Social media was never just a one-way broadcast channel. A holistic social media strategy includes creating useful, entertaining content and building a community.
But you can’t connect with your audience if you’re not responding to comments, ignoring direct messages (DMs), and skipping brand mentions.
If you’re here, you already understand why engagement matters. Most creators and small business owners struggle with:
- Lack of time to reply and engage
- Scattered notifications on multiple platforms
- Absence of systems makes engaging feel overwhelming
That’s where social media engagement tools come in. They help you stay on top of your notifications across channels, collaborate with your internal team members, and participate in brand-related conversations without drowning in manual effort.
In this article, we’ll explore 11 social media engagement tools designed to help you stay connected with your audience — consistently and seamlessly — no matter how busy you get.
The best social media engagement tools:
- 1. Community in Buffer — Best social media engagement tool for creators and small businesses
- 2. Sprout Social — Best social media engagement tool for detecting unusual spikes
- 3. NapoleonCat — Best social media engagement tool for customer service
- 4. Manychat — Best social media engagement tool for automating direct messages
- 5. Sked Social — Best social media engagement tool for agencies
- 6. Eclincher — Best social media engagement tool for inbox analytics
- 7. Agorapulse — Best social media engagement tool for responding to ad comments
- 8. BrandBastion — Best social media engagement platform for multilingual comment moderation
- 9. Siftsy — Best social media engagement platform for getting insights on your comment section
- 10. Hootsuite — Best social media engagement platform for enterprise companies
- 11. CommentGuard — Best social media engagement platform for comment moderation on Facebook and Instagram
Best social media engagement tool for creators and small businesses
Free plan/trial: Free plan available for up to 3 social media channels.
Price: Plans begin at $6/month/channel.
Buffer is a social media management tool designed to make engagement feel calm and manageable rather than chaotic and overwhelming. Community, Buffer’s engagement dashboard, has all the key features you’d need:
- You get an alert for all the comments on your posts
- You can save replies to answer frequently asked questions
- You can filter comments based on unanswered, newest, or oldest
- You can choose to reply to comments natively or directly using Buffer
- You can engage with your audience on the go using the Buffer mobile app
- You can manage conversations across multiple social networks, including Threads, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram
Bonus: Buffer is one of the only social media management platforms that has habit-building features to boost engagement. You get a ‘comment score’ that tracks your consistency and speed over a period of time — ensuring you make social media engagement a ritual.
Buffer’s AI assistant picks up on your voice to help you respond to your audience more efficiently, without losing that human touch. The AI assistant also helps you get comment insights to practice sentiment analysis. You can ask the AI to spot:
- If your posts are attracting new commenters
- Which posts are sparking the most conversation
- What topics are getting an emotional reaction from your audience
My favorite feature is the ability to create a new post from one of your comments. Often, engaging with your audience sparks content ideas and you can turn those ideas into posts directly from Buffer. It’s social listening in action, but a lot smoother and faster than the manual way.
Of course, Buffer is about more than engagement — it’s an all-in-one social media marketing tool that helps you schedule posts, track performance, collaborate with your team members, build your link-in-bio page, and so much more. And it has a free version (with affordable paid plan options), so you aren’t creating a hole in your pocket in exchange for smoother, faster social media management.
✨ Get Buffer at no cost today.
2. Sprout Social
Best social media engagement tool for detecting unusual spikes
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 30-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $199/month.
Sprout Social, like Buffer, is a full-fledged social media management tool. It’s best suited for large companies because of its price and features.
In its engagement features, what stands out is the real-time alerts — it pings you when there’s been an unusual spike in brand mentions. This can come in handy to maintain brand image and detect a potential crisis before it blows up.
Apart from this, the platform lets you enhance your responses to customers using its AI features. You can adjust the tone to be more friendly, professional, longer, or shorter. Its AI assistant can also help you summarize consumer sentiment and prioritize important interactions where you need to respond more urgently.
Sprout Social also integrates with review websites, including the Apple App Store, Yelp, Google My Business, and Salesforce Service Cloud. This means you can use one software to ensure customer satisfaction across multiple channels. You can even create team reports to understand how quickly your support reps are responding to queries raised via social media.
All of these engagement capabilities are in addition to access to social media metrics, the ability to schedule posts across platforms, practice social listening, and even run influencer marketing campaigns.
