The 21 Best Social Media Marketing Tools to Try in 2025

While it’s entirely possible to have a strong social media marketing strategy without a stack of tools, the right ones can make your life a lot easier.

Social media marketing tools can help you create content, schedule posts, engage with your audience, analyze performance, study competitors, keep up with trends, search influencers … phew! I could go on.

Whether you’re flying solo or working with a team, having a few good tools in your toolbox can save time and help you focus on what really matters: creating great content and connecting with your audience.

The challenge isn’t just stitching these tools together (though that’s no easy feat either!): it’s figuring out which ones are worth your time and budget.

In this article, we’ve rounded up 21 of the best social media marketing tools for various use cases to save you the trouble of researching.

Some of the tools on this list will help you do multiple tasks, while others are more specialized. Whatever your strategy is, you can mix-and-match tools from this list to bring your social media marketing plan to life.

Let’s get into it.

1. Buffer

Best social media marketing tool for creators and small business owners

Free plan/trial available: Yes. Free forever for up to 3 channels. All paid plans also have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Paid plans begin at $6/month/channel.

Buffer is a social media management tool that can make many tasks on your to-do list easier. Some of my favorite core features:

• Schedule your social media posts across all major social media platforms
• Store your rough post ideas in a dedicated dashboard 
• Create a customized landing page within minutes
• AI assistant to refine your social media captions
• Collaborate with your social media team
• Measure and analyze your performance
• Template library to spark content ideas

As you can probably guess, Buffer alone is powerful and can take many tasks off your plate. However, the great part about Buffer is that it is both powerful and easy to use (one of the rarest combinations in the world of social media marketing tools, in my opinion).

Buffer’s also quick to add all the above functionalities for new social media platforms (hi there, Threads and Bluesky) at whip speed. This means that Buffer can evolve as your strategy shifts — a big plus when you don’t want the headache of adding another social media marketing tool for a new platform.

Creators and social media managers often struggle with posting consistently because they have a lot to do besides social media management. This is why Buffer has habit-building features like streaks to keep you motivated. The tool also makes it easy to store ideas using the create space (my favorite feature), because inspiration can strike anywhere, anytime.

🚀 Sign up for Buffer’s free-forever plan→

2. Hootsuite

Best social media marketing tool for combining social media management with social listening 

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a 30-day free trial.

Price: Pricing starts at €149/user/month for five social media channels

Like Buffer, Hootsuite is a social media management platform. This means you can use it to publish posts on multiple platforms, track performance, and respond to comments. But what makes it stand out is its social listening features.

Since acquiring Talkwalker, Hootsuite has emerged as a top contender in the social media listening tools market. You can:

• Track brand mentions and stay on top of trends
• Never miss a piece of user-generated content
• Understand brand sentiment

The tool’s trademarked Blue Silk AI also condenses heaps of data and findings into a digestible format. And Hootsuite goes beyond social media platforms to also find what people are saying about your brand on other websites, forums, and podcasts.

Beyond social listening, Hootsuite is more suitable for large and complex teams. It has numerous advanced features — so learning to use the tool is a complex process.

Its price might also be a dealbreaker for many people. It might be a better idea to pair a dedicated social listening tool with an affordable social media management platform if Hootsuite’s cost is out of your budget.

3. Sprout Social

Best social media marketing tool for combining social media management with influencer marketing

Free plan/trial available: No free plan available. All paid plans have a 30-day free trial.

Price: Pricing starts at $199/seat/month, including five social media accounts. All plans require annual billing.

Sprout Social is another all-in-one social media tool. It can help you manage your overall social media presence, helping you do tasks like:

• Publish posts across many social media channels
• Respond to comments and queries coming in via social media networks
• Understand your social media performance and pinpoint what’s working (and what’s not)

Apart from these features, Sprout Social also offers a great influencer marketing tool, where you can find authentic and relevant creators using topic search. Let's say you want to find influencers who post about sustainable makeup products. You can input that phrase on Sprout Social’s influencer marketing tool directly and discover creators who post on that subject.

Then, you can analyze a creator’s profile to ensure they match your brand values and requirements. You can even manage your influencer marketing campaigns right inside the tool (in addition to your other social media campaigns).

If you’re a social media marketer also managing influencer marketing for your company, Sprout Social can be a godsend — you can manage all your efforts in one software instead of scraping multiple tools together.

What can hold you back is the cost. Sprout Social’s influencer marketing tool comes at an additional cost (separate from the price of its social media marketing software). A silver lining: If you don’t like Sprout Social as a social media tool, you can still use it as your influencer marketing software and pay for it separately.

