19 top Hootsuite alternatives for your brand in 2024

As social media becomes more influential, impactful and involved, having robust tools with the latest and greatest features is becoming increasingly important.

Take the introduction of new AI tools recently. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 81% of marketers already say AI has had a positive impact on their work. The takeaway? Teams who don’t have tools with up-to-speed AI features are already falling behind.

Between new platforms and new innovations, there’s a lot keeping marketers on their toes—and their schedules full. You need the best tool for the job. Hootsuite is a major player in the social media marketing platform space. And whether you want an option with different pricing, more specialized or just want to try something new, we’re here to help you do your research.

Use this list to brush up on Hootsuite alternatives in a few categories to kickstart your search:

1. Best overall Hootsuite alternative
2. Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing
3. Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics
4. Hootsuite alternatives for social listening
5. Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service
6. Hootsuite alternatives for influencer platforms
7. Free Hootsuite alternatives

Areas to focus on when comparing tools and Hootsuite alternatives

Social teams should regularly evaluate whether their current tools are hitting the mark, or if it’s time to try something new. A social team can only be as agile as their tech stack enables them to be.

Whether you’re curious about Hootsuite alternatives or you just want to see what’s out there before you make a decision, it’s always beneficial to see what other platforms have to offer.

Here are some key areas to look for when researching a new tools for your team.

Quality customer support

Customer support is everything. And it’s two-fold for social media tools—on the one hand, you need a tool that enables you to enact timely quality support. On the other, your team needs to receive quality customer support too.

When sourcing a tool, pay attention to whether they have readily available customer service to help your team. You need to be able to get help quickly to ensure your tool never slows you down.

According to the Index, 58% of marketing teams say they either share social customer care with their customer service team, or they own it but sometimes customer service will step in. Which means you need a tool that enables collaboration between your teams—ideally with AI capabilities to speed you up too.

Strong innovation

Marketers move at the speed of social. And tools must also follow this fast pace to help teams do their best work.

But making these changes and evolving to keep pace with the digital space takes time. The tools that will most benefit marketing teams are those that prioritize innovation by constantly looking for ways to enhance their roadmap and evolve.

Proven ROI

Proving social media ROI is a key success indicator that social teams must demonstrate. It also happens to be the most difficult.

A robust social media analytics and reporting tool enables social teams to demonstrate and prove ROI, and understand the full impact of their efforts. This means offering different kinds of reports that span channels, individual post breakdowns and paid vs. organic metrics.

A robust reporting tool also enables you to demonstrate ROI to leadership and other teams. Your platform should have sharable reports for stakeholders and clear, easy-to-understand data visualizations like charts and graphs.

Best overall Hootsuite alternative

Before we dive into the full list, let’s start with Hootsuite competitors that encompass every category on this list.

1. Sprout Social

We have to toot our own horn a little. Sprout Social is a stand-out all-in-one alternative on this list—especially for mid-size, large and enterprise businesses.

But don’t take our word for it—from AI-powered capabilities that fuel your social strategy end-to-end to high-level integrations with tools like Salesforce and Zendesk that unify your tech stack, check out what makes Sprout the best tool below.

Then try it free for 30 days yourself to compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite for yourself.

Start your free Sprout trial

Scheduling and publishing

Efficiently plan, schedule and publish social posts from a centralized social media calendar. Features like the campaign planner and tags take the guesswork out of reporting on content and campaign success.

The calendar also enables seamless collaboration with in-calendar notes, content placeholders, drag-and-drop functionality and Approval Workflows that enable internal and external stakeholder reviews.

Sprout’s AI and automation features also act as a virtual data or copy assistant. Suggestions by AI Assist generate captions with tone options in seconds. And Optimal Send Times uses 16 weeks’ of audience data to suggest seven “best times to post” as you schedule.

From our “SproutLink” link-in-bio tool, to URL tracking to measure success in Google Analytics, an Asset library and more, Sprout’s publishing capabilities simplify your scheduling process.

Analytics and reporting

Sprout’s analytics and out-of-the-box reports do the heavy lifting of gathering and synthesizing your data for you. This frees you up to focus on the higher-level thinking that requires a creative human behind the wheel, like strategic and creative planning.

Sprout’s analytics provide deep insights that make measuring ROI and benchmarking against competitors to stay ahead a breeze. With Sprout’s ability to plug into your CRM, get a full 360-degree view of your customer, and the customer journey. And our Tableau integration to create dynamic reporting dashboards, further breaking down social data silos.

Sprout’s analytics and reporting enable you to get a full view of your strategy performance, to benchmark against competitors and helps transform your social media intelligence into shareable business intelligence. Find out more about Sprout’s analytics and reporting capabilities here.

Social listening

Sprout’s social listening solution and AI-driven technology offers custom topics, or pre-built topic templates that enable you to perform competitor analysis, analyze brand health, uncover industry insights, analyze campaigns and monitor events in a snap.

Our social listening solution empowers you to be proactive by grasping how your audience feels about you and your competitors, uncovering influencers to partner with, identifying trends as they emerge and by getting ahead of crises with custom alerts and granular sentiment analysis.

If you want to try our social listening solution, reach out to us for a personalized demo.

Request a demo

Customer service

Sprout’s social media customer service solution goes beyond responding to comments. Our features enable smooth team collaboration and provide ways to improve the customer experience across platforms.

Manage conversations yourself, or create a Case for other team members to complete. See in real-time when other team members are responding to comments in the inbox to avoid duplicate work and a disjointed customer experience.

Meet customer needs quickly with Sprout’s copy AI features, or with canned FAQ answers stored in the Asset Library. And further free up your team’s time with a customizable SproutBot that can handle the common inquiries for you.

With Sprout’s customer service solutions, directly engage with customers and see the extent of past interactions for more context. And with our Salesforce and Zendesk integrations, effectively bridge the gap between sales and customer service to get a 360-degree view of your customer and their journey with your brand.

Influencer marketing

The future of social media marketing involves creators and influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, over half of marketers are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset their primary challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

With Tagger by Sprout Social, we offer a creator and influencer marketing solution to help you ease into the future of social media.

Discover authentic and impactful creators to partner with, and use Tagger to manage your relationships, contracts, campaigns and more in one centralized platform. And Tagger takes the guesswork out of creator partnerships by measuring the success of your collaborations.

Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing

A robust social media scheduling tool is a must to keep your posts timely and accounts consistently active. Yet, 35% of marketers cite their brand’s scheduling tool as their top challenge when planning and scheduling content, according to Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report.

