A rundown of our all-time & current favorite tools, tips, hacks & strategies to help you succeed with your social media, on a budget: scheduling tools.
If you’re here, surely you’ve googled this already. And you’ve definitely noticed that there are endless tools, strong conflicting opinions, and a wide-priced variety of solutions all making big promises about what you need to succeed and streamline your social media efforts. But we’d also wager that if you’re here, you don’t have a massive marketing budget available to spend... or the time to waste learning a new platform that won’t ultimately deliver much (who does?). Luckily for you, we’ve tried nearly everything. And we’re here with the rundown of our all-time favorite tools, tips, hacks & strategies to help you succeed with your social media, on a budget. [Because things change often, and fast, we’ll be updating this post regularly, too.]
tl;dr: best tools for social media scheduling Overall: Hootsuite, Buffer & Sprout Social For Instagram only: Planoly & Later For Facebook only: Facebook.
The best scheduling tool for you will depend a lot on which social media platform(s) you’re looking at, and how many. [side note: Small org? Few followers? Team of 1? You probably don’t *need* to be super active on every platform! In fact, you’re likely better off focusing your efforts on the one or two platforms with the greatest potential value for your goals/audience: invest in specializing & shining where it matters, instead of being mediocre everywhere at once]
Facebook:
If Facebook is your primary channel, we hope this is obvious: you already have a bunch of powerful scheduling, analytics, and creation tools built in and free. Right inside your Insights section, you can check what time of day/week more of your followers are online, toggle over to Publishing Tools to schedule posts to go up at those times, and then access info about clicks, engagement and reach within your Insights. Facebook’s new-ish Creator Studio is a one-stop dashboard for your content library, insights, ads, and accessing videos that are available to cross-post on your page. But it’s not necessary to use Creator Studio to schedule posts or access insights. What we absolutely recommend as necessary: make sure your org is set up with a Facebook Business Manager. This allows you to control who has access to what on your page (and for spending $$ on your ads) and also ensures that all activity and analytics will be saved in one central, accessible place...no matter how many interns you go through.
Bottomline:
If you’re focused on Facebook, you may not need another scheduling/analytics tool for your social content.
The greatest advantage - aside from it being free - is that when you schedule a post on Facebook you can see *exactly* how they will look once published. This sounds small but can be a big & annoying thing - some scheduling tools don’t adjust/advise how to best crop your graphics, or end up publishing things in a slightly wonky way. Always click through on your scheduled posts to see exactly how they’ll look, and adjust if necessary.
Make sure you’ve set up a Business Manager.
Instagram:
Despite being owned by Facebook, scheduling content for Instagram is a whole different story. (And yes... so are Stories.) If Instagram is your priority, stick with an app that truly specializes in the platform like Planoly or Later. Unlike Facebook, you’ll probably need to use your phone - or a mobile app somewhere - to get the most functionality here. Instagram is built for mobile and the free/cheap tools just won’t offer you the same functionality if you’re doing this from your desktop.
First:
Are you set up as a Business Account? You’ll need to be, to access the built-in insights and sync up with any 3rd party tool for scheduling. Check your account settings to make the switch - you’ll need to have and connect with a Facebook business page to verify.
Instagram’s insights: you can get access to some pretty useful info here, about the demographics of your audience and when they’re online. (Now that Instagram’s feed is not chronological, choosing the right time to post is more important than ever.)
Both Later and Planoly offer free and paid plans. Both free plans offer powerful tools: you can visually arrange, draft and schedule photo posts to be auto-shared at the time of your choosing. Carousel posts (multiple photos) can be auto-scheduled on Planoly’s free plan, not on Later. But note that neither free plan allows you to auto-schedule video content.
As far as stories go: Planoly’s free plan will allow you to schedule these, but there’s no auto-publish, they’ll send you a push notification when it’s time to publish and you’ll have to post within Insta (where you can add location, tags, interactive elements). There’s no story scheduling option on Later’s free plan.
Bottomline:
Both Planoly and Later offer powerful support, for free. If you’re a heavy story user and on a tight budget, Planoly might give you a slight edge.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn, really? Once little more than a digital resume gallery, LinkedIn has grown up in a big way to become a powerful tool in any social marketer’s arsenal. But for nonprofits especially, who rely on corporate volunteers and sponsors, staying active and engaged here can be extra crucial. Coming down from our soapbox: is your company page set up? As an admin there you’ll have access to ok-but-not-great analytics about your posts, audience and page. But there’s no built-in scheduling tool on LinkedIn, you’ll have to use a third-party app for your planned content. And tbh, none are perfect when it comes to LinkedIn - even if you’re paying.
