10 effective social media automation tools to use in 2023

If you feel like posting, replying to followers and manually generating reports on every social media account you own is too much, we agree.

The good news is that with social media automation tools, repetitive or manual tasks that took you hours are now done within a few minutes.

Social media automation is the process of optimizing the tasks you perform for your social media activities. Its purpose is to reduce the hours spent managing your social media networks so you can focus on other tasks like analyzing data or coming up with better strategies to grow your social media presence.

Automated tasks include scheduling posts, replying to the most common customer requests, creating reports and tracking mentions of your brand. Rather than adding these activities to your manual to-do list, using automation tools to get them done will help you:

• Save time managing every social media account in one place
• Stay active on social media when your audience is most engaged or outside business hours—without you being there
• Check social data in real-time across social media networks
• Enhance team collaboration to boost productivity with workflows

In this article, we’ll walk you through the best social media automation tools—free and premium. You’ll learn features, use cases and who would benefit the most by using them.

1. Sprout Social

It’s no surprise that Sprout Social is our favorite solution to automate social media tasks. We developed it with your best interests in mind to unlock the potential of your social media strategies.

Here are three areas of our tool that will help you automate your social media efforts:

Social management

Sprout’s social management features focus on publishing, scheduling and reporting to aid your day-to-day social media activities.

Key features:

• Content Creation & Management: Schedule up to 350 posts and campaigns with a content calendar that spans all your social media networks. This feature also recommends proven times to post and generate engagement.
• Conversation Management: Get messages from all your social media networks in a Smart Inbox and reply from one platform. You can delegate these messages to specific team members and automate canned responses.
• Data Reporting: Analyze your performance across all your social media networks. Create custom reports and see graphics of your growth.

Customer care

Sprout Social’s customer care features help you better the experience of your customers or social media audience with your brand. With us, you can build stronger relationships and provide a responsive service.

Key features:

• Bot Builder: Create chatbots to automate your customer support. This feature helps you provide information 24/7 for Twitter and Facebook.
• Social CRM: Generate customer profiles and add relevant information to help your customer support team. Check conversation history from customer profiles to provide a custom experience. Sprout integrates with Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot so you can work across platforms to track the end-to-end customer experience.
• Review Management: Get notifications from Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook and Glassdoor. This helps you manage your reputation on social media and other online platforms from one dashboard.

Sprout Social Listening and Analytics

Sprout Social’s Listening and Analytics tools give you business-critical insights to help you make strategic decisions. Get deep insights and data about the general sentiment around your brand, topics your audience is interested in and specific keywords you want to monitor.

Measuring performance data across your social networks, and integrating listening data, enables you to get the big picture of your brand’s health quickly. Plus, you can automate reports using the graphs and charts Sprout creates for you. With this, you can see what people are saying without having to manually search each social platform.

Key features:

• Competitor Reports: Compare your metrics against your competitors to understand your brand’s health. This feature allows you to filter topics by competitor, content type and sentiment, helping you identify trends to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout does the work for you, gathering the insights that matter to you and cutting out the need to manually audit each competitor’s social performance.
• Paid Performance Report: Analyze your social media advertising across networks. Instead of monitoring performance within each platform’s ad dashboards, Sprout pulls your data into one place so you can easily see how your paid efforts are performing. You can select the accounts and campaigns you want to include during a specific period. The reports give you metrics and graphics for Paid Video Views, Paid Web Conversions, Paid Engagement and Paid Impressions. All of these can easily be repurposed into a report for stakeholders, enabling you to focus on making strategic and timely optimizations.
• Social Listening: Rather than digging through millions of online conversations manually, quickly get business-critical insights from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to impact your current strategy and guide future action.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, mid-size brands, small businesses and agencies that want a full package of tools to make data-driven strategic decisions, build lasting relationships with customers and grow their social media presence.

Free or premium? Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial or a demo. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

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2. Sendible

Sendible is one of the social media automation tools that has all the features you need to run your social media daily activities from scheduling, posting, monitoring and analyzing on a budget.

Key features:

• Publishing: Schedule individual posts on your content calendar from your dashboard or in bulk with CSV files. With Sendible, you can resize images to fit every social media network without leaving the app.
• Collaboration: Add clients and team members to create workflows with approval and custom permissions.
• Analytics: Generate and automatically send reports to your clients. Also, get insights about the social media networks that drive the most traffic to your website, optimal posting times and top-performing posts.
• Social listening: Check data around industry keywords, hashtags and trends.

Who is this for? Agencies, brand managers or social media marketers that manage social media presence for clients or their own.

Free or premium? Sendible offers a free 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse offers an all-in-one social media automation tool that’s great for those just starting to grow their social media presence. This solution takes pride in providing great customer service with a 30-minute response time.

Key features:

• Social Inbox: Manage your messages with the Inbox Assistant, which organizes or labels your items. With this feature, you can create canned responses to address the same questions multiple times.
• Social Publishing: Schedule and approve content with your team and clients. Agorapulse also offers a mobile app to publish on the go.
• Social Listening and Reporting: Use parameters to focus on conversations about your brand and competitors. Get custom reports of gained or lost followers and social media interactions.

Who is this for? Freelancers, agencies, small businesses and enterprise organizations that want to manage their social media presence from one platform.

Free or premium? Agorapulse offers a 30-day free trial or a demo. If you’re looking for free social media automation tools, Agorapulse offers a free plan for individuals with limited functionalities along with other premium plans.