A solid publishing and scheduling tool must be intuitive on top of easing the publishing process. And with 43% of social teams feeling siloed, according to the Index, collaboration features are key, too.

Check out these Hootsuite alternatives for their scheduling and publishing features.

A quick note: Our pricing sections highlight “billed monthly” plans, but most of these tools also offer annual plans.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an end-to-end social media management platform with features that cover inbox and publishing, a unified social inbox, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration needs.

Agorapulse supports publishing and scheduling on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Google My Business and TikTok. And their high “Ease of Use” ranking on G2 is reflected in their intuitive, clean publishing calendar. Communication features enable smooth, real-time collaboration with shared notes, tracked action items and visibility into who is communicating what.

Agorapulse’s calendar offers other staple features as well, including UTMs and an AI assistant. But one unique feature is its grid layout feature to preview upcoming Instagram posts, making Agorapulse an interesting option if you prioritize Instagram.

Pricing: When billed monthly, standard plan at $69/mo, Professional at $99/mo, Advanced at $149/mo and a Custom plan.

(Source: Agorapulse)

3. Buffer

Buffer has been around nearly as long as Hootsuite. While Buffer won’t have as many features as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, it’s well-suited to creators, individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Buffer offers a simplified publishing calendar and core team collaboration features, like post reviews and account management. In their analytics, they also offer your best days, types of content and posting frequency to power smarter publishing.

Like many social media management platforms, Buffer has an AI Assistant feature that helps you brainstorm, repurpose and tailor posts to publish across platforms, and will provide suggestions for posts from long-form content. What makes it unique is that, as of the writing of this article, Buffer offers their AI Assistant to all new users, including those on the Free plan. While Hootsuite’s is currently free of charge to its users, that offer is for a limited time while OwlyWriter AI is in beta.

Pricing: When billed monthly,, they have a Free plan, then paid plans start at $6/month, making Buffer an extremely affordable option.

(Source: Buffer)

4. Oktopost

Oktopost touts itself as a tool best suited for B2B companies looking for a full social engagement suite.

The platform emphasizes its calendar’s focus on managing campaigns, with every cross-channel post published categorized with a specific campaign. The calendar is visually appealing and has color-coding and drag-and-drop functionality for quick adjustments.

Like other platforms, it also offers an asset library, UTM tagging and team collaboration functionality like revision history. Additionally, Oktopost puts an emphasis on their brand safety features. Their “banned keywords” function assures everyone is adhering to brand voice and company standards.

Pricing: Custom pricing based on customer needs.

5. Eclincher

Reviews praise Eclincher for being easy to use for scheduling, and overall, for having supportive customer service.

The platform has many of the key features we’ve talked about for publishing, including an intuitive drag-and-drop calendar for cross-network publishing, link in bio for Instagram, best times to post feature and agencies/team collaboration features. Additionally, it offers a local SEO tool to show how well your business ranks for any keyword, which can help inform content.

Pricing: Eclincher is an affordable solution, with a Basic plan at $65/month, Premier at $175/month, Agency at $425/month (all while billed monthly) and an Enterprise plan at a custom price.

Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics

The way that brands use social media analytics is expanding beyond the marketing team. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.

Here are some Hootsuite competitors who are worth looking into for their analytics and reports.

6. HubSpot

While other platforms on this list are social-specific, HubSpot is a “customer platform” that connects marketing, sales, content and customer service teams and efforts.

HubSpot enables you to see marketing, sales and service data in one place, breaking down silos with out-of-the-box social reports and analytics. HubSpot’s reports give you a holistic view of how your platforms and campaigns perform.

HubSpot’s ability to integrate with your CRM helps you see your social media efforts in the context of your larger business by: tracking leads, new customers and website traffic—a metric 60% of mid-management social media pros track regularly, according to the Index.

Pricing: Their Marketing Hub pricing is broken down by team size.

(Source: HubSpot)

7. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the more specialized Hootsuite competitors on this list. It’s meant for analyzing competitor content and discovering content and influencers with an emphasis on journalists.

For competitor analysis, BuzzSumo can ID the most-shared content and how it performs by network and format. Their Facebook Page Analyzer helps you benchmark and compare up to 10 Facebook pages for content engagement. And if YouTube is your focus, BuzzSumo’s video marketing feature helps analyze and optimize your videos, surface popular video content by topic, ID gaps on competitor channels and more.

BuzzSumo also has a robust influencer marketing tool. With a focus on Instagram, X and the web, this tool helps you uncover influencers and creators who post about topics relevant to your brand.

Pricing: When billed monthly vs. annually, BuzzSumo offers a Content Creation plan at $199/mo, PR & Comms plan at $299/mo, Suite at $499/mo and Enterprise at $999/mo.

(Source: BuzzSumo)

8. Rival IQ

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that solely offer analytics, Rival IQ is hyper-focused on analytics and reporting. Its suite of reports and analytics tools includes solutions for competitive analysis, social post analysis, social media audit tools that you can compare directly to competitor performance, hashtag analytics and social listening solutions.

Their tools can surface phrases and topics that drive social engagement in your content, helping you optimize it. The post type analysis feature helps you see engagements by different types of media and posts. And custom dashboards or templates help you present your data the way you want to.

Pricing: They do offer a free analytics plan. For their monthly billed plans, they also offer a Drive plan at $239/mo, Engage at $349/mo and Engage Pro at $559/mo

(Source: RivalIQ)

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management tool made for large companies and enterprise. Their Marketing Analytics feature gathers data across 30+ digital channels. And those insights are added to a dynamic, AI-powered dashboard that unifies your cross-channel data and makes it visible to everyone.

Marketing Analytics enables you to look at campaigns, marketing insights and general trends in one source of truth, breaking down silos and streamlining data. These reports can be customized to reflect content performance, for example, to better understand what performs well.

Curious about how Sprout stacks up? Compare Sprout Social vs. Sprinklr here.

Pricing: You can only request a customized quote.

(Source: Sprinklr)

Hootsuite alternatives for social listening

As social data becomes more impactful and utilized across whole companies, marketers will also need more sophisticated tools to uncover impactful insights. That’s where social media listening comes in.

Social listening unpacks insights about competitors, products, audience sentiment and more. Here are a few Hootsuite competitors for social listening and some of their features.

