Common sense and popular wisdom both dictate that driving engagement on social media means posting with some regularity. What “regularity” means will largely depend on your industry, the importance you place on an online presence, and, crucially, the time and resources you’re able to devote to generating social content. But managing those posts and when they go live can be streamlined with the use of a social media scheduler. Some feature analytic tools and other additions to drive engagement, but they all equal more free time to generate content or focus on other aspects of your business while maintaining a social presence.
The first crossroad you’ll come to when choosing a scheduler is how many businesses/accounts you’ll be managing. If you own or work with more than one business, you’ll either need a manager for each—which defeats most of the time-saving advantages of social media schedulers—or you’ll need one tool that can handle them all. Sendible is something of a gold-standard in that regard, but it has some drawbacks. The application isn’t particularly stable, so it’s time-saving potential isn’t optimized because unexpected crashes and restarts are part and parcel of the experience. It also costs $29 USD per month, which rolls right into the second important decision you’ll have to make when choosing a scheduler.
Social media schedulers with more tools are almost universally more expensive than those that just schedule and push out social media posts. The amount of money you’re willing or able to spend influences the overall quality of the tools you can choose from. Most schedulers offer some kind of free trial; a few, like Hootsuite and Loomly, offer a free tier in addition to their paid products. But the free options are feature-light, usually limited strictly to automated posting of content. Access to analytics and content creation/curation tools are reserved for paid apps.
Maybe ironically, the last important crossroad in picking a social media scheduler is deciding which platforms you use or want to use. Some schedulers, like TweetDeck, only work with a single platform. Most of the popular options—including the ones previously mentioned here—support Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But users who need to manage content for LinkedIn will be limited to Hootsuite or Smarter Queue, and those who need support for YouTube will also be limited to a handful of options, the pricey Sendible among them. If you’re only posting to the “big three”, then many schedulers will suite your needs. But outside of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, your preferred manager isn’t guaranteed to support your preferred social platforms.
Choosing the right social media scheduler isn’t necessarily an easy process, but it can pay major dividends in time and money. An increasing number of industries are engaging customers on social media. The days of neighborhood mechanics and grocery stores getting by on word of mouth are either over or quickly coming to an end. Using a social media scheduler in tandem with content tools and a solid engagement strategy will make sure you stay relevant.