Click the Buffer icon in your toolbar (or use a keyboard shortcut), compose your update, and click Add to Queue to schedule. The more slots you have, the more updates you'll need to schedule, but scheduling updates is easy with Buffer's intuitive dashboard, mobile apps, and browser extensions.įor scheduling content from the web, Buffer offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Head to Settings > Posting Schedule to tweak this at any time, delete or add time slots, or disable an entire day. By default, Buffer creates four slots per day: in the morning, around noon, late-afternoon, and later in the evening for the time zone you've selected. When you first connect a social account, Buffer will create a schedule for you.
Free users can connect up to three social accounts, including Facebook Pages and groups. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. Don't decide on one based just on our observations try the two or three that sound like they might suit you best, and go from there.īuffer is one of the longest-running social media tools aimed primarily at scheduling posts, although it's gone through multiple updates, shifts, and iterations.
It's also worth noting that every app has a free trial or even a totally free plan. Price wasn't as much the issue as value for money.
There are plenty of enterprise- or influencer-focused apps out there that charge a serious premium for features you'll never use. (Unfortunately for marketers, not all social networks allow the same kind of analytics, which means you won't necessarily get the same features for every social network you use.)įinally, all the apps had to be cost-effective for small and medium businesses. To make it easier for you to identify what content works for your audience, the best social media management tools will offer detailed analytics on how your posts do. Different audiences will engage differently with different kinds of content. Also, it was ideal if apps offered access to your social media inboxes away from the distraction of the feed, so you could reply to customers without getting sucked in. This meant we required apps to enable you to schedule future posts and updates so you could batch your social media work into a couple of blocks each week. It shouldn't be a hands-on job that takes time every day. It's easy to waste time on social media-whether you're posting for yourself or your business. Support for other networks or services was a bonus but not essential for inclusion. With this in mind, we set out some pretty firm criteria on what we felt made a great social media management tool:Įach app had to support multiple social networks: at the very least, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Most small businesses don't have the staff or the time to waste posting individual updates and checking in on each site a few times every day.
Social media management apps have one purpose: to make managing your business's social media presence easy and efficient.
For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.