Generally speaking, digital marketing agencies consist of small teams with minimal financial resources. Thus, picking social media tools for agencies can be quite challenging.
The best social media tools for an agency have to be budget-friendly, cost-effective, and diverse. By diverse, we mean that they must be able to suffice multiple clients and their requirements.
Now you must be wondering where to find this “ideal” social media management tool.
The best bet in this regard is to keep certain goals in mind. When you know your goals, it would be easier for you to shortlist the tools that might meet your requirements.
So, the first question you need to ask yourself is why you need a social media tool in the first place.
Why Should Your Agency Use a Social Media Management Tool?
As a social media marketing agency, you are tasked with the daily grind of planning, managing, and monitoring multiple client campaigns across different social media platforms. On top of that, you need to constantly collaborate with your clients.
That’s where a social media management tool comes into the picture to help you juggle all the chaos effortlessly. Along with all your social media tasks, these tools bring client and team communication inside a centralized place.
Using these tools, you can schedule posts across multiple channels, analyze data, collaborate with clients and teams, engage with messages and comments, and create social content faster.
But which tool to choose? Here are 5 features that you must bear in mind during your hunt for the best social media management tools for agencies:
1. Advanced Social Post Scheduling
Manual posting is not even feasible for single businesses handling their own social media marketing. Now, for agencies handling posting for multiple clients across different social media platforms, it’s a nightmare.
Hence, we make use of different social media management tools that schedule the posts for you across multiple social media platfroms and publish them at the right time. In this way, you can make sure that you are posting at the right time for each client.
2. Analytics and Reporting
For any client campaign to be successful, it is important to keep a keen eye on its analytics. A good social media tool for agencies makes real-time insights watching a breeze.
Not only viewing but reporting is also a crucial part of the process for agencies. The data you receive from different social media management tools is shared with your team to develop a better strategy—or to keep following the same if things are going well.
3. Social Media Engagement
Engagement is a big part of every social media marketing strategy. On behalf of your client, you need to reach out to people in comments and DMs and increase engagement levels.
For that, your agency needs to look for a tool that brings the conversation across all social media channels on a single page. This will make engaging with their audience super easy.
4. Social Channel Integration
A group of social media tools for agencies must enable you to integrate with different social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and others. In this way, the management tools will help you post, interact, and gain insights into what’s happening across every social media profile of your clients.
5. Responsive Alert System
In case of mentions or more than usual activity on social media platforms, the tools must inform you. In this way, your team can effectively respond to any issues or queries that people are putting forward.
Many different social media management software are available that offer multiple services. Now that you know what features your ideal social media tool should have, check out the list of the best social media tools for your agency.
How we analyze and select Social media tools:
We have compiled the following list of top-notch social media tools through extensive research and evaluation. Our process involved actively weighing factors like user experience, G2 ratings and reviews, cost, and scalability. We assessed the proficiency of these tools in automation, crafting content, visualization, analytics, and teamwork to rank them. We have dedicated immense effort to curating this list, with the aim of equipping marketers with insightful data for choosing the right tools that will help grow their businesses.
Best for:
Businesses, Publishers, Non-profits, Mid-stage startup teams, Higher education, Solopreneurs, E-commerce, and Sports teams.
About Buffer
Buffer is a very intuitive and focused social media tool. Many brands, agencies, and enterprises rely on it to drive results based on social engagement. It offers a complete suite that allows for publishing, engagement, and analysis. Hence, it is a complete tool in itself.
The tool provides special capabilities for creating shoppable links for businesses to drive traffic and boost sales for them. Whether it’s a lone marketer, an agency, a startup, or an established brand, Buffer caters to them all.
However, compared to Buffer alternatives, the tool falls short with its rather plain UI, which is not very dynamic. Also, customer support from Buffer has fallen short of addressing the queries and doubts sent their way.
Pricing:
Buffer provides a range of four pricing options along with a 14-day trial period for each. There is a free plan for beginners. Paid plans range from $6 a month for one account to a monthly $120 for 10 accounts.
Key Features:
- Post Scheduling: Users can craft custom posts and automate their publication through Buffer’s scheduling capabilities.
- Analytics: Getting a hold on detailed analytics is made easier by the tool to automatically generate comprehensive, shareable reports for each connected social profile.
- Audience Interaction: It gets easier to manage audience messages and comments, prioritizing impactful conversations using Buffer’s advanced social inbox.
- Team Collaboration: Buffer makes collaboration seamless with your entire team and include clients in the social media content approval process.
- Start Page Creator: Users can utilize the Start Page feature to design visually appealing, straightforward landing pages that efficiently convert social media traffic into sales.
- AI-Powered Assistance: Buffer simplifies social media caption creation with its AI Assistant, enabling users to generate content quickly and effectively through guided prompts.
