With ecommerce, fortunately nowadays it’s relatively simple to get your products listed on social media sites through a variety of the best social media management tools out there (many of which will let you drop a link, or let the customer buy from you directly through the app). Believe it or not, it is possible to do the social media management all by yourself, from the content production to the post scheduling and marketing. If you’re in the later stages and found some success already, you can outsource this altogether by hiring an agency to take it off your hands.
If you would prefer that someone else who’s already an expert in this area manage your social media, then hiring might be the best option from the get go (if you have the capital). If you’re in the beginning stages of your ecommerce business, or choosing to go the solopreneur route, then having some social media management tools under your belt will help you a ton. When you’re creating the content, some of the listed tools will help you create more professional looking photos/videos/copy/etc. When you’re curating and scheduling the posts, some of the listed tools will auto upload for you, giving you more time to get back to the parts of the business you love.
Features & Pricing
Kapwing is a social media management tool in the form of an online video editor that connects content creators with a user friendly platform to reformat video sizes for different social media post types, add closed captioning to your clips, and much more. A lot of entrepreneurs in the ecommerce area starting out might not already have a video editing tool downloaded on their computer, or be able to afford to install a professional one like Adobe or something. Kapwing offers online video editing in both a free and low cost paid version, so you can start with the free one (no credit card required and it’s not just a free trial) and see if you would like to upgrade later for features like capacity for larger files/longer videos/unlimited transcription/higher resolution. The higher resolution feature makes a difference if you post on social media platforms that can be viewed from desktop.
Pros
- The free version is free forever
- No watermarks in your social media posts
- Saves room on your hard drive
Cons
- Social media tools like this requires a high speed internet connection
- Cannot work offline
- Can only export in 720p
(source: tiktok)
Features & Pricing
TikTok now provides their own management tool to upload and schedule your videos easily on desktop. A great number of business owners now have their social media managers use this scheduler, and native tools provided by the company itself are always the “when in doubt” way to go. TikTok’s website has a button on the top right hand side of the page to go to the upload page. The pricing is free because social media companies have a goal of keeping you on their site for as long as possible, and they want you to abide by their guidelines.
Pros
- Free forever
- Set it and forget it up to 10 days in advance
- Privacy settings included (not usually included with third party apps)
Cons
- Business accounts only and can’t batch a month in advance/no ongoing queue (a hurdle if you’re trying to develop a well organized social media strategy way into the future)
- No option to add a trending sound (which is important for algorithmic favor and getting the most amount of organic views possible)
- No video editing options like on mobile (just a place to drag and drop your mp4 file)
Features & Pricing
Here’s another great scheduling tool, because it’s native. Pinterest, like Tiktok, is one of the few social media channels that has their own uploader and scheduler from the desktop site. This free tool provides the ability to create and schedule both photo and video pins. Pinterest also lets ecommerce accounts tag multiple products in photos. This online tool gives you a few options too for unique media management features like adding your logo and editing a cover photo.
Pros
- Free ninety nine!
- Schedule up to two weeks in advance
- Videos, links, product tags included at no extra charge
Cons
- It’s another one of those media management tools where you can’t batch a whole month in advance
- No ongoing queue
- Cannot upload large video files or long clips
Features & Pricing
Later is a third party platform that is an official partner with both Instagram and Pinterest. With this tool, you can schedule social media posts for all the main platforms. Looking for ways to improve your social media analytics? You can make your posts more shoppable with their link in bio feature. You can get started with their free forever account without a credit card required, and same thing upgrade later (jinx) on for as little as eight bucks a month.
Pros
- Can schedule a whole month of posts in advance to multiple accounts
- Can create clickable posts to increase your sales through their link in bio feature
- Their paid plan includes Shopify connection
Cons
- No ongoing queue
- Not all post types are allowed to autopost, you’re likely going to need the mobile app and receive post notifications to upload manually (which is annoying if you’re going for a ‘set it and forget it’ approach to your social media marketing)
- If you plan on posting more than once a day, you’re going to need the more expensive tier to get unlimited uploads
Features & Pricing
Socialbee is a little bit more up there in price, and currently they only offer a free trial. The least expensive plan they have is nineteen dollars a month. This company is kind of more targeted towards agencies, because of their premium features that other social media management tools don’t have such as the ability to have ongoing queues and concierge services.
Pros
- The queue is a lifesaver! You only have to input your evergreen content once and it will repurpose it for you to all the major social networks. This really comes in handy when things get busy here at the agency.
- Same thing with the concierge services. You can get a social media person from their team to create post drafts for you, then all you have to do is make any necessary edits and mark them approved. Perfect for writer’s block.
- If you’re a solopreneur with a personal TikTok account and some algorithmic favor going then you’re in luck. With Socialbee you don’t need to switch to a business account.
