Online social media planning tools can help you manage all of your online platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Youtube videos, Pinterest, Google reviews and more). These free social media tools are great for small businesses that want to manage their business on the go.
Social media is a big part of any marketing strategy these days from Facebook, Google+, to Pinterest and more. Social media marketing is a great way to capture prospective customers and keep close relationships with current clients, but it’s tough to find the time to strategize all your social media marketing efforts on your own. We put together a list of some great free social media planning tools that will make it easy for you.
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.
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.
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.
Monday.com
Monday.com doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. Its Basic plan costs $8/seat/month. That plan is for teams just getting started with managing all their work in one place.
Monday.com doesn’t specifically target social media marketing. Instead, its focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your team. It is ideal for marketers and those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.
Boards are at the heart of Monday.com. A board is a fully customizable table for managing your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards that represent your workflow. Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point, one of which targets social media management. That template creates two boards:
- Campaign ideas and requests
- Campaign progress and status
Team members can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. If you decide these ideas are viable for a post, you can use the board to create an efficient and standardized workflow for a social media campaign.
The Campaign Progress and Status keeps track of your campaigns, split into Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed, and Stuck.
ContentCal
ContentCal offers a 14-day free trial. Feature-wise, it is a CoSchedule-like tool. It offers a powerful collection of features to help you manage our entire content marketing plan. It’s segmented into 3 tools. Here’s a look at what they do:
- Publish: This is where you’ll go to collaborate with team members on content ideas, create workflows, and publish articles, emails, and press releases. ContentCal also comes with Web Clipper, a tool that captureS content you come across on the web and saves it to your content library for use later.
- Analyze: Dig into audience engagement with content and campaigns. Track hashtags, stories, top-performing content, and competitors to see what’s working and how to improve your content. Reporting is a major component of driving growth, and Analyze lets you visualize data for paid and organic analytics across platforms, and export your u findings in PDF or PPT format.
- Engage: Connect with customers through ContentCal’s team inbox. Depending on the size of your organization, you can assign queries to specific teams, handling messages from all platforms. Engage also offers a notes feature for messages from customers. These can be added by team members to formulate a complete and effective response to customers.
ContentCal’s also working on a fourth feature called IQ. It’s an AI-powered intelligence solution to offer deeper insights. It will help identify channel performance, assign a content quality score, benchmark competitors, attribute revenue to campaign performance, and deliver industry benchmarking.
AgoraPulse
Although AgoraPulse offers a generous 28-day free trial, it is one of the more professional, and therefore expensive, social media management platforms, once you’ve concluded your trial. The cheapest plan is the $99 per month Medium plan.
It features an extremely user-friendly interface.
The heart of AgoraPulse is its unified Inbox. It shows your comments, mentions, conversations, and reviews relating to each of your social accounts. The Inbox Assistant allows you to set rules that automatically clean up and organize each account’s Inbox.
It includes a Social Listening module that allows firms to keep an ear open for mention of their brand name (or any other term).
AgoraPulse provides a variety of ways to publish content. The default Publishing tab takes you to a calendar, showing the social messages you have scheduled, queued, published, sent to approval, had assigned to you, or failed. AgoraPulse is at its most potent when you use its bulk publish feature. This lets you import a series of posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or as a group of pictures to transform into posts.
It provides an extensive array of reports, both globally about your social account usage, and also about specific items of content.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite has a special place in my heart, likely because it’s the first social media management platform that I used at my very first job as a Marketing Assistant. At the time, I was managing the company’s social strategy before social advertising had really taken off. I can still remember the hours upon hours I would spend putting together a posting content calendar and setting reminders for myself to tweet at certain times. This was until I discovered Hootsuite and my life as a frantic Twitter bird instantly changed.
So what does the Hootsuite free plan include? This option is decently robust with the ability to:
- Manage 3 social profiles in one place
- Schedule 30 posts in advance
- Generate leads with social contests
The free plan also includes basic analytics for tracking followers and various growth and content statistics and two RSS feed integrations. Not too shabby!
Conclusion
Social Media Marketing is a tool that can improve your brand’s visibility and sales. Fanpages and business pages on Facebook and Twitter etc create a platform for this purpose. Businesses need to create a social media marketing strategy, to post regular updates and engage with their fans and followers in order to gain maximum attention. It is no more an easy job that can be done manually. A social media planner tool will help you to get the best results from your social media efforts.