10. Brand24

Brand24 is among the specialized Hootsuite alternatives that purely handle social listening—not management or publishing. While it features media monitoring, it’s multi-purpose at what it touts as a lower industry price point.

Brand24 offers many of the core features that marketers look for in a social listening platform. It pulls insights from 25 million digital sources to support social media monitoring (in addition to media monitoring). And it can ID influencers, send alerts for discussion changes, measure customer sentiment and track hashtags. And it supports up to 108 languages, making it widely accessible.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $99, a Team plan at $179, a Pro plan at $249 and an enterprise plan at $499.

(Source: Brand24)

11. Keyhole

Social listening is just one of Keyhole’s products—they also offer solutions for publishing, influencer marketing, analytics and data, and trends. And G2 reviews often highlight its user-friendly design.

Like other social listening solutions we’ll talk about, Keyhole offers many of the core features you would need for industry research, benchmarking, brand monitoring and influencer marketing. And their QuickTrends feature enables you to easily identify opportunities in your industry.

Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $79/mo, Team at $149/mo, Pro at $249/mo, Advanced at $449/mo and Enterprise at $833/mo (billed annually).

Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service

Social media customer service is an increasingly important piece of the marketing puzzle. It can make or break a brand’s connection with customers, and their loyalty.

According to the Index, 51% of consumers say that the most memorable brands simply respond to them on social. So you must take advantage of every chance to interact.

If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives that are specifically built for customer service, here are a few options to consider, and some of the features they offer.

12. Zendesk

If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that only handle customer service, Zendesk is built purely for managing customer relationships, and for helping sales teams.

While not social media specific, Zendesk allows your social and customer service teams to deliver personalized interactions, across multiple touchpoints—from social media channels like Facebook and WhatsApp to Slack, mobile apps and your website.

Zendesk offers robust automation and AI capabilities that enable agents to quickly respond and provide self-service articles that Zendesk suggests for you to share. Zendesk also helps you create new help articles on the fly—write a few bullet points and the platform will help turn it into a customer service hub article. And their Content Cues help you understand what gaps exist in your help center articles.

Pricing: Zendesk comes at a high price point, but has a lot to offer. Their monthly billing plan offers a Suite Team at $69/agent/month, $115/agent/month, $149/agent/month and Suite Enterprise, which is a custom price.

(Source: Zendesk)

13. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a dedicated customer service tool that emphasizes its solutions for social customer care. They also provide an all-in-one customer service tool vs. offering multiple products that must be purchased separately—a factor that makes LiveAgent an especially budget-friendly option.

LiveAgent also highlights its social media monitoring and customer service platform as part of its software, further bridging the gap between customer service and social team workflows.

Pricing: LiveAgent’s monthly billing plan offers a Small business plan at $15/agent/month, Medium business plan at $35/agent/month, a Large business plan at $59/agent/month and an Enterprise plan at $85/agent/month.

14. Hiver

The factor that makes Hiver one of the unique Hootsuite competitors is that this customer service platform was built for Google Workspaces and as they put it, “transform your Gmail into a multi-channel helpdesk.”

Hiver enables agents to manage support channels, like email, live chat, phone and beyond, directly in their Gmail inbox. Agents can add color-coded tags and automated rules that help categorize business communication emails directly in their inbox to sort by priority.

It promotes itself as easier to use and cheaper than Zendesk. The catch is that Hiver only supports WhatsApp when it comes to social media.

Pricing: Hiver’s billed monthly option offers their Lite plan at $19/user/mo, Pro plan at $49/user/mo and Elite at $69/user/mo. They also offer custom quotes for brands that need over 50 licenses.

Hootsuite alternatives for influencer marketing

According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 300 marketers, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy.

Creator and influencer marketing is only going to become more important. And over half of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms, like Tagger, to help offset their main challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.

Here are a few platforms to consider for influencer marketing.

15. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ offers a database of over 17 million creators from all niches. Their platform offers robust search tools to help you unearth the right creators to partner with, including enriched creator profiles that highlight brand affinities, and AI-powered advanced search that helps you search by metrics, keywords, hashtags and more. They also offer creator recommendations that uses a helpful proprietary scoring system that helps automatically and quickly narrow your search.

They also offer an extensive list of 13 solutions that span discovering and managing creators, a creator CRM, competitor benchmarking and team collaboration tools.

Pricing: They prompt you to sign up for a free demo and to request pricing.

16. Heepsy

With a free plan complete with 360 monthly creator search results and core filters that help you surface relevant creators, Heepsy is among the most budget-friendly options.

This platform supports sourcing creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube across all payment plans. Heepsy is more focused on the search element of influencer marketing, including features focused on finding influencers, influencer search, influencer statistics and influencer lists. With features like an authenticity analysis, they make it easy to find quality influencers to partner with.

Pricing: Free Plan, then their “billed monthly” plans are as follows: Starter Plan at $49/mo, Plus Plan at $169/mo, Advanced Plan at $269/mo and Heepsy services or Enterprise plans that prompt you to talk to their sales team.

(Source: Heepsy)

17. Influencity

Influencity offers a robust community of influencers to choose from at 200 million influencer profiles worldwide to search through in their library. And the emphasis they provide on their site highlighting their high G2 rating makes them a stand-out.

This platform offers an extensive lineup of features and products that span influencer discovery to relationship management and campaign reporting. This makes them a competitive end-to-end solution for finding and managing influencer partnerships.

Pricing: Influencity plans range from Basic at $168/mo, Professional at $348/mo, Business at $698/mo and a custom plan, making them a great option for mid-market and large enterprise businesses who want to expand their influencer marketing strategies.

Free Hootsuite Alternatives

Free tools will always be the most budget-friendly option, including the aforementioned Buffer. However, free tools also have more limited features and options—like limited profiles or no analytics options.

But if you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that are free, here are a few tools to check out.

18. Social Champ

Social Champ is a full social media management platform that provides a calendar, publishing capabilities, analytics and an inbox solution.

Social Champ’s free plan enables one user to connect up to three social accounts and have 15 scheduled posts active in their queue at a time. While you have access to sentiment analysis, you can only use their AI Imaginator and AI content wizard tools three times in total.

Social Champ’s free plan offers a robust lineup of content suggestions, GIFs for content and reports. But your reports only gather data as far as two weeks in the past.

All-in-all, this is a solid option if you want to try Social Champ out, or if you have a handful of social accounts.

(Source: Social Champ)

19. SocialBu

SocialBu is an all-in-one social media management solution specifically geared towards small businesses. It’s also a newer tool, having launched in 2018.

