Say what you want about social media, but it’s an effective marketing tool. If it wasn’t, brands wouldn’t have poured $17 billion dollars into social media marketing in 2019.

Of course, to make sure your social media marketing budget is well spent, it helps to have a plan in place. That’s where social media content planning tools come in. This is the software that makes it easy to manage your social media presence and ensure you get the highest ROI possible.

In this guide, we’re going to introduce you to 10 social media content planning tools that can optimize your social media content strategy. But first, let’s learn a bit more about the benefits of social media content planning tools.

Benefits of Social Media Content Planning Tools

Social media can be overwhelming. Thousands of brands are publishing dozens of posts, tweets, and pics on a daily basis. If you want to amplify your brand’s visibility, you need to post engaging content on a consistent basis. 

Social media content planning tools and, combined with a good social media content strategy, can make this possible. Here are the specific benefits of using social media content planning tools:

• Consistency: Social media content planning tools allow you to schedule posts across all your social media channels, and then publish automatically at a desired time. This ensures your social media channels publish content consistently. It also frees up your time to focus on your broader social media marketing strategy.
• Organization: Social media content planning tools allow you to see all of the social media content you’ve created in one place. This allows you to easily view what you’ve shared in the past so that you can avoid duplicate content.
• Customization: Social media content planning tools can help you customize your content for each social channel you post on. This ensures you maximize the impact of your messaging.
• Analytics: Social media content planning tools can track performance across posts and channels so you can understand what’s working and what isn’t—and adjust accordingly.
• Alerts: One of the main benefits of sharing content on social media is that you get to directly engage with consumers via comments. A social media content planning tool can alert you when customers comment on your posts so that you can be sure to respond to their queries in a timely manner. 
  

The bottom line is, social media content planning tools make it a lot easier to execute on your social media marketing strategy, while simultaneously minimizing the amount of manual labor involved (if you need more labor, consider a social media virtual assistant).

If you’re ready to invest in social media content marketing tools for your business, here are some options worth your consideration.

The 10 Best Social Media Content Planning Tools

There are plenty of social media content planning tools worth your consideration. But the following list reflects the ones we think are the best of the best.

Note that for each tool, we’ll tell you how it works and what it’s useful for. Here are the social media content planning tools worth your consideration.

1. Buffer

Best for:

• Content publishing
• Content scheduling
• Analytics
• Collaboration
  

How it works:

Buffer is used by over 75,000 companies to manage their social media presence. With Buffer, you can schedule and publish social media content across multiple channels, view how followers are engaging with your content, and track metrics related to your social media marketing performance. Buffer also has collaboration tools so that multiple users can work in the software at once.

2. Hootsuite

Best for:

• Content publishing
• Content scheduling
• Analytics
• Collaboration
• Advertising
• Social listening
• Alerts
  

How it works:

With roughly 15 million users, Hootsuite is a popular social media content planning tool. The reason is simple: Hootsuite is capable of doing pretty much everything needed to effectively manage your social media marketing strategy. 

Hootsuite can monitor conversations and key topics related to your business, measure and analyze your content performance, manage social media advertising campaigns, curate and publish content, and monitor incoming messages from followers.

3. Sprout Social

Best for:

• Content publishing
• Content scheduling
• Analytics
• Collaboration
• Advertising
• Social listening
• Alerts
  

How it works:

Sprout Social is a direct competitor to Hootsuite. It differentiates itself by being more small business-friendly (Hootsuite is primarily used by enterprise organizations). With Sprout, you can publish to multiple social channels simultaneously, schedule posts, organize and manage your content library, and track metrics on all your posts.

Sprout also has collaboration tools that make it possible for multiple users to work in the platform at once. Other features include hashtag analysis and social ad reporting. There’s also a “ViralPost” tool that informs you of the best times to share content to maximize exposure.

4. Feedly

Best for:

• Content curation
• Social listening
• Topic research
  

How it works:

Feedly provides users with an AI research assistant (named Leo) that is capable of keeping up with all of the topics and trends you care about across blog content and social media. Simply tell Leo what topics, trends, and keywords are relevant to your business, and it will curate them for you in a personalized feed.

