Posting random content on social media will only fetch you a random audience. No one needs that. Businesses only need an audience that is intended at buying or converting. That’s why it is important to publish the right content on the right platform. It is, therefore, even more important to publish your content at the right time. That is where social media calendar tools come into the picture.
The challenge with social media posting is that social media marketers have to handle multiple accounts. For these multiple accounts they have to run multiple campaigns. And, each campaign, in itself, requires them to post tons of content. Things can turn exhausting and extremely confusing with that kind of workload to manage.
If you are a social media manager with a digital agency, or you run social media for your small business, you need a social media content calendar to help you visualize your content strategy and sort out the chaos.
Consider the following example, when your work pressure can sky-rocket.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday is a huge opportunity for eCommerce merchants to increase their sales using social media. At that time of the year, you will be required to run a number of campaigns to maximize engagement and sales from channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. That will only happen when you’ve carefully laid out a content posting calendar.
Let’s have a look at the top social media calendar tools you must try to manage your content in a better way.
8 Best Social Media Calendar Tools You Can Try
1. SocialPilot
$30
An extremely comprehensive platform for social media scheduling and posting, SocialPilot can be a great tool of choice. So, if you are looking out for an easy-to-use social media calendar tool here are the details about the robust features it has to offer.
- A macro-level view of your scheduled content: Gives you a birds-eye view on how your social media plan for the entire month has panned out. Once you have scheduled posts day-wise or week-wise for a long period of time, you need to revisit your plan and double-check.
- Digging deeper into your plan with filters: Useful if you are handling multiple clients and have created month-long social media campaigns for many. You can filter your calendar view to dig deeper into account specific or group-specific scheduled content.
- Easy re-scheduling of your social media posts: Everyone errs. It may happen that when you run through your month-long plan for social media marketing you find that you want to move some posts from the fourth to the third week. Or, you might feel like sending a post scheduled for 3.00 pm to 6 pm because your analytics show that the later gets more engagement. That’s why the rescheduling feature is helpful. It’s super easy and super quick to use because you just need to drag and drop your scheduled posts on the desired date on the editorial calendar.
- Easy re-sharing of evergreen content: Some posts keep bringing in the traffic, engagement, and conversions. Identify these and don’t forget to enable ‘resharing’ on such posts. Why waste your time writing new content from scratch when you already have posts that are already working for you the way you want? Of course, you can’t reuse just your old content but some new posts and some evergreen content is a fine mix.
- Easy publishing: You can link blog feeds so that as soon as you publish posts they automatically get published on your social media accounts. You can also queue them up in case you want to modify the time at which they get posted.
- Make it visually attractive: You can play with different types of visual posts by adding multiple images, interactive GIFS’, posting native videos, creating a new image with Canva integration, carousel posts and much more.
What Users are Saying
2. Trello
$12.50
A very popular tool that is used by both individuals and companies, Trello is typically a team management tool. It isn’t typically a social media content calendar tool but can be used as one. Managers can allocate and assign work to team members inside the Trello dashboard. This reduces the amount of ‘emailing’ required on a daily basis.
For example, you can create different columns — To-do, In review, Posted, To-repost, etc. So, once your ‘in review’ post has been approved by seniors you can ‘post it’ and move it to the ‘Posted’ column. Or, you could create ‘channel-focused’ channels where you put in different cards under each and assign dates to these cards.
Once you’ve organized all your content on your Trello board you can go to the calendar view, which gives a comprehensive view on which post is scheduled to go out when.
Pros of using Trello
- A very easy user interface that anyone can start using without any help.
- The tool works on all devices — laptops, mobiles, and even tablets. That way, it helps you set your social media calendar even when you are on-the-go.
- You can color-code your cards, which makes it easy to understand the status of workflow on different campaigns. Trello makes content planning and publishing look like an easy job.
Cons of Trello
- You will have to integrate Trello with a third-party social media tool if you want to automate social media posting from Trello. This is additional work, which might make you rethink using Trello as a social media calendar tool.
- It gets difficult to manage and organize your work when you have multiple clients. The tool is best suited when you have to handle only three or four social media channels for four or five clients.
3. Evernote
$14.99
With an easy to use interface, Evernote can be intelligently used to manage your social media calendar. Just like Trello, Evernote is more of a task management tool that allows you to put dates on your social media content as well.
Evernote also makes it super easy to collaborate and work together with others in the team to manage your social media marketing campaigns. Using the app you can organize your calendar into monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, to view when your content is created, when it is being sent for review, or published on social media.
Pros of Evernote
- Syncs with multiple devices with ease. And, has a clean and easy interface.
- The feature Related Notes can be of much use for social media managers. The app uses an automated system that reviews content that you’ve earlier created in Evernote and recommends it if it relates to the content you are currently working on. This helps with better idea-generation, and also helps dig out some really good social media posts that have in the past won you excellent results.
Cons of Evernote
- Creating a back-up of all the content you’ve created, listed, and organized on Evernote, is difficult.
- Though the user interface is easy to understand it isn’t very neat. There is a lot of scope of improvement on that front.
4. Loomly
$159
Loomly earlier went by the name Calendy. As of date, the tool positions itself as a ‘brand management’ platform. For companies, both small and big, Loomly is a social media marketing platform that helps plan, create, and execute paid as well as organic social media campaigns with ease. This social media calendar tool’s feature allows you to view your editorial calendar in list-view as well as calendar-view.