SocialBu’s Free plan enables you to connect up to two profiles, with your choice of Facebook, X or Mastadon. You can publish up to 40 static posts per month, and can surface hashtag suggestions, design with Canva and discover content within the platform. However, just note: This tool doesn’t offer an inbox in the Free plan.

When it comes to your tech stack, it pays to do your research

Your tech stack is your lifeline. And in the social media marketing world, it has the power to make or break your workflows, strategy and ability to grow the entire business.

That’s why choosing the right solution for your social media needs—from publishing and engagement to influencer marketing and analytics—is critical.

When it comes to new tools, it always pays to try before you buy. Check out Sprout Social’s different plans to evaluate which is right for you. Then try our platform free for 30 days, or reach out to us for a personalized demo.

The post 19 top Hootsuite alternatives for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

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19 social media tools for your brand in 2024

Marketing on social media may be effective, but it can be extremely time-consuming. From figuring out what to post and posting at the right time to engaging with your audience–everything takes time. If you’re not managing these tasks efficiently, you’re going to end up overworked and overwhelmed. That’s where social media tools come in, helping you save time and streamline your social media management.

In this guide, we show you some of the best tools to help you with social media. From free social media tools to AI solutions, let’s check out the best social media tools for your brand in 2024.

Table of contents:

• What are social media tools?
• What you should look for in a social media tool
• Best all-in-one social media tool
• Free social media tools
• Social media tools for scheduling and publishing
• Social media tools for analytics
• Social media tools for content development
• Social media tools for content ideas
• AI social media tools

What are social media tools?

Social media tools are tools used for performing various activities related to social media. This includes scheduling, publishing, analytics, content creation and even automation. The term “social media tools” encompasses different kinds of tools dedicated to all these aspects of social media.

What you should look for in a social media tool

With so many options available in the market, it can be overwhelming to decide on the right tool. To guide your decision-making, here are a few things to look for in a social media tool.

Boosts your ROI

The tool should be able to positively contribute to your social media ROI. For example, a tool that helps you produce high-performing content at scale will boost your ROI. Similarly, something that helps you drive more engagements and visibility makes a good investment.

Improves efficiency

Saving time and improving social media efficiency are two of the biggest reasons why people turn to social media tools. So you should be looking for tools that let you automate or simplify certain tasks.

Gives you performance insight

Knowing how your existing efforts are performing is vital for building a strategy that delivers results. Social media tools should help you with this by providing vital performance insights to inform your strategy. Look for a tool that comes with robust social media reporting and analytics features to understand your performance.

Best all-in-one social media tool

Let’s face it–it would be so much easier if we could manage all our social media activities in one place. No more confusion, no more switching between multiple tools. That’s why you need an all-in-one social media tool that supports everything from publishing to analytics and monitoring.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media platform that helps you do it all.

It’s more than a social media management platform; it’s an all-in-one solution for your social media needs. This includes features for composing and scheduling posts and engaging your audience. It even supports social media listening, campaign management and performance analytics.

Sprout’s visual calendar helps you plan your social media content and strategically diversify your posts. You can set up posts to go live automatically and even maximize audience engagement with Optimal Send Times. This tells you the best time to publish your posts based on 16 weeks of audience data.

Speaking of engagement, Sprout’s Social Inbox helps you manage all your social comments and messages in one place. From here, get crisis notifications and automatically detect which messages to prioritize. Sprout even helps you enhance your responses using AI Assist,

These comprehensive features make Sprout perfect for businesses and agencies like. With approval workflows for teams and message tagging, Sprout aims to take the difficulties out of your social media workflow. As an added benefit, you get presentation-ready reports without additional work.

Free social media tools

Sometimes, the additional investment in tools can eat away at your marketing budget. Startups and solopreneurs don’t always have the extra money to spend on expensive platforms to support their social media goals. Fortunately, there are several free social media tools that are just as capable (albeit with a few limitations).

2. CapCut

If you’re looking for a social media tool to create awesome video content, CapCut is the answer. This all-in-one video editor is free to use and comes with effects, filters, music and stickers to turn a generic video into something unique. You can choose from hundreds of templates and customize them to quickly create engaging video ads.

Ideal for creating Reels and TikTok videos, CapCut provides advanced tools to support smart video creation. It lets you convert text to speech and vice versa, remove backgrounds and enhance video quality in just a few clicks.

3. Canva

A personal favorite, Canva is a free social media tool to create original graphics. It lets you create social media visuals in just a few clicks with hundreds of pre-designed templates. These are templates optimized according to each platform’s recommended social media image sizes. So you don’t have to worry about cropping and resizing the graphics after creating them.

What’s great about this tool is that it offers template collections according to the latest social media trends. For example, you can find templates for “camera roll dump” or “#WithMe” social media posts. This helps you create content that’s relevant and on-trend to better engage your audience.

4. Wistia

Another one for video marketers, Wistia is a free platform for creating and editing videos. It lets you record your screen and webcam, making it ideal for creating educational and how-to social videos. You can even add background music and customize the player controls to make videos that are on-brand.

Social media tools for scheduling and publishing

Successful social media marketing relies heavily on posting strategically. It’s not just about posting great content; it’s about posting great content at the right time. So you need social media scheduling tools to help you with automated publishing.

5. CoSchedule

CoSchedule offers a social media calendar to help you visualize your social media publishing strategy. You can create predefined social sharing plans and reuse them as templates to simplify your publishing efforts. The ReQueue feature lets you continuously publish your best content to keep your calendar filled.

It supports automated publishing across multiple social networks. Not only that, but the Best Time Scheduler optimizes your send times to reach your audience when they’re most active.

6. Post Planner

Post Planner simplifies cross-channel publishing by letting you create multiple posts in one go. You can tailor these posts for each network to ensure that they’re optimized according to the platform’s unique best practices. It even lets you save texts such as hashtags and CTAs so it’s easier to reuse them over and over again.

Post Planner supports one-click scheduling and lets you reuse your top-performing posts. It allows you to randomize the order of posts to keep things varied and interesting.

7. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar simplifies social media publishing with a limitless content library. The tool saves all your posts so you can repurpose them whenever you run out of ideas. You can automate your publishing strategy with unlimited scheduled posts. So your content goes out at the desired time without you having to post it manually.

Social media tools for analytics

Social media analytics tools offer you a variety of data. They show how well your posts, as well as campaigns, are performing, what your competitors are doing and track keywords.

