How can you juggle the needs of your business and still somehow find the time to manage your social media accounts as well?

Rather than giving up, there are a number of helpful apps that can make the process of focusing on your business and social media marketing manageable. We have tried many options, from using the social media platform itself to robust social account management tools.

Here is our top five pick list. If you think we missed one, please share it in the comments below and tell us why it's your preferred platform!

Hootsuite

With free and paid versions, Hootsuite is particularly effective for teams. Updates can be scheduled in advance and the assignments extension allows one team member to assign social media posts to others in the organization.

The program natively supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linked In, FourSquare, WordPress, MySpace and mixi accounts. Many other social media accounts can be integrated with Hootsuite using apps, some of which are free while others have a monthly fee.

The program has added some advanced scheduling options, but for highly targeted Twitter scheduling SocialBro is the program of choice. Also, while you can integrate Facebook Insights into the tool, its social analytics are currently less robust than programs like SproutSocial.

What we like best: Built-in ability to post to Google+ accounts and good value for a reasonable monthly fee.

What we like least: Compared to other tools the visual interface is clunky and somewhat awkward to use, particularly when managing multiple accounts.

Buffer

Think of buffer as a place where you can queue up social shares for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that are then posted throughout the day, on the schedule you set-out, without your team having to worry about when the posts actually go out. There are free and paid versions available and while the features are more limited that other programs, Buffer is quite convenient, especially for individuals or smaller teams where the goal is to share content from outside the organization. For people who use the Chrome or Safari browser is easy to add an extension that lets you add articles and resources you find online without leaving your browser. The extension also lets you buffer one piece of content to multiple social media sites.

It is possible to set-up different schedules for each social media channel that you connect to Buffer and the paid version offers more advanced scheduling options. When using the program the ability to Buffer is added to status update boxes on Twitter, Facebook and Linked In.

What we like best: With the Chrome extension the ease of posting from the browser makes posting to various social media sites effortless.

What we like least: Analytics are limited compared to other social media management tools and you will need to use another program to monitor and manage engagement.

SproutSocial

This tool is one of the most attractive, usable social media monitoring tools I have used, although that comes with a higher price. SproutSocial's visual dashboard provides immediate feedback on who is engaging with your organization in social channels and it also has excellent team management and delegation tools, including a team content calendar.

Instead of showing an inbox for each social media account, the program uses an integrated inbox, which makes it much easier to track conversations. However, the program currently only supports Facebook, Twitter and Linked In and it does not have tools to identify the best time to post an update.

What we like best: The visualization of user interaction and having a unified inbox

What we like least: The price

SocialBro

Rather than trying to serve multiple social media platforms, SocialBro is focused on doing an excellent job for just one platform: Twitter. One of its most useful features is the "best time to tweet" option, which helps to ensure that your message is heard. The program also provides a number of tools to help users understand their community, find new followers and analyze competitors. The analytics provided can be filtered by things like the number of followers someone has or the friend/follower ratio. It also can be used to create an optimized tweet schedule that can then be imported into HootSuite.

What we like best: Ability to analyze followers, competitors, identify influencers and determine best times to tweet.

What we like least: Considering this is only for a single platform (Twitter), for small businesses the price / value proposition gets steep when you want access to the advanced analytics and features like direct messaging campaigns.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a Twitter management tool that became so popular that Twitter purchased the application. While the name implies that this is a stand-alone tool for managing Twitter accounts, it is possible to connect accounts from other social media platforms as well.

The program is free, makes it easy to schedule tweets in advance and the interface lets you position streams of what people are saying, how you are being mentioned, who has followed your accounts and keyword searches side by side, which makes it easy to get an overview of what is happening on Twitter in a single screen view. You choose what you want to see and how the streams are organized.

What we like best: Ability to see status updates, mentions, followers and direct messages side-by-side, for multiple accounts, in the order you choose.

What we like least: The new version of Tweetdeck, which is being forced on all users effective May 7, adds extra steps to processes that used to be available in a single click, such as replying to a user by clicking on the reply button built into their avatar.