Leo utilizes machine learning so that it gets better at curating content over time. 15 million users utilize Leo to separate signals from noise, and gain a better understanding of the content landscape.

5. Tweetdeck

Best for:

• Social media marketing on Twitter
  

How it works:

Tweetdeck is a free platform for those looking to manage their brand’s presence on Twitter. It works by integrating directly with your company’s Twitter account and creating a dashboard from which you can monitor specific accounts, hashtags, and topics. Tweetdeck will also send you notifications whenever anyone engages with your tweets.

Furthermore, it’s easy to schedule and publish tweets directly from Tweedeck. For those looking to optimize their brand presence on Twitter, Tweetdeck presents an easy-to-use option.

6. Sked Social

Best for:

• Instagram marketing
• Visual content scheduling and posting
• Visual content analysis
• Collaboration
• Analytics
  

How it works:

Sked Social is a social media content planning tool that is primarily used for sharing images and stories to major social media networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With Sked Social, you can create images using the in-app photo editor that mimics Instagram’s user experience. You can also prepare “stories” for Instagram and Facebook and schedule them to be posted at the most optimal times.

Sked Social also comes with unlimited access for team members, meaning you can work together to create stories and images that amplify brand visibility. Furthermore, Sked Social provides you with analytics into the performance of your Instagram content. It’s one of the top social media content planning tools for those looking to manage their presence on Instagram.

7. Post Planner

Best for:

• Content scheduling
• Content publishing
• Content curation
  

How it works:

Post Planner is a social media content planning tool designed specifically for small businesses and those doing social media marketing on a budget. On its website, Post Planner boasts that users of its platform receive 510% more engagement on social media than competitors like Buffer and Sprout Social.

The platform’s Discovery Engine analyzes content from thousands of feeds across the web to identify top-performing content that will resonate with your audience. And of course, Post Planner comes with a content scheduling tool that allows you to publish to social media at the times that are best for your business.

8. Sendible

Best for:

• Agency social media marketing 
  

How it works:

Sendible is a social media content planning tool designed specifically for agencies. Through Sendible, agencies can manage the social media presence of all their clients. The platform allows users to schedule and publish social media posts across multiple channels and generate in-depth reports on the content that’s most engaging for your audience, the optimal posting times for your brand on each social network, and website traffic from social.

These reports can then be shared with key stakeholders at a regular cadence. Sendible also allows for multiple users, so your clients can access dashboards where they can view their performance, review posts, and request content.

9. Agorapulse

Best for:

• Content publishing
• Content scheduling
• Alerts
• Analytics
• Collaboration
• Audience segmentation
• Advertising
• Content recommendations
  

How it works:

Agorapulse is a comprehensive social media content planning tool that serves as a nice alternative to Hootsuite or Sprout Social—particularly for large teams. It integrates directly with your social media channels and boasts content scheduling and publishing tools. It can also bulk upload posts to be shared at specific time slots, and collects engagement with your social media posts across all channels in a single inbox, making it easy to respond to all customer inquiries at once.

It’s primarily used by large teams and agencies, and can accommodate up to 20 users at a time. 

10. Knotch

Best for:

• Content curation
• Analytics
• Competitor research
• Alerts
• Collaboration
• Customer feedback
  

How it works:

Knotch is an end-to-end Content Intelligence Platform used by Fortune 500 companies to measure their content performance, gather qualitative feedback, perform competitor research, curate content, and collaborate with other stakeholders within their organizations on all owned and paid content channels (social media, blog, YouTube, etc.)

When you sign up for Knotch, you’ll gain access to our easy-to-use content dashboards that will give you a birds-eye-view of how each individual piece of content is performing. We also serve you with tailored insights based on your content objectives, and generate a custom content score based on quantitative and qualitative feedback received from customers. 

Through our Competitive Content Analysis & Market Intelligence product, Blueprint, you can view all of the content your competitors are producing, as well as the keywords they’re targeting and the brands they’re working with. Overall, Knotch serves as a key social media content planning tool for those seeking to gather the intel they need to create a highly-effective social media content marketing strategy.

Try Out Knotch for Free

If you’re interested in content planning and competitive content analysis to optimize your social media presence, request a free 7-day trial to see if it’s a fit for your organization.