13 Top Social Media Automation Tools (2024 Pros & Cons)

In this post, I’ll be sharing my favorite social media automation tools.

There are lots of social media tools out there that can automate common tasks like publishing posts, managing comments and messages, and building analytics reports to save you time.

Below, I’ve reviewed and compared what I think are the best options on the market.

#1 – SocialBee

SocialBee is my top pick for the overall best social media automation tool. It can automate your entire social media strategy from start to finish.

SocialBee is an all-in-one solution, so it comes with a bunch of different tools that you can use to automate all the different tasks involved in social media management.

For example, you can use the content calendar to schedule posts in advance and auto-publish them to all your profiles across networks. 

Plus, you can automatically recycle evergreen content, generate captions with the built-in AI writer, create and send out analytics reports, manage messages & comments in the social inbox, and more.

However, the feature I like most of all is the AI Copilot—SocialBee’s social media strategy generator. It’s a unique feature that I haven’t seen in any other tools.

Once you load up the Copilot, it’ll ask you some questions about the goals of your social media campaigns, your brand, your target audience, and so on. 

Then, it’ll generate your whole social media campaign for you. It starts by letting you know which social media platforms you should focus on. Then, it devises your optimal posting schedule and content mix, sets up some ‘content categories’, and queues them up to be posted at set intervals.

And finally, it generates dozens of posts to add to each category, ready to get published to your social media accounts at the perfect time.

If you were to do all that manually, it’d take weeks—even with a whole social media team working on it. With SocialBee, it takes less than 5 minutes. That’s crazy.

Pros and cons

#2 – Pallyy

Pallyy might just be the best social media automation tool for content creators. It’s very affordable, easy to use, and can automate a good chunk of your social media activities, including content creation, publishing, reporting, and inbox management.

Pallyy’s main feature is its drag-and-drop content calendar, which you can use to schedule posts in advance to all your connected social media accounts. Pallyy will publish them automatically at the time/date you choose. You can also create a queue to simplify the publishing process further.

I like how you just drag images/videos from your media library onto dates in the calendar to schedule posts. It’s much faster and simpler than the way you schedule posts on other tools. And I also like that you can switch to the planning grid to preview how your scheduled posts will look on your feed once they get published.

Pallyy’s social inbox is great too. It centralizes comments and messages from all your profiles in one running feed to make it easier for you to reply to your entire social audience without switching back and forth between different platforms. And you can use automation rules to filter messages and assign them to different users.

Pros and cons

#3 – Metricool

Metricool is another all-in-one tool that comes with everything you need to automate every area of social media management. That includes automated publishing, inbox management, hashtag tracking, analytics & reporting, and more.

I particularly like Metricool’s Autolists feature. It allows you to group social media posts into lists, and schedule them all at once, rather than individually. And trust me, that can save you a lot of time.

For example, let’s say I always share a funny meme on my Twitter account on Wednesday, and I always share a post promoting whatever product I’m selling on Friday.

Rather than scheduling every post I make one by one, I can make two autolists: a ‘memes’ list and a ‘promotional posts’ list. 

Then, I can queue up the ‘memes’ autolist so that a post from it gets shared every Wednesday at 2 PM, and do the same for the ‘promotional posts’ autolists on Friday.

Once I’ve done that, all I have to do is create posts and add them to each autolist. Metricool will cycle through them and share one post each week in the order I added them, at the right time/day, until the list is depleted.

And what’s really cool is you can even make your autolists circular so that once a post is published, Metricool automatically re-adds it to the back of the queue. This is ideal for evergreen posts that you want to share again and again.

Pros and cons

#4 – Sendible

Sendible is the best social media automation tool for agencies. It has all the same features as other automation tools, but with a few extra goodies that make it particularly well-suited to agencies, like white-label client dashboards.

Sendible’s social media scheduling calendar lets you set up automated post publishing to all your clients’ social media accounts. 

You can keep the social sets of each brand you work with separate in client dashboards, and even customize those dashboards with your own brand colors, logos, etc. so it looks like the software was built in-house.

You can also set up automated mention monitoring, automatically generate and send out easy-to-understand client reports, and automate lots of other tasks you might do on a day-to-day basis.

