Everyone is on social media these days, making it THE place for freelancers in marketing to find clients. A social media strategist freelance job can be the best option for people who are just starting out in freelancing, and don’t have much expertise yet.
Have you ever wondered what tools are available for managing your social media accounts as a freelancer? Want to know how to hire a social media manager? In this post, I’d like to share with you the best tools to manage your freelance business’ clients and potential clients. I’ll also go in-depth about what I think are great jobs for social media managers, including some cool opportunities for people of all ages.
Buffer
Batching your work together by task and doing it all in one sitting can be a great way to save time.
Instead of interrupting the rest of your schedule to stop and make daily social media posts, Buffer allows you to write your posts ahead of time and set them in a queue to be automatically published on a particular schedule. These are some of the most interesting social media tools for freelancers.
Sitting down to write out all of your social media posts for the week might only take a few minutes if you do it all at once, but can otherwise be a huge time sink that draws you away from your work if you’re manually creating one post at a time throughout the day.
Buffer works as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. You can even use email to add to your queue from a mobile device.
Hootsuite
Besides just having a name that’s really fun to say, Hootsuite is another great social media management tool. You can schedule posts across multiple social media accounts in Hootsuite similar to Buffer, but it also has additional features.
You can engage with customers and followers from inside the app and reply to comments with a single click.
Hootsuite also provides a pretty robust set of analytic reports that allow you to track how your social media posts and performing and how your audience is growing. It also provides valuable insight into what types of posts with your audience and which don’t.
Hootsuite is a more comprehensive “all-in-one” package than Buffer, but also comes at a slightly higher monthly price as a result. The time savings that you can gain by having all of your social media activity accessible from a single dashboard definitely makes it worth the price tag.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an up-and-coming competitor to Hootsuite that has actually been making a favourable impression on the social media pros of the world. It includes most of the features that Hootsuite offers and often expands upon them, making it a good all-around social media tool for freelancers.
The app offers an “inbox style” way of looking at comments and private messages that allow you to quickly clear through backlogs and ensure nothing gets missed.
Unlike Hootsuite, Agorapulse offers fully customisable analytics reports for free. That means unlimited access to charts and statistics that can be added to presentations with a single click.
Automated rules that can be set up ahead of time allow Agorapulse to moderate your content even while you’re offline.
But perhaps one of the most interesting and useful features of Agorapulse is how it tracks your audience. Data is retained on every person you interact with on social media including their comments, likes, mentions, shares, and private messages. In a pinch, you can see the whole backstory and any previous history you may have with a specific commenter.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is unique from the other social media management tools we’ve discussed because they choose to specialise in supporting only the Twitter platform. If you are a Twitter power-user and focus primarily on it instead of other platforms, then Tweetdeck might be the perfect tool for you.
It’s a web-based tool that gives you control over all of the Twitter accounts you manage. The dashboard shows a column for each of your Twitter accounts so they are easy to keep separate. It can also separate specific activities such as direct messages and notifications into either own columns as well. It’s highly customisable, and you can add, delete, or change the order of the columns.
Much like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck allows you to schedule future posts ahead of time so that you aren’t stuck updating Twitter throughout the day.
BuzzSumo
Unlike the other items we have discussed so far, BuzzSumo isn’t a tool to consolidate or schedule your social media posts. You can think of it more like the Google Analytics of social media, giving you access to information on what is currently hot and trending.
BuzzSumo allows you to instantly search across the last 12 months of content on all major social media networks. You can use it to view backlinks, find influencers to work with, analyse your competitors, and more. It’s a great tool to use as part of a B2B social media campaign.
The information gleaned from BuzzSumo can be exported in Excel or CSV format for further analysis.
Triberr
One of the best ways to get your information shared is work with people in your same sphere of influence, as opposed to viewing them as competitors.
If you run a blog devoted to cats, you could really benefit from networking with other cat bloggers who might share a similar audience to you.
If you were around in the early days of the Internet, you might be familiar with the concept of “web rings“. They were essentially a way for up-and-coming websites to form a community and agree to link to each other’s websites. While web rings aren’t a common practice online any more, Triberr is like a Web 2.0 version of web rings, adapted for social sharing.
