7 Social Media Scheduling Tools For Small Businesses

Using social media for your business or personal brand in this day and age is crucial to your success and visibility in any industry. Building a community around your personal projects, brand, initiatives, etc can help immensely in bringing people together and connecting with them in a meaningful way to garner support and loyalty from your audience.

When diving into the world of social media marketing, it is important to note that taking a one-size-fits-all approach is not the best way to go about it. This is because some social channels are best suited for certain content and audience compared to others, so it is important to keep this in mind when planning your content for the various platforms. Consider the kind of brand you want to build and the people you want to connect with, then pick out the social media channels that are best suited to achieve your social marketing goals.

Using a social media scheduling tool for content distribution has a lot of great benefits. It is the best way to help you stay organized and on track with content planning, saves a lot of time, enables you to post consistently, and eliminates the manual and chaotic aspect of the work since it helps you plan and schedule all your posts across various channels from one centralized place. You can prepare and plan your content weeks or months ahead.

Social media scheduling platforms are third-party social media management tools that allow users to schedule posts across multiple social media accounts from a centralized dashboard.

5 Things To Consider When Choosing A Social Media Content Scheduler

1. Ease Of Use, Functionality & Features

The built-in features, functionality, and user interface will play a key role in your experience with the social media management tool as well as the outcome of your content strategy. Key factors to consider in this regard may include things like:

User-friendly interface
Collaboration functionality
Analytics and reporting
Social listening and engagement features
Scheduling and publishing capabilities

2. Pricing

All the social media management tools I know have a free trial period or plan that you can use to see if the platform is best suited to your specific needs. I recommend taking advantage of their free plan or trial period to have a feel of what the platform is like before making any commitments. Even if you start out with a free plan, you should also consider if their pricing plan is within your budget for when you have to upgrade in the future. Check the pricing page of all the platforms you are considering to make sure you can stick with them long-term money-wise.

Image from buffer.com

3. Which Social Channels Are Available On Their Platform?

Another important factor to consider is the social media channels that are available to use on their platform, think about the channels that are integral to your content marketing strategy and check if they integrate with those channels. If your social media marketing strategy involves channels like Tik tok, Instagram, and Pinterest, then a social scheduling tool that does not integrate with these platforms is not a good fit for you. Choose a tool that makes all the social channels you want to use available to you.

4. Official Industry Partnership With The Platforms

Building an online community is not an easy job, it takes a lot of time and effort. Therefore it is important that you do not go against the policies or community guidelines of any of the social channels you use. Giving a third-party tool or app access to your social media account means giving them permission to interact on the platform on your behalf, hence it is important that you trust them to be sure your account is safe and secure. The safest way to ensure that your account is safe is by going with a scheduling tool that has an official and verifiable integration partnership with the social media channels you want to use. Buffer for instance has an official partnership with the various social platforms they integrate with.

5. Customer Support Accessibility

At some point in your customer journey with any company, you may need support. So you want to make sure that if and when you need help, they will be there to give you the help you need in a timely manner.

Now that you know what to consider when choosing a social media management platform, below are 6 options you could consider to see which one best fits your needs and the outcome you are looking to achieve.