4. Verlynk

Best social media management tool for combining social media management with social media monitoring

Free plan/trial available: Free plan allows you to connect up to 3 social media accounts (but not X). You can schedule up to 10 social media posts per channel at a time. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Pricing starts at $9.99/month for 10 social media channels.

Verlynk can assist you with a range of tasks. It can be your:

• social media scheduling tool
• engagement tool
• monitoring tool
• analytics tool

But what makes Verlynk stand out is its unified social media inbox feature. You can respond to conversations across your social channels in one place — this includes DMs, comments, and mentions.

I love that you can also filter your inbox based on social media channels, audience sentiment, message type, timeline, and conversation status. If you use social media for customer service, you can even create canned responses for frequently asked questions.

And what if you use social media platforms to generate leads? In Verlynk, you can set up real-time alerts to ensure you never miss a message and reply promptly.

Verlynk is ideal for a creator or social media marketer who relies heavily on social media to run their business — whether that’s to generate leads or provide customer support.

That said, Verlynk doesn’t suffice as a social media monitoring tool if you get a large number of mentions, messages, or comments across multiple networks. In that case, you’d be better off pairing a social media tool with a dedicated monitoring software.

5. Madgicx

Best social media marketing tool for creating Meta ads

Free plan/trial available: No free plan. All paid plans have a seven day free trial.

Price: Pricing starts at $72/month and increases with your monthly ad spend.

If you practice social media advertising on Facebook or Instagram, Madgicx can help you run, manage, and optimize your paid strategy.

What about the Meta ads manager? The Madgicx dashboard is far more user-friendly and offers additional features. It goes beyond basic analytics and even allows you to create ads using AI. You can even scroll through the ad library and save ads you like within your industry for future inspiration.

My favorite feature is the AI marketer, which analyzes your ads and suggests areas for improvement. This feature can come in handy — especially if you’re a beginner or looking to experiment.

Lastly, Madgcix has an add-on one click report tool that allows you to monitor ads not just on Meta, but also on Google Ads, TikTok, Google Analytics, Shopify, and Klaviyo — all in a single dashboard. It costs $29/month (early bird price).

6. Kitchn

Best social media management tool for managing a social media advertising strategy

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a seven day free trial.

Price: Pricing starts at $209/month for one seat and one ad account.

Kitchn is another tool to manage your advertising efforts seamlessly. While Madgicx is focused on improving your ad strategy, Kitchn’s main purpose is making it more efficient.

It has lots of features like bulk upload, direct cloud integrations, and auto-mapping your ads across various placements that help you execute your advertising strategy faster.

You can also mix and match various creatives to experiment and quickly edit multiple ads at once. The best part is all these features aren’t hard to use — there’s little to no learning curve to the tool.

I also love Kitchn’s quality assurance features, which identify dead links and ad errors, ensuring your ads run as they should.

Kitchn can help you manage ads on Meta, Snapchat, Pinterest, and TikTok. The only drawback is that its cost isn’t beginner-friendly. But if you have a comprehensive paid social strategy across multiple platforms, Kitchn will prove to be worth the investment.

7. Keyhole

Best social media management tool for market research

Free plan/trial available: Not publicly available.

Price: Not publicly available.

Keyhole is a top-tier social media analytics tool to understand your target audience better. You can conduct an in-depth competitor analysis, analyze trends, and even do product research.

Its audience demographics can also help you uncover deep insights about your potential customers — the keywords they use, the products they need, and the marketing that resonates with them.

If you’re working in a time-sensitive industry (like the news), Keyhole’s real-time data can help you identify how the sentiment about a particular topic is evolving by the minute.

But you can’t manage social media marketing using Keyhole alone. You need to pair it with a management tool that allows you to build a social media calendar and engage with your followers.

8. Siftsy

Best social media marketing tool for analyzing comments on your posts

Free plan/trial available: Not publicly available.

Price: Not publicly available.

Siftsy is a qualitative social media analytics tool to help you analyze the comments under your social media posts. This tool can come in handy for various use cases. For instance:

• When your audience’s opinions on something
• When you’re teasing the launch of a new product
• When you want to analyze the comments under an influencer’s post.

You can simply paste the URL of your post on Siftsy or upload a CSV file if you want to analyze multiple posts in bulk. The tool works with most of the popular social channels — namely, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube.

9. Socialinsider

Best social media marketing tool for a dive deep into your performance analytics

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Plans start at $99/month for 20 social media accounts.