The drawback is because of its cost and extensive feature set, Sprout Social is not a right fit for creators or small teams — it’s best for enterprise orgs that want to run various kinds of digital marketing campaigns using a single tool.
3. NapoleonCat
Best social media engagement tool for customer service
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 14-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $89/month for two users and five social media profiles.
NapoleonCat can help you schedule posts, analyze social media performance, and create reports. But where it truly shines is the customer service area. If you handle a ton of customer concerns on social media platforms, this might be the best tool to manage them.
For starters, it has a dedicated social media CRM so you have all the historical customer conversations in one place. You or your team members can add internal notes, comments, and relationship sentiment to add the full context in a jiffy. This feature alone can help you significantly boost your brand reputation.
Beyond this, NapoleonCat also aces sentiment analysis, has a unified inbox, and scalable collaboration features. The only drawback is its supplementing features (creating social media posts, built-in analytics, etc.) might not suffice as a one-stop social media management tool.
4. Manychat
Best social media engagement tool for automating direct messages
Free plan/trial: Free plan available for up to 1,000 chats.
Price: Plans start at $15/month for up to 500 chats and increase as your number of DMs grows.
Ever saw one of those posts where creators ask their audience to comment “link” or something specific to receive a free resource? Manychat helps automate those direct messages for creators and businesses.
Currently, Manychat supports only three social media platforms: Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Messenger. It’s also available for messaging tools like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Manychat isn’t a traditional social engagement tool; it helps you do some very specific tasks. But it’s an excellent software you can add to your tech stack to increase engagement. It prevents comments and DMs from piling up and acts as your support rep 24/7.
You can also use this tool to auto-reply to incoming messages that ask FAQs. It’s really simple to set up DM automations, too — you can get it up and running in just a few clicks.
5. Sked Social
Best social media engagement tool for agencies
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 14-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $59/month for three social media accounts.
Sked Social is designed for agencies managing multiple brands across various social channels. Yes, it has a single inbox for all comments, DMs, and brand mentions. But it also has excellent collaborative tools, allowing you to check in with your clients before responding to anything you’re unsure about.
You can assign tasks to different team members, tag stakeholders for approval, and leave internal comments. The best part is it has unlimited seats for each plan. So, even if you’re a small agency, you can add unlimited team members to your account.
In addition to its community management features, Sked Social also has agency-friendly workflows to schedule social media posts, get detailed analytics, practice social listening, and conduct competitive analysis. Each feature has built-in approval systems that help you collaborate smoothly with internal team members and external clients.
My favorite feature is storing user-generated content (UGC) received via tagged posts or brand mentions directly in your Sked Library. Collecting UGC becomes so much easier.
6. Eclincher
Best social media engagement tool for inbox analytics
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 14-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $149/month for ten social media profiles (but only one brand) and one user.
Eclincher is another agency-friendly tool, but its specialty is inbox analytics. It’d be more suited for teams or agencies that need detailed analytics on their inbox performance. The Inbox Report in Eclicher gives data like:
- Response time, bifurcated by each team member
- Number of incoming messages in your inbox per day
- Completed vs. open items in your inbox per day
- Busiest time for your inbox
You can further filter this data to get granular analytics. For example, you can compare how many messages you get for each social channel you’re on to see which network’s DMs are the most active. Similarly, you can bifurcate team performance by completed time vs. first response time. There’s a lot more when you dive in there.
Apart from advanced inbox analytics, Eclincher also has a unified inbox to help you respond to DMs more quickly and effectively. The only con is the tool doesn’t have these in-depth analytics for the comment section.
You can also use this tool for complete social media management — create a content calendar and schedule posts, run social media campaigns, and track overall performance. But Eclincher’s price makes it a better fit for agencies managing multiple accounts.
7. Agorapulse
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 30-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $99/user/month.
Agorapulse is a social media management software that can do a host of tasks, but it’s one of the few tools I found that can help you respond to ad comments across multiple social channels — specifically, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
When you reply to ad comments with links, you can also use UTM tracking to ensure accurate attribution of clicks and sales.
If you’re running ads on social media, it’s crucial to track conversations surrounding those paid advertisements — especially negative comments, as they can hurt your overall performance. Using Agorapulse combines all comments (organic or paid) under one roof, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Note that Agorapulse can display comments under ads, but it can’t measure your ad’s performance overall. You’ll still need a third-party tool for that.
