Social media tools can be the difference between effective marketing and a waste of time. Discover five tools everyone should be using this year.

How does your company manage social media? If your answer involves one or more employees manually updating your accounts, I have good news for you.

There are tools you can use to make this process so much easier and more efficient! Reclaim your employees’ time and focus on the things that make your business unique. All you need are the right tools.

Some tools cost a bit of money, some are free, and others have a free option with additional paid features. Here’s the list of five social media tools you can’t miss in 2019.

Posting to Multiple Accounts: Buffer

Being consistent on social media isn’t optional. If you want to build your brand, you can’t afford to have any social media accounts that look like a ghost town.

However, it’s not realistic to keep up with the optimum posting schedules on multiple platforms. That’s what Buffer does for you. You can scan your followers to determine the optimal time to post on a variety of different platforms, and you can add your content to the “buffer” so that it will be scheduled to go on the next open slot.

Buffer has a free version that allows one user to post to three social media accounts, with up to 10 scheduled posts per account. For $15/mo you can post to eight social media accounts with up to 100 schedule posts per account.

Supported platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, with Pinterest available on paid accounts.

All-In-One Platform: Social Sprout

If you have a bit more of a budget for social media, you might consider Sprout Social’s all-in-one social media management for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For $149/mo, you can get tools to manage 10 social profiles at once. These include publishing, a content calendar, monitoring for mentions of keywords (such as your company or industry), and other powerful resources.

You also get reporting, response time analysis, trend analysis, and custom workflows.

If you want a single tool to do everything for you, Sprout Social is the way to go!

Focus on Pinterest: Tailwind

A lot of bloggers and small businesses love Tailwind for its ability to uniquely interface with Pinterest. In fact, it’s the only Pinterest-approved tool you can use for posting without risking penalties.

You can upload pins and images in bulk, pin to multiple boards, loop popular pins so they appear frequently in others’ feeds, and optimize your schedules. Recently Tailwind added functions that allow you to manage Instagram as well, with optimized scheduling, automatic posting, and analytics.

If you have fewer than 25 employees, you can pay $9.99 a month for the basic package. This gives you smart scheduling, basic analytics, and 5 memberships to Tailwind Tribes. If you’re a large brand or agency, you’ll pay significantly more, but you’ll get full profile and board reporting, brand monitoring, ROI measurement, and many other features.

Find Content to Share: BuzzSumo

Do you struggle to figure out what to share on social media? You want to talk about something that’s relevant and interesting to your audience, and you also want to find popular content that people are currently sharing.

BuzzSumo can do that for you. Simply enter a topic or keyword and you’ll see what content is performing best. You can also use BuzzSumo for competitor analysis, to see what social sharing is working well for others in your industry.

For $79/month, you gain access to unlimited searches and 5 alerts for mentions of brand, competitors, or keywords. With the $139/mo plan, you get 10 alerts and an analyzer that finds the most popular questions people are asking on a variety of sites online. You can use this to create content that answers those questions, which will be sharable right away.

Need more help creating and finding content? Consider working with a digital marketing professional like Local SEO Search who understand the social media landscape.

B2B Social Media: Oktopost

If you’re targeting other businesses, rather than individual users, you might think there are not great social media tools for you. Fortunately, there are!

Oktopost allows you to manage, monitor, and measure all of your B2B social media. Curate content, schedule your posts in advance and listen to the current conversations going on between potential business clients.

You can also create social media promotions and manage social employee advocacy on Oktopost.

The Right Tools Can Help You Succeed

With the right social media tools, you don’t need an entire department dedicated to updating your business social media accounts. Instead, you can manage your social media posts in advance, discover how people are talking about the keywords that matter to your industry, and determine which shared content is performing best.

You can’t afford to not participate in social media, but you also can’t afford for it to eat all of your resources. With these five tools, you’re well-positioned to meet your goals.

To read more on topics like this, check out the business tech category.