The Best Tools for Social Media Managers

Having been a Social Media Manager for the past 7 years, I’ve definitely been around the block with all the social media management tools.

And yes, I mean ALL of them! 

I’ve thoroughly tested all Instagram scheduling tools, graphic design programs, email marketing platforms, and all the boring stuff towards managing your own business (like invoicing, accounting, contracts, etc).

Below are my absolute FAVORITE tools that I currently live and breathe by for managing my social media management business and clients.

​

Later

First and foremost, I need to give a shoutout to my ultimate favorite Instagram scheduling platform - Later. I plan all of my client’s Instagram posts through Later and will continue to use it as my #1 Instagram scheduler. Sure, I’ve used other platforms like Planoly and Unum; but I continue to come back to Later.

Not only is it super easy to organize your posts and make sure your Instagram feed looks cohesive, but their analytics section is TO DIE FOR. As an analytics geek, I love seeing which hashtags are performing the best and they make it easy to determine what your top performing time to post is. 

They also have the BEST blog and email marketing. It’s always so up to date with the social media trends and gives the best tips to your social media success.

​

Tailwind

Tailwind is my favorite tool for Pinterest scheduling! Tailwind makes it easy to schedule your pins well ahead of time and make sure that my clients always have content going out. 

The best part? You don’t have to be glued to Pinterest throughout the day. I don’t even know what I did before discovering Tailwind!

I also love their SmartLoop feature which allows you to automatically schedule posts that you want to show up time and time again (aka I love it for scheduling blog pins to consistently drive traffic to my website).

And again, great analytics tracking to show you what pins and boards are performing.

Canva

Canva is absolutely, without a doubt, the EASIEST and most straightforward graphic design app for non-graphic designers! It’s a great tool to quickly put together a graphic for social (they even have templates sized properly depending on what you need a graphic for!).

They also have resume templates, invitations, ebook templates, and everything you could probably imagine.

Honestly, I also know how to use Photoshop, and still choose Canva over it just because how easy it is to keep your branding colors and fonts all in one place.

It’s completely free, but they also have a paid version that consists of lots of features (like saving brand guidelines for multiple clients - which personally I find incredibly helpful).

​

Toggl

Toggl is one of the best time tracking apps out there. One of the most important things you should do as a freelancer is to track the time you’re spending on clients. I promise, this will help you in the future when you suddenly have started to grow and need to know what your least profitable client is. 

Especially if you charge your clients a monthly retainer, you want to be able to calculate your hourly rate and make sure your business is profitable.

Toggl is a free program and super easy to categorize your different clients and projects.

​

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is one of the best email marketing platforms out there (and there are A LOT!). It’s great for email marketing starters and it’s super easy to design email marketing campaigns for your business and for your clients. I love using ConvertKit for my business’ email marketing funnels.

Mailchimp is also a great email marketing platform, especially if you’re just starting out with email marketing. It’s how I got my start and it’s fairly intuitive as well.

​

Wix

As a Social Media Manager, you absolutely need to have a creative and comprehensive website to promote your services. Luckily, you don’t need to have design skills or hire a website designer to create an amazing website. I love Wix just because of EASY it is to use and put your ideas to life! Their drag and drop designs are very intuitive and, while they do have some glitches in their system from time to time, it’s the perfect way to quickly build your website in a few hours (without the need to hire a website designer!)

And so much easier to use than WordPress or SquareSpace in my opinion!

​

Quickbooks

As a freelancer or business owner, it’s SO important to track your expenses and income. Quickbooks makes it super easy to do both! They have an invoicing system that allows you to easily send out all of your monthly invoices within 5 minutes. Then, on the other side, their expensing system is also incredibly easy to use and I’m able to reconcile all of my line items in less than an hour per month.

I promise you, when tax season rolls around, you’ll be happy you invested $5-10 every month (and your accountant will be too!).