after sleeping on it and taking some time to really think about how we can optimize our time we landed on this formula for posting this is a video that we never intended on making in this video we're going to give you a breakdown of our findings from evaluating hoot suite and Metric cool and buffer and in the end of the video we're going to tell you the unconventional path that we ended up going down for social media posting we recently filmed a minseries podcast and from that we got our video producer to make a bunch
of short form content that we were posting on Instagram and Tik Tok and YouTube shorts and then even Twitter and Linkedin and guess who was doing that manually this girl after a month or so of doing this we decided that we needed to turn to software to help us automate some of this process we thought that we would have our variety of tools to choose from and this would be a really simple decision but we were totally wrong all right now let's get into it [Music] first up metric cool so when we started doing research
for our social media posting tool we jumped on YouTube and started watching some reviews and demos and one tool that kept popping up was metrol and we had heard of hoot site and buffer before but metrol was it seemed like more YouTubers were talking about it so it was the software that we wanted to look at first and when we watched tutorials online it just looked like it had all the features like I really thought that we found the greatest Solutions you can post on all the social media platforms from YouTube shorts to Instagram to
Tik Tok Etc and it even has a cool calendar that shows you when your audience online and the best times to post so we signed up for an account we connected all of our social media accounts and within the first couple of minutes of using it and actually trying to schedule post we started seeing some of the limitations the first thing we noticed was that posting for you shorts isn't optimized so while you can use it to post to shorts you can't actually add a description or you can't pick your thumbnail which is a newer
feature that YouTube released and one that's really important so for us YouTube is our most important channel so we're more protective of that so immediately we knew that we weren't going to be able to use metrol for YouTube but for the other channels like Tik Tok and Instagram and Twitter we thought maybe we can use Metro cool for all of those and then just keep manually posting to YouTube as we've been doing but you guessed it we ran into more trouble because when we scheduled our Tik Tok for example it posted and the entire caption
was unformatted and it just doesn't look very good especially when you've put so much work into creating the content and then the real trouble came when we went to post a reel on Instagram so like I said we've been posting these videos manually for quite some time now and I've had no issues from doing them from my phone however when I uploaded the same video that we always get back from our video editor edor into metri cool there was an error with the video size metrol was saying that our video size was too large and
when I contacted their support they had suggested that we resize all of our videos for them to be posted through this app at that point you start thinking is this really saving me time or is this going to waste more of not only my time but my team's time as well so their chat support were very insistent that this is an API limitation and that there was no way around it and this is just what we had to do so at that point kind of decided it's time to put metrical on pause and evaluate some
of the other tools that's when we took a look at the next tool which is buffer the first thing that we noticed when we logged into buffer was that the user interface was much prettier and much more friendly than that of metric upon connecting our accounts it had pulled in all of our previous social media posts and put them on a nice calendar which gave us a bird's eye view of all the content that we've been posting and in just the experience of using their scheduling tool just felt like a little bit more clean and
refined so prettiness aside functionality is what matters at the end of the day we tried to schedule our Tik Tok post and we also ran into the same issues with not being able to choose a thumbnail and also not being able to format our captions then we went to schedule a reel on Instagram and to our surprise and Delight it's scheduled and posted right away and we had no issues with the video size which for us was a huge wi with buffer you can also post on YouTube shorts but you also have the same limitations
as you did with metrial with not being able to add tags or a description or a thumbnail like I said before we knew already that we are going to be protective over our YouTube channel and continue to post that directly through the YouTube app another limitation we found with buffer is that it didn't automatically analyze all of our previous data and give us the suggestions for the best time to post and I did contact them and ask them about this and they said the more that you use buffer to post the more that they're able
to give you the best times to post and that kind of data speaking of data if you are concerned with reports and metrics it doesn't pull in analytics for your YouTube account and it does for the other platforms but I'd say metric cool did a slightly better job at showing you all sorts of analytics all this being said both Alex and I on our team we go into the apps and we just look at the analytics from the apps themselves so because we're a small team we don't have reports and stuff like that that we're
pulling out to show other people on our team so that feature is not something that's super useful for us we really wanted to use social media scheduling tools to schedule social media and that is the main thing that we looked at so with all this being said we were impressed with buffer however we couldn't help but wonder that maybe there was going to be this one dream tool that was going to do it all and really just help us out and save us time from having to schedule these posts manually so then we went on
