Social media management tools are the ultimate tools for social media optimization. The best social media tools can really streamline all the tasks associated with social media marketing, which allows you to focus on what’s most important: making sure your followers and customers are totally engaged.
To make your life easier, I have made a selection of the best free social media scheduling tools. It was hard to search around to get them all in one place, but I managed to find them and here they are.
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.
Falcon.io
Falcon.io. is a cloud-based social media marketing and customer experience management solution that features tools for social media listening, engagement, publishing content, measuring, and customer data management.
They pride themselves in being versatile for any type of marketer whether it’s for a solopreneur or a digital agency. Toting Auto-Queue posting and visual planning, their tool can be used for monthly planning across different social channels.
They have a Social Inbox feature in addition to social monitoring and listening. They do not have an Influencer Search feature, yet they are a fully encompassed tool that is likely to serve business of any size.
Falcon.io provides users with a content calendar that allows them to plan, create and schedule content in collaboration with marketing teams.
It also facilitates the creation of pages using the campaign builder that consists of pre-designed templates providing APIs that deliver metrics on social data, audience and content, for integration with existing client CRM, CMS and analytics systems.
This social media management software offers support through online guides, tutorials and via email and a ticket submission portal 24/5 on business days and custom hours on weekends.
Pricing starts at $129 a month and increases based on custom features.
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.
Sendible
Sendible is brimming with features tailor-made for busy agencies.
Like the rest of the social media management tools on our list, the platform allows you to schedule and monitor engagements across multiple social accounts. For marketers juggling a roster of clients and campaigns, a dedicated management platform is a must-have or reining in the chaos.
Sendible encourages the use of workflows and approvals for the sake of assigning and delegating tasks in a timely manner. Features such as roles and account limits are helpful for agencies working alongside clients and freelancers. Much like Sprout’s own ViralPost, the platform has its own optimized timing feature as well.
Pricing: “Creator” plan starts at $29/mo.
Loomly
Loomly is an ideal tool for small social teams and agencies looking to master the art of collaboration.
In addition to social media management features, the platform also boasts features to help marketers wrangle their projects. This includes calendars, deadlines and workflows.
As an added bonus, Loomly actually generates ideas for your social media content strategy based on trending topics and social conversations. The affordability of the platform is a huge point in its favor, as is Loomly’s clean, easy-to-use interface.
Pricing: “Base” plan starts at $25/mo for two users.
Agorapulse
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, & YouTube
G2 Ranking: 4.5 out of 5
Agorapulse, similar to the above fully integrated social media management platforms, contains all of the main features of scheduling, visual calendar, social inbox, analytics, and team collaboration.
Similar to eclincher, Agorapulse also provides a competitor analysis and permits boosted Facebook posts to really capture your audience. Unfortunately, they don’t have an influencer feature so you can’t really stalk your favorite industry leaders.
Regardless, Agorapulse has a cult following of niche users that find this social media management software to meet their needs. Don’t count them out!
Pricing begins at $79 per month up to $399 per month.
eClincher
Best in class social media management tool
Prices: $49, $99, $199 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 14-day free trial)
Description: Like most social media management tools, eClincher allows you to schedule and publish posts, respond to social messages, and analyze your social media performance.
Unique value: What makes eClincher different from other tools is that it enables you to auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds, has a media library for your images, and lets you search for social media influencers.
CoSchedule
#1 marketing calendar
Prices: Starting at $0 – 20, $40, $60, $210, $300, $1,200 per month (with a 14-day free trial)
Description: CoSchedule is more than a social media management tool; it’s a powerful calendar to manage many aspects of your marketing. With CoSchedule, you can manage and collaborate with your team to create your social media posts, content, events, and tasks.
Unique value: CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place.
Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.
MavSocial
Streamlined social media management
Prices: Free, $19, $78, $199, $499 per month (with 7-day free trial)
Description: MavSocial is a social media management tool with a focus on visual content. For the higher-priced plans, it seems that you can also manage your Facebook ads with MavSocial.
Unique value: On top of the common features (such as scheduling, monitoring, and reporting), MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use, and edit your multimedia for your social media posts and a search engine where you can browse through millions of stock photos.
If you wish, MavSocial can also help you repeat your social media posts for a specified duration.
Conclusion:
Any online professional worth their salt knows the importance of maximizing social media efforts. Because social media affects online reputation, it is important to keep it under the control of a marketing team or a social media manager. Having said that, social media management tools have come a long way and have gotten easier to use over time.