You want to grow your business but you don’t have a big budget for marketing. You see the returns from other businesses with bigger budgets but your business cannot afford spend $1000 a month on social media advertising or pay for multiple monthly subscriptions. Social Media Automation tools are an essential part for peak performance in any business. An Automated Social Media campaign can bring sales and revenue you never thought possible!
In this post, we shall be looking at the best free social media manager tools.
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platforms, from typical features like scheduling and analytics to some interesting ones like automatically removing outdated Twitter DMs from users’ inbox.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.
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.
Later
Later claims to be the number one marketing platform for Instagram. It’s undeniably one of the most cost-effective and worthwhile tools for visually planning, schedule, and analyzing social media content, especially for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
You can schedule Instagram posts for a week in just 20 minutes with visual calendars, drag-and-drop operations, and automation scheduling. You can also preview your Instagram posts
IFTTT
IFTTT allows you to unify your posts on different social media platforms. This tool helps you build your own commands to connect various applications so that they’ll perform actions automatically if triggered.
For example, if you post an image on Facebook, then tweet the image to your followers on Twitter. You can also have that image saved in your Dropbox account and shared on Instagram as well. A single and simple process does it with IFTTT.
ScheduGram
Everyone is checking images on Instagram all the time. Having a scheduling tool that helps you to create a constant flow of content posting on this trending platform opens a door for your business to increase brand visibility. ScheduGram is undoubtedly a great solution.
With ScheduGram, you can bulk upload your scheduled posts and manage multiple profiles with ease. You will receive email notifications
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.
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.
Buffer
Buffer is also one of the best apps for managing your social media presence and scheduling your posts. The app also comes with analytics tools that enable you to track your audience’s activity and figure out when it is the best time to post in the future. We especially love its Chrome extension, which integrates itself seamlessly and never gets in the way, yet it is always there when you need it. It is a more straightforward and more effective way of managing your social media, and you are never more than a few clicks away from setting up anything you want. Buffer supports over 7 different platforms – you can add up to 4 on the free plan.
Bonus Tool: 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.
Conclusion
There are literally hundreds of social media marketing tools out there, so it can be challenging to know where to start. This blog aims to help those doing social media marketing for their business find the best free tools to test for themselves. The tools we selected above were based on a combination of user ratings and social media activity, with each tool being strong in one or more categories. You’re bound to find one that is perfect for your business!