8. BrandBastion
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 15-day free trial.
Price: Not publicly available.
Imagine going viral and being unable to keep track of comments — not just because of the volume, but because your post has reached a different corner of the globe. BrandBastion can prove extremely useful in ensuring your comment section remains clean and aligned with your values.
BrandBastion has a proprietary AI technology built on millions of social conversations and trained across 109 languages. It can detect nuance, context, sarcasm, and subtlety within your comment section without you lifting a finger.
What also stood out for me was their agency model. You can partner with them to practice social engagement on your behalf using the same tool. Another notable offering is their outbound engagement service — BrandBastion practices trend tracking for your industry, allowing you to participate in relevant social conversations while they’re still popular.
Book a demo with BrandBastion.
9. Siftsy
Free plan/trial: Not publicly available.
Price: Not publicly available.
Siftsy is a social engagement tool specifically built for your comment section. All you have to do is upload a CSV file with your social media posts or drop a link. The tool will then analyze the comments to find what customers love, complain about, and want more of.
There are various use cases of this tool:
- You can use it when one of your product-related posts goes viral to understand buyer sentiment
- You can use it for social listening and market research to dissect key themes in your comment section
- You can use it to analyze influencer content — understand how their audience interacts with them and what they say about your products
Social media managers can also export the insights they get using Sitfsy for social media reporting. Maybe you wouldn’t need a recurring subscription of Siftsy, but you can use it once every quarter (or after specific campaigns) to deeply analyze your comment section.
10. Hootsuite
Best social media engagement platform for enterprise companies
Free plan/trial: No free plan. Paid plans have a 30-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at €99/user/month.
Hootsuite is a well-known social media management tool. It can be your ultimate tool to implement a complex social media strategy, if you have the budget.
- Like Manychat, it can help you create DM automation workflows to engage your audience
- The customer support features are quite close to NapoleanCat, minus the extensive CRM
- Its in-built social listening features can help you find truly useful content ideas and understand audience sentiment
- The Streams feature can help you stay on top of trending topics and monitor brand mentions, even if someone doesn’t tag you
The disadvantages are that Hootsuite has a steep learning curve — you’ll need some time to get the hang of all the features. Cost is another big factor. Most creators or small businesses don’t need so many functionalities regularly — it’s much more affordable to stitch together different tools as and when you need them. Most of Hootsuite’s best features are also tucked away in the highest tier plan.
That said, if you’re an enterprise org that needs one tool to do it all and you have the budget for Hootsuite, go for it.
Best social media engagement platform for comment moderation on Facebook and Instagram
Free plan/trial: No free plan. All paid plans have a 7-day free trial.
Price: Plans start at $29/month including 5,000 comments.
CommentGuard is a moderation tool specifically for Facebook pages and Instagram. It has a unified inbox where you can see all the comments you’ve received on your post. The tool automatically hides comments containing profanity. You can also customize the topics you don’t want to display in your comment section.
It also has a few engagement-specific features like saved replies, AI-assisted responses, and setting up FAQs. If you work with an assistant or have multiple team members, you can add them at no extra cost and provide them with custom access.
CommentGuard is a great choice if you want a tool specifically for comment moderation. But it’s limited to only two social channels as of writing this article (Facebook and Instagram). If these are your primary platforms and you’re spending too much of your time moderating comments, this tool is a great choice.
Your audience is waiting
Let’s be honest, you didn’t start creating content on social media to post, ghost, and drown in notifications. No, you began this journey in hopes of building a genuine connection with your audience and finding your tribe. But it’s challenging (and overwhelming!) to do that as you grow and start managing multiple networks simultaneously.
Engagement tools help you reclaim your time while increasing the quality of your engagement. No better win-win, if you ask me.
If you’re a creator or a social media manager of a small business, it’s worthwhile choosing an all-in-one, affordable tool that can help check off multiple tasks from your to-do list. Instead of juggling various tools together, you can power your whole strategy using just one software.
Buffer, for example, is an excellent social media management tool that’s user-friendly and not heavy on the pocket. Its community hub will become a place you’d want to come back to. Replace the chaotic notification and DM mess with a calm, central hub to manage all your social media efforts. Get started with the free plan today.
