywhere, Threads are a thing, Mastodon may or may not be relevant anymore. Despite the turmoil, social media remains one of the most powerful tools available to modern businesses. You can use it to find new customers, drive traffic to your website, and engage with existing customers in order to keep them engaged with your business. But despite all the drama, the tools you use are more important than ever to keep things on top.

Social media is even more fragmented than it used to be, and if you’re not careful, you can waste valuable time trying to manage multiple inboxes across five different apps, posting the same content across platforms and what it’s on Everything else. It is almost impossible to use regular client applications. You need a social media management app to do it right. The best social media management app allow you to manage all your social media presence in one app. You can edit, analyze, and manage your social media accounts, so you can focus on creating content that your audience enjoys. I put about 50 social media management apps to the test, and based on my testing this year, here are six of the best.

Good social media management app Buffer provides a straightforward social media strategy Hootsuite offers a full-featured X experience SocialPilot for small groups Loomly for automating any social media service Iconosquare for visuals Sendible offers an affordable social media management app with it all Once you choose a social media management app, you can automate it to make it more powerful and efficient. See how you can use automation to improve your social marketing. Or, if your focus is more on Instagram, here are 3 ways to install Instagram for Business yourself.

What’s the stylish social media tool? How we test and estimate apps Our stylish apps roundups are written by people who have spent utmost of their careers using, testing and writing software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours probing and testing apps, using each operation as it’s intended to be used, and assessing it against the norms we’ve established for the order. We’re noway paid for links from any app or website in our papers we take for granted the trust compendiums place in us by furnishing honest reviews of the orders and apps we review.

The problem with social media management software is that they all have the same limitations: the content that social networks allow. This means that not only do most social media management app offer similar features, but those features vary among the social networks they support. For example, TikTok gives you completely different analytics data than Facebook, while Instagram is different to post than YouTube.

And that’s before we even talk about Twitter- instead, X. Until Elon Musk bought it, Twitter had an open API. Many social media management apps relied on offering features like competitor monitoring and social media listening. But such features currently cost around $42,000 per month, so they’re only available on some full-featured enterprise apps or the most expensive plans.

All of this means that when it comes to good social media manager software, you shouldn’t expect wild standout features for specific social networks. No social media management platform allows you to post directly to an individual Instagram profile or respond to comments on someone else’s Facebook page posts. There are still some key features that top social media managers have that set them apart. They often make managing your business’s social media easier and more efficient. Specifically, they offer:

Support for multiple social networks, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, is limited, though support for Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, and new Twitter alternatives are similar it could be important in the future. The goal of each of these apps is to manage your social network as much as possible in one app. Powerful scheduling tools, so you can batch your social media posts at the beginning of the week or month, then just let them run. (Being able to respond to customers on your social media inbox was a bonus, but you didn’t have to.)

Detailed analysis of how your posts are performing. The larger the app, the more powerful search I need—at least until what social media apps offer is limited. For enterprise applications, for example, I needed X more powerful features like social tracking, where you can view information about your business, or even your competitors. Many specialized applications may not allow access to these important APIs. cost effectiveness. All social media software is limited to those that offer the same features, and the higher prices have to be justified by new features, stellar customer support, and integration tools .

AI also looks like it’s going to have a big impact on how companies manage social media, but for now, I haven’t been super impressed with the many apps they’ve done a great job with. Most apps that let you schedule your posts already use some form of AI to find the best times, and the apps that were meant to write social media posts for you are all very similar, not much better instead of using ChatGPT. For an AI-powered social media manager, check out our list of the best available right now. And while many of the apps on this list incorporate AI features, they’re all tools that let you post whatever you want on social media—whether written by you, an AI, or an intern . . . .

Every tool that made the list has a free trial—sometimes even a free plan—so don’t be afraid to dive in and give it a try. The best social media management app for you will be the best fit for your needs and price.

I’ve been talking about tech for over a decade and have updated this list for the last three years, so I’ve spent dozens of hours researching social media marketing software. After you’ve put them through their paces, compared the features and user experience they offer to other similarly priced apps, and generally evaluated how good (or bad) it is to use them, these are the six social media planning tools that I think would be the best | Suitable for most projects.