Last year we filmed a podcast mini-series and ended up with a ton of short-form content from each episode, which required manual posting to each social media platform.
Originally, we planned on posting the short form content to YouTube Shorts, but since we had the content, we decided to also post it on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and even X. We quickly learned that posting to 5 social media platforms manually is super time consuming and not the best use of our time 😅
We would end up spending 1-1.5 hours per day formatting captions for each platform, posting, and of course, getting distracted every time we opened up any social media app. It felt like we were draining our battery before even starting our workday. With that, we knew it was time to turn to software for help.
Given the large number of content creators, we assumed there would be numerous innovative tools available to streamline this process. Surprisingly, we were wrong.
After spending a few weeks evaluating various tools, we landed 3 top contenders: Hootsuite, Metricool, and Buffer. With that, we went even deeper in our evaluation of these 3 tools, set each up, and actually used each for posting.
Spoiler Alert: None of the tools worked exactly as we wanted. Out of the three contenders, we liked Buffer the most, but even with that, we couldn't use it to schedule shorts to YouTube or TikTok due to limitations.
Given all the limitations we encountered, we decided the best path forward was to use combination of the best social media posting tool we found—Buffer—in combination with manual posting.
We do not use a social media scheduling app for posting on YouTube Shorts. Instead, we use the native YouTube app, upload our short, select our thumbnail and related video, then schedule it to post right within the app. Then, we go intoYouTube Studio via browser on our computer, add a description & tags.
Yes, it's quite involved, but YouTube is second largest source of traffic (other then our website via Google) so we want to do it right 💪
While we don't care a ton about Tiktok, we do like that SEO still plays a role on the platform (meaning, we can post a video and months/years later, it is still getting views and engagement from people searching for the topic).
With TikTok, we upload all of our content into the app on the phone, save them as drafts, and we post manually on the days that our YouTube Shorts go out. We don't optimize for the best time to post as it's a secondary social channel for us and it's too exhausting trying to keep up with the best time to post.
This is the platform we care about the least and where we haven't found our audience. Instagram doesn't use SEO so once you post content, it gets thrown into a general algorithm, and you pretty much find out how many views your post will ever get within the first 24 hours. We also found that silly content performed best on Instagram, and while it's fun getting 230K views on a post, it's also virtually meaningless for our business when it's not related to software 😄
We found Buffer was the best platform for posting on Instagram. And when we had a ton of content, Buffer is what we used for this. Now that we are posting less frequently as our podcast mini-series has ended, we are finding that we are just saving posts as drafts (like with TikTok), and manually posting.
We group these two together because they are more professional networking social platforms (well, we suppose on which end of X you are 😄). Alex is most active on X and he loves Typefully and uses it for all his posting.
You can read our full Typefully Review, but the TL;DR is that Typefully offers a better experience that posting natively on X (less likely to lose what you wrote due to X outage, and also great for storing post ideas and drafts).
Alex also hardly ever posts on LinkedIn (honestly, we don't love the platform, since posts you "liked" are shown to your network, we find people are very hesitant to engage with content as the know their boss and co-workers will see), but because Typefully allows you to easily cross post on both X and LinkedIn at the same time, it's no extra time to toggle on LinkedIn also — so you can end up naturally expanding your reach.
Both Buffer and Typefully have AI features to help you write posts (usually the better the prompt, the better the output) however we still have yet to use AI to write any copy for us because....well it sounds a bit like AI (e.g. Alex and I can tell when other peoples posts are written with AI 😄).
That said, depending on your industry, it can definitely be worth experimenting with, just set your expectations for AI to more so help with writing a draft rather than the finished post. It will speed things up and help you not have a blank screen at the very least, which we've found helpful at times!
This experience taught us that the social media posting space is challenging to innovate in as all of these tools are so reliant on the API's of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X themselves.
Great solutions rely heavily on each social platform having robust APIs, but think about it, do these platforms really have incentive to build great APIs?
All social platforms prefer that users open their apps, get distracted by content, and see ads because that's how these apps make money. So don't hold your breath for the perfect solution.
We wish this Best Social Media Scheduling Apps page could be a bit more positive, but hopefully it will at the very least, save you some time.
Our Top Picks are Buffer (for Instagram), and Typefully (for X and LinkedIn), but expect some limitations along the way.
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All-you-need social media platform for small businesses.
Buffer is the best all-around social media scheduler. While it's still not perfect (API limitations with social media apps make it hard for any of these scheduling apps to be), it's the closest we found.
Buffer has the best interface and user experience, it is a modern social media management tool, while the others out there like Metricool and Hootsuite feel quite outdated and klunky, and are also less stable and reliable.
We used Buffer to schedule short form video content on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X and the platform worked as we'd except (with one LinkedIn exception—see full Buffer Review for details).
We decided to skip using Buffer for YouTube Shorts as you can't add a thumbnail from Buffer or add in any tags, and since YouTube is our most important social media platform, we didn't want to compromise on the limitations. We also decided to skip using Buffer for TikTok as you cannot format the caption (TikTok API limitation).
Not only is Buffer is the best all around social media scheduling tool, it also has a super generous free version for up to 3 social media platforms. Definitely worth giving a shot.
Built for 𝕏 and LinkedIn, powered by AI
Typefully caters to professional folks who want a better posting experience on X and LinkedIn. You can plan, write, draft, and schedule posts via Typefully.
But if you are wanting to post on all social media channels (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok), then Typefully is not going to be for you. If scheduling on all social media platforms with one tool sounds more appealing, our top pick in that case is Buffer.
Typefully was created for those who want to grow their following, and with that, there's no better tool for posting on X and LinkedIn in our eyes.
You can read our full Typefully Review to get a better understanding of how it fits into our social media software stack.
Helping large teams prove social media ROI
Hootsuite has been around the longest out of all the social media management platforms and with that, the tool certainly feels like you're stepping back in time 😅 Hootsuite's interface is much more clunky and outdated when compared to something like Buffer, for example.
Hootsuite is catering to large enterprise teams and have gone very deep into building social analytics, competitive benchmarking, permissions, approvals and reports. With that, their pricing starts at $99/month, but even this tier is restrictive as most of the features we mentioned unlock on the enterprise plan.
If you are a small business, or a modern social media agency, we'd recommend staying away from Hootsuite as they are much better social media scheduling tools available. For instance, Buffer has a free tier and can do everything Hootsuite does for scheduling and content planning on their $99/month tier.
If you don't have 1000+ employees at your company, skip Hootsuite altogether.
The digital Swiss Army Knife for social media managers.
While initially thought Metricool would be the answer to our social media scheduling needs, we quickly became disappointed due to many limitations with Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts posting.
Out of all the social media scheduling apps we used, we had the most trouble posting our Instagram Reels with Metricool due to a video file size error (we cover the details of this in our full Metricool Review, but the long-and-short of it is that none of these issues occurred with Buffer, with the exact same video files).
The most impressive feature of Metricool is the best time to post feature, which shows when the highest percentage of your followers are online. While this was available for Instagram, TikTok, and X, it was not available for YouTube Shorts or LinkedIn.
All this being said, we found Metricool underwhelming and instead recommend Buffer for Instagram, LinkedIn, and X posting (unless X and LinkedIn are your main platforms for posting, then we'd recommend Typefully.)
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