After sifting through numerous user reviews of Buffer sourced from reputable platforms such as G2 and Capterra, we meticulously examined each one, considering all aspects of the tool. From this thorough analysis, we’ve compiled the following insights.
Pros
- 27.3% of users said that multiple in-app integrations in Buffer helped them seamlessly manage multi-platform publishing from the same dashboard.
- At least 20% of all Buffer users agreed that maintaining consistency on social media became easier with the help of the tool and its content scheduling capabilities.
- The competitor analysis features in the tool has added value for some users, making it easy for them to keep track of industry trends.
- Also, a total of 10% of users liked the collaborative responding abilities in Buffer, enabling them to divide message handling as a team.
- A major percentage of users distinctly commend the ease of navigation they got with Buffer’s UI design.
Cons
- 25% of Buffer users said they faced some difficulties with the publishing features of the tool, even encountering errors and bugs.
- The scope of improvement in customization capabilities has been singled out by more than 33% of users.
- Similar to Buffer analytics, reporting data also shows inaccuracy and inconsistency, which has been pointed out by 1 out of every 5 users.
- The lack of CRM integration into Buffer has been raised as a concern by many users, further limiting the inbox’s functionality.
- 20% of the users have found the team workflows difficult to grasp and navigate, causing confusion rather than streamlining things.
Best for:
Professionals, Small teams, Small-medium businesses, and Enterprises.
About Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a veritable all-rounder when it comes to any type of social media activity. With the tool’s variety of capabilities, Hootsuite adeptly addresses the diverse demands of all social media. This makes it the go-to choice for brands and businesses.
It is designed to manage different social media handles such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.
This software accommodates a varied user demographic, ranging from individual influencers and bloggers to global corporations. Marketing agencies capitalize on its capabilities to seamlessly manage multiple client accounts, optimizing their efficiency with minimum manual effort.
Recognized across industries like retail, finance, healthcare, and education, Hootsuite’s uses vary a lot. It’s numerable in-app integrations make it a great choice for a marketing suite. However, its steep pricing makes Hootsuite unaffordable to smaller businesses.
Pricing:
Hootsuite offers five pricing tiers after a 30-day trial, ranging from $99/month to $249/month, catering to different social account and user needs.
Key Features:
- Scheduling and Publishing: The tool’s robust scheduling and publishing features let you craft and schedule multiple posts at once to be published at the time of your choosing.
- Engage Customers: Hootsuite’s integrated social inbox helps effortlessly keep tabs on followers’ conversations, engage in meaningful interactions, and foster engagement. The AI chatbots can also automate responses, enhancing customer communication.
- Social Listening: This feature helps users stay attuned to online trends and diligently monitor brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags. You can glean valuable insights into the prevailing public sentiment for their brand.
- Social Media Ads: Seamlessly manage your social media ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, all from Hootsuite’s intuitive dashboard.
- Analytics: Access comprehensive analytics data from connected profiles across multiple platforms, all conveniently displayed in a centralized dashboard for actionable insights.
- Team Collaboration: Foster seamless collaboration by defining clear roles for your team and clients, ensuring efficient workflow and project management within Hootsuite.
- Employee Advocacy: Extend your brand’s reach by enabling employees to share company posts on their personal social profiles, harnessing the power of their networks.
- AI Writer: Streamline the creation of captivating social media post captions with the assistance of our AI-powered writing tool, making content generation faster and more effective.
We went through a hundred user reviews for Hootsuite, gathered from trusted review platforms like G2 and Capterra. After carefully analyzing each of them in respect to all the features of the tool, we have gathered these insights.
Pros
- A majority of users find Hootsuite’s content publishing capabilities on multiple platforms quite useful.
- 9.09% of users with larger teams and clients find the features of exporting and sharing reports is very helpful as they can share these reports from Hootsuite and keep everyone in the loop.
- 81.25% of users were highly appreciative of the team collaboration capabilities in Hootsuite, which allows them to work seamlessly with all their team members and clients.
- The ability to prioritize messages in Hootssuite’s inbox is appreciated by 15% of people as it makes it easier for them to address important interactions easily.
- 18.20% of users found the help resources and tutorials provided by it quite helpful in learning how to use Hootsuite. They also appreciated having dedicated customer support managers to assist them.
Cons
- 41.56% people faced difficulties in using the tool due to the complex scheduling process involved.
- Content recycling, which is an important feature under scheduling, has some gaps that concern 76.92% of users to some degree.
- Despite giving accurate data most of the time, nearly two-thirds of all the users found the analytics presentation to be hard to decipher.
- Many a user has faced problems in managing user access and granting permissions while working with their team and clients.
- With delayed message retrieval, slow loading, and difficult organization, some users have expressed frustration with the overall performance of Hootsuite’s social inbox.
SocialBee is a social media tool that offers social media management with training sessions for your team. This social media tool for agencies has automated publishing, efficient tracking, content management, customer engagement, and many other features.
