With so many social media management tools out there, how do you know which one is the best for you?

How do you know which one will meet all your requirements and cover all your needs?

It's easy to get lost in the whole variety of these tools! That's why in this article I want to share what social media management tools we tried so far and, most importantly, which one became our favorite.

First of all, why should you even consider using a social media management tool? Structure, consistency, and organization are the keys to success in marketing. Therefore, if you're not managing your social platforms with a social media management tool, you're making your life harder.

Not only will the use of a social media management tool make your life significantly easier and free up some time. Some of the tools are free which means you will accomplish your social marketing goals without any extra cost.

Social media management tools will help you manage multiple social profiles in one place and repurpose content, schedule posts in advance, track analytics across platforms, and much more. They are real game-changers for your social strategy!

That said, let's go over the tools we used, their advantages and disadvantages, what we liked, and what was missing.

I should say that all the tools have a similar set of features but offer different pricing and a killer feature that made a difference for our choice.

Buffer seems to be the best-known social media management tool and was the first one that we tried.

What makes it stand out among other platforms is the free plan. Yes, it goes with limited features and only gives you the ability to manage three social profiles and schedule up to ten posts. But it should be enough when you're starting out.

The minimum plan is priced at $6 per month for each social media channel that you're using.

Buffer supports most of the popular social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and even some that are not very widespread like Google Business Profiles and Mastodon.

It has an intuitive and user-friendly interface which guarantees a short learning curve with this software. Besides the support of a wide range of social media platforms, Buffer offers neat and useful features like scheduling the first comment, Stories, or Reels on Instagram, tagging users and locations, Twitter threads, content ideas suggestions, and much more.

Buffer even has an AI Assistant that you can use to generate content ideas and repurpose your existing content, helping you grow your engagement across all social platforms.

While all of that sounds awesome, Buffer has one disadvantage that made us choose a different software - it does NOT yet support YouTube. And because it's one of the main platforms for our business, we continued our search for the best social media management tool.

SocialPilot is another popular social media management tool that we tested and that you could use.

At the first glance, it offers pretty much the same features as Buffer but there're a few things that can make a difference for you.

First of all, SocialPilot supports scheduling and publishing videos on YouTube. If that's one of the platforms where you're building your social presence, then SocialPilot may be a better choice for you. While Buffer seems to be developing a solution for YouTube, at the moment of publishing this article, it's not available yet. 

Additionally, using SocialPilot, you can publish carousel posts, boost posts and add Facebook audience targeting with your Facebook Ads account, and bulk schedule your posts.

And another possibility that SocialPilot offers its users is white labeling. You can customize SocialPilot to match your brand identity and get the reseller benefits of the white-label setup

SocialPilot has a 14-day free trial, and the lowest plan that you can use afterward is priced at $30/mo for 10 social media accounts.

The next social media management tool on our list was MeetEdgar. It has the same set of features (plus some extras) as the above-mentioned tools and supports the most popular social media platforms (does not support YouTube, however), but schedules content in a unique way.

MeetEdgar groups all of your content into categories and then adds time slots to each category. It fills up those slots with your content and publishes them for you.

Moreover, MeetEdgar automatically finds quote-worthy pieces from articles or blogs and automatically creates variations for your post. All you have to do is click a button and share. Also, it continues publishing and resharing content, even once you reach the end of your queue, ensuring your posting is continuous. This all goes together with the great analytics possibilities and link shortening.

MeetEdgar pricing starts at $29.99/mo for 5 social accounts, and you can use the 7-day free trial to test the tool.

And with that, we finally reached our favorite social media management tool we're using at the moment - AgoraPulse.

At the first glance, AgoraPulse is similar to all the other tools that we've mentioned above. It supports the most popular social media platforms, allows you to schedule your content, and manage the comments, messages, and reviews in one place.

But one feature of AgoraPulse that makes it the best social media management tool for us is its extensive support of YouTube. Yes, SocialPilot also gives you the possibility to schedule YouTube videos. However, AgoraPulse offers much more!

One of the reasons why we decided to use AgoraPulse is the possibility to manage our YouTube comments directly in its Social Inbox. If you're publishing on YouTube and/or managing YouTube comments, you may know that YouTube doesn't have a decent way to show you all the comments, and more importantly, the replies to your comments (in other words, comment threads).

Usually, you'd see a notification from YouTube if someone replied to your comment, and you can read the reply in a dropdown window. But it's SO inconvenient to reply in that dropdown! And you don't really see the whole thread!

AgoraPulse solves that problem! You can easily see and reply to all the comments under your YouTube videos as well as replies to your comments in one place.

And you, of course, know that the more comments and engagement you have on your YouTube video, the better it performs. That's why this feature is crucial for us and that's why we went with AgoraPulse for our social media management.

The only disadvantage of AgoraPulse that I want to point out, is the pricing. It's a bit higher than what other platforms are charging and the lowest plan is priced at $69mo per user per month with 10 social profiles available.