If you run multiple social media accounts, you should definitely use social media management tools to help you out. Social media is important to create brand awareness and to grow your audience. Hootsuite is the best social media management tool that provides you with many great features.
I’m sure that there are other great options that you can use though so if you don’t like Hootsuite, check out these other top free social media tools in the list below.
SmarterQueue
Another incredible all-in-one platform, SmarterQueue covers all the bases you need for planning, publishing, and analyzing.
Their free options include a reporting tool to help you identify your top Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts. The free social reporting tool helps you determine your best types of content, hashtags, mentions, posting times, and more, so you can optimize all your social media marketing efforts.
They also offer an Instagram Top Nine tool, so you can pick your favorite nine posts to share as a collage – these always get lots of engagement at the end of the year.
You can explore their entire platform when you sign up for a free trial. This gives you access to all of their awesome features, including:
- Intelligent scheduling automation powered by queues and posting plans, content categories, evergreen recycling, and content variations.
- A social media calendar to help you visualize all the content you’re posting on each channel.
- A monitoring tool that keeps you in the know on what people are talking about and how they’re discussing your brand.
- A comprehensive analytics dashboard with interactive charts to help you with reporting and optimizing your strategy for each social channel.
- A social inbox for managing all your communications across each of your social media accounts.
They also provide features to help you conduct a competitor analysis, so you can see how to outperform other brands in your niche.
SmarterQueue Upgrade Options
- Solo: $16.99/month when paid annually
- $19.99 for month to month
- Business: $33.99/month when paid annually
- $39.99 for month to month
- Agency: $67.99/month when paid annually
- $79.99 for month to month
- Custom: Starts at $16.99/month when paid annually
- Starts at $19.99 for month to month
- Customize any plan with add-ons.
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.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. You can use it to schedule posts, receive in-depth reports, and collaborate with your team members, thanks to built-in teamwork features. It enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what your customers are saying. There is a free limited plan available for 3 social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages.
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. You can share ideas with, create approval workflows, build your content plan and then publish that content to multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). ContentCal’s analytics will help you understand your content performance and the latest ‘Respond’ features act as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media.
One of the star features is the fact that ContentCal integrates with over 2000 other applications so that you can create the perfect social media workflow by connecting ContentCal to tools you currently use (think of things like Slack or Trello) and also distribute content to channels beyond social media, like emails and blog posts. The best content is created together. Involve your team (and clients) into the content creation process, share ideas, gain feedback and watch your content performance soar!
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is an advanced social media management tool. Its flagship product, the Social Inbox, helps brands manage social media engagement and provide excellent social customer service across all major social platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business.
The Auto-moderation feature helps social media managers in managing their profiles hands free. You can use it to filter out and automatically handle the most recurrent questions, and also to protect your social profiles from harmful content, such as comments including abusive language or spammy links.
With NapoleonCat, businesses and individuals can improve their response rates, streamline social communications, and analyze their performance – and it’s all available in one user-friendly dashboard. The tool’s other features include automated publishing, reporting, and competitive analysis.
SocialOomph
SocialOomph offers a wide range of features for multiple social media platforms, from typical features like scheduling and analytics to some interesting ones like automatically removing outdated Twitter DMs from users’ inbox. According to the statistics by Zendesk, SocialOomph ranks in the top 5% of social media management apps.
This tool has capabilities to manage your activities across many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. For Twitter, it can automate direct messages to new followers to welcome and start building a connection with them. You can also look for high-influencing Twitter individuals by setting up keyword searches.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social offers great support in growing your business, or even agency, by optimizing your brands on social media platforms. The tool features a cohesive function list that allows you to track your social channels’ performance seamlessly at ease.
With Zoho, you can flexibly schedule your posts with your own timeline, or use Zoho’s predictions for the times your followers are the most active to increase the reach rates. The tool is supported by a content calendar that enables you to visualize the posting timeline and organize your posts as you wish. Monitoring your posts on Zoho Social is no longer challenging as there are multiple listing columns provided to keep you updated with what matters across channels. Especially, you can grasp your audience’s insights with the comprehensive analytics tool pack including Facebook lead ads, CRM integrations, and advanced reporting features.
Zoho Social offers some quite affordable plans for individuals, businesses, and agencies, ranging from $15 to $400 per month. Each plan is provided with an equivalent feature list to satisfy specific market needs. You can try these plans for free in advance, and consider your payment later after the trial ends.
Ubercircle
Ubercircle will help to streamline your social media processes and deliver content to your audience effectively. You can save hours of planning, scheduling, analyzing, and reporting on social media networks. It takes only 10-20 minutes a day to get all tasks on set and ready to go live.
Ubercircle allows you to work straight from the web without having to download the app and install anything. That makes things more convenient!
Another noteworthy feature is the ability to organize photos and videos. All your photos and videos will be stored in one place accessible on any device. It’s easy to sync photos and videos from the phone, desktop, Google Drive, or Dropbox. From here, you can also edit your media with a few drag-and-drop operations.
Buffer
Buffer has been a popular social media management tool for a long time. It’s an intuitive and dependable place where you can manage your social media networking in a neat and organized dashboard.
The app offers a full package of features for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration. Your scheduled posts display in a queue list format. You just need to scroll down to see which posts already go the status of your posts, whether they go live, platform and time.
On Buffer, you can track your followers’ activity and know the perfect time to publish your content based on that.
Friends+Me
Friends+Me not only focuses on Google+ features but also helps you to achieve goals by boosting your content promotion across all social media networks. Frends+Me enables you to stay focused on the creation of great content to share, which is the best way to increase your brand visibility. It has available plans for businesses of all sizes.
Users can share their Google+ content to other networks effortlessly. It’s flexible and simpler than many other tools.
Sprout Social
Another all-in-one social media management tool is Sprout Social. It provides tools that cover all essential aspects of social media management – ranging from scheduling, drafting, publishing to monitoring and reporting.
Especially, Sprout Social has social CRM tools that help you understand your customers, serve them in a better manner, and establish a strong relationship with them.
Reporting is a superb feature of this tool. All reports for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn are designed so neatly and beautifully that you can use for further purpose without having to edit anything on them.
Conclusion
Social media marketing and management is a time-consuming and hard chore. There are lot of social media management tools out there which help you with tasks such as publishing content, responding to fans, engaging users etc. It’s indeed an overwhelming task to select the best tool for this purpose.