Social media has now become an integral part of almost every aspect of life, even business. Whether it is personal branding or building a community around a brand, social media management tools can save you a lot of time and help you create the perfect content to increase your following while ensuring that your brand continues to develop.
If you are looking at free Instagram tools, then this guide will give you the list of best free social media management tools, so that you can use these free Instagram tools to get more followers.
Looking for the best free social media management tools to manage your Instagram pages and grow your following? We’ve compiled a list of awesome Instagram tools to help you schedule posts, analyze your performance, and more.
Trying to manage your social media presence on all seven social networks can be exhausting. It is even harder without the right Instagram scheduling tools to make it easier. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the best social media management tools out there in the market. So without further ado, let’s dig in and discover our favorite Instagram scheduling tools.
Social media monitoring tips
Monitor in all the languages your customers speak.
This one can be easy to overlook for North Americans used to working in one language. But if your company just acquired a start-up in Montreal, remember to set up searches using French, English (and Franglais??) words and phrases.
Meanwhile, if your new client does a lot of work in a language that you don’t speak, work with the local team to find out how to spell “love it” in Vietnamese, or “the worst” in Russian.
Depending on the size and relative importance of your audience, you might want to use a language-specific social monitoring tool. Crowd Analyzer, for instance, excels at social monitoring in Arabic.
Many social media monitoring tools (ahem, Hootsuite) allow you to share permissions with team members so that you can get help where you need it, like for instance from your French or Spanish colleagues.
Mention.com
Mention is a social media mention monitoring tool that tracks social media conversation across the web, blogs and social networks.
It’s a very simple way to see what people are saying about your brand or industry, especially considering you’ll be able to track keywords, competitors and even specific employees–all for free!
Note: at the time of this writing all social media mentions were limited to 1000 mentions unless you have a paid account. Also note that only 3 projects can be created with this version.
After you’ve signed into your account, you can add social media keywords as projects.
How it works:
When adding a social media keyword project on Twitter, you’ll want to include the social network name and mention frequency type . Then enter your keyword once on both screens.
To set up social monitoring of your brand or competitors, click on ‘Social’ from the top nav bar and then select ‘Brand Monitoring.’
You’ll want to specify which social networks you’d like to monitor (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogs). Then decide what kind of mentions you’d like to follow:
- Mentions Only
- Favorites Only
- Mentions & Replies (recommended).
Awario
What it does: Awario is a social media monitoring tool – it locates mentions of any given keyword (or keywords) across all the major social media platforms, including Instagram.
To find mentions of your brand or product in Instagram specifically, you need to set up an alert and untick all other social media platforms and the Web.
You’ll then see mentions with and without the #hashtag, and you can reply to any mention without leaving the dashboard. You can also connect multiple Instagram accounts and reply using any of those without having to login and logout at any point.
Awario also helps you determine which mentions you should pay attention to by sorting mentions based on the mentioning accounts’ number of followers. This is not always the key metric for all brands, but it does serve as a helpful prompt for particularly high profile responses.
Awario can also show you a list of brand-relevant Instagram influencers (people that have mentioned your product a lot and have a large number of followers), while there’s also capacity to produce reports on mentions’ analytics from the dashboard.
Available options: Awario offers a free trial for two weeks. The Starter plan, tailored for small companies, costs $19/mo (10 alerts, unlimited users).
Free version: https://awario.com/
Buffer
What it does: Buffer is a scheduling app – it lets you schedule posts to be published to all the major social networks from your dashboard, though it does work a little differently for Instagram.
For most platforms, it’s essentially a ‘set and forget’ process – you choose a time you want a post to be published, and to which network, and Buffer will take care of the rest. Instagram, however, doesn’t allow third-party tools to post direct to the app, so after you’ve scheduled your post in Buffer, the Buffer app will send you a reminder about when to post on Instagram, based on your chosen date and time. The app will then redirects you into your Instagram account, where you can review your scheduled post, apply filters, and post it. Its helpful in ensuring you post at more relevant times and in managing your content strategy across various platforms from one place.
Available options: Buffer is a freemium app – you can connect one Instagram account for free. Awesome Plan, that starts with $10/month lets you add more than one account.
Free version: https://buffer.com/
Simply Measured
What it does: Simply Measured is a social analytics tool. Their Instagram Account Report provides clear stats and insights on the number of your posts, the breakdown of post types (e.g. video and photo), total engagement, engagement per post, the number of likes per photo, and how your overall performance is trending. It’ll also help identify keyword mentions in the comments, filters that are performing best, locations of your top-performing posts, and the best days and times to engage with your audience.