By banding together with fellow writers, you can get more traffic directed toward your posts and find other people in your niche to work with.
Canva
The best way to catch people’s attention on social media is with eye-grabbing graphics. With multiple social media posts per day, the work associated with creating infographics and other images can quickly add up. Unless you’re a large corporation, you probably don’t have the money to hire a professional graphic designer to create all of your social media imagery for you.
Canva makes it quick and easy to create designs for your social media for free, without having to pay for software like Photoshop or go through all of the associated struggles of trying to learn it.
The app is web-based and offers hundreds of templates custom-made for each social media platform which can be easily customised to meet your specific requirements. There are hundreds of free images, fonts and backgrounds or you can pay to upgrade to stock photos.
See that image at the top of this post? I made that in Canva in just a few minutes.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a different kind of social media scheduling platform. Instead of you having to do all the work of figuring out when to post, it stores and organizes your posts into categories. Once you set a schedule, it will auto-schedule your posts by the categories you selected so your feed stays full and engaged.
Features:
- Helps you auto-fill your content schedule
- Can suggest other posts you could use
- Ability to sync with your blog, YouTube channel, or podcast to keep your feed up to date with your content creation
Pricing:
- There is no free plan at the moment, but there is a 7-day trial
- Small plan starts at $19 per month with three social channels
Sendible
Sendible is another option that allows you to schedule and visually map out of your content. One unique feature about Sendible is that you’re able to see the post before it goes live so you can make sure it looks aesthetically pleasing. That way, you don’t have text or images that look out of place.
Features:
- Visually plan your month
- See how posts would look before they’re live on your social media channels
- Reports and analytics
Pricing:
- While it doesn’t offer any free plans there is a 14-day trial period
- From there, plans start at $29 per month
HelloWoofy
HelloWoofy is a newer social media management platform, at least compared to some of the other options, but it offers a ton of features some of the other ones don’t. It can connect with newer platforms, such as TikTok, and it also has advanced integrations you don’t see in some of the other social media management tools, such as Amazon’s Alexa.
Features:
- Connects to: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google business, Medium, TikTok, Twitter, WordPress, and more
- Connects with advanced features like Alexa
Pricing:
- Paid plans starting at $49 per year (which breaks down to about $4 per month) which gives you access to 25 accounts and allows you to add in a team of 9 members (which may or may not apply to your freelancing business)
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a great option for freelancers who just want to manage a handful of profiles. They have a free plan that you can use and then upgrade later if you need to post to more profiles. Crowdfire offers the ability to get suggested content based on the categories and industries you post about.
If you create content as a freelancer, you are also able to link your sites through Crowdfire so your content is automatically posted and shared across your social profiles. That way, you don’t have to go in and manually create posts every time.
Features:
- Upgraded accounts give you 90 days of advanced analytics
- Get ideas for content based on the categories you choose
- Ability to post content from your own blogs and sites
- Tailored posts for each site, so you don’t need to tweak each post for the specific platform
Pricing:
- Offers a free plan with three linked accounts
- Can manage Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram from free plan
- From there, the plans are at a manageable price starting at $7.48 per month with five linked accounts
- Upgraded account allows you to also manage Pinterest
Tailwind
Tailwind only works for Pinterest and Instagram, but if you’re looking to only focus on those platforms, this might be a great fit. One of the best features it offers is that it will automatically design your image to look like a graphic designer created it. You can include text, graphics, more images, or anything else, to create a branded post. Tailwind designs the image itself so you don’t need any fancy graphic design skills to make it stand out.
Features:
- Only for Instagram and Pinterest
- Once you upload a photo, it automatically gives you hundreds of ways to style it
- Automatically assigns the right size to the image for the platform
- One calendar for all of your social profiles
- Automatically finds hashtags
- Recommends communities for you to connect with
Pricing:
- Paid plans start at $9.99 per month
- Small plan allows one Pinterest account and one Instagram account with 200 post designs per month
Conclusion:
Every day I learn about new social media tools and platforms that are available. Many of them are launched by the big companies which means there is a lot of money behind these projects. It can seem a bit overwhelming but I have successfully used many of these platforms in my business. So if you are wondering about the best social media management tools for freelancers, this post is for you!