Socialinsider is a dedicated social media analytics tool. You can do a competitor analysis and get post-by-post metrics.

However, my favorite feature is the content analysis — the tool helps you understand which of your content pillars are performing best across social media apps. You can even conduct a content pillar analysis of your competitors in the higher-tier plans.

These insights can help you immensely in your content creation process — you can understand which topics resonate the most with your target audience and double down on them.

The tool also has an AI summary of your social media metrics, so you don’t have to do the work of analyzing your raw data (if you’re not a numbers person like me, nothing sounds better) and get strategic insights about how you should evolve your social media marketing efforts.

But since Socialinsider is a dedicated analytics software, you’ll either need to manually post and engage with your followers or use another tool to accomplish those tasks.

10. Mention

Best social media marketing tool for social listening

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Plans start at $49/month for 5,000 mentions, one user, and two basic alerts.

Mention can help you manage your entire social media marketing strategy — schedule posts, collaborate with your team, and track analytics. But social media listening is what gives it an edge.

The software analyzes your brand mentions from over one billion sources ( 🤯) daily. You can analyze the sentiment behind each mention and uncover tags dating back up to two years. Mention’s AI tool can also summarize the mentions for you.

You can also set up alerts for specific queries to stay ahead of the loop and monitor conversations about specific topics in your industry.

If you work as a team, Mention also lets you assign specific mentions to your team members. For example, someone from customer support can handle a product query while someone inquiring about your items can go to sales.

The only con is that Mention is not easy to use, and its social media management features aren’t the best compared to other apps on this list. For effective social media marketing, you’ll likely need to pair it with another tool.

11. YouScan

Best social media marketing tool for image monitoring

Free plan/trial available: No free plan or trial available.

Price: Plans start at $299/month, billed annually.

YouScan’s standout tool is its image recognition. Sure, social media monitoring tools can help you spot brand mentions, but can they spot your logo in images across the web? YouScan can!

Sounds like a small thing, but imagine being able to find your product on the shelf of a famous creator or kickstarting influencer partnerships with people who already use your product. It’s also excellent to spot counterfeits.

The catch? Its price. YouScan is more suitable for established enterprises or agencies that need a dedicated listening tool. 

12. SparkToro

Best social media marketing tool for audience insights

Free plan/trial available: Free plan available for five searches per month.

Price: Paid plans begin at $50/month.

SparkToro is not a traditional social media marketing tool. It's technically an audience research tool that you can use to learn more about your potential customers.

You can learn which newsletters your target audience reads, what podcasts they listen to, which influencers they trust, keywords they use on Google, and even which subreddits they follow. It's the best way to do a crash course on your audience.

You might not be able to justify investing in SparkToro solely for social media marketing, but its use cases are beneficial across all areas of marketing, growth, and sales.

13. Manychat

Best social media marketing tool for DM automation

Free plan/trial available: Free for up to 1,000 contacts.

Price: Paid plans start at $15/month.

Manychat is a social media automation tool. Do you ever spot those “comment [keyword] for [value]” call-to-action on your favorite creators’ captions? Manychat helps you automate that. Everyone who comments gets the resource you intend to provide.

If you generate leads through your social media marketing, Manychat is the best way to stay available 24/7. It's also an excellent tool to start a conversation with your followers on DMs.

But Manychat isn’t a social media engagement tool, so it won’t be able to help you beyond the initial automation.

However, if you’re a small business running your business on DMs, Manychat can help set up complex workflows that aid in warming up potential customers and answering their questions.

14. Modash

Best social media marketing tool for finding influencers

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Plans start at $299/month.

Modash is an influencer management tool that helps you find, outreach to, manage, and report on your creator marketing efforts. It lists every influencer across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok with over 1,000 followers.

My favorite feature is the vetting tool — you can not only see a creator’s audience details, but also their popular and sponsored social media posts. The tool also provides benchmarks for standard metrics, such as engagement rates, so you don’t have to guess whether a creator is above or below average.

Due to its price, Modash is only a suitable option when you’re running multiple influencer campaigns and have a comprehensive creator marketing strategy.

15. Short.io

Best social media marketing tool for shortening your URLs

Free plan/trial available: Free for up to five custom domains and 1,000 branded links.

Price: Paid plans start at $5/month.

Short.io is a URL shortener that helps you create branded and free links. Its detailed statistics also help you understand how your URLs are performing — like your top links, locations where your link is being clicked, which browsers your audience uses, etc.