The reporting and analytics, as well as post scheduling, are quite efficient with SocialBee. Additionally, you can easily manage multiple accounts at once. It covers the content across different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and even Google My Business.
It can recycle content by producing certain variations, which makes SocialBee one of the most praised social media agency software.
Pros
- You can track your brand’s position with detailed analytics.
- Never leave your queue empty with the option of recycling content.
- You can assign each post to a specific category.
Julie S.
It has lots of bells and whistles, and just like Recurpost, its dashboard is content-based. It also allows you to save hashtags and use RSS feeds.
Cons
- SocialBee lacks Instagram direct posting capabilities.
- Analytics does not work fine for all platforms sometimes.
- Their dashboard isn’t user-friendly. You need help from customer support to navigate and understand the flows.
Prokopios S
The user interface is a bit “clunky” and unintuitive (for me). It’s not always clear how to achieve what you want.
Post Planner is one of the amazing social media tools for agencies. It helps the social media experts to come up with a high quality of content, plan the publishing schedules, and post consistently.
It allows for keyword filtering, which is not available in many social media tools. Additionally, it offers features like content management and efficient post scheduling. The different but relevant data is analyzed to give a proper insight into the social media activity.
You can easily plan and schedule your posts using social media posting tools. It helps to increase the reach of your content and enhances your engagements. It also allows for content curation.
Pros
- With Post Planner you can predict the engagement of the post while scheduling.
- Has unified content streams.
- You can recycle evergreen content.
- Allows you to revive top-performing content.
Megan C
When I am stuck, I can find inspiration from their post suggestions. The ability to manage multiple accounts at the same time just makes life so much simpler.
Cons
- They have a non-intuitive user interface and it becomes difficult to navigate through.
- Their customer support isn’t available most of the time.
- Scheduling features are pretty laid-back.
Post Planner User
PostPlanner is an extremely non-intuitive, difficult, inflexible, stubborn, and impermeable program that has never left me satisfied after use. Moreover, their customer service and use of “fine print” are more than unethical.
In the list of the best social media tools for agencies, eClincher is an addition. It is particularly important for companies that are looking for a powerful and intuitive interface to manage their social media platforms. It helps you with editing, scheduling, boosting posts, and monitoring.
The analytics and report results of eClincher are quite remarkable. Moreover, it collaborates with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, Pinterest, Canva, Zendesk, and others.
Pros
- Find out top influencers in your niche based on the keywords you use.
- A centralized inbox to manage your social media comments and messages.
- It has an image library where you can upload and store images and videos to use while scheduling.
Aly L.
No logging in and out of accounts or different managers as well as can post and schedule to all the social channels needed. Monitoring accounts and interacting is also easier.
Cons
- They have a cluttered user-interface that gives a bad user experience.
- Their unified inbox is a great feature to have but it’s super clumsy and challenging to use.
- They lack a client management feature.
Angela B.
The price is pretty steep for a small business. The analytics options really are minimal. Quite honestly, it’s not much to go on — the keyword research kind of sucks.
CoSchedule is one of the best social media tools for agencies. to complete work on time and deliver it accordingly. It employs agile methodologies to bring out the best results. In addition to being the management tool, it is an amazing calendar as well. It perfectly manages the posts, contents, tasks, and events.
Pros
- CoSchedule has this unique feature where you can analyze your headlines.
- Along with tracking your social media accounts you can also track your team performance.
- Keep your assets organized with Asset Organizer.
Abigail N.
Most social media marketing and content marketing tools do not come inbuilt with a headline analyzer to help you choose the best headline for your post. With Coschedule this is possible which I love the most.
Cons
- CoSchedule lacks enterprise level features like monitoring and listening. They don’t have a social inbox to help you manage comments, messages in one place.
- Customer support is not very helpful to fix problems.
Aaron E.
There’s tedium in managing lists. Why can’t items be hidden when they’re completed, for example? Linking projects and tasks together is also very clunky.
MavSocial is a simple social media tool for agencies where one can streamline their social media activities by engaging with the audiences, listening to the newer trends, monitoring the analytics and collaborating with team members, etc.
MavSocial supports platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google My Business, and WeChat.
Pros
- With MavSocial you can monitor your competitors.
- Curate content with the content curation feature.
- This social media tool for agencies has an in-built centralized asset management system.
Clint M
It has a very intuitive design, you can easily navigate between the different menu options and access the configuration options of campaigns and elements.
Cons
- MavSocial doesn’t support Pinterest scheduling. So if you are looking to grow your Pinterest profile, you’ll have to subscribe to an additional tool.
- Though they have an asset management system – they still do not support Google Drive for easier access.
Julie Anne G
My only suggestion to improve MavSocial would be the ability to link with Google Drive to easily upload photos, images, etc., as this is where we currently store all our content.