to evaluate the next tool which is hoot site hoot site has been around as long as I can remember in the social media space and they are priced higher than buffer and Metric cool starting at 99 a month but given we're a business and we thought if it could really save my time and from doing this manually it would be worth the price tag if it could take care of all the needs that we have that we created an account and we put our credit card on file and by the way out of these three
apps it is the only tool that actually required us to put a credit card on file and with that I just want to give a big shout out to Bill spend and expense for allowing us to put a virtual credit card on file and not being worried that it was going to be charged because we could easily freeze it right after creating an account so we're in the account and within I'd say five minutes my stomach started sinking because I had quickly realized that this tool wasn't going to be all that I thought it could
be it's very apparent that HootSuite was built a long time ago in terms of the user interface they have some parts of the tool that are newer but then you can click the wrong button and you get into this really old archaic view so that wasn't really impressive and then when it came to actually scheduling it felt more limiting than buffer nevertheless we connected all of our accounts and found that there were the same limitations as we had before so in terms of Tik Tok we didn't get that caption formatting we couldn't pick a thumbnail
with Instagram it gave us the same error that metric cool did with the file size and then when it came to YouTube shorts again same limitations no thumbnail no descriptions no tags I've said it three times by now so paying $99 a month and it doesn't even have all the features that something like buffer does that's free for three accounts it just didn't make sense but upon looking at hoot Suite A little bit more it's very clear that the tool is created for teams and like I was saying at the beginning teams that need comprehensive
reporting they need to show their team Trends in social media they need permissions they need approvals and all that kind of stuff so they're very featur rich in these more Team Tools so in terms of being the best scheduling app it wasn't it so within I'd say 30 minutes we disconnected all of our social media accounts and we Sunset the idea of using hoot site as an option okay so where did we end up today I wish I can tell you that there was one tool that we really discovered and we really loved and it
really met all of our needs but that wasn't the case we did take a look at some other ones here and there but in terms of the top three contenders we do think that it is hoot sweet buffer and Metric cool the best app that we found was buffer and we were really between a rock and a hard place as they say where we were thinking do we continue to post manually or do we use buffer for some of the apps so went back to YouTube and started doing a little bit more research to try
to dig into what other people are doing and then I found out that Tik Tok actually actually created their own scheduling tool within the desktop app now that was interesting because then I thought what if I use buffer for Instagram and for Twitter and Linkedin and then I use the Tik Tok desktop app for Tik Tok and then I can just post to YouTube as I've been posting and I really thought I was on to something so of course I tried it I uploaded my post I wrote my caption and I scheduled it and it
flopped dramatically what happened it posted to Tik Tok and the caption was formatted but then I realized that the video resolution had scaled way down like to the point where our skin looked grainy and gross and it was also sitting at one view for over an hour which if you post a Tik Tok that just doesn't happen because their algorithm just puts it in the flow right away so I think it like descaled their video and then didn't do anything with it so this might be a feature that Tik tok's building out and they're going
to put more TLC into and I think it has a lot of potential but as of right now of recording this video it's unusable on our end anyway so my friends we went to the drawing board again what were we going to do we really wanted to save time here and not make our process even more complicated with trying to figure out a batching solution to post after sleeping on it and taking some time to really think about how we can optimize our time we landed on this formula for posting we were going to use
buffer for posting to Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn because as far as those platforms go there was no issues that being said we did have one experience when we tried to schedule a post on Twitter and it failed however when we rescheduled it for later that day it worked so I'd say in terms of reliability I'd give it maybe like a nine out of 10 right now one thing we're also monitoring with buffer is social media engagement so we've been sending our post to Instagram and we've been trying to track if it's getting less views
than we normally do when we manually post it so far we don't really have a solid answer it seems to be okay because our views have been consistent up and down with Instagram anyway but it's a platform that we generally care about less like our audience is not really on Instagram so just getting the content out there is enough for us on that platform I think this is an important distinction to make when it comes to these tools I think you really have to take a look at all the social media platforms and think what
do I care about the most and where do I want to invest the most time and what's okay to sacrifice a little bit and that's what we did through our strategy with our YouTube shorts we actually found that you can schedule the shorts through the YouTube app which is really cool and an idea that we didn't really think about we fell across it when we were trying to save some drafts on our phone so you can open up YouTube you can upload your video you can save your thumbnail and then instead of posting it you