You can also use a UTM link to understand where your website visitors are coming from. In the paid plans, you can also redirect users based on their location, automatically expire old links, and use password-protected links.

16. Repurpose.io

Best social media marketing tool for repurposing your short-form videos

Free plan/trial available: No free plan. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Paid plans begin at $35/month.

Content repurposing is an ongoing task for every creator and social media marketer. You want to get the most out of every piece you create, but doing so over and over again can get cumbersome. Enter: Repurpose.io.

You can integrate your social media accounts into the tool and crosspost on multiple platforms. The software will automatically resize and optimize your videos to fit each channel perfectly.

17. Quuu

Best social media marketing tool for content curation

Free plan/trial available: No free plan. The paid plan has a seven-day free trial.

Price: The paid plan costs $19.79/month per social media profile.

Quuu is an AI social media assistant that helps you with your content creation process. You can ask it to create posts based on the articles you’ve read, and it will generate a draft that you can then infuse with your own voice.

Quuu does its best to understand your brand voice and produce publish-ready posts, but the best way to use content creation tools is to get a rough draft, not the entire social media post. And with Quuu, the thinking behind a piece of content also has to be yours.

The software also serves as a social media scheduling tool, allowing you to schedule posts directly using Quuu.

18. Canva

Best social media marketing tool for editing your images

Free plan/trial available: Free plan available.

Price: Paid plans begin at $15/month for one person.

Canva needs no introduction. There’s no wonder why it has become a staple in almost every social media strategy — it’s the easiest tool to create beautiful images from scratch.

Even if you aren’t a graphic designer, you can quickly learn how to use it and build templates for your brand’s images, collaborate with your team, and even schedule social media posts.

I love that the tool now has image specs for most social media platforms, so you don’t have to spend time resizing anything. The free templates are also invaluable for building upon an existing image, rather than creating one from scratch.

19. CapCut

Best social media marketing tool for editing your videos

Free plan/trial available: Free plan available. Pro plan has a seven day free trial.

Price: Pro plan costs £21.99/month.

CapCut is a video editing software and a pretty awesome one at that. It's best for TikTok (ByteDance owns both apps), but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to edit videos for other platforms.

The best part is that CapCut’s most notable features are free, and the tool is easy to use. You can choose from a variety of fonts, transitions, stickers, and more. The latest? AI video generation. You can even cut your long videos into snackable social media clips (post from YouTube to TikTok in a jiffy!).

20. Rival IQ

Best social media marketing for competitive analysis

Free plan/trial available: No free plans. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Price: Paid plans begin at $239/month.

Rival IQ is an analytics tool excelling in competitive analysis. You can benchmark your engagement, follower growth, and other metrics against your competitors to check how you’re performing compared to your industry.

The tool also summarizes the key takeaways from the analysis and lets you know when a competitor has likely boosted a post to improve its performance. All of this data can help you refine your social media marketing plan and understand how your strategy compares to your peers.

Because of Rival IQ’s cost, I’d say it’s best for businesses who have a comprehensive competitive analysis strategy.

21. Supermeme.ai

Best social media marketing tool for turning text into memes

Free plan/trial available: No free plan. Free trial for 10 credits.

Price: Paid plans start at $9.99/month.

Does social media marketing require memes? Of course not. But does it make it a lot more fun? 100%. Supermeme is a meme generator — you type the text and it generates the meme.

It features an elite meme database to provide context for your texts, and it's watermark-free. If you want, you can even brand your memes without using another image editor. Plus, the memes are available in 110+ languages. Color me amused.

How many tools do you need?

There’s no right answer to how many social media marketing tools you need. It depends on your social media strategy, team size, and goals.

That said, my parting advice would be to avoid beginning with too many tools at once. It can be heavy on the pocket and the mind (more tools can be overwhelming). Instead, start with an all-in-one tool and layer specialized tools as and when you think you need them to be more efficient.

For example, with Buffer, you can get started quickly. It can help you schedule posts, interact with your audience, store ideas, and get in the groove of social media management. Once you're in the flow, you can always add more specialized tools if and when you need them.

Sign up for Buffer for free 💸 .

More tools we love

• ⚡️ I’ve Tried 50+ Productivity Tools — Here are My Top 9
• ✍️ 9 of the Best AI Writing Tools and Assistants to Help You Work Smarter, Not Harder
• 🎆 The 9 Best AI Image Generators of 2025 (+ Examples)
• 🚀 26 Free Instagram Tools to Help Grow Your Account in 2025