I also think Sendible’s pricing plans are excellent value for money for agencies. In particular, the White Label plan is a great choice as it lets you add 20 users and up to 60 social profiles—that should be enough for around 10 client brands or more.

Pros and cons

#5 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio can automate everything from post creation & curation to social media publishing, reporting, inbox management, and beyond.

One of my favorite things about ContentStudio is its Discover tool. You can use it to automatically find engaging content from across the web, and share it to your social profiles based on the rules and filters you set.

I also like ContentStudio’s automation recipes. They’re pre-built, customizable workflows that you can deploy to do lots of useful things. 

For example, there are recipes to automatically share articles and videos to your socials, pull content in from RSS feeds, recycle your evergreen posts to get more value from them, and more.

ContentStudio’s social inbox deserves praise too. It doesn’t just pull messages from multiple social media accounts and display them in one place like other tools—it also has useful built-in automation features to save you time. 

For example, it can automatically route conversations to specific team members, and even automatically reply to common queries using canned responses.

Pros and cons

#6 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse can automate many of the tasks involved in social media management, from publishing to inbox management.

Queues is one of Agorapulse’s more powerful automation features. Rather than scheduling each of your social media posts individually, you can set up an automated publishing schedule. Then, just add posts to the queue and Agorapulse will take it from there.

I also really like its Advocacy tool. You can use it to automatically send emails to advocates in your distribution lists asking them to share your links/posts to their socials. And in doing so, amplify your organic reach. This is something you don’t get with a lot of other platforms.

Aside from the above, Agorapulse can also do things like automatically pull all your messages, comments, and DMs from different social profiles and pages into one organized feed for easy inbox management.

It can automate your social listening efforts too by monitoring the web for mentions of keywords that matter to your brand. And it automatically pulls data from your socials into visual reports, making it easy to analyze your performance, growth, content, and audience.

Pros and cons

#7 – Vista Social

Vista Social is another good option for brands and agencies. It’s an all-in-one social media automation platform that comes with several tools in one.

With Vista Social’s automated Publishing toolkit, you can plan, schedule, and share posts to all your social media accounts automatically, from one place. It has a built-in ChatGPT-powered AI writer to help you create your posts fast, which is pretty neat.

Its unified social inbox automatically compiles all your messages and comments from all your accounts into one place, making it easier for you and your team to manage and reply to conversations.

On top of that, there’s also an analytics tool that you can use to automatically compile cross-network metrics and build comprehensive reports. Plus, a listening tool that you can use to discover social conversations, a link in bio page tool, and more.

I also like that Vista Social comes with a built-in review management tool. This is something I haven’t seen on any other social media automation tool and comes in useful if your main goal is to manage your online reputation.

Pros and cons

#8 – Quuu Promote

Quuu Promote is a tool for automatically generating social media shares and social backlinks. It’s a must-have social media automation tool for bloggers.

The way Quuu Promote works is super simple. All you have to do is sign up, add the blog content you want to promote, and select the niche/category that best describes your posts.

Then, real people will start sharing your content across social media platforms like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Not only does this help your blog posts reach a wider audience, but it also helps generate thousands of social backlinks for your site over time.

This can indirectly help with SEO by increasing your content exposure and traffic, giving you more opportunities to get backlinks from other websites and ultimately, boosting your domain authority.

I know what you’re thinking—it sounds too good to be true. I thought so too at first, but it’s legit. The people who share your posts are all users of Quuu’s core content curation software (i.e. real humans, not bots), and they’ve all signed up specifically to find high-quality content to share on social. 

They’ve also manually subscribed to specific categories, so you can be sure your content will be a good match for their audience.

Pros and cons

#9 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is another tool that can do it all, but it’s a particularly good choice if you’re interested in automating your social media reporting as its analytics are best in class.

Iconosquare’s feature set includes publishing tools, social media listening, conversation management (a unified team inbox), and team collaboration tools.

But its standout feature is its analytics dashboard. Once you’ve connected your social media accounts, it’ll automatically start collecting a ton of data and insights to help you analyze your performance on social media, and benchmark it against your competitors.

Then, you can display that data in your own custom analytics dashboard. There are 100+ KPIs to choose from, and you can drag and drop different widgets onto the page to display all sorts of charts, tables, graphs, and other visualizations.

