Earlier this year, our team did a deep dive into as many social media management tools as we could find (no, really, about 15 of them) with the goal of finding the top contenders out there for our clients.

At BrandGlue, our social media services span a wide range of clients. Therefore, we need a wide range of tools in our toolbox so that we can deliver the best of the best. 

What we learned is that many of these tools offer very unique capabilities, and we felt it would be worth sharing our findings, whether your team is evaluating a new social management tool, or you’re just curious about what’s new out there. 

Here are our favorite social media management tools in 2023.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the more popular tools in the social media management platform space. It allows individuals and businesses to manage and schedule their social media content across various social networks from one central dashboard and is pretty beginner-friendly. It provides tools for monitoring social media activity, engaging with audiences, and measuring the performance of social media campaigns.

Hootsuite supports a wide range of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and more.

A few of our favorite functionalities include: 

• Scheduling 

  • Hootsuite has a very user-friendly interface, making it a great tool for social media beginners to novices. 

• SRT captions for videos

  • Most other platforms we researched don’t include the option to upload your own SRT captions for videos. In our eyes, this is a huge bonus!

• New features 

  • As one of the more popular options for social media management, Hootsuite is typically first in line for new features or API updates with platforms, making it pretty appealing for clients that want to be on the cutting edge on social media.

• OwlyWriter AI 

  • A few months back, Hootsuite added artificial intelligence functionality into its platform. This allows for you to instantly generate captions. It’s great for any teams that need a little extra content creation inspiration on those days where there is a lot to post.

Falcon.io

Falcon.io is a great option for anyone who wants to rely heavily on social media monitoring and listening. It’s now part of the umbrella company, Brandwatch, allowing for access to a large archive of consumer and social data. The app leverages industry-leading AI tools to discover new trends before competitors. (You can also use the tips in our blog post: ​​Strategies for LinkedIn and Facebook Competitor Tracking Tools ) 

A few of our favorite functionalities of this app include: 

• Social listening

  • With this tool, you can track keywords, phrases, or hashtags across a variety of social platforms. Within those searches, you’ll find a dashboard that shows the sentiment of posts, demographics, top related hashtags, top influencers, and more. For example, if your company has an event coming up, you can track your event hashtag to report on who talked about your event, what else they mentioned, and what similar interests they have so you can cater better social posts to them in the future. 

• Benchmark tool

  • Falcon.io’s benchmark tool goes a step deeper, allowing you to compare your brand to competitors and industry leaders, and hone in on a winning social strategy. This would be a helpful tool for designers on your team to have access to, as you can see visual trends that are resonating the most with your audience or your competitor’s audiences.

Loomly

Loomly has all the essential/basic tools needed for social media managers. I would say, compared to the other platforms, it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles to navigate around – but this only adds to the ease of using the tool. 

A few of our favorite functionalities of this app include: 

• List calendar view

  • Loomly has a very nice list view of your social media posts so you can easily see and organize your scheduled posts. This could help eliminate the need for using manual spreadsheets to plan your posts. 

• Campaign tracking 

  • When scheduling posts, Loomly allows you to label and sort them into campaigns. This is a great function if you need to report out on a longer campaign, eliminating the need to sort manually through hundreds of posts months back to report on the metrics. 

SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a good social media management tool for brands that have multiple locations they want to post the same social media post across. For example, you might want to push out the same social media post highlighting a new coffee beverage at Starbucks in Chicago and Starbucks in Seattle. With SocialPilot, you can easily toggle between these locations to post seamlessly. 

A few of our favorite functionalities of this app include: 

• White Labeling

  • For companies that want the platform to have their own branding in a social media platform, SocialPilot has that ability with its upper-tier plans.

• Dropbox Integration

  • Does your company store images and videos in Dropbox? This integration makes it easier to select and upload your files for social media posts. 

Sendible

Sendible is a social media marketing platform that allows individuals, agencies and small businesses to engage with their audience across multiple channels at any time. Over 30k+ agencies, marketers, and brand managers rely on Sendible to amplify their brand stories.

Here are our favorite features of this app: 

• Queued posts

  • If you have evergreen content you want to go out in a regular cadence, Sendible’s queue feature allows you to easily promote these posts over time. 

• Content customization integrations

  • Sendible integrated with GIPHY, Pexels, and Canva! No graphic designer on your team? Social media managers can successfully find and customize visuals for posts. (Or, if content production generally is stressful, you can check out our blog post here for some tips .)

Oktopost

Oktopost is a new resource we discovered this year that focuses on enterprise social media management and employee advocacy in one platform. At a time when employee advocacy is becoming increasingly important for a brand’s social strategies, it’s a great option to have that 2-in-1 capability within your own social media management tool. 

Here are our favorite features:

• Employee advocacy

  • Oktopost is the only employee advocacy tool that is seamlessly connected with your social media management platform, providing shared workflows, campaigns, and reporting to help your social team save time and stay productive.

• Campaign tagging

  • As we mentioned earlier, campaign tagging can make life a lot easier for social media managers to organize their campaigns and report out on them.

Conclusion

Whichever social media management platform you choose to use, you’ll be in great hands. My best advice is to find what specific use case could help your brand standout, and choose your tool based on that.

For example, does a client want to be on the cusp of new social trends and technologies? Falcon.io might be the right fit. Is your brand involved with a lot of events throughout the year? Perhaps finding a tool with campaign labels would help you stay organized and make reporting on those events easier. 

Luckily, there are many more options than in previous years, and the social media world is your oyster. Which is your favorite social media management tool to use? Let us know in the comments below!