9 best social media project management tools for teams and agencies

What features do social media teams need from their project management software? 

Social media teams need many of the same overarching project management tools as their colleagues in other departments. The difference is that those standard features have to work more flexibly and responsively if they’re going to be truly useful to social media teams. 

So, when you’re searching for a new social media project management platform, look for: 

• Customizable workflow management features for repeatable tasks: Workflows keep your content up to scratch in terms of quality and compliance. They can also act as templates for repeatable processes and save time when you start new projects. For social media teams, look for a tool that supports multiple custom workflows, so you can set up standard content creation and approval workflows for different assets, channels, or clients. 
• Robust asset management: Social media teams produce design assets at scale, and they often have to repurpose the same content for different channels. This makes version control systems essential. Look for platforms that clearly indicate task ownership throughout your workflow, use project folders to organize your output, and include file-sharing systems to break down information silos. 
• Integrated collaboration features: Social media projects already involve juggling platforms, so your project management system shouldn’t be just another set of disjointed tools for your team to get to grips with. The best project management platforms bring your team collaboration and resource management tools under one roof, which helps prevent tasks from being overlooked. 
• Scalability across projects and clients: When it comes to managing multiple accounts, social media teams need to know their project management system can scale. The best platforms support separate project spaces with adjustable access permissions and portfolio-level project management. This puts your team in a strong position as your audience or client list grows. 

While a social media management tool might offer some of this, you’ll likely struggle to find all these key features in one place. 

Think of it as the difference between a content calendar, where your social media posts sit in a Kanban board waiting to be published, and a project calendar, which shows how your work fits together, highlights milestones, and shows your capacity for new projects. 

Both are important, but while one helps you stick to a posting schedule, the other does the deeper work of organizing your team and their resources to make that posting possible. 

9 best social media project management tools (for different teams and use cases)

In this section, we’ll explore the nine best social media project management tools, starting with Wrike — our powerful work management platform for marketing teams, creative and design teams, and agencies.

We’ll also explore eight more traditional social media management tools that you can use in combination with Wrike to optimize work like bulk scheduling, analytics, and audience engagement.

Here are all the tools we’ll cover below:

• Wrike
• Vista Social  
• SocialBee
• Iconosquare
• Bynder
• Hootsuite 
• Typefully
• Sprout Social 
• Buffer

1. Wrike: Streamlined project management for social media teams 

With Wrike’s project management tools, your social media team can build the perfect space to plan, deliver, monitor, and report on their work. 

Custom workflows for all your tasks

Social media teams rely on multiple workflows to manage their projects. From content creation to proofing and the onboarding processes that build smooth relationships with new clients, these workflows must be completed to the same high standard every time. 

With Wrike, you can set up repeatable processes with custom statuses that reflect your team’s unique approach, and template those workflows to boost efficiency on all your subsequent projects. 

Time and again, the marketing teams that work with Wrike tell us these features help turbocharge their creative and organizational workflows: 

• Custom item types: Custom items represent the tasks your team regularly completes, like creating Instagram carousels, building animations, or posting to LinkedIn. Each custom item has its own workflow stages to reflect the differences in these processes. This helps you ensure that all the requirements are met every time you post — even if every client you work with has, for example, a different sequence of approvals.
• Dynamic request forms:  Request forms streamline your project intake. For example, if your social media team creates content for different areas of your company, you could set up request forms tailored to events, product launches, updates, or even recruitment. These forms have custom fields to gather all the details you need from the client and hit the ground running on a new project. 
• Approval workflows: Wrike helps you define users with approval authority and notify them as soon as a new piece is waiting for review. They can provide feedback within Wrike so it can be actioned quickly, or push the content straight to the next stage of the workflow. Many marketing teams that work with Wrike report slashing their approval time with this software — like Marketing Architects, whose client approvals are now turned around “in an afternoon.”

What’s more, all Wrike workflows can also be automated with intuitive, rule-based triggers. To return to the example of approvals, you can set up your workflow so that when an asset is approved, the file is automatically routed to your project folder or DAM system — or even directly to your client, from within Wrike, for final approval.

Robust DAM tools to organize your work

Maintaining a cohesive brand across social media channels and campaigns isn’t easy. That’s why Wrike partners with leading DAM software providers, including Bynder and MediaValet,  to help your team store and recall the right files for every project. 

