Third-party apps can be a great way to streamline your social media management, but it’s important to not use them everywhere. Scheduling posts through third party software like Later or Hootsuite may end up hurting the results you see on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram which have built in features for scheduling content. Because Meta wants you to use their scheduling tools, they will actually suppress the reach of posts that are scheduled through outside apps. However, there is still a place for these third party systems when it comes to social media.

For Facebook and Insta

Third-party scheduling tools are a must for running any social media campaign. This is because other platforms like Twitter, TikTok and Linkedin don’t have built in features to schedule posts on their own! These apps can cut down your time working with social media significantly while giving you an overview of what content will be appearing throughout all channels at once. So if you want to orchestrate your messages a certain way across platforms, you don’t have to bounce between websites to do so.

For Everything Else

All of this to say, third party scheduling apps are an important tool to use when you’re trying to grow your social media presence. Later.com is a very simple application for scheduling Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tiktok. You can schedule through it for free, albeit with limitations to the number of posts and features like tagging. Hootsuite is more of a one stop shop for scheduling, posting, and analytics data. There are also a ton of functionality options that you can play around with, such as assigning special access to your employees to specific accounts. Buffer is probably the best for someone just starting out. Its free options give you enough functionality to do things, and if you decide to upgrade, the price point is fairly cheap.