Cons
- If you don’t already have at least 100 pieces of content saved to your marketing campaigns, then the queue won’t be useful and your posts will repeat too often. It’ll start to look obvious on your feed, meh.
- Although the concierge services could be an affordable inbetween option if you’re not ready to make the leap and hire a full time social media manager, but please understand that you get what you pay for. We’ve hired two of their “bees” and although both team members were wonderful to work with, they were overseas and there was a tiny language barrier. Meaning every once in a while the posts needed heavier copy editing to sound like they were written by a native English speaker.
- At the end of the day, it’s just not the cheapest option for an ecommerce business.
Features & Pricing
Planoly provides a free forever plan, yay! You can get unlimited auto uploads for only ten bucks a month after that. What makes this social media scheduler stand out from the bunch is their add on option for ecommerce. They have a product called “sellit” where for an extra thirty bucks per month you can tag your store’s products in shoppable posts directly in Planoly for single-click checkout, and other goodies like that to increase traffic/leads/sales.
Pros
- Official Instagram and Pinterest partners! This means Planoly’s tools will keep up to date with the social platforms’ terms of use and help keep your account in good standing (sometimes with unofficial third party apps they run the risk of being flagged as a bot).
- Their simplified social selling add ons make it a great option to consider if you’re in the ecommerce space
- Best times to post, autopost 1st comment, analytics
Cons
- Do not, I repeat, do NOT create original content inside Planoly itself. It glitches every now and then (at least for me) and I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I lost some really good copy that took me a while to type up. Please create your content somewhere else like a google doc, then copy and paste!
- Because they’re official Instagram partners, not all post mediums are available for auto uploads. You’re gonna need the mobile version to get post notifications and manually upload if you’re utilizing all the different post types (stories, igtv videos, reels, things like that).
- The “sellit” add on plan is kinda expensive when you have all these other expenses to consider in your ecommerce biz!
Features & Pricing
I’m pretty sure everybody and their mother has a Canva Pro account, or at least has someone’s sign it for it (just like how we all share Netflix logins, I see you!). In my professional opinion, for any small ecommerce business or entrepreneur, Canva is a must, even if it’s just the free version for now. You get access to graphic design and stock photos/videos for just about anything you need for any social media sizing. Plus, they now have scheduling too. We’ve actually featured them before too in a little tutorial on how to put together a brand kit with your hex colors.
Pros
- It’s the industry standard these days for do it yourself graphic design! I even professionally use it as a tool for client content creation.
- It’s pretty affordable at around ten dollars a month for the amount of value you get, and you can even get the pro version for free if you’re a nonprofit.
- You don’t have to have a degree in graphic design, or even an eye for design to be honest. They have templates and color/font combinations for just about any of the multiple platforms out there, so all you have to do is fill in the blanks (which I adore).
Cons
- The free version kind of annoys me to be quite honest! Once you get in there trust me you’ll want the paid version, or to not use it at all because all of the fonts/stickers/photos/videos you’ll actually want to use are locked behind the paywall.
- Sharing for team collaboration is glitchy. If you want to give someone else edit access it’ll take a few tries. Sometimes just typing in their email is enough (like with Google Drive), but other times they still won’t be able to view and you’ll just have to copy/paste the link from the browser.
- It’s really just for graphic design if you ask me. It has video editing capabilities, but I only use it for very simple TikTok clips (under 15 seconds). If you’re looking for video editing you’ll want to invest in the paid version of Kapwing.
Features & Pricing
HeadlineStudio by CoSchedule is an online interactive tool that will assist you with titles and the first line of your social media copy. When this tool is utilized, you basically copy and paste your overall main theme for the post. Then it will spit back out a score and provide suggestions to optimize your headlines. Once you have a score that’s in the green or a 70+ you’re good to go. It will tremendously help you with SEO (search engine optimization) and creating those eye-catching previews that will make your potential customers stop their scroll and click “see more”, “read more”, “learn more”, “shop now”, etc! It’s a must in my book and will always be in my arsenal. Because the reality is we all skim the headlines and “click-bait” is the content that gets results. Typically, a tool like this would be geared more towards blogs or landing pages, but I’ve still seen an improvement in organic engagement on the different social media platforms from HeadlineStudio’s help.
Pros
- Only need an email address to use it for free
- Backed by the big guys like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Buffer, Social Media Examiner, etc. and for good reason
- Boost your ranking on search results and Facebook pages
- Helps you get more organic traffic and potential customers without ad spend
Cons
- Your headline count doesn’t roll over each month, so if you want to write a lot of content you’re gonna need to pay up
- Pricing is not transparent, you will need to first make a free account and go to the billing section to see the price to upgrade, and if you need more than a 60 headline limit, you need to email their customer support for the price
- The paid version is a little up there for something that only helps you with titles or the first sentence of your copy. For reference, we spend about $350 annually for the subscription.
