It is vital to have a business that is easy enough for everyone inside. But keeping up with your social media platforms isn’t always the easiest thing to do. To help, here are the best tools to schedule social media posts for you.
In this post, we’re going to look at some of the top social media scheduling tools out there.
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. It’s essential for creating social media content production workflows and managing ongoing projects.
You don’t have to provide any credit card information to get started with their free trial. You can also sign up for their Hobbyist plan, which is free for single users to get access to four social profiles, one calendar, and 10 posts per month.
Their features cover all the bases, from planning and publishing content to reviewing analytics and responding to conversations.
For creating content, your team uses the content hub to collaborate on all ongoing social media content initiatives. You can integrate with all your favorite tools, including Trello and Slack, and the pinboard makes filling your calendar as easy as dragging and dropping posts.
This platform also includes snippets to save commonly used phrases and a web clipper tool so you can grab resources you want to share while you’re browsing the internet.
Other notable features include:
- Robust analytics reports for measuring content performance, follower growth, engagement, and more, all displayed in colorful graphs and charts.
- Tagging options to organize all your output by theme, category, or any other category you want to track.
- A shared team inbox for managing all social media conversations in one central location.
ContentCal Upgrade Options
- Pro: $17/month when paid annually
- You must sign up for a full year to access the Pro tier.
- Company: $47/month when paid annually
- $59 for month to month
- Premium Custom: Reach out to get a custom quote.
- Enterprise Custom: Reach out to get a custom quote.
- Agency: Reach out to get a custom quote.
- Learn more about their pricing options, optional add-ons, and additional services here.
Hootsuite
Like many of these tools, Hootsuite offers both free and premium plans. Their free plan is pretty robust and allows you to:
- Manage three social profiles in one place.
- Schedule up to 30 posts in advance.
- Generate leads using social contests.
- Easily integrate with 150+ free and paid apps.
The free plan also includes some basic analytics to help you track followers, various growth and content stats, and two RSS feed integrations. Not too shabby for a free tool.
We love using this tool to schedule out our social posts because of the way it’s organized – a visual calendar dashboard shows you what you’ll be posting and when. Now that’s organization.
Hootsuite Upgrade Options
- Professional: $29/month
- Team: $129/month
- Business: $599/month
- Enterprise: Custom plan; contact for pricing
- Read more about pricing options here.
SmarterQueue
Another incredible all-in-one platform, SmarterQueue covers all the bases you need for planning, publishing, and analyzing.
Their free options include a reporting tool to help you identify your top Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts. The free social reporting tool helps you determine your best types of content, hashtags, mentions, posting times, and more, so you can optimize all your social media marketing efforts.
They also offer an Instagram Top Nine tool, so you can pick your favorite nine posts to share as a collage – these always get lots of engagement at the end of the year.
You can explore their entire platform when you sign up for a free trial. This gives you access to all of their awesome features, including:
- Intelligent scheduling automation powered by queues and posting plans, content categories, evergreen recycling, and content variations.
- A social media calendar to help you visualize all the content you’re posting on each channel.
- A monitoring tool that keeps you in the know on what people are talking about and how they’re discussing your brand.
- A comprehensive analytics dashboard with interactive charts to help you with reporting and optimizing your strategy for each social channel.
- A social inbox for managing all your communications across each of your social media accounts.
They also provide features to help you conduct a competitor analysis, so you can see how to outperform other brands in your niche.
SmarterQueue Upgrade Options
- Solo: $16.99/month when paid annually
- $19.99 for month to month
- Business: $33.99/month when paid annually
- $39.99 for month to month
- Agency: $67.99/month when paid annually
- $79.99 for month to month
- Custom: Starts at $16.99/month when paid annually
- Starts at $19.99 for month to month
- Customize any plan with add-ons.
Buffer
Like Hootsuite, Buffer has been in the social media management space for a long time.
Buffer is a respectable platform. It allows you to manage multiple social media profiles easily and includes many of the same features as Hootsuite.
This platforms organizes your scheduled posts in a queue list format so you can easily scroll and monitor the posts that will go out on your various social platforms. Neat and simple.
It also allows you to schedule content while browsing the web with Chrome extensions. Where Buffer shines is its ability to monitor user activity and then suggest the perfect time to post based on your followers’ activity. Pretty cool!
With a basic free Buffer account, you can link three social accounts, 10 scheduled posts at a time, and can have one user.
Buffer Upgrade Options
- Pro: $15/month
- Premium: $65/month
- Business: $99/month
- Read more about pricing options here.
Later
Later is a free, easy-to-use platform for starter businesses looking to schedule photos and videos on their social media. (You cannot schedule text-only posts with Later.)
Later works with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, and has a 30-post limit each month for each platform (50-post limit for Twitter). You can add one social profile per platform.
To schedule a post, all you have to do is upload your media, and drag the photo or video you want to schedule onto the calendar. Put your caption in the comments section and pick your time to post!
For marketers on the go, Later even has a free app you can download for Android or iOS. A big plus with this app is its Instagram preview feature.
When scheduling your Instagram posts, you can actually preview what they will look like on your existing feed. You can drag and reorder your scheduled posts how you please to ensure your aesthetic is just the way you want!https://fast.wistia.net/embed/iframe/fmy659omt5
Later Upgrade Options
- For Individuals
- Plus: $9/month OR $7.50/month billed yearly
- For Businesses
- Premium: $19/month OR $16/month billed yearly
- Starter: $29/month OR $24/month billed yearly
- Brand: $49/month OR $41/month billed yearly
- Read more about pricing options here.
Friends+Me
Friends+Me is a great platform that mainly focuses on Google+ features. Despite the discontinuation of Google+, this tool is still really valuable. It also supports many other social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
They have a free plan that allows you to schedule five posts at a time, and they even offer you standard support services. You can also integrate with Pinterest and Instagram, but you are required to upgrade the service to do so.
Friends+Me Upgrade Options
- For Individuals
- $9/month
- For Businesses
- Small: $29/month
- Medium: $59/month
- Large: $259/month
- Read more about pricing options here.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social allows you the flexibility to schedule your posts when your audience is most likely to be engaged and active. They also provide you with an intuitive content calendar that helps you map out all of your posts for maximum organization.
Additionally, you can use it to monitor your mentions in real time so you can respond quickly. Zoho Social has a free version that offers you limited scheduling and monitoring.
Zoho Social Upgrade Options
- For Individuals and Businesses
- Standard: $10/month billed annually
- Professional: $25/month billed annually
- For Agencies
- Agency: $200/month billed annually
- Agency Plus: $300/month billed annually
- For more information about pricing, check out the detailed pricing list here.
Conclusion
The free social media scheduling tools all require that you have a free account with that respective site in order to take advantage of them. That means having a website, blog, or account on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. We’ve outlined three free social media planning tools for you to use. Ready to start scheduling your social media posts?