8. Rival IQ

Rival IQ offers the ability to immediately benchmark your own post and profile performance against others. It’s great for tracking what your competitors are doing and what strategies are working for them. This tool highlights where your competitors are focusing their efforts. It even compares profile attributions such as a bio or about statement.

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the perfect tool for tying your social media efforts to your website performance data. You can use it to track how many visitors you’re attracting from social and from specific campaigns. This helps you figure out how your social media efforts are contributing to your larger business goals. Check out our guide on Google Analytics for social media to get started.

10. Audiense

Audiense is a consumer intelligence platform that gives you a better understanding of your audience. It goes beyond demographic data and uncovers insights about their interests and personality. It even helps you identify the influencers and brands that they follow. This allows you to craft more impactful social campaigns and messages that resonate with your audience.

Social media tools for content creation

Whether you’re creating videos or original graphics, social media tools can make your content look more attractive. Use the following tools to create high-performing posts no matter the type of content.

11. Animoto

Animoto helps you easily create videos from your phone or desktop. Using your own media or their stock library, adding elements like music and text has never been easier. The company also provides templates, plenty of tutorials and the option to customize for your brand on the paid plans.

12.  Venngage

Venngage turns anyone into an infographic designing pro. It offers plenty of infographic templates that you can customize with a robust editing tool. So you’ll find yourself creating presentations and social media-ready graphics in no time. This is a great tool for those who find themselves in need of business graphics.

13.  Unsplash

Unsplash offers professional photos for free, thanks to a community of photographers who donate their work. With over two million hi-res images and a robust search engine, even the smallest of brands will find something to use here. The Unsplash image license grants both commercial and non-commercial use. And there’s no need for attribution (although it’s appreciated).

Social media tools for content ideas

Finding the best content to share for your brand is a balancing act. The following tools do the heavy lifting on content curation by surfacing trending topics and articles. Trendspotting for social media content curation is an important portion of a marketing strategy.

14. BuzzSumo

Designed with content marketing in mind, BuzzSumo is a powerful tool for discovering content ideas. Its robust research tools provide you with the necessary info for deciding on which content and keywords to focus on. Not only does BuzzSumo share information on how hot a link is, but it also provides details on who shared it and where.

15.  Google Trends

Google Trends is a search engine that focuses on current and recent trending events. Using data from Google’s search engine, it documents keywords that are trending in any particular location. When you enter a keyword, you’ll find historical data and be able to plot them against other keywords.

16. Feedly

Feedly helps you read the Internet. Subscribe to any website that has an RSS feed and organize the feeds into different topics. With Leo, the AI research assistant, you can train it to focus on the topics and keywords you want. Paid plans offer the ability to follow newsletters and annotate articles for your fellow team members.

Even better? It’s a Sprout Social integration, which means you can curate and read the article in Sprout and share it as a post, all without leaving the Sprout app.

AI social media tools

AI marketing tools add speed and accuracy to your social media efforts. From content creation to brainstorming, these AI tools let you automate different aspects of your social media.

17. FeedHive

FeedHive has an AI Writing Assistant that helps you fine-tune your social media posts for optimal performance. With over 3,000 idea templates, you can easily come up with content ideas in a matter of minutes. The platform’s AI makes predictions on how your post will perform and gives you suggestions on how to improve your posts. Additionally, FeedHive suggests the best times to post based on how active and engaged your followers are at certain times.

18. Flick

Flick uses AI to improve your social media content and scheduling strategy. The AI Assistant generates hundreds of content ideas for you to choose from so you never run out of what to post. A key highlight of this tool is the caption writing feature, which lets you auto-generate unique captions in your brand voice and tone.

19. Ocoya

Ocoya speeds up social media content creation with AI-powered writing. The AI Assistant lets you generate social media text posts in 26 languages. You can then use the platform’s pre-designed templates to create eye-catching visuals to accompany your text.

Test out a new social media tool

Being a social media manager involves more than publishing posts. A social media manager is a graphic designer, content creator, salesperson and customer care advocate rolled into one. To keep on top of all these responsibilities and tasks, social media tools are important and necessary.

Finding the right tools that fit within your workflow and proving your investments via ROI is a delicate dance. Make the decision process a little easier by signing up for a Sprout Social trial.

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How to balance speed and quality customer service

It’s not enough to resolve issues quickly anymore. Businesses need to meet their customers with the personalized service they’re accustomed to on other channels. Like how the barista at your neighborhood coffee shop asks you “the usual?” when you walk in the door.

In the early days of social media customer care, speed was the most critical performance metric. In 2022, 77% of consumers reported expecting a response from brands within 24 hours—with 13% expecting a response in mere minutes, according to The Sprout Social Index™. Our latest Index report suggests consumers still want swiftness, but are more concerned than ever about quality customer service: 70% expect companies to provide personalized responses to customer service needs.

But departmental silos, limited understanding of the value of social customer care and clunky tech stacks hinder businesses from delivering best-in-class service. Leaders who don’t invest in solving some of these issues will be leaving money on the table and putting their customers’ loyalty up for grabs.

What customers expect from your service: quality and speed

In a world where social DMs have become a form of texting in their own right, brands replying quickly to customers is table stakes. Consumers want more than a fast response, they want the right response. One that means they don’t have to reach out again or deal with another issue a few weeks later. They want to feel like their problem is your first priority.

Take this stat from our latest Index report: A majority of consumers (76%) place equal value on brands that respond quickly to customer needs and brands that prioritize customer support.

Unfortunately, most consumers don’t believe they’re getting high quality care. According to Zendesk CX Trends Research, 62% of consumers believe businesses could be doing more to provide personalized service. As only 30% of brands have implemented customer care processes and tools to actively engage with customers on social, this isn’t a major surprise.

But that doesn’t mean consumers are making concessions or lowering their standards. The same Zendesk report highlighted that 70% of consumers expect anyone they interact with to have full context surrounding their customer service inquiries. What good is meeting your response time service-level agreements (SLAs) if you’re not actually resolving customers’ issues or leaving a mediocre impression?

Read more about how top brands provide exceptional customer service and support.

Common roadblocks to delivering high quality customer service

Though 88% of business leaders agree social media is a critical tool in providing customer care and service, there are still knowledge gaps that prevent teams from accessing the tools and resources they need, and gaining stakeholder buy-in.

