We made this video because we accidentally created a social media posting problem. After filming a mini-series podcast, we had a bunch of short-form to push across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, X, and LinkedIn—and Andra was doing it manually. So we tested the “obvious” social media management tools (Metricool, Buffer, and Hootsuite) thinking we’d find one hero app that does it all. Spoiler: we didn’t. Metricool looked perfect in demos (multi-platform posting, calendar, “best time to post”), but we hit real limitations fast: YouTube Shorts scheduling wasn’t optimized (no description/tags/thumbnail), TikTok captions came out unformatted, and Instagram Reels threw file size errors that support told us to “just resize everything.” Buffer felt cleaner and actually posted our Instagram Reels without the file size drama, but it still had the same Shorts/TikTok limitations (no thumbnail selection, limited caption formatting) and it doesn’t magically know your best posting times until you’ve used it for a while. Hootsuite was the most expensive and the most disappointing for our use case: dated UI, felt more limiting than Buffer, and still had the same API constraints—plus it required a credit card up front. Our final workflow is the unconventional path: Buffer for Instagram/X/LinkedIn, native YouTube scheduling for Shorts, and for TikTok we draft/batch on the phone and post manually. Also: connecting YouTube to any scheduler asking for full permissions is… scary, so we’re extra protective there.