can go to schedule and schedule it for a future time and then upload the video and then you can go to the desktop app and add the description and the tags and related videos and all that sort of thing right within the desk desktop app for us we're totally fine to do that because we could still batch our content this way which was a really big unlock and something that made us really happy and we've been using that now for over a week and it's been working really well for Tik Tok it is a platform
that we do care more about than Instagram so we didn't want to just post content with Messy captions that weren't cohesive or coherent to read and we didn't want to have thumbnails that we didn't select ourselves and one of the reasons that we do care about Tik Tok is that we do find that is good for SEO like some of the content that we posted a year ago is still getting favored and liked and people are commenting so I do think that the way that Tik tok's algorithm is built it's optimized to incentivize creators like
us to create content on their over Instagram which kind of feels like you post it and then your content just dies so that's our strategy we're using buffer for LinkedIn for Twitter for Instagram we are then planning our content up to two weeks in advance then we're taking all of those videos I transfer them over to my phone I upload them all to Tik Tok at once I write the caption I save everything in my draft and then go manually post one video a day and then in terms of YouTube we're using the native scheduling
tool all this being said is it better than what we were doing before with manually posting once a day yes absolutely it takes about one day to schedule a couple weeks worth of content and then we don't really need to think about it anymore I think what we're realizing is that these social media apps don't really want want to make it easy for any external tool to schedule posting a lot of these tools rely on YouTube for example to build features into their API to be able to relate a video through the API or to
choose a thumbnail through the API so if YouTube's not building that then no external tool is actually going to make this possible YouTube Instagram Tik Tok what they would love and what they get more benefit from is having you open up the app to post every day because you get distracted sucked in and then they can show you an ad and it really plays well to their ad Revenue model I wish that this could be a more positive video with having one hero tool that can do everything for you but we really just wanted to
brain dump all the information that we learned over the past couple of days to hopefully save you some time when doing your own research posting natively to the social media apps is the winner here and doing it manually is probably the best way but if you have platforms that you care about less like Instagram Twitter LinkedIn we'd say buffer would win that category hey okay so Alex from the future here so there is one other scheduling app that we wanted to recommend as we've been using it since recording this video so if you're someone like
me and is trying to grow their ex following like Twitter X so the tool is called typy and it only works with x in LinkedIn but if you're someone like me that is trying to specifically grow their X following that's kind of where the community is that I'm closest with I'm finding that I'm actually posting now on LinkedIn which is also great because I don't even need to think about it I write the tweet that I want to PO post on X and then I end up posting it to LinkedIn as well I'd be willing
to bet that anyone that you're following on X that also is posting on LinkedIn is probably using tifully that's kind of what we've uncovered if you're also someone that posts on X you've probably experienced a bug in which you've just completely lost a draft that you've spent the last half hour or an hour writing maybe it was due to a Refresh on your browser or on your phone mobile app crashing this is something that you don't have to worry about with typ f because it's Autos saving at all points in time so your draft is
always right there and present one of the unintended benefits of using a tool like typy is that you don't get sucked into social media before or after writing your post you can just write them schedule them and get out do me a favor and the next time that you post on one of these platforms see how much time you waste afterward scrolling through other people's posts Tyle also has some other power user features like Auto post autod DM and auto plug so the next time that someone has their thread that goes viral I bet you
there's going to be an autop plug they're going to be pitching why you should go check out their website in the second comment they're probably also using typ F the last thing is typ does a really great job at analytics so you can see how you're growing from week to week month to month and you could even see what posts are giving you the most engagement so you can focus more on doing more of that all right now back to Andre one more little thing to note is that every platform that we connected our YouTube
account with asked for full permission and access to our YouTube account to even delete videos and if you're investing a lot of time in your YouTube account that's obviously pretty scary we even reached out to the founder of metric cool to ask about this and every platform was consistent with the fact of saying that it's part of the API requests and they have to get your permissions but they will not delete anything but for us it just feels a little bit too Ry so if you made it to the end of the video we want
to know how do you schedule your social media post and if you had a request for any of the apps we talked about what would your dream social media scheduling feature be if this video helped you would love for you to like And subscribe WE Post regular software reviews here on our YouTube channel for instance check out this superhuman video that is the best way to check your email we'll see you in the next one
