Last Updated 1 month by Emily Standley-Allard
We may come across a wide realm of social media management tools, including video content creation tools, design and image creation tools and so on, but you and I both know how it takes effort to pick the best ones that can help you manage all your social media accounts under one roof seamlessly to complete and automate social media tasks regularly, while also generating a positive ROI rather than burning a hole in our pockets.
As a Social media manager, there are many miscellaneous to-dos that I look for in a great social media management tool.
Amongst scheduling and coming up with an overall social media strategy here are specific things that are done on a day-to-day basis —
- Creating content
- Strategizing for each social platform
- Posting at the right time
- Keeping an eye on social trends
- Living in the insights and analytics pool
- Project management
- Billing
- Creating reports
Here are a few of the best tools you can extensively use (some are free) and some are paid but most are definitely affordable and worth their price for the features they offer and the time and energy one saves using them.
Let’s get to the best and most affordable social media management tools!
Canva
This tool allows you to create posts as per the social platforms you’d like to publish to.
The available templates and 5GB cloud storage is just enough for anybody starting off or more.
Canva is one of the easiest and best social media management tools in my opinion.
The fact that you do not have to look for the image dimension or rack your head too much on the creatives is a bonus of why it stands out amongst other content creation tools.
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Unsplash
This image tool provides free high-resolution photos that you could use to create a blog banner, wallpaper or background to make that Instagram post on your feed pretty.
Unsplash has images for all, and these images are submitted by the members of their community.
You can browse through their category or simply search for the image you’re looking for.
For example, if I want to look for a blog banner, I can simply look up for it, also pick an orientation, choose a color and filter the search bar as per my specific need.
Pixabay (Free)
This tool helps you choose from a big pool of illustrations, graphics, videos and musics to make your content interesting and interactive. Similar to Unsplash, you can filter content based on orientation, size, color and even category.
Check out 26 more of the best FREE image sites you can use for your website, social channels or business.
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Video content creation
Lumen5
This video creation tool is mainly designed for brands and business to create quick video posts using the templates that are already available.
While this is free, it has certain limitations like creating 3 videos per month and having to choose the font, transition, theme and background for every video.
The paid subscription starts at $15 per month and $11 per month if you opt for a yearly subscription.
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Movavi
This tool helps you create, import your videos, and photos into projects, and edit them.
You can split and slice videos, arrange them around on the timeline, and even add transitions (basic ones) to the video.
Video Annotation Outsourcing
However, with the rise of video content, there’s a surging demand to enhance video annotation outsourcing. For businesses looking to amplify their video content strategy, video annotation outsourcing has become an invaluable resource, seamlessly bridging the gap between engaging video content and insightful data analytics.
Type Studio
This app is an online text-based video editor that converts your video by just editing text.
You can edit a video without having any video editing skills.
All you have to do is delete the text and that part of the video will be auto cropped.
While the free plan has limitations, the paid ones allow some super cool features like-
- Automatically add subtitles
- Annotate the video
- Language translation option
CloudApp
This tool is the one that helps you record quick videos, take some screenshots and annotate videos and images.
These are converted into a shareable link that can be viewed by anyone.
It’s one of the best apps used to share a tutorial, escalate something that doesn’t look right on the screen and so on.
CloudApp is available on iOS and Windows at the moment, but you can always add the tool to your Chrome browser 
Grammarly
It’s a tool that automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes in all your content.
All you have to do is copy-paste the text within the text box of the app or website.
You can also download the Grammarly Chrome extension that helps you over and select the text and also highlights the misspelt words and even punctuations.
The advanced features also include Tone adjustments, a Plagiarism checker, a Style guide and more.
This tool is great because you never need to wrack your brain for marketing content all on your own ever again.
I use WriteSonic to write copy in over 24 languages AND generate eBooks and digital art!
Social Media Tools – To-do lists and notes
Trello
Trello is one of the best organizer and team coordination tool.
It has features like creating boards, lists, cards and checklist.
You can assign tasks to members, and they will be notified each time there are changes to the card. One can also add a deadline, view the activity log and add attachments to each of the task cards for efficient usage and understanding.
The Free plan has most of the features and the paid plans start from $10 and have some cool features like a dashboard, calendar view, templates, custom Backgrounds and stickers too.
Evernote
This tool helps in creating quick notes and jotting down ideas from brain to document.
The free app is more than enough but even the paid app is priced at a cool $7 per user month with access to all the features.
Dropbox Paper
Dropbox Paper is a type of doc for teams to create and collaborate together at once even if they’re in different parts of the world.
It’s one of the best apps to use at the moment while we’re all waiting for this pandemic to end.
You can currently, comment, create to-do lists, add a timeline, assign tasks and also mention team members using the @ symbol.
Sprout Social
A really great social media management tool makes social media managers work a whole lot more manageable. It’s the difference between night and day.
This is because it becomes that one-stop for all the social platforms they manage.
Amongst the different tools available, my top pick of the crowd is Sprout Social for the winner of the most reliable, advanced, informative and affordable tool for social media automation and management.
Sprout offers a lot. Which is why it’s not the cheapest but definitely worth the most.
There are other social media tools out there that are less money for sure. But in the end they wind up costing you more because they don’t do everything Sprout does.
Sprout helps not only with scheduling posts, managing content, mentions, and measuring analytics…they have a report builder, RSS feeds, social listening tools, help with content planning, offer competitor and sentimental analysis and Profile/ Client management.
Along with every educational guide for every social platform you could ever need.
Here are the key features of how you could use Sprout Social to the fullest –
- With Sprout Social’s content curation tab, you can share relevant content from the feed. This helps to keep your social accounts active and engaging when there isn’t enough original content.
- You can Compose posts and schedule them using the “Best time feature” or a time and date you’d like the post to be published on your social media handle.
- The Mentions feature fetches all the posts on your social accounts where your account has been mentioned. You can reply to these with text, GIFs and emojis.
- The RSS feed feature allows you to add RSS feeds of sites publishing content relevant to you.
Sprout Social will then pull all of their content in the app for you to share. - The calendar view is basically a bird’s-eye view of all the posts you’ve scheduled on a particular social account. The master calendar allows you to view the scheduled posts for all your social accounts at once.
- Analytics plays a super important role to understand what works best for social platforms. Sprout Social’s analytics gives you an in-depth understanding of your posts, audience, engagement and more.
- There’s a cool Report Builder feature that allows you to fetch data and create reports within a few minutes. These are entirely customizable in terms of the metrics and data you’d like. You can download them and share it too.
- Sprout Social’s Listening and insights features allows you to track and monitor your and your competitor’s mentions.
This feature is important for your brand to know everything you need to know about your audience. - Sprout Social allows you to try them for FREE for 30 days.
You will see why over 30,000 major brands and businesses have improved their ROI by 233% with Sprout.
Conclusion
For more ways to grow your traffic and build your website, your social channels and your epic online business follow me for more tips!
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Make use of these great and affordable social media management tools to level up your social media game and build your online business faster today!
Try Sprout social so you can manage all your content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep dive into analytics, get listening tools and create custom reports. Try it for 30 Days free.
