Social media has grown to become an essential aspect of marketing for many businesses and personalities. Making use of social media, especially Twitter, brings a variety of benefits including better engagement and interaction, building your brand awareness and authority, reaching out to more people, etc. Social media not only helps you to build relationships but also help you to generate revenue. Various tools exist out there to help you manage and make the most out of social media.
The use of the internet and the popularity of social media has led to a rapid development in the emergence of social media management tools. These are software that help you manage your various accounts on different social media platforms.
As you all know, it takes work to ensure your business has a great social presence. You need to update social media profiles regularly and keep track of which social efforts are paying off. Wouldn’t it be nice just to sit back and let someone else do the hard work? If you’ve been looking for the best free social media management tools 2021, you’re in luck! I have researched many different options and picked out some of my favorites.
Social media management software helps save time and money. These best free social media tools for online business will not only help you manage your social media but also streamline your marketing strategies.
The Cost of Social Media Management Software
The cost of social media management software varies depending on the brand’s popularity and its offerings and capabilities. Most companies offer multiple price options depending on a user’s needs. For example, it’s more costly for a large marketing agency to pay for this kind of software compared to an individual brand that has fewer needs. Most software is available as a monthly subscription, though many companies offer a discount to customers paying annually.
Smaller organizations can expect to pay an affordable price for this kind of software — usually somewhere between $20 and $40 per month. Most midsize teams can expect to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 per month for social media management software.
Larger organizations and marketing agencies can expect to pay a lot more — in most cases, at least $150 per month and up to $600 per month. While they pay more for this software, they won’t have to worry about a limit on the number of posts they make or the social media accounts they use. They may also get access to more advanced reporting tools.
A few social media management software companies offer free plans, but they have limitations. This may work out nicely for individual companies that don’t post content often. Most brands offer a free trial period of their software, the average trial period being 14 days.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social believes in the power of social media to create connections and build brands. They have been awarded by their top-tier software review sites for their commitment to customer satisfaction, RO and user adoption rates, as well as usability. Learn more about Sprout Social, and how it might be a great fit for you and your business!
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most effective way to manage and grow your social channels. You can use it for free, but if you want more features like visual scheduling, then there are multiple plans available that will help you go faster than ever before! Learn more about Hootsuite and manage your social media channels with ease!
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is the best place to stay on top of what’s happening in your industry, bring people together with common interests and find new opportunities. Manage your Twitter account with ease, through Tweetdeck. Learn more about Tweetdeck and decide if it’s the right fit for you!
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media management tool that helps businesses and agencies grow their presence on the internet. You can sign up for free, and see if it is the right fit for you!
Social Champ
Social Champ is a social media management tool with some next-level automation features supporting the six major social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business.
With features, such as Auto RSS feed, Bulk Upload, Social Media Calendar, Analytics, Team Collaboration, Recycle, Repeat, and others, you can fully automate the processes.
Social Champ also has integrations for Canva, bit.ly, UTM tracking, and a royalty-free image library. All-in-all, Social Champ allows you to perform all social media tasks, ranging from creating and scheduling to analyzing and tracking.
Use the content dashboard to create, edit, design, and schedule posts. View all the scheduled/published posts in a calendar view and reschedule them using drag/drop features. Analytics and reports allow you to track the progress of different socials with platform-centric metrics.
SocialOomph
Source: SocialOomph
Tools like Hootesuite and Buffer are helpful for scheduling posts. But if you don’t want to pay for social media scheduling, you’ve still got options. SocialOoomph is a freemium tool that lets you schedule posts to your favorite social channel.
The free version gives you one profile, unlimited scheduled posts, and up to three posts per hour. Yes, if you want to post across multiple social feeds, you’ll need to purchase a premium membership. But if you just want to double down on one channel, this is an easy option.
Many B2B businesses like to double down on LinkedIn. With SocialOomph, you can schedule posts to publish multiple times per day, every day of the week, so that you can sit back while your content works behind the scenes for your business.
Agorapulse
Source: Agorapulse
If you’re looking for one tool to easily schedule, engage, and report on social media for all your profiles, Agorapulse is the tool for you. Agorapulse boasts powerful features to make social media management that much easier.
Plus, Agorapulse’s 14-day free trial allows you to try all aspects of the tool, including flexible scheduling options, ad comments management, automatic report scheduling, and world-class customer support.
Later