First, the free:
Buffer is easy to use, visually clean & simple, and offers a lot of functionality even in the free version. Create a regular content schedule, add copy, images and videos to schedule your LinkedIn posts. But - and this is a big but - we come up against 2 big flaws when scheduling lots of LinkedIn content here. First, images & videos can get…weird: there’s no way to preview how your published post will really look. So it’s easy to miss when images aren’t cropped in the right dimensions to look good on the LinkedIn feed. And often, a whole lot of weirdness happens with videos: instead of embedding on the page/post, they can show up as a link that clicks out. Secondly, if you plan on doing a lot of tagging of other company pages, Buffer might not be your best bet. Theoretically you should be able to do this on Buffer, but in practice, it seldom works.
Note: none of these tools, including Buffer, allow you to tag individuals in your scheduled content. This is a limitation from LinkedIn. If you want to tag people in your post, you’ll need to visit your page once published and edit the post to @ them.
The Cheap
If you plan on sharing a lot of LinkedIn content, Hootsuite might be your best bet. The free version allows you 30 scheduled posts at any given time, split between 3 total networks. And the company page tagging works better/as it should here, plus Hootsuite offers the ability to tweak and target detailed audiences for each post you schedule. To schedule more posts and/or link more platforms, as well as access deeper analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, starting at 45/month or 350/year (last we checked).
More expensive at minimum 99/month, Sprout Social is very similar to Hootsuite overall and in handling scheduled LinkedIn content. Why the higher price tag, what’s the value add? If you need to track a LOT of incoming messages and mentions across your social media - making sure everyone gets a timely reply, moderating discussions and keyword mentions, etc. - Sprout pulls all of this together in one handy central location so you can track, reply, and monitor.
Twitter:
A couple assumptions and caveats up front here. If you’re the average small-medium nonprofit, Twitter probably isn’t your biggest or best social channel! That’s because big success on Twitter takes a big investment of time, with a high volume of regular, conversational activity: tweeting out a link to your latest newsletter or a motivational quote twice a week, probably ain’t gonna cut it. But, climbing down from our soapbox again, the point here is that *if* Twitter is a super valuable platform for your org, you’re probably sharing a LOT of tweets -- more than you’ll be able to schedule on the free version of any of these scheduling tools (if you want to schedule content for other platforms, too). And if that’s the case then you likely already know about Tweetdeck, where you can schedule unlimited tweets totally free. If you’re more like the average nonprofit org that wants to tweet occasionally and maintain a presence on Twitter, you don’t need a standalone scheduler for Twitter and you’ve got a lot of options that are free and cheap.
Free
Tweetdeck - if you’re a heavy Twitter user. Or if you’ve maxed out your free scheduling with content for other platforms and need to cobble together a solution for Twitter-only.
Free or Cheap:
The free versions of Buffer & Hootsuite both offer great options for scheduling tweets out in advance. What works better for you might come down to your particular mix of platforms & content needs. And personally, we think the interface can make a big difference, too. While Hootsuite might technically offer a bit more functionality, figuring out where all the buttons and options are can be messy and confusing, especially when you’re sharing an account with colleagues. We find the Buffer Chrome plugin to make our lives much simpler - add content or a retweet with comment directly from whatever page you’re on.
Less Cheap: Sprout Social has basically the same scheduling functionality as Hootsuite and Buffer. But like we said in the LinkedIn section above, if you’re moderating and monitoring a ton of discussion or keywords, the social CRM tool that Sprout offers might be worth the extra $$$. Like most tools, you can do a free trial before you commit to paying anything.
Bottomline: If Twitter is not core to your social strategy, nearly any scheduling tool can do what you need - think of tweet scheduling as an add-on that most any can handle. If Twitter is your everything, try a Twitter-only tool -- that also happens to be free-- like TweetDeck.
Overall:
Look we hope you made it this far because you read the whole post. But because we’re realists let’s assume you scrolled here first to get the bottomline.
Sorry to say, there is no one-size-fits-all social scheduling tool for every org: it depends on your goals and which platforms are most important for you (and if you're not sure about that, get in touch, we'd be happy to help you map it out).
That said.
Totally free tools for scheduling your social media: most of the free versions of tools we’ve talked about here offer similar limits, 30 scheduled posts across 3 social platforms, and one user, more or less. So choosing the right tool, or combination of tools, really depends on where and how much content you have available to schedule in advance. But if you’re not yet sure about your platform and content priorities, you can’t go wrong with Hootsuite or Buffer.
If Instagram is important for you: add an Instagram-specific tool to supercharge your plans and simplify your life, like Planoly.
If you have no budget whatsoever: schedule any Facebook content within the Facebook scheduler, and keep those content slots available for LinkedIn or Twitter (on Hootsuite or Buffer).
If Twitter is important for you: use a Twitter-specific tool like Tweetdeck, which in addition to being free allows you to add endless columns for tracking topics, trends, mentions, etc.
If simplifying your social plans is most important: especially if you’re sharing social responsibilities with others, spend a little $$$ to keep all your drafted and scheduled content in one place, like Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social.
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