Sendible is another excellent social media tool for agencies that will assist you in managing and automating your social media networks. Sendible allows you to schedule individual campaigns on various social media accounts and allows you to control how your campaigns are delivered directly from your dashboard.
The best feature is creating content and scheduling it prior to a week, month, or more. You may also customize your post for other social media sites.
Pros
- It helps you manage multiple social media accounts by managing workflows.
- You can also delegate tasks and measure your ROI.
Luke F
The three things that I like the best about Sendible are the content calendar and its functionality, analytics and customizability with great data charts, and the monitoring aspect.
Cons
- Users report frequent glitches and reconnection issues.
- Navigating through the dashboard is overwhelming.
Verified User
Sometimes the integrations don’t work 100%. Instagram often doesn’t pull featured images even when fetched. Hashtags sometimes run together after they’re added to various services. The mobile app seems to have a lot of bugs and the Services concept takes a little bit to get used to.
Wrapping Up
The sheer amount of options of social media tools for agencies can sometimes overwhelm you. It is highly dependent on varied use cases and needs. However, considering crucial goals and pricing factors in mind, the best bet among these so far is SocialPilot.
Manage multiple accounts of different clients in more than 8 social media channels hassle-free. You even get to enjoy white-labeled reports having detailed performance analytics. Give it a shot with a free 14-day trial for super easy and efficient social media management.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are social media tools?
The tools that help you manage multiple social media accounts from one dashboard with different sets of features are social media tools.
What should an ideal social media tool for agencies look like?
A social media tool that has features like the following would be an ideal social media tool for agencies:
- Advanced scheduling and publishing
- Monitoring
- Listening
- Deep analysis and reporting
- Ads
- Team and client management
What are the best social media tools for agencies?
- SocialPilot
- Buffer
- Hootsuite
- Social Bee
- Post Planner
- eClincher
- CoSchedule
- MavSocial
- Sendible
What are the four main types of social media tools?
The four types of social media tools are as follows:
- Content curation tools
- Social media scheduling tools
- Content creation tools
- Social media analytics tools
What is the best social media scheduling tool?
One of the best social media scheduling tool for agencies is SocialPilot. You can curate, create, schedule, and even get reports on your social media performance with this tool. The pricing is also affordable for the features it offers.
About the Author
SocialPilot – #1 Best Social Media Management Tool for Agencies
$30
per month
SocialPilot is the most cost-effective social media tool for agencies. It allows you to make budget-friendly choices and offers various amazing features not just while scheduling but also great troubleshooting support. It helps you analyze your social media activities thoroughly, schedule your posts in advance, manage your client accounts hassle-free, and ensure a smooth workflow for your team.
Moreover, it integrates with different apps, such as Canva and GIPHY, for interactive content posts. Such tools with diverse functions are the right choice for your agency. Thus, we can say that SocialPilot possesses all the abilities that must be present in a social media tool for agencies.
SocialPilot’s wide integration with major social media sites makes it the best choice for different businesses and agencies. It carefully fetches all the data from these sites so that you can easily plan and strategize for the future.
Best for:
Marketing Agencies, SMBs, Multi-Location Brands & Professionals
Management and Branding
With SocialPilot, you can bridge the gap between managing your daily operations and enhancing your client’s brand image, making them work together seamlessly for greater efficiency and impact.
AI Assistant
Your Smart Companion for Efficient Workflows
White Label
Amplify Your Social Media Impact with the Stamp of Your Brand
Bulk Scheduling
Streamline Your Calendar with consistent Planning and Posting
Team Collaboration
Collaborate for Seamless Teamwork within a Single Dashboard
Social Inbox
Engage with DMs & Comments with AI-gen Replies in the Smart Inbox
Social Media Content Calander
Plan, Post, & Prosper with a Unified Smart Social Media Calendar
Image WaterMarking
Enhance Your Visuals with a Strong Branding Impact
Content Library
Save Content Ideas for Rainy & Never Let Your Feed Get Dull
Collaborator Tagging
Invite & Tag Influencers on Your Post to Generate Combined Reach
These features not only streamline effective processing but also create stronger and more unified branding.
SocialPilot has more social media marketing tools to support you in your client management and branding journey.
Other Key Features:
SocialPilot Pricing
SocialPilot offers a 14-day free trial and access to all premium features (no credit card required & cancel any time). Choose a plan that fits your needs.
$170.00/mo
$85.00/mo
$42.50/mo
$25.50/mo
What Do SocialPilot Users Say?
Nicolle H.
Simple and easy to use with all the functionality. I run many social accounts, setting up these accounts is so easy. I use this on a daily basis and can keep track of all my scheduled posts.
Wendy P.
I have multiple clients with multiple social media profiles and SocialPilot offers me a platform where I can easily schedule all of them in one place. For 90% of my clients, I choose to use SocialPilot.