Here’s how social media marketers and care teams describe their greatest challenges to delivering exceptional customer care and experiences:

The pressure to be “always on”

According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey, 63% of customer care professionals said a high volume of customer care requests is their most prominent obstacle. As one member of The Arboretum, Sprout’s online community for social professionals, put it, “The most significant challenge I face when managing customer care on social media is the expectation to be available to answer questions 24/7. Plus, pressure to make sure each answer is 100% correct and can’t be misinterpreted in any way that could reflect poorly on the business.”

Another added, “Social platforms have become essential for customer support. However, it can quickly become overwhelming for businesses due to the sheer number of inquiries they receive and the expectation for quick responses from a real person.”

In an era where customers want to be able to connect with a service agent the moment they need help, it’s critical to have agents available at all hours. But without proper staffing and handoff, this can stretch social and service teams thin and lead to burnout, on top of dissatisfied customers who don’t feel prioritized or like they’re getting an authentic response.

Departmental and technological silos

When it comes to ownership of customer care in 2024, only 8% of customer service teams plan to own this function exclusively. Shared ownership requires reimagining your teams’ entire approach to collaboration. From your tech stack to your internal workflows, pressure test each stage of your social customer care process to find out where silos are slowing service down, and where there’s too much strain on one team.

For example, social teams are often not equipped to handle complex customer service needs, but they’re often asked to do so anyway. As one member of The Arboretum described, “A social media manager doesn’t have the resources to resolve every customer complaint. Customers use social more and more for issue resolution, but there’s a solid wall between customer care (which leverages traditional communication channels) and social media engagement.”

Others agreed that collaboration between teams at their org is lackluster. “Our team’s inability to provide quick and effective customer care is due to the lack of timely interdepartmental communication,” says one social marketer.

Lack of training and education

Social customer care is a new domain, with most teams struggling to keep up with best practices. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse survey, 35% of businesses plan to hire additional agents and host additional training to improve the quality of customer interactions on social.

But these gaps are often the product of social customer care being thought of as an ancillary duty rather than a business-wide priority. As one member posted in The Arboretum, “There is a lack of recognition that social media ‘counts’ as customer service and care. Engaging with customers and your audience through comments and DMs doesn’t get the same respect or regard that dealing with customers through email, phone or in-person channels often does.”

While social professionals and service teams understand that social customer care is key to resolving issues on channels where customers provide open, honest—and very public—feedback, internal education to other departments is needed to help others see its impact. Enable key stakeholders and senior leadership to see how the ability to interject, navigate and even control the conversation can help retain customers and build the bottom line. Ensure training and education is happening org-wide, not just for the marketing and service teams.

Not having the right tools

Many social and service teams don’t have the tools needed to provide both quality and speedy customer care. With disjointed tech stacks and disparate communication channels, the work of customer care becomes like shoveling snow with a teaspoon—cumbersome and inefficient.

Our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey reveals many organizations’ most prominent challenges stem from technology breakdowns—48% are left with manual tasks that take up significant time, 41% with gaps in available customer care intel for agents to reference when handling requests and 26% cite a lack of technological resources. The lack of investment in customer care processes and tools to actively engage on social is a major hurdle to developing a sophisticated strategy.

An Arboretum member describes how not having the right tools impedes quality: “Customers appreciate personalized responses that address their specific concerns. However, doing this effectively on social media, where conversations can be disjointed and context may be lost, can be difficult.”

According to the Index, 50% of marketers plan to implement advanced social media management software to streamline workflow efficiency, which suggests leaders are aware technological investments are crucial to crafting a cohesive customer experience. More brands see the potential of social media management software—not just for posting and reporting, but as the central hub for social customer care functions.

How to provide high quality customer service, fast

What it takes to deliver memorable and positive customer experiences is changing. As customer expectations evolve, so too should the best practices your teams follow and the processes and tools you use.

These are actionable steps to overcome the challenges and meet customers where they are.

Use AI and automation for support

Social care teams are hesitant to use AI, fearful that it could damage the relationships they’ve built with customers and make interactions seem less human. Nearly half of marketers (49%) say their top concern in regards to AI is job displacement or reduced human involvement in social media management, according to the Index.

But the reality is by thoughtfully tagging in AI to handle customer care tasks like answering frequently asked questions, marketers and service agents will have more time to allocate to their most meaningful work. The Index highlights that 81% of marketers say AI has already positively impacted their work, citing benefits like more time for creativity (78%) and increased efficiency (73%). Another 47% say they will begin using AI in 2024 to handle basic customer inquiries and asks. It may sound counterintuitive, but emerging technologies can reallocate care teams’ time and help them meet consumers’ demands for authenticity and human connection.

For example, in the Sprout Social platform, our Case Management solution enables your team to automatically create Cases for each social message that needs a reply—and route them to the right team or individual based on custom criteria and rules.

Each team in Sprout has access to a distinct queue, where they can see all incoming messages assigned to them and key details about each Case. Teams can access Cases via a specific pane in the primary navigation menu.

The Case Management solution is a part of the Smart Inbox, where all incoming messages from across social channels are visible in one single stream. The inbox also includes other tools that empower your team to resolve issues faster, with AI-enhanced agent replies that make replying fast and easy, tags that allow for efficient sorting and filtering, and bulk actions to quickly manage Cases.

Here’s an example of how chatbots can be set up to help automate repetitive conversational tasks (like gathering information), resolve customer issues at a faster rate and provide 24/7 service, even when no agents are available.

Personalize the experience

Using name-only-personalization has been the extent of personalization for most of modern marketing (email, direct mail, etc). While using a customer’s name is a tried-and-true best practice, true personalization goes deeper. Consumers don’t want to be thought of as one of thousands (or millions) of people who receive the same canned response, they want to be seen as a VIP who deserves an experience that meets their unique needs.

Truly resolving customers issues starts with data, and finding meaningful data requires integrating social with other business intelligence software like your CRM. By having a centralized, 360-degree view of your customers, you will increase the quality of service you provide and break down departmental silos. This data will deliver key insights about your customers, from the first time they sent you a DM to the last time they made a purchase. Our Q3 Pulse Survey data reveals about 38% of customer care leaders indicated consolidating agent and customer data to guide business decisions was already at the top of their wishlist.

Sprout enriches your Salesforce CRM records with social data to provide a comprehensive view that enables your team to engage in real time with the right context. Notice how the sidebar is populated with Salesforce Service Cloud data in this example of an agent responding to a customer via the Smart Inbox.

Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence Connector takes it a step further by combining social data in an omnichannel view with other marketing data. By harnessing this intel, customer care and marketing leaders can work together to align on the business value of social customer care and elevate it into strategic planning conversations.

Use listening and social data to understand what your customers care about

The best customer care is proactive. Understanding what your customers care about, the common issues they’re having and how they feel about your brand will shape your brand’s care strategy. According to our Pulse Survey, 23% of customer care leaders count an inability to make data-driven decisions among their most pressing challenges, and another 37% are eager to adopt social media management tools that increase the value and business impact of customer care.

By using a social media listening solution like Sprout Social, you can leverage AI to uncover critical customer insights. With Sprout’s suite of Listening tools, you can automatically sift through billions of data points to zero in on trends and key learnings you need to guide future strategy. For example, you can find out how your customers are reacting to your latest product launch through the Sentiment Analysis tool, and use that data to train your team and inform future product development.

Be an example of high quality customer service

In this new generation of customer care, speed is no longer the only king. Responses don’t just need to be fast, they need to be thoughtful and tailored to an audience of one. As the volume of messages and mentions you receive rises, so too will customer expectations of your business on social. To stand out from the competition, you need to invest in the right training, processes and tools to propel your business forward.

Audit the tools and processes your organization currently uses to find gaps and redundancies. Build the case for shared ownership of customer care and access to social data. Identify the new skills you and your team need to lead a robust social care strategy. For help getting started, read the latest edition of The Sprout Social Index™, and dive into the latest data about creating customer experiences that drive business value.

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16 social media best practices to use to succeed in 2024

Social media managers are time travelers. They need to look to the future to be ready for the shifting forces (*cough* algorithm changes) of social. But at the same time, they must pay attention to current social trends, emerging tech and landscape. And grounding yourself in social media best practices is a great place to start.

To help you get ahead with your social media marketing and maximize your social channels in the coming year, we’ve compiled a list of 16 essential social media best practices for 2024.

1. Focus on responsiveness and personalization
2. Automate where you can—with a human touch
3. Examine your social customer service approach
4. Be more business-focused and strategic with sharing your social data
5. Leverage AI…and refine how you use it
6. Iron out your approval process
7. Reimagine your team’s structure and size
8. Feature customers and trusted faces on your feed
9. Be selective about taking a stand
   
10. Leverage your employees
11. Use video…but mix it up
12. Redefine your relationship with trends
13. Highlight your product in action
14. Think platform-first
15. Optimize existing platform strategies
16. Optimize for social commerce

These best practices for 2024 are grouped below in different key areas for your business, including customer care, bringing authenticity into your strategy and beyond.

Best practices for world-class social customer care

In today’s competitive social landscape, stellar social media customer care is a non-negotiable. Leave it behind in your strategy, and your consumers will leave you behind in the feed.

Here are a few social media marketing best practices for stellar customer care.

1. Focus on responsiveness and personalization to build loyalty

According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs.

But the quality of your responses also matters—70% of consumers expect a company to give them personalized responses.

Ensure your team has the tools they need to shorten your brand’s response times and create more quality responses. A few ways to start:

1. Audit your current response time average. A report like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report will quickly calculate your performance by response rate and percentage.
2. Use tools like customer service chatbots to have chat coverage 24/7 for low-lift questions to free up your team.
3. Ensure your team is engaging with positive comments to build loyalty, too—not just questions or complaints.

2. Automate where you can—with a human touch

A greater need for personalized, frequent responses means more time for your already-strapped teams. Enter AI and automation.

For example, in 2024 54% of marketers plan to employ customer self-service tools and resources like chatbots, FAQs and other forms to scale social customer care. They also want to use AI copy tools, like ChatGPT or Sprout Social’s Suggestions by AI Assist, as a starting point to generate real-time responses to customer questions and FAQs inside self-service tools.

Just always edit to humanize and stay on-brand—you don’t want to lose trust with consumers who are already wary of brands speaking to them through AI.

3. Examine your social customer service approach

Prioritizing social media customer care is crucial as more people turn to social for their customer support needs. 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. Rethink how you approach social customer care, and whether you’re prioritizing it.

The Index also found that 58% of social and marketing teams will either share social customer care in 2024, or customer service will be assisting marketing. If you’re not already collaborating across these teams, it’s time to start. Think: splitting up social monitoring, or working together to create FAQs, canned responses and bot copy.

And scale social customer care by utilizing the right social customer service tools, including AI and automation. A tool like Sprout Social will give you a 360-degree view of your brand’s interactions with your customers—integrating the worlds of social media and customer service.

Redefine how you work and social’s role in your business

Social media insights have impact and implications beyond social—just look at the need to prove social media ROI. And according to the Index, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.

But just as social media changes, teams must also change to keep up with the demands put on them. Here are a few tips to bring into your workflow.

4. Be more business-focused and strategic with sharing your social data

According to the Index, social media traffic to the website is a top metric that 60% of marketing strategists, managers and directors track regularly. This is your sign to start tying your social media data to larger business goals.

Turn to your fellow marketers for reference. The Index found that in 2024, most marketers plan on connecting the value of social to business goals by quantifying the value of social media engagement in terms of potential revenue, tracking conversions and sales from social and using social data to inform areas outside of their team.

A few key ways to do this:

• Use UTMs to connect social media posts and strategy directly to website traffic and sales.
• Consider a more sophisticated tool like Sprout’s social listening to uncover deeper data insights that has org-wide uses, including product analysis information, consumer sentiment, competitive share of voice data and beyond.
• Create reports for collaborators outside of the social team to expand social’s impact cross-org. Get started with these 10 social media report examples.

5. Leverage AI…and refine how you use it

The Index found that 81% of marketers say AI has already had a positive impact on their work—especially freeing up time for creativity and boosting efficiency. And the questions around AI have shifted from “will it take my job?” to “will it impact consumer trust?”

As you move into a new phase of the AI era, refine how you use it. Experiment with it for customer care responses, and content ideation and creation. But ensure you’re always editing for brand voice, humanizing the copy and personalizing customer-facing messages.

Apply it: Start using AI for the repetitive tasks you complete regularly, from strategy planning to content creation and data analysis. Try Sprout’s AI Assist technology to see how we can streamline your day-to-day across publishing, engagement, reporting and beyond.

6. Iron out your approval process

Trend cycles move at the speed of light. Which means your approval process must keep up.

