Five Social Media Management Tools Worth Knowing
An overview of five social media management tools — Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Agorapulse and Sendible — and what each is built for.
Running social accounts across several platforms by hand doesn’t scale much past one person posting occasionally. Past that, most businesses reach for a social media management tool: something that schedules posts across platforms, gives one inbox for replies and mentions, and reports on what worked. Five names come up most often — Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Agorapulse, and Sendible. Pricing, plans and exact feature sets change often enough on all of them that they’re worth checking directly before you buy; what’s durable is the category each one competes in.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the longest-standing tools in this space: a dashboard for scheduling posts, monitoring brand mentions, and pulling audience data across multiple accounts at once. It’s built for both single businesses and agencies managing several clients’ accounts side by side.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social leans further into analytics than most of its competitors — beyond scheduling, it’s built to show which content is working and why, broken down by audience segment. It also routes incoming messages to the right person on a team, which matters once more than one person is handling replies.
Buffer
Buffer is known for a simple, uncluttered interface: publish content, then see straightforward performance stats on how it did. It’s a common starting point for a small team that wants scheduling and basic analytics without a steep learning curve.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is built around team workflow as much as scheduling — a shared inbox for responses and mentions, bulk queuing, and the ability to assign specific posts or comments to specific people. That makes it a natural fit for an agency or a marketing team where more than one person touches the account.
Sendible
Sendible is aimed squarely at agencies handling several clients’ social accounts at once, with a shared dashboard across the major platforms and some social listening built in to catch relevant conversations beyond a brand’s own posts.
Where this fits with your CRM
None of these five tools replace a CRM — they manage the social channel, not what happens after someone clicks through and becomes a lead. OneHash CRM picks up from there: tracking visitor and email activity so a reply on social media and a form fill on your site land in the same pipeline instead of two disconnected systems. For the posting side itself, a social media calendar is worth building before you pick a tool to run it through.