If you want to share your data with your clients, you can set up automated reports. Just choose the time frames and social profiles you want to report on, and when you want to send them out, and Iconosquare will do the rest.

Pros and cons

#10 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is the most expensive social media automation tool on this list, and its price tag might put it out of reach of smaller businesses and independent creators. However, it’s a great option if you have the budget for it.

As you’d expect given the price, Sprout Social is one of the most feature-rich automation tools on the market. It has all the usual stuff like automated publishing, analytics, and social listening. But on top of that, it also has a few features that I haven’t seen in other tools. 

My favorite is the bot builder. It lets you create your own custom, automated chatbots for Twitter Direct Message and Facebook Messenger so that you can communicate with customers on social around the clock, even when you’re out of the office.

I also like the way the bot builder integrates with the built-in Smart Inbox (a unified social media inbox) so your team can carry on the social conversations that start with your bot. 

The Smart Inbox is also loaded with powerful automation tools, like automated message prioritization, canned responses, message routing, and inbox rules.

Pros and cons

#11 – IFTTT

IFTTT is one of the most flexible social media automation tools on this list. It gets its name from the conditional statement, ‘if this, then that’—-and that pretty much sums up exactly how it works.

The idea is that you connect different applications to IFTT and then use conditional statements (known as Applets) to set up automations between them. So, when something happens in one application, it ‘triggers’ something else to happen in the other.

There are lots of potential use cases for this, but I’ve found it to be particularly useful for social media. 

For example, you might use an IFTTT Applet to automatically post on your Facebook page when you start a new live stream on Twitch. 

Or, you could use it to automatically change your Twitter profile picture when you update your Instagram photo. Or even to automatically cross-post every new photo you upload to Instagram to your Facebook page. The possibilities are endless

Most other social media automation tools can only do a handful of things, like auto-publish scheduled posts to your socials and automate reporting/inbox management. But with IFTTT, you can do almost anything you can think of. That’s what makes it so powerful.

Pros and cons

#12 – Brand24

Brand24 is the best social media automation tool for PR teams and anyone who wants to keep track of their brand mentions.

Unlike most of the other social media automation tools we’ve looked at, Brand24 isn’t an all-in-one platform. It only does one thing (but it does it really well), and that’s monitor the web for mentions of your brand name, or whatever other keywords you want to keep track of.

That includes all the social media platforms, plus news sites, blog posts, forums, podcasts, and millions of other sources. Whenever someone mentions the keyword you’re tracking anywhere on the internet, Brand24 will let you know about it.

It’ll also use AI to automatically extract valuable insights from your brand mentions. For example, automated sentiment analysis tells you whether each mention is positive, negative, or neutral. And automated topic analysis tells you what kind of conversation topics your mentions appear in. 

One of my favorite features is the anomaly detection, which detects sudden spikes or drops in volume of mentions and lets you know what might have caused it. You can set up alerts to receive notifications about any sudden changes so you can take action right away.

Brand24 also offers automated reporting. So, it’ll compile all those insights it gathers into easy-to-understand reports, with metrics like mention volume, reach, brand reputation score, AVE, etc.

Pros and cons

#13 – Crowdfire

Crowdfire is one of the most affordable social media automation tools on the market. Plans start at under ten bucks a month, and you get a lot for your money. It comes with automated publishing, reporting, inbox management, content curation, and more.

I particularly like Crowdfire’s Article Recommendation feature. Social media marketers can use it to automatically pull the best content from around the internet (based on your topics of interest) into a pool of articles and images.

If you spot something you’d like to share in that pool of content, you can do so in one click. 

Just customize your caption as needed and choose which social network you want to share it on. 

Then, click ‘post at best time’ to let Crowdfire automatically schedule it to be published at the perfect time to maximize reach and engagement. Or alternatively, choose a time manually.

Pros and cons

Conclusion

Those are my favorite social media automation tools on the market right now.

Each of them can help automate different social media tasks and processes. The best choice for you will depend on what specific features you need, which social media platforms you want to focus on, and your budget.

Looking for more tools to help with your social media marketing efforts? Check out these social media scheduling tools, and these tools for hosting social media giveaways.

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