If you’re feeling bogged down by a slow approval process, take the initiative to create an optimized workflow for your team and cross-collaborators. Build a seamless social media approval process all drafters and approvers can agree to. It could be the difference between going viral and getting left behind.

Apply it: For best results, use a social media collaboration tool like Sprout Social to formalize your approval process. Sprout’s Approval Workflow also lets you add and remove external stakeholders so they can review social posts before they’re published without needing to log in to Sprout.

7. Reimagine your team’s structure and size

The way you use social data, insights and platforms has evolved. And so too must your team.

We’ll always say that now is a good time to add fresh talent to your team. But it’s not just team size that needs to be rethought—it’s your team structure and how you work. For example, 64% of social teams are organized by network. That is, one team member is responsible for TikTok, one for Instagram, etc. But this approach may not be as effective as it once was as teams share insights beyond social.

Even though social data can inform other departments, 43% of social teams are still feeling siloed. If you can relate, it may be time to see how a new team structure might help. Can a team member focus on engagement, and another awareness? Or can a team member be dedicated to analytics, and another to content creation?

@sproutsocial

What skills do social media managers need for the future? And what will social team structures look like? Find out in our latest webinar. #socialmediamarketing #socialmediamanager #socialmediatips

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Best practices to bring authenticity into your strategy

There’s a reason why Merriam-Webster’s word-of-the-year in 2023 is “Authentic.”

Between the rise of AI and shaky brand promises in recent years, audiences are wary of inauthentic messaging. In fact, authentic, non-promotional content is the number one thing consumers report not seeing enough of from brands on social, according to The Sprout Social Index™.

Creating authentic content is one of the quintessential best practices for social media. Here are a few ways to do it.

8. Feature customers and trusted faces on your feed

Featuring actual customers and user-generated content on your feed helps build social proof and trust, and bring authentic voices into your content.

Partnering with creators and influencers also adds a trusted voice to your content and extends your reach. In fact, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy in our Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey.

52% of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset the challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns. If that’s something you’re looking for, consider adopting a platform like Tagger to manage your partnerships.

@aerie

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9. Be selective about taking a stand

Only a quarter of consumers polled in the Index said that the most memorable brands on social speak out about causes and news that align with their values.

Audiences are wary of inauthentic brand statements and promises. Know your values, and take a stand on issues that are aligned with them. Take L.L Bean, for example—they took a social media pause for mental health awareness month because it aligned with their brand values and mission.

10. Leverage your employees

Some of your most influential brand advocates are the people behind your brand: your employees. Adding employee advocacy to your social strategy is one of the most effective ways to amplify your content, humanize your brand and engage your audience.

Launch an employee advocacy program and curate a pipeline of content to ensure long-term success. In a Sprout survey of 1,110 US social media users across industries, over half of engaged social users are most likely to share employee updates. So create a “meet the team” series to showcase your employees.

@sproutsocial

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Social media best practices for evolving your content

Just as people’s interests and tastes change, so too do the types of social content, preferred formats and trends they follow.

Here are a few social media best practices to evolve your content for optimal engagement.

11. Use video…but mix it up

Video’s popularity is here to stay, at least according to the 66% of consumers who say short-form video is the most engaging in-feed content.

But we’ve also seen a renewed focus on static content in 2023. Even Instagram pared back their focus on video to renew focus on photo posts.

Fill your content calendar with a healthy mix of video, carousels, polls and static photo or graphic-based posts. And pro tip: lighten the video lift by recruiting social video talent from your team and beyond.

12. Redefine your relationship with trends

Using trends is a great way to build awareness. But you don’t have to jump on every single one—that’s inauthentic and unsustainable. According to the Index, 38% of consumers say the most memorable brands on social prioritize original content over trending topics.

Use a healthy mix of on-brand trends and original content, and keep looking at your social analytics to find your top-engaged and most successful formats. If you use Sprout, the Post Performance Report surfaces your top posts across networks by your metric of choice.

13. Highlight your product in action

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, 51% of consumers like to see brands highlighting their product or service in their social posts.

But remember, your product or service shouldn’t be the hero of your posts. Instead, demonstrate how it empowers your target customers to overcome their challenges. With your customers’ use cases in mind, show your product or service in action.

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14. Think platform-first

It’s true that you should repurpose posts across social networks to alleviate workload. It’s also true that you need to adjust each post to feel native to each platform.

Approach your content in a platform-first way, so each post you publish fits on the networks you’re posting to.

Here are a few social platform guides and best practices to follow:

• Best practices for Facebook
• Best practices for Instagram
• Best practices for X (formerly known as Twitter)
• Best practices for LinkedIn
• Best practices for YouTube
• Best practices for TikTok

15. Optimize existing platform strategies

New platforms are bound to emerge—just look at the recent launch of Threads.

Experimenting with new platforms will always be important. But optimize the content and approach you take on the platforms you use—and that your audiences uses most often.

Here are a few tips:

• Find the best times to publish: Optimizing your publishing time is an easy way to achieve more engagement. Check out our best times to post guide, pinpoint the best times for your brand to post based on channel and industry, and use Sprout’s Optimal Send Times as you schedule your posts.
• Post regularly: Consistency is key—74% of consumers think the publishing sweet spot for brands is one to two posts per day. Check out our article on how often to post on social media.

16. Optimize for social commerce

By 2025, social shopping is set to become a $1.2 trillion channel. And with TikTok recently rolling out TikTok Shop in the US, platforms are continuing to invest in this approach. Social commerce is a great way to sell directly on social.

Have a point of view and use data to back up your decision on where your customers want to buy, and optimize your social commerce tools on platforms where they are ready to go all in.

Whether you set up shop directly in your platforms or link to products in posts, optimizing your social channels for social commerce directly connects your customers and products. Start enhancing your omnichannel customer experience with all-in-one social commerce tools the help reduce friction in the buying process—for example, you can use Sprout’s social commerce solutions to integrate your social and commerce workflows.

Develop your social media best practices this year

Social media is always shifting. Platform shake-ups and new frontiers push social managers to learn new skills, change how their team works, experiment with emerging technologies and refine their approach on a regular basis.

Ground your 2024 strategy—and beyond—in social media best practices to help you weather all the uncertainty. We recommend that you bookmark this list so you can revisit it when you need help optimizing your social efforts.

To put these best practices for social media in action, we also recommend using a tool that supports all of them—from finding your best posting times, to auditing your content. Begin your free Sprout trial today, and transform every area of your organization and team.

Start your free Sprout trial

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