The tool basically gives you a comprehensive overview of how effective your Instagram efforts are, what you have to change, and what exactly worked and should be repeated in future.
Available options: Simply Measured offers a free Instagram report for users with up to 25,000 followers.
Free version: https://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools/
Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month. Later started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool, but since its inception, they’ve added support for other social networks and are continuously adding new features. The app has a strong focus on visual content. Whether you want to schedule in-feed image or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all of these options. Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but you get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans. Their paid plans start at $9/month.
TweetDeck
Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free application that enables you to manage multiple (unlimited) Twitter accounts from a unified interface. You can create your own customizable social media dashboard that allows you to send and receive tweets and manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. You can use TweetDeck as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop app. TweetDeck can be set to post scheduled tweets, build Tweet lists, and more. And the extra special part is that it’s always free.
Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
Photo Editor by Aviary
Photo Editor by Aviary is one of the most comprehensive and highly recommended photo editing apps. With the app, you can enhance a photo with a single tap, add effects and stickers, draw, add text, and more.
There are over one-thousand free photo effects, stickers, and frames in the app but more are available for purchase if you’d like to expand your library.
Photo Editor by Aviary is available on Android, iOS, and Windows, which means you can most likely use it regardless of which smartphone you’re using.
PicFlow
With PicFlow, you can easily create 15-second video slideshows for Instagram in three quick steps:
- Select your photos
- Select a music
- Set the timing of each photo by tapping
If you would like to make longer videos, remove the (tiny) watermark, or unlock more transitions between photos, you can purchase them from within the app for less than $3.
Pic Flow is available on Android and iOS.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is another free design tool that we love at Buffer.
Here’s a unique feature of Adobe Spark that I like: just by turning a dial in the editor, I can get different design recommendations for my caption.
Crowdfire
What it does: Crowdfire is one of the few tools that helps you grow followers with minimal effort.
Follower growth is the thing most social media marketers struggle with – it’s one thing to post great content, it’s another to get that content seen. What’s more, you can’t just have any followers, you need your key target audience to see your content – so how can you expand your audience and boost your Instagram footprint to get your strategy moving and build engagement?
To a large extent, Crowdfire helps you do exactly that. It lets you mass-follow the followers of your competitors, which, in most cases, will consist of the target audience you also want to reach.
Research shows that around 30% of the people you follow will follow you back, and that percentage is potentially higher if your product is something they might be interested in. To ensure constant follower growth, unfollow people that haven’t followed you back a couple of days later – Crowdfire shows you who these people are and lets you mass-unfollow as well. All of this without you having to even log into Instagram.
Available options: Free users can add one Instagram account. Paid plans start at $9,99 and allow more users and some additional handy features. or full clarity on the plans available to you and your business, it’s best to contact Crowdfire for more information.
Free version: https://web.crowdfireapp.com/
Instagram Insights
What it does: Instagram Insights provides you with all basic statistics you need to make sure your efforts on Instagram are reaching the right audience – and producing the result you want. If you don’t have the time and resources to try out additional tools, or if you’re not sure Instagram is even the way to go in your marketing strategy, start by using Instagram Insights.
You’ll have access to free analytics once you’ve set up your Instagram business account – which you’ll absolutely need in any case. The app will show you total impressions of your posts, their reach, profile views, and website clicks, and also the basic demographics of your audience and their top locations. You can also see the times of the day most of your followers are online, which can be extremely useful.
Available options: Free once you’ve set up your Instagram Business account.
Free version: https://www.instagram.com/
Why is social media listening important?
Social media listening is vital if you are focussed on building a positive brand reputation and being aware of what conversations are happening online that you can take part in.
Social media listening involves tracking usernames, keywords and hashtags, on one social media platform or across several.
Using the insights gained through social media listening, you can:
- Create more relevant content for your supporters
- Plan more targeted social media campaigns
- Improve your social media strategy
- Provide better customer service
- Create new products or services that your customers are asking for
Conclusion
Social media has become a vital marketing tool. And if used right, can drive sales and leads for you. But with the number of social media management tools out there, it can be hard to know which one works best for your business. It’s also difficult to know how these tools can help you increase reach, build brand recognition and grow your customer base…
Free Social Media Tools is the ultimate answer to every digital marketing professional’s problem. It contains a huge variety of tools that will provide you with everything you need to manage your most important social media accounts in true comfort – Instagram, Facebook Pages and Twitter.