Pros of Loomly
- The tool can suggest ideas based on which you can optimize your posts for more engagement and conversions.
- Great tool if you have multiple clients as well as a big team to manage. Allows for easy collaboration and effortless scheduling.
Cons of Loomly
- Sharing directly to Instagram from Loomly is an important feature that’s missing.
- The tool provides very few integrations with other platforms. It also offers very few CRM integrations
5. ContentCal
$99
If you are an eCommerce merchant or, say, a food or fashion blogger, you should consider the social media calendar tool — ContentCal. The tool brings the focus on ‘visuals’. So, on your social media editorial calendar you can view all attached visuals.
The image-focused content that you create and schedule on your ContentCal calendar can be easily viewed, removed, approved, and rejected by others in your team, using Approval workflows.
Using its ‘Planning Channels’ feature you can manage the number of channels that you want to schedule posts for. It’s easy to both add and remove social media channels in your list, for different accounts that you are working for.
Pros
- Extremely intuitive and user-friendly. It is easy to get started with the tool in less than five minutes.
- You can add ‘notes’ for the different campaigns you are running, which makes planning and content creation super efficient.
- On your ContentCal calendar you can ‘tag’ the content that you’ve created for publishing, by theme or category.
Cons
- The tool isn’t particularly great if you wish to schedule content containing videos.
- To publish on Instagram you’ll have to integrate ContenCal with a tool like Zapier.
6. MeetEdgar
$49
Taking social media content creation to the next level, MeetEdgar can actually write posts on your behalf. What the tool does is that it uses intelligent algorithms to extract content that’s winning the most engagement from the right audience and suggest it to you so that you can post and promote them on social media.
On your Edgar — social media calendar tool, you can schedule posts ‘category-wise’. This means you can segregate your post into blog posts, infographics, discount/promotional posts, webinars, etc. Color-coding on these category posts makes this task super easy.
Pros
- A comprehensive social media management tool that allows you to handle all work by logging in only into one account.
- The platform is very easy to use and understand.
Cons
- It supports only 3 social media platforms so you can only publish posts for Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
- It is a comparatively expensive choice for a social media calendar tool.
Verified MeetEdgar User
We like the tool for scheduling purposes but the reporting really lacked the details we needed to send to our clients, which resulted in more work — so we weren’t saving any significant amounts of time. Edgar is ideal for managing one company’s social media, but as an agency, we found it difficult to manage multiple clients on a single account you’d essentially have to create multiple accounts, making it more costly than competitors.
Here’s a detailed comparison of SocialPilot as a powerful MeetEdgar alternative
7. Google Drive
Free
Those who use Gmail, and not Microsoft Office, would be well-versed with the Google Drive Suite. There are features inside Google Drive like Google Sheets, Google Docs that social media marketers can use to plan, create and organize their work.
You can use Google Calendar to organize and set dates for different social content that has to go out on different channels. For example, you can lock ‘25th December’ for ‘Christmas posts’.
Pros
- The free version is loaded with features and capabilities. You really don’t need to buy a paid version of Google Drive.
- Needless to say, people around the world are very comfortable using Google Drive. It is extremely intuitive and user friendly.
- Both small and big companies can make elaborate content on Google Drive. There is no limit to the number of accounts or channels you can manage from within Google Drive.
Cons
- Difficult to integrate with other channels of communication. Even the number of plugins you can use with Google Drive is limited.
- Not a great fit if you are looking to manage all your social media postings and social media calendars in one place.
- It’s more of a file-sharing, storage platform than a social media calendar tool.
8. Hopper HQ
Where a number of social media calendars that we’ve talked about aren’t Instagram-friendly, Hopper HQ markets itself as the #1 Instagram scheduling tool. Fashion brands, cosmetic brands, Restaurants, food bloggers, models, and influencers — Hopper HQ is for you. Social media marketers who manage more than one Instagram account have the added advantage of being able to manage all accounts using a single Hooper HQ login
Other than Instagram, Hopper HQ works for only Facebook and Twitter. The tools social media calendar planner is easy to use, has a neat layout, and also helps easy re-scheduling of posts that you’ve lined up for sharing on social media.
Pros
- The tool enables bulk uploading, which means you can upload upto 50 posts in one go.
- The tool has some interesting image editing features. It helps you add filters, borders, and text overlays, etc. to make your images more eye-catching.
- You can make sure that your audience on mobile sees quality images and pictures. Before posting, you can preview how the images will look on mobile screens.
Cons
- Sometimes, posts that you have scheduled randomly fail to get posted. This makes the whole automation exercise a fail.
- Editing pictures, though a feature, is really difficult in reality. You really have to work hard to adjust the image sizing as per your requirement for different device screens.
- It supports only Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so you have to use another calendar tool for managing other social media platforms like LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Over-to-you
Content calendar tools are a basic requirement for anyone doing social media marketing. Those who’ve just started out with it need social media calendars to keep on track, never miss out on posting, and foster the discipline of posting on time. Those working with multiple accounts or on multiple campaigns, across channels, need calendars to stay organized.
We’ve discussed eight of the best social media calendar tools in this post. SocialPilot comes out as a tool with robust capabilities for scheduling, re-scheduling, managing bulk posts, and working across different channels. We’d suggest you give it a try.
Or, if you are using any other calendar tools, we’d love to know how it’s working for you.
Originally published at https://www.socialpilot.co.
