Essential Social Media Platforms for Growing Your Business
Top-notch social media management platforms, designed to elevate your brand's online presence.
Best for Minimal Social Media Marketing and Upkeep:
HubSpot: This is the perfect option for companies that just need one platform to do it all. With HubSpot, brands can manage all their marketing, sales, and social media needs in one place. You’ll be able to work in apps like Salesforce, PipeDrive, Zendesk, and other mediums for marketing campaigns such as email, social media, google ads, and your website. Your whole team will be able to work simultaneously together on projects. However, HubSpot poses a hefty price to get and customize these services. The minimum social media campaign integration cost is $800 a month, but can be as high as $3600!
From our experience, Hubspot has an extremely helpful support team that you can chat with or call to resolve any issues or questions. However, their social media features are somewhat lacking. If you are more of an adventurous brand in social media marketing, you may find the lack of integration for carousel and Instagram Reel posts disappointing. Our team has also experienced some bugs when drafting posts where the entire draft is deleted, so we recommend writing your drafts outside of HubSpot. You can schedule basic posts for Instagram, Facebook, and X in one place, and have them automatically publish at the same time. For better community management, set up keyword comment monitoring so you never miss critical interactions. If you have a more relaxed approach to social media marketing, HubSpot may be a great choice for your marketing needs if you’re already using the software.
Plann: If you are just starting out on your social media marketing journey, prefer posting less, or choose to post your content manually, Plann may be the best option for your business. Plann is great for creating a consistent aesthetic since it can help you coordinate the colors of your feed and give you templates to help with designing your feed. They also have automatic post publishing to Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook for business accounts.
This platform may also appeal to businesses just entering social media marketing as it is free for single users and just $9.99/month to add more. We recommend this platform for small brands or those just starting their social media marketing with a customer base that is more active on Facebook and Instagram. We like Plann, and it works well for some of our clients; however, other platforms do much more for less.
Tailwind: If your team needs a straightforward social media scheduler, some post-creation tools, and templates for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, then Tailwind may be a good fit for your team. They offer a free link in bio feature called Smart.Bio, which works nicely for leading social media audiences to various links like your website, blogs, or a feature news article. You can get analytics for how your posts are performing, and they’ve launched an email campaign tool! If you’d like to have one platform for multiple marketing channels, Tailwind is a great choice.
Our team and clients find that the free version is fine for most organizations because it has many features, such as twenty monthly posts across Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook, twenty post designs a month, a Smart.bio with a custom link just for your brand, basic account analytics, and unlimited email contacts. However, we have found that when your social media or email marketing grows, the free account limits how many posts you send out and the templates you can utilize.
For businesses that are just starting to move digital work in-house, have a small team, or are interested in becoming influencers, we recommend signing up for the free account at first. Then, move to the $12.99/month version when things take off. The paid version offers 100 scheduled posts a month and 200 designed posts!
The Most Affordable Options:
Meta Business Suite: In 2020, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched a free business management tool for business accounts, Meta Business Suite. In 2021, they added an automatic post-publishing feature to their platform for posts and stories. For a free system, this platform has a lot of bells and whistles. You can:
manage paid ads
access your social media analytics
efficiently deal with direct messages for Facebook and Instagram
respond to post comments
plan and schedule posts for both Facebook and Instagram
Our clients utilize this tool for a range of purposes from managing all their social media marketing ads and posts with Meta Suite, to others who only use it for customer service to respond to direct messages or customer questions. It is user-friendly, and Facebook has created forums for businesses to find answers to common questions. If you can’t find your answer in the provided community knowledge base then you’re out of luck because their customer service is non-existent.
While it is free, Meta Suite is not without its problems. As the development team rolls out new functionalities, we’ve experienced issues such as automated Instagram posts publishing without captions or disappearing entirely. Overall, these many free features are quite impressive, and businesses will just have to be aware of the shortcomings if they choose this as their primary platform.