(source: search engine journal)
Features & Pricing
Here we’ve got TweetDeck, you’re go-to native tweet scheduler and management tool that’s free and provided by the social media platform itself. The all-in-one dashboard is the safe route to go for your Twitter account in order to avoid a horror story (we all have that one friend, or know that one article where one day somebody just woke up and their social media account was gone. Either they were mistakenly marked as a bot, or banned for third party software usage, obviously can’t get a social media company on the phone, and therefore loses all the progress they made on that platform). It may not have all the bells and whistles that an agency level software will give you, but at the end of the day, free is free baby! It gets the job done and you can schedule your tweets in advance for auto posts. What more could you really need?
Pros
- Free tool provided by Twitter itself with unlimited scheduling
- Schedule tweets as far in advance as you want to boost your marketing efforts
- Add images, videos, links (to buy from you of course!)
- Settings includes a “confirmation step” to double check your work before confirming your post
- Has a column for what’s trending in your dashboard, so you can get see what your target audience is up to and get ideas for tweets that will get more organic attention all on one screen
- Includes a column for your social inbox and notifications in your dashboard, perfect for streamlining your customer service
Cons
- Obviously it’s just for Twitter, it won’t help you with the other social media networks you’re on
- Sometimes the login or remember me feature is buggy, just make sure you have your username and password saved somewhere else just in case
- Not that much I don’t like actually, it’s straightforward and has everything I need. Just watch out for updates in the news though, sometimes journalists will report of glitches that you might see on your end too
(source: meta)
Features & Pricing
So…this is a tricky one to explain, but I’ll do the best I can for you. Facebook, or err, em, Meta, likes to change things. And they like to change features to their websites/tools often, often without telling us. Long story short, yes they have a free forever native scheduling tool to plan out auto posts for social media management on both Facebook and Instagram. In fact, they kind of have a few. Sometimes it’s in Creator Studio, sometimes it’s in the Ad Center if you do boosted posts, sometimes it’s in Business Suite. Sometimes they glitch out or look different next time you log in. I’d say use it since it’s free and made by the company that owns the platforms, because at the end of the day that’s what’s best in order to secure your social media presence long term. Just again, have your content created somewhere else that’s secure first, and just copy/paste/upload media files.
Pros
- Free forever with a visual content calendar for two major social platforms in one
- Schedule auto posts for up to at least a month into the future
- Can actually back date posts (comes in handy if you’re riding solo and got busy)
- Can upload longer videos like Youtube
Cons
- The inconsistency that is Facebook/Meta (I mean, let’s be real.)
- Glitches might get in the way of getting the job done in a timely fashion
- It is absolutely wonderful when it works and you can find the tool you need for the kind of post you’re creating, but when it’s bad I mean it’s BAD bad (not Michael Jackson bad unfortunately)
Features & Pricing
I used the social media software by Sprout Social at a PR agency that I worked for in the pre-pandemic-era. And it was definitely an agency-level tool we needed in order to handle multiple clients. It’s an awesome all-in-one that many successful businesses use. I used it to manage all of our client’s social media platforms and it was nice to just use one thing, and to be able to use it all throughout the workday without any glitches or problems. The owner of the agency knew about Sprout because that’s what she used at her job before starting her own business. The company she worked at was in the hospitality industry, and they owned about 90% of the hotels in their state. Sprout worked great for her being able to manage the multiple social media accounts of all these hotels! That being said, this tool is best saved for the ecommerce companies that are a few years into success and perhaps have expanded to multiple locations (if you’re a brick-and-mortar as well), or have different social media accounts for different languages/countries.
Pros
- Has everything you need for social media if you’re a big organization with a lot of social channels (and probably many social media managers) like Purdue University, Unicef, Eventbrite, Subaru, etc.
- As far and scheduling tools go, with this one you can queue posts
- Even their lowest plan includes review management for Facebook and Google My Business
- Can boost posts in the app directly
Cons
- This is gonna cost you a pretty penny! There’s no free version. It starts at about a hundred bucks a month after tax.
- Even for how much you pay, at the end of the day not everything can be autoposted. Some content will require the mobile app downloaded plus a post notification in the middle of your busy day
- If you’re looking for something free, you only get a thirty day trial.
Features & Pricing
It’s 2021, long links are way out of style by now. Especially since we have tools like Bitly, with a decent amount of value in their free tier, where you can create up to 100 short links per month. With this one, you get to shorten your links to save you characters in your social media posts. Plus, it’s neater, more organized, and easier for people to remember and type in themselves (for example, with an Instagram photo post, or something else that isn’t clickable). You can even customize the links to match your brand so they’re easier to remember in the long term, helping to retain more sales and site traffic in the span of a few years.
