Social media management tools 2021 – the best free social media management tools 2020 – help you track all your posts from one place. Find out the differences between the various types of social media management tools, so you can choose which is right for your project.
Have you ever wondered which are the best free social media management tools 2020? Or which are the best free social media management tools 2021? There’s a lot of options available, so it can be hard to choose. That’s why I decided to write this article. Here I’ll show you which are the best free social media management tools 2021 to increase your productivity in managing your brand online.
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.
PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic also doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. It’s cheapest plan is also a minimal $9 per month.
The critical point of difference for PromoRepublic is its design focus. Indeed it feels like a merger of Canva with a social media management app. You can design and schedule beautiful posts without leaving the app.
You can use it to schedule and share posts with all the major social networks, including Instagram and Pinterest. PromoRepublic suggests a suitable posting schedule for each of your social networks, but you can easily modify this. You organize your posting schedules across a centralized calendar.
It comes with 100,000 post ideas, and these cover a wide range of topics. Most come pre-designed, with eye-catching graphics. You can easily modify and customize their post ideas to suit your business with PromoRepublic’s full graphics editor.
PromoRepublic is currently trialing brand reputation management. You can request beta access so that you can get live updates about your brand from the web and social media.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s main app focuses predominantly on social publishing. You need to buy a separate app (Hootsuite Insights) if you want social listening capabilities.
It offers a free plan, with three social accounts, one user, and up to 30 scheduled messages. You gain unlimited scheduling with the $29 per month Professional plan, along with a series of other upgraded features.
The core of Hootsuite is Streams. You set up a tab for each of your social networks on the Streams page, and then you add a series of streams for each social account. You can use these streams as a replacement for the individual social account apps. For example, you might have the following streams from your Twitter account: Scheduled Posts, Mentions, your Twitter Home page feed, list of tweets you make, and a stream for each of your Twitter lists.
You have multiple ways of making posts, including the Publisher screen which features a calendar view.
Zoho Social
Whether you’re a growing business or an agency, Zoho Social will help you manage multiple profiles, research relevant keywords, work with team members, and of course schedule posts from one dashboard.
Zoho Social has many of the same tools and features that the other platforms have, but they also have Facebook lead ads, advanced reporting features, a SocialShare browser plugin, and CRM integrations. Zoho Social caters to agencies as well so marketers have the choice of choosing between the business or agency plans. Pricing for the paid plans ranges from $8.33 to $125+ for larger agencies. Zoho Social’s free plan allows you to manage 1 brand, and includes the URL shortener and SocialShare browser plugin.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media manager that focuses on visual content. It has an official partnership with Pinterest and Instagram. This focus makes Tailwind a winner in its niche.
Tailwind lets you know the best times for posting content on Instagram. It gives you hashtag suggestions too. Tailwind also offers a community of influencers. When it comes to Pinterest, Tailwind streamlines multiple pins with one click. There are tools for re-sharing and re-using social content. With Tailwind Tribes you can easily expand your contact list.
Tailwind name is best for:
- Small teams
- Startups
- Ecommerce
- Social media scheduling
CoSchedule (good tool for managing blogs)
CoSchedule is a suite of social media marketing tools. The bulk of the tools are divided into packages that start with a simple blog calendar. The next packages are a marketing calendar and a marketing suite.
The blog calendar is great for WordPress. It also covers the major social media platforms. With easy drag and drop tools you can manage your Google Docs, WordPress, Facebook and Twitter accounts in a single dashboard. The CoSchedule Marketing calendar lets your team plan and schedule social posts. There are also tools for content curation and an asset organizer for media files.
CoSchedule is best for:
- Small businesses
- Startups
- Marketing teams
- Blogging
- Content calendar
- Social marketing
eclincher
eclincher has been around since 2012 but is recently becoming a more popular option for social media management. It’s got a clean look and feel, with loads of features.
One of the unique aspects of eclincher is how it lets you automate your social media posts. You plan your posts and eclincher automatically knows when to publish. This is great for bulk upload and recycling past popular content. Team members get a unified inbox for engaging with fans and customers. Social monitoring, analytics and post-optimization are also part of eclincher’s platform.
eclincher is best for:
- Startups
- SMBs
- Team collaboration
- Auto posting
- Social analytics
- Real-time monitoring
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a good social media manager for brand management. It’s a hip looking platform well suited to the needs of cool startups. The goal here is to take over the routine task of monitoring your social media accounts.
Automation is a big part of MeetEdgar. It can automate when posts get published, but it also automates writing posts. It does this by finding trending texts and quoting them into your posts. MeetEdgar also lets you A/B test content. Users of MeetEdgar can get weekly reports sent to their emails. Finally, MeetEdgar offers great user support to its subscribers.
MeetEdgar is best for:
- Individuals
- Startups
- Brand agencies
- Automation
- Scheduling tools
- A/B testing
Loomly
Loomly is our top pick for large team collaboration due to its comprehensive plans for teams of up to 26 people. All plans also come with core features such as audience targeting, post preview, automated publishing, analytics, and more.Pros
- Try it out free for 15 days
- Base plans start at just $25 per month
- Manage and share all your social assets in one place
- Real-time optimization of posts
Cons
- Plans for large teams can be costly
- Companies with large ad spend may have to upgrade to a more expensive plan regardless of their team size
Loomly is an excellent option for large teams that want to collaborate on a social media strategy. While their base plan is only accessible for up to two users, their top-tier plan for businesses can include up to 26.
Core plans from Loomly include the following:
- Base: $25 per month (2 users)
- Standard: $57 per month (6 users)
- Advanced: $119 per month (16 users)
- Premium: $249 per month (26 users)
- Enterprise: Price available upon request
This pricing is only available if you pay for a year of management upfront; you’ll pay more if you want to pay for your plan monthly. As you compare options, you’ll also note that each tier of management software has a cap for ad spend, so you will have to use the Premium plan if your business spends $5,000 or more on ads with Meta.
All plans from Loomly let you post unlimited content and come with core features like audience targeting, automated publishing, post sponsoring, interaction tracking, and basic analytics. You’ll also get chat and email customer service with each of their plans. A 15-day free trial is also available regardless of which tier of coverage you want to try out.
Conclusion:
There are so many social media management tools out there I’m sure you’re wondering which ones you should be using for your business. And with so many of them requiring monthly fees, you don’t want to be wasting money on tools that aren’t the best.