Wrike’s digital asset management tools help you: 

• Publish your assets with ease by combining your tools, allowing you to publish to your DAM software directly from Wrike 
• Stay on brand by searching, previewing, and using DAM files stored in Wrike to minimize redundant requests from your team and keep your project details accessible 
• Collaborate with all your stakeholders by creating a central space to share files and review edits before signing off on the content 

With these integrations and Wrike’s robust project folder system, you can streamline the content creation and publishing process for every type of asset your team produces. 

Frictionless collaboration from intake to approval

From brand and video teams to your company’s communication specialists and the wider marketing team, social media projects need streamlined collaboration to succeed. The goal here is to avoid the siloing that can happen with spreadsheet systems or content production tools that other teams can’t access. 

Wrike is built for collaborative work. From the moment a new task arrives in your workspace (for example, through a dynamic request form), you can assign ownership. As it progresses through your content workflow, the task owner can change according to the work that needs to be done.

Imagine a video that passes from the videography team to the team that captions the post. In this case, the task owner will change, the team will be notified automatically, and Wrike will save the data on that status change in case you need to audit the process later. Again, when the task goes for approval, it will belong to the person with the authority to review it and send it for publishing. This system clarifies the chain of responsibility and shows every team member who they need to contact for further information. 

Wrike doesn’t just streamline communication; it also speeds up the discussions you have around your work with features like: 

• @mentions to notify a team member when their attention is needed
• Commenting features integrated with your task cards or design assets, so you can discuss the asset while viewing the latest version 
• AI-generated comment summaries to catch up with discussions on the content or design process
• Personal dashboards where team members can view their notifications and the tasks assigned to them 
• Automated messages triggered, for example, as a task approaches its deadline, if it’s stuck at a certain workflow status for too long, or if a team member is working over capacity 

You can also adjust a team member’s permissions at any time, which keeps your collaborative processes secure.  

Portfolio-level tools for scalability

Whether your in-house social media team handles multiple cross-channel social media campaigns or your agency has multiple clients, scalability is key in this line of work. With Wrike, your project management system grows with you. And no matter how many tasks or workflows you add to your space, you’ll have the same in-depth access to granular data on your team’s performance. 

When you use Wrike to manage a social media portfolio, our software centralizes the data on multiple projects and uses it to power a real-time portfolio dashboard like the one below.

These dashboards give you ongoing insight into your performance, so you can make informed decisions about social media strategy and resource management. Because all this data is pulled from your Wrike workspaces, you can still drill down from this bird’s-eye view into the individual projects and posts you need to check on in just a few clicks. 

This level of insight is also possible because Wrike is set up to encourage cross-team collaboration. For example, with the right permissions, it’s easy to show your design team an overview of the social media teams’ upcoming projects and milestones, so they can schedule their work more efficiently. Wrike workflows can span separate departments and workspaces without duplicating assets with our innovative cross-tagging feature. Naturally, our full range of reporting tools is also available at the portfolio level. 

Find out more about how Wrike provides enterprise-level portfolio management and security here: Powerful project portfolio management software.

Integrations with your other creative tools

Wrike also closes gaps in your content process by integrating your project management software with your other core tools. 

When you work in Wrike, you can build out your workspace with a selection of over 400 apps and integrations. These integrations include QuickBooks, Zoom, Google Drive, Slack, and all the other tools it takes to keep an agency running. For the creative side of social media management, Wrike integrates with Adobe Creative Cloud to make your content creation and approval workflow more efficient than ever. 

By integrating Wrike with tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, or Premiere Pro, your team can discuss the assets they’re producing directly on the asset itself. 

Rather than sharing the asset in a file manager and writing a list of feedback points in an email, your feedback becomes pixel-accurate. You can then use Wrike’s @mention and commenting features to discuss a solution, removing many of the barriers to creating together. 

The marketing team at OSF Healthcare uses the Adobe extension every day to “bridge the gap” between the creative process and the management work associated with hundreds of creative requests a month. Heidi Wessler, the team’s Graphic Design Coordinator, states that Wrike has sped up the feedback and approval process by 50% and made it possible to raise the quality of their assets by discussing and implementing feedback more efficiently.