4. ContentStudio

ContentStudio differs from other social media automation tools as one of its features analyzes the content strategy of influencers, so you can use it to your advantage. Plus, this tool covers the basics of scheduling and analyzing social media posts.

Key features:

• Publishing & Scheduling: Schedule and approve content with your team or clients. You can also use the Chrome extension to share content with your audience easily.
• Analytics: Get demographic information from your followers and publishing behavior data from competitors.
• Social Inbox: Categorize your conversations and assign them to the right team member. You can reply to messages with canned responses and see if a teammate is already replying in real-time.
• Discover: Search high-performing content and analyze it so you know what topics are trending.

Who is this for? Agencies, brands or marketers that want to grow their social media presence while boosting productivity.

Free or premium? ContentStudio offers a 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media automation software that focuses on checking the general sentiment around your brand. With this, you can manage conversations with your clients and better their experience with your brand.

Key features:

• Discussion Volume Chart: Check graphs of your brand mentions online. When you spot a peak, you can analyze if it’s the result of your social media efforts or a sign of an issue that needs investigating.
• Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 uses AI to determine if online brand mentions are positive, negative or neutral—and set up alerts so you can act if you receive a negative mention.
• Data Exporting: Automate the generation of reports on PDF, Excel and even infographics.

Who is this for? Solopreneurs, agencies and enterprise companies that want to track their online reputation.

Free or premium? Brand24 offers a free 14-day trial. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

6. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media automation tool that provides general features like scheduling, analytics and social listening with integrated AI. They scale up B2B social media by offering a People Database to get more qualified leads.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Create multiple social media posts in seconds with AI. Then approve or reject these posts using workflows with tier permissions.
• Employee Advocacy: Generate a leaderboard where you can track your team’s performance metrics. Oktopost lets you filter your posts by topics so your team can share content they care about on their social media.
• AI-powered Social Listening: Monitor your brand mentions across major social media networks and websites. You can also get information about influential profiles that address relevant topics.

Who is this for? B2B companies that want to scale their social media presence and show its impact on business goals.

Free or premium? Oktopost offers a demo, becoming a premium tool after.

7. Loomly

Loomly is a social media automation tool that offers content management features for both organic and promoted posts, plus live optimization tips for your content.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Get step-by-step guidance to create organic and promoted content on Loomly. Then receive notifications (email, Slack, push or Microsoft teams) every time a team member edits or comments on your content.
• Ad Campaigns Creation: Create campaigns and boost sponsored posts from Loomly and schedule the date you want them to go live.
• Analytics: Analyze all your social media posts, even the ones that weren’t posted from Loomly, and get insights with automated UTM codes added to your URLs.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, agencies and small businesses that want a simple and easy-to-use tool to manage their social media presence.

Free or premium? Loomly offers a free 15-day trial. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

8. CoSchedule

Different from other social media automation tools, CoSchedule helps you organize, schedule and publish all your marketing projects in one place.

Key features:

• Marketing Calendar: Organize and schedule all your marketing projects (blog posts, social media, presentations and landing pages) in one place. Assign these projects to team members and monitor the progress in real-time, using easy drag-and-drop features if your plans change.
• Other CoSchedule free tools: A variety of free tools to help you optimize your content like the Headline Analyzer, Email Subject Line Tester and Social Message Optimizer.

Who is this for? Agencies, small businesses and solopreneurs that want a tool tailored to the project management of your marketing content.

Free or premium? CoSchedule is one of the few free social media automation tools. It offers a Marketing Calendar that will forever be free with limited functionalities and other paid plans.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is a solution that helps you market on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest while also helping you grow with email marketing. With Tailwind you can generate ideas, design stylish content and optimize it to convert more customers.

Key features:

• Plan: Get a social media plan tailored to your type of business and marketing needs. This feature provides content ideas and reminders to track your posting schedule in the social media calendar.
• Create: Automatically generate multiple designs for your posts with customizable brand colors, fonts and your logo with one click.
• Schedule: Schedule your post at the best times for engagement or set a reminder to manually post.
• Optimize: Obtain recommendations for high-performing hashtags according to your captions. Add links to your posts to convert more customers and get sales.

Who is this for? Brands or small businesses that want a tool focused on content creation and design while covering their scheduling needs.

Free or premium? Tailwind offers a free plan and three other premium plans.

10. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a tool that offers social media automation at scale. You can manage hundreds of social media accounts across networks from a single hub. This makes PromoRepublic a perfect tool for brands with multiple locations.

Key features:

• Content Creation: Have access to templates for high-performing posts and customize them with your brand colors and style.
• Publishing: Use workflows to approve edits or leave suggestions and collaborate with your team.
• Advertising: Create advertising campaigns that reach local audiences by using filters for zip code or city.
• Engagement: Post your content at proven times to generate engagement and answer customers’ questions or comments from your social inbox.
• Listening: Get data about your posts to determine the kind of content that your audience likes the most.

Who is this for? Small businesses, agencies and multi-location brands that want to manage multiple social media accounts across different business locations.

Free or premium? PromoRepublic offers a demo and then becomes a premium tool.

Automate your social media success

With social media in the game, there are a lot of opportunities to understand, entertain and communicate with your audience. But often, managing your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok in front of thousands of people online can seem like a lot for one person or even a small team.

That’s why it is imperative to use social media automation tools—not only to automate social media posts, but to enhance customer care and scale up your strategic decisions.

If you want the full experience of managing your social media accounts, customer support and deep insights into your audience, sign up for a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social.