Schedule your posts for Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook to save time for more important things. These free social media management tools will become priceless in a business setting.
Social media is a great way to reach your audience, but it can also be difficult and time consuming to manage so many channels. Luckily, there are some free social media management tools out there to help. These free tools can streamline your social media efforts and save you time.
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!
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.
Latergram
Although also available for Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, Latergram is often one of the most cited when it comes to scheduling Instagram posts. The platform allows all content to be previewed, generating a post calendar so you can better analyze the content distribution and also check on Instagram for example if the feed is harmonious.
In the free version of Latergram you can manage one profile per platform, enter one more person to help you handle posts, schedule 30 posts per month on Instagram, 50 on Twitter, 30 on Facebook, and 30 on Pinterest. Finally, this tool in its free version offers a basic level analysis for the user to follow the posts that performed well.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most popular tool for managing social media platforms. 18+ million social media marketers use it, and it has everything you need to manage your team, schedule posts, measure results, plan upcoming campaigns, etc. From freelancers to large businesses, it’s the perfect tool for anyone who wants to grow their social media presence the right way.
Hootsuite comes with five different plans, including a free plan. The free version plan allows you to manage two social media accounts, schedule up to 5 posts at a time, and allow one user.
You can easily create, schedule, and customize posts for all your connected networks from their beginner-friendly dashboard. Plus, you can connect to more than 20+ different social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and more.
One of the key features of Hootsuite I like is the Engage. Using this option, you can quickly access all the incoming messages across your social networks.
💰 Pricing: Hootsuite offers five different plans. Additionally, they also offer 30 days free trial on professional and team plans.
- Free Plan: One user, two social accounts, five scheduled posts
- Professional Plan ($49/ mo): One user, ten social accounts, unlimited scheduled posts
- Team plan ($129/ mo): 3 users, 20 social accounts, custom branded URL
- Business plan ($599/ mo): 5 users, 35 social accounts, content library, campaign planning
- Enterprise plan (custom): 5+ users, 50+ social accounts, team productivity reporting, social selling add-ons
Buffer
If you want an app like Hootsuite, Buffer would be a great alternative. In fact, it’s much cheaper than Hootsuite.
Buffer offers two different plans – free and essentials. The free plan is limited to one user, allowing you to add three social media accounts, schedule 10 posts per social channel.
With Buffer’s powerful publishing tools, you can schedule posts across all major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. You can also schedule posts in advance, so they get published when it’s convenient for you – and automate them based on your RSS feeds.
This comes very handy when you run a large website. For example, let’s say you published a post about best SiteGround alternatives, and then the RSS feed will automatically add the post to Buffer.
Another feature of Buffer I like is its Chrome extension that lets you easily share any page, link, or video from any website directly into Buffer without opening up another tab in the browser.
💰 Pricing: Buffer offers two different plans – free and essentials. Plus, you can also try their essentials plan free for 14 days.
- Free plan: 1 user, up to 3 social accounts, schedule 10 posts, basic publishing tools.
- Essentials plans ($5-$10/ month): unlimited channels, unlimited schedule posts, advanced publishing tools.
Conclusion
We have searched the internet extensively, and there are no free social media management tools with the functionality we wanted. What this means is that we had to create our own software solution. We wanted a piece of software that would help us to manage all of our social media channels in one place, bring in content from our blog, save hours every week, help us to scale content, customise our designs and easily create new Facebook posts.