Whether you’re a business owner, blogger or a personal user, its likely that posting to social networks takes up a lot of time in your day. In order to keep content flowing at the optimum times it can be very useful to schedule your posts in advance, ensuring you can post everything you want and leaving you more free time online. These top social media scheduling tools make sharing to your profiles easy, and they all offer a combination of free and paid plans too.

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1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite has both a website and desktop app that make sharing, searching and social listening easy. Hootsuite free plan includes three social profiles from around 35 supported networks, unlimited scheduled messages, 2 RSS connections and a limited number of app integrations.

At first the dashboard looks intimidating, but once you’ve learned to navigate your way around, you’ll find that Hootsuite offers great functions that are unavailable in other scheduling tools.

With Hootsuite you can include images and links within your posts and schedule them for a specific time, which makes this great as a social media scheduling tool for blogs or websites.

Hootsuite also gives users the opportunity to schedule, share and reply all from within one service, so feeds can be configured within the dashboard to view your Twitter home feed, mentions and also specific hashtags for example. This option is helpful for businesses as you can manage your social accounts from one place, including outreach on Instagram by showing feeds for searches (although no scheduling tools are available for Instagram).

For $9.99 per month you can upgrade your Hootsuite account to allow team members, up to 100 social profiles and improved analytics.

2. Buffer

Buffer allows scheduling for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net with the option of adding posts to a queue or choosing a precise date and time. The free account allows one profile for each social network and up to 10 scheduled messages at any one time. As well as scheduling, Buffer provides analytics in which posts can be filtered so you can view your most and least popular for a range of different post types. The ability to drag and drop scheduled posts into new positions within a queue is very handy feature within this system that makes it a great tool for social sharing and updates.

Buffer also aims to suggest new content to post that your followers may like, however this feature falls a little short and the content is often not relevant enough for specific niches. Although if you upgrade you can add RSS feeds from your favourite websites in order to see and link to their content straight from Buffer.

The Buffer ‘Awesome’ upgrade is available for $10 per month and enables you to link up to 10 social profiles for each network and schedule up to 100 posts at any one time. Buffer’s blog is brilliant if you’d like to learn more about social media and is one of the reasons this is a great social network scheduling tool for website owners.

3. Twittimer

Twittimer is a scheduling service that was designed for Twitter but has recently added functionality for Facebook and LinkedIn too. Their basic account is free and you can add up to three messages but the pro account offers multiple social profiles and unlimited scheduling from $4 per month which is a bargain compared to some social media scheduling providers.

Twittimer is easy to use with a very visual interface that allows you to schedule posts with images for a precise time or day, edit or delete your scheduled posts, and view 60 days of archives including stats for Twitter. The scheduled feed is large and bright which makes it easy to see what is being posted when, and is particularly helpful for campaigns that thrive on images.

This service also integrates with Bit.ly so you can automatically shorten links and view analytics with a Bit.ly account. New functions are being added all the time and the developer is very helpful with questions or suggestions.

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4. ViralWoot

Viralwoot is the perfect app to use in conjunction with Pinterest to schedule pins and grow your Pinterest account. This Pinterest scheduling tool is great for bloggers and allows you to schedule pins with a free bookmarklet plus promote your pins too to gain extended reach.

Adding pins to the tool from your own website or blog is easy but you can also schedule repins so that your shared content is always being posted at the most optimum times for your audience. Viralwoot encourages users to collect ‘seeds’ through activities such as liking and repinning which can be spent on gaining more likes, followers and repins for your own profile.

Upgraded plans start at $12 per month and allow you to schedule a large amount of pins per month, add more Pinterest accounts and create Pin Alerts. If you haven’t considered this type of social media scheduler before then Viralwoot is the site to try- posting pins at the right time can really help to increase exposure for your content.