Later: If you asked us which platform most of our clients use for social media scheduling, the easy answer would be Later. With plans starting at $0 to $40 a month, Later offers:
user-friendly platform
multiple social media post-planning
automatic scheduling
link in bio editing
first post comment functionality
carousel posts
automated reminders to users who want to push out posts manually
All these features make this affordable platform option quite a contender. Smaller brands that are just starting out won’t even have to pay to use the platform if they can get by with a single user. Unlike the other options on this list, Later includes TikTok posting functionality. Currently, TikTok is the most visited social media platform, so if you’re interested in starting your brand’s marketing on TikTok, Later would be a good option. If you want to lean into the prioritization of Reels on Instagram, you’ll be happy to know that Later can also post and schedule this type of content in advance. Later also offers a community engagement feature that allows brands to respond to comments from within the platform. However, if you’d like to reply to direct messages in Later, this feature is still unavailable. You’ll have to respond to direct messages natively within Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook. Later wins our vote for the best ROI of any platform, due to its many robust features for very little spend!
Best for Brands with Larger Followings:
Sprout Social: If you want the most out of social media management platforms, it will cost a little more than the other options on this list, but could be very valuable for brands with large followings. Sprout Social is one of a handful of social media management sites that do a little more work for you and your team. With formidable features in their simplest plan, like a super user-friendly interface, social media CRM, product and service review management, and an “all-in-one” social inbox to respond to all direct messages in one place, Sprout Social saves brands a lot of time. Sprout Social's most advanced plans can diminish the need for real-time social media support through automated tagging of customer messages and chatbots that can respond to messages using AI technology. They also track metrics to help teams track engagement effectiveness and responsiveness.
These combined tools can free up a lot of time and labor for social media teams. While there are many great features, most of the analytics and tracking software is reserved for the more expensive plans. Brands can expect to pay anywhere from $99-$279 monthly or around $1,000-$3,000 yearly for this easy-to-use platform. While the least expensive Sprout Social plans lack analytics tracking and CRM benefits, they still have many helpful social media management tools. If you have high social media engagement and are looking to save time, streamline many social media processes, and quickly understand your metrics, then Sprout Social is a great option for your team.
MeetEdgar: For many social media teams, constant content creation can be exhausting. If you’re feeling content creation burnout, MeetEdgar might be a perfect fit for your team. What makes MeetEdgar different from so many other social media management programs is its ability to use its AI helper, Inky, to generate content for your social media accounts from automations you set up in advance. MeetEdgar can create entire posts around a link you provide and help build an evergreen content library to post when you have less time to manage your account. If you set up rules in advance, MeetEdgar can automatically create captions, recommend hashtags, and schedule content from your evergreen library for you. When it runs out of content, it will reshare older content to keep your accounts active and engaged. It also suggests different variations of your posts to test and try out with your following on different social media platforms. Moreover, the platform tracks how well every post does, the best sharing times, and what content your followers respond to the most. Pretty cool!
This impressive content generation software includes easy post-creation tools and robust metric tracking with test variations integrated into analytics. It can help brands with established accounts gauge what their audiences are looking for, freeing up more time for social media teams to focus on community engagement, collaborations, and sales and marketing goals. MeetEdgar plans are affordable, given all the content creation features, at around $29.99/month or $299-$499 yearly. The only drawback of MeetEdgar is the lack of messaging and direct community management tools. However, with more time freed from writing or managing content, brands can invest their resources elsewhere, such as real-time community engagement with their audiences, which is the most meaningful metric to drive return customers and build a community.
While each of the systems we've explored has its own set of advantages and limitations, they all offer a significant leap forward compared to the manual execution of social media tasks. From post-scheduling and creation to analytics tracking, these tools streamline processes, saving your team precious time and resources. If you would like support in setting up or maintaining platforms like this along with community management and more, our Marketing Ops + Sales Support team is perfect to help you scale.
Author Bio
Hey there! I'm Katie, a Lead Client Specialist on the HigherRing eCommerce/CPG team. I navigate the exciting world of social media, ERP, CRM, and API software, while also mastering operations and supply chain development. When I'm not optimizing processes, you can find me indulging in delicious vegan food or reveling in all things green.