Pros
- Even the free version of this social media tool includes unlimited clicks
- Link history and reporting
- If you don’t already have another tool that shortens your links, odds are you’re going to use this
Cons
- The basic paid version starts at thirty bucks a month, so there isn’t something in the ten-ish dollar range like other tools on this list
- QR codes are a must in my opinion for ecommerce businesses, and to get access to their QR features you got to pay up.
- If you have a product based business, you probably already pay for a premium plan with a website/ecommerce platform that actually has a link shortener built in, so why pay for this, you know?
Features & Pricing
If you have MeetEdgar, you’re in luck because they are known to schedule posts in their automated queue. Their whole schtick is that you save even more time with their tool vs. others because they decide the times and such for you, and make sure even if business gets busy, your social media will be consistently posting in the background without you having to lift a finger. It’s that easy! Other social media posting tools that have a queue option tend to be on the higher end, but this is probably the most affordable content queue you’re going to find (which is why I made sure to include it on the best social media management tools list this year). They have a 7 day free trial and then after that their plans start at only twenty bucks a month.
Pros
- The queue! Oh my gosh the queue is such a security blanket, I cannot function in this industry without one.
- Their customer service is actually one on one with actual human beings
- They’ve got the thumbs up from Neil Patel!
- I have a colleague who has a few small businesses in the automations/operations space and this one is her favorite for systematizing her social media posts
Cons
- Well there’s no free forever version like the others, but I don’t think there’s a free forever queue tool to be honest
- It’s pretty simple and just gives you what you need, no bells and whistles like the other social media apps have
- There are other tools on this list with a queue that include other features as well, so you might get more bang for your buck somewhere else
Features & Pricing
Okay so Hubspot has free management tools for email marketing…but if you want to publish posts with social media tools you’ll be stuck behind a paywall (…but they do have free social media courses! Good to know if you’re a beginner and plan on being a solopreneur for a while). However, if you do decide to invest the pretty penny, then you’ll be pleased to know it’ll probably be the only software you need since they probably include more bells and whistles than all the others (like social media ads and a more in depth analytics feature).
Pros
- Manage social media easier with keyword monitoring, so you’re alerted when you’re mentioned anywhere (social listening). You won’t have to have a bunch of tabs open to the major social media platforms or scroll through a sea of other notifications, so that’s nice
- Bouncing off the keyword thing, they also have a special feature with a trigger to alert your sales team (if you have one, if not it will alert you) so you know to prioritize certain conversations and build relationships with your leads
- Check out their free 2022 social media marketing calendar to help you with publishing content in the new year!
Cons
- Buckle up! Because the social plan starts at eight…hundred…dollars..a month to schedule content! This is meant for at least medium sized businesses with an overall marketing strategy (not just social media)
- If you’re going to commit to Hubspot you really have to commit because their software is very complex. It needs to be set up and executed perfectly or you will hate it.
- Odds are you’re going to be either taking their courses and/or spending hours in contact with their customer service to get through this complexity and make it work.
Features & Pricing
What I like about Buffer is their free plan includes not only the basic social media features other free tools have, but they also include a landing page builder. And the paid version starts and only five dollars a month, so I say why not! Give it a try, and they integrate with other tools on here like Bitly. This is literally the most affordable content calendar/social media management tool you are going to find with premium ecommerce must-haves like the queue, reporting features, shopify connection, etc.
Pros
- A popular, trustworthy company that provides a ton of value at an affordable price. I just feel taken care of by them
- See your sales and which of your products are selling best on social media
- Integrate your content from Canva, Google Drive, or Dropbox right into your queue
- Officially partnered with Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn for social media scheduling
Cons
- It covers the major platforms, but does not currently connect to TikTok, so I don’t consider it an all in one platform. If you plan on going heavy with video marketing I’d skip Buffer
- The free version doesn’t even have analytic features that are free to view on the social media sites themselves like Instagram
Conclusion
When you find and settle into a groove with the best social media tools that fit your specific ecommerce situation, you will no doubt skyrocket your success vs. otherwise. Competition in this industry is always changing between the platforms, so it’s always best to go with a multi platform approach, even if all you have time for is to just focus on one platform and repurpose a queue to the others. If you use a social media management tool (or a few key ones), the online dashboard or software will handle all of that in one tab (or less than five I promise). If you’re reading this, you’re probably an ecommerce business owner, not a social media marketer by profession! So it’s important that you can return to all the other moving parts of your business such as fulfilling orders, nurturing customer relationships, and working towards sustainable growth. These are my favorite social media tools for all the things I’ve needed in this line of work across a variety of budgets from free to the thousands. A little bit of photo editing, video editing, search engine optimization, copywriting, analytics, post scheduling, content calendars, and everything in between.
