The 6 best social media management tools in 2024

By Harry Guinness · November 22, 2023

A hero image with the logos of the best social media management tools

Social media has been in upheaval for the last 18 months. Twitter is now X, AI is everywhere, Threads is a thing, and Mastodon may or may not be relevant again. Despite the chaos, social media is still one of the most powerful tools available to modern businesses. You can use it to find new clients, drive traffic to your site, and keep in touch with existing customers so that they stay engaged with your business. But with all the drama, the tools you use to keep on top of things are more important than ever.

With social media even more fractured than it was, if you aren't careful, you can waste huge amounts of valuable time trying to manage multiple inboxes across five different apps, post the same things on all the different platforms, and keep on top of everything else. It's next to impossible using regular consumer apps. To do it properly, you need a social media management app.

The best social media management tools allow you to control your full social media presence in a single app. You can automate, analyze, and manage social media accounts, so you can focus on creating the kind of content your audience loves. I put almost 50 social media management apps to the test, and based on my testing this year, here are the six best.

The best social media management tools

Buffer for straightforward social media scheduling
Hootsuite for a fully-featured X experience
SocialPilot for small teams
Loomly for automating any social media service
Iconosquare for visual content
Sendible for an affordable all-in-one social media management app

Once you've picked a social media management app, you can make it even more powerful and efficient by automating it. Take a look at how you can use automation to improve your social marketing. Or, if you're focused mostly on Instagram, here are 3 ways to automatically post to Instagram for Business.

What makes the best social media management tool?

How we evaluate and test apps

Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.

The problem with social media management software is that it all has the same limits: the features the various social networks give it access to. This means that not only do most social media scheduling tools offer very similar features, but those features vary between the social networks they support. TikTok, for example, gives a totally different set of analytics data than Facebook, while Instagram is different to post to than YouTube.

And that's before we even talk about Twitter—rather, X. Until Elon Musk bought it, Twitter had one of the most permissive APIs. A lot of social media management apps relied on it to offer features like competitor monitoring and social media listening. But those kinds of features now cost around $42,000 per month, so they're only available in some of the most fully-featured enterprise apps or on the most expensive plans.

All this means that when it comes to the best social media manager software, you shouldn't expect wild standout features related to particular social networks. There's no social media management platform that can post directly to a personal Instagram profile or reply to comments on someone else's Facebook Page posts.

Still, there are some key features that the top social media managers have that set them apart. They generally make managing your business's social media presence easy and efficient. In particular, they offer:

Support for multiple social networks, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok at the very least, though support for Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky, and the other Twitter replacements looks like it might be increasingly important in the future. The goal with any of these apps is to manage as many of your social networks as possible in one app.
Powerful scheduling tools, so you could batch your social media posts at the start of the week or month, and then just let them run. (Access to your social media inboxes so you could reply to customers was a bonus, but not required.)
Detailed analytics on how your posts do. The more expensive the app, the more powerful the analytics I required—at least until they hit the limit of what the social media apps offer. For enterprise apps, for example, I required more powerful X features like social monitoring, where you can scan for posts about your business, or even your competitors. More basic apps can't afford the API access these otherwise require.
Cost-effectiveness. With all social media software limited to offering the same kind of features, high prices need to be justified with additional features, stellar customer support, and team and collaboration tools.

AI also looks like it's going to have a huge effect on how companies manage social media, but for now, I wasn't super impressed with many of the apps that made a big deal of it. Most apps that allow you to schedule your posts already employ some kind of AI to find the best times, and the apps that aimed to write social media posts for you were all very similar, and not significantly better than using ChatGPT. If you want an AI-powered social media manager, check out our list of the best currently available. And while many of the apps on this list are adding AI features, they're all still tools that enable you to post whatever you want to social media—whether you, an AI, or an intern wrote it.

Every tool that made the list has a free trial—and sometimes even a free plan—so don't be afraid to dive in and try them out. The best social media management app for you will be the one that best fits your needs and price point.

I've been covering tech for over a decade and updating this list for the past three years, so I've spent dozens of hours exploring social media marketing software. After putting them through their paces, comparing the features and user experience they offer against other similarly priced apps, and generally assessing how good (or bad) they are to use, these six social media planning tools are the ones I think will be the best fit for the majority of businesses.