Team KSA is always working to master the world of social media, and this has not been an easy task. To successfully execute our social media, we use a platform to schedule our posts in advance. This allows us to drive our social strategy and create a plan months in advance, eliminating the risk of forgetting to post and throwing a whole content calendar off. Here are some of the most common platforms and the pros and cons of each, so you can pick the platform to best suit your needs.
Buffer
Team KSA uses a Buffer paid plan to schedule posts for ourselves and for our clients. If you are looking for a free version, this is not the account for you because you only get 10 posts for free. Premium plans start at $15 a month for 8 accounts and 100 posts. One of our favorite features of Buffer is it allows you to schedule posts to multiple platforms at the same time, and customize your messages if you want them to be slightly different for each platform. You can also add hashtags in the first comment when posting to Instagram, and it gives you recommendations of best times to post. The mobile app is super helpful, and will send you notifications about when posts successfully go out or if there is an issue.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to schedule content in the platform as well as create it. The free plan allows you to schedule 30 posts in advance across three accounts, which is great for businesses who do not need to schedule far in advance. Hootsuite also offers a reasonable price for the platform, at $30 a month to schedule posts across 10 accounts. There are more expensive plans with additional features if you have more needs.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is great for collaboration, and allows you to set different user-level permissions to give specific access to different team members. It also provides analytics with information on which posts do the best. There is a 30-day free trial, then plans start at $99, definitely a bummer there are no free plan options.
Loomly
Loomly is a clean platform, but can be pricey if you are using it for multiple clients. The free trial only lasts two weeks, and the lowest price plan only allows for 10 or fewer social accounts at $20 a month. Loomly stands out with its workflows so you can separate posts based on whether they need edits, are approved, are scheduled, or have been published. You can also manage interaction from within the platform, and manage comments and mentions from there rather than having to go into the social media platforms.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar has all of the typical features of a social media scheduling platform. A standout feature of this scheduler is it allows you to create different categories for different content types, like a category for blog posts, another for #motivationalmonday, and another for articles. Something to make sure you consider when scheduling is this platform will start to repost content once your queue runs out, which could be a pro or con depending on your goals. This platform has one plan for $49 a month, but offers military and non-profit discounts.
Sendible
Sendible has a great compose box that allows you to take a post from an idea to ready to go. It lets you add images and videos and then post to multiple platforms simultaneously. Similar to Buffer, you can tailor content to platforms or even recycle content that does well. You can post to WordPress, Medium, Tumblr or Blogger in addition to social media, and allows you to post videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. There is also an integration with Canva, which is a great tool for creating engaging visuals. There are different paid plans depending on the size of the agency using the platform, and they list their most popular plan as their $199 Medium Plan “For Growing Agencies.”