Are you a social media manager or social media consultant? We have compiled a list of the best free social media management tools that are out there today. With this list, you will be able to streamline your social media management process and save time.
Here is a list of the best free social media management tools for brand managers, social media specialists and agencies. We’ve created this list as a part of our free digital marketing course – “Social Media Foundations.” This free course covers tools that you can use to manage social media in 2019.
Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Prices: Forever free plan, $5, $10, add $10 per month per social channel connected (with a 14-day free trial).
Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by small businesses and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place
Prices: Free plan, $29, $129, $599 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
Sprout Social
Real people. Real brands. Real connection.
Prices: $99, $149, and $249 per user per month (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.
Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.
Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
SocialPilot (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Edge)
With many apps in this category, if you want to delegate social media management to someone else in your organization, you’ll have to pay a serious premium for the privilege. (You could give them the login credentials to save money, but that comes with a whole host of security concerns.) With SocialPilot, though, the Small Team plan starts at $50/month and includes two other team members and 25 social media accounts. With Buffer or Hootsuite, you’d be paying hundreds of dollars more per year.
While SocialPilot’s user interface is a bit dated, it’s entirely functional. The sidebar has tabs for managing your posts and accounts, accessing your inboxes or analytics, lining up content from RSS feeds, and configuring your team and client setup. All the features you’d expect of a good social media management app are there—though it’s the Team options that are most compelling.
Different team members can be assigned roles, based on what you want them to be able to do. For example, you can set things up so content creators have to submit all posts for approval, or allow managers to edit and schedule but still retain final approval for yourself. This allows you to delegate responsibilities to the people you work with, without having to give them free rein.
SocialPilot also integrates with Zapier, so you can automatically add content to your SocialPilot queue whenever something happens in the other apps you use most.
Social Pilot Price: From $30/month for the Professional plan; the Small Team plan with 3 users and 25 accounts starts at $50/month
MeetEdgar (Web, iOS, Chrome)
MeetEdgar is like an autopilot for your social media accounts. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you and is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This isn’t an analytics tool—just a scheduling one.
What makes MeetEdgar so different is its automation. The app can find quote-worthy text from links, and then compose updates to go along with them. After pasting your link, simply click Suggest Variations, and MeetEdgar will create four alternative updates based on the contents of your link. You can edit them, delete them, or add your own manual variations, and then click Save to Library. This is the only tool we came across while researching that actually creates your content for you. Better still, it can generate variations on past updates that have performed well, making it easy to recycle updates without duplicating content.
Another standout feature is the ability to categorize your updates. Add different types of content to different categories, so you can better space out content types over the course of your schedule. You may want to create one category for blog posts, another for how-to posts, and another for promotional material. Color-coded categories make it easy to ensure your schedule contains a good range of content that will appeal to different users. You can also automatically add content from sources like your blog or your Medium, WordPress, or YouTube accounts with a quick import.
There’s little in the way of analytics tools in MeetEdgar, but the app does implement A/B testing to isolate best practices; plus, you can use the built-in ed.gr link shortener to track clicks. You can schedule content via the web, via the Chrome extension, or using a bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox.
MeetEdgar integrates with Zapier so you can, for example, automatically add your and other folks’ articles to your Edgar library for posting.
MeetEdgar Price: From $19/month for Edgar Lite with 3 social media accounts, unlimited media library, 4 categories, and unlimited support.
eclincher
Platforms: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok
G2 Ranking: 4.7 out of 5
eclincher might just be the best kept secret in social media due to their grassroots ‘word of mouth’ content marketing efforts in the past. ec, as brand advocates tote, has been reviewed as “the swiss-army knife of social media”.
why eclincher?
They are pushing out extremely more value to marketing agencies and larger business teams, than their competitors.
You might expect that customer service is a standard in general. But, in the SaaS world eclincher’s support team really takes the clients’ expectation of service seriously, and not just because they are 24/7.
You’ll capture some serious social media ROI using eclincher’s social media management tool. Centered around marketing automations, eclincher helps social media managers save time using a single dashboard with this digital marketing platform, automate mundane marketing tasks with bulk scheduling options, rss feeds, queues, etc.
Every feature or capability seems to have the goal of productivity in mind to the end user.
An all-in-one social media management tool and consistently expanding platform, eclincher is packed with all the value every social media team needs (and wants too).
Scalable from the professional solopreneur, SMBs (Small & Medium-Sized businesses), Enterprise, to Agencies with large teams who need that extra workflow and internal/external team collaboration.
The huge benefits you gain working with a well-rounded solution helps you quantify your return, increase productivity, save precious time, and gain back insight for what is working and what isn’t.
It stands to note their customer support is consistently and notably awarded best in class from sites like G2Crowd, Capterra, GetApp, and the like.
This top rated powerful social media management tool, or should we say a platform, has everything you need to execute your social media marketing strategy.
There are loads of value in the features and capabilities offered, such as a comprehensive content publisher, savvy drag and drop visual calendar, campaign tracking, competitor analysis, and omnichannel tailored social media post editing.
If Instagram scheduling is top of mind you’ll love the Insta Link in bio traffic driver, custom Instagram grid planning, and being able to schedule Instagram stories and carousels with push notification.
eclincher has an intuitive scheduler toting auto posting with smart queues, a very smart inbox or social CRM so you never miss a review, message, or engagement, integration of RSS feeds, suggested content plus curation, keywords and hashtags monitoring, social media analytics reporting including Google Analytics, URL shorteners, campaign tracking and more.
This social marketing tool really has it all to keep campaigns innovative and organized catering to multiple social media account(s).
Did we mention they already partner with a wide range of companies like Canva, wave.video, Zendesk, Bitly, Feedly, Unsplash and add more integrations constantly? Slack could come in 2022 and TikTok for Business already was integrated in 2021.
If they don’t have a feature or integration you need, your odds are good they probably will soon.
Remarkably, two of the most amazing benefits of working with eclincher is their agile team atmosphere and their ability to be nimble with the ongoing addition to features benefiting new and current clients without costs pushed onto users.
The real value of eclincher evolves when you need to scale. If you have many brands to manage or a lot of franchise locations, that cost adds up in thousands.
Comparing against some of the social media marketing giants like Hubspot, Sprout Social, or Sprinklr eclincher is the best choice for scaling large accounts with multiple locations or brands.
You won’t have to lose capabilities with regard to visual marketing either.
In other words, if the feature doesn’t exist, suggest it with their live 24/7 live chat offering and if it is scalable and beneficial for companies like you, they will implement that suggestion. How cool is that?
They have recently updated their UI in July 2019 to be more user friendly and users are raving! There are a lot of features to choose from, so make sure to get a live FREE personal demo.
Pricing starts from $59 per month up to $219 for more advanced plans. Pricing supports up to 40 social media profiles, but some clients have hundreds of profiles and require a more custom social media plan.
Customized add-ons such as Reputation are also available for larger teams so be sure to check out their paid plans. LIVE demos are available with their team and currently they offer a 14-day FREE trial with no credit card required.
(Chrome extension for browser extensions; app available for iOS and Android)
If you are a current client you may also benefit from their referral program.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a way to manage your social media accounts, this guidebook is the right place to begin. Here, we explain a list of most essential free tools to manage your sites. We also offer additional tools on managing content and time management, which are relevant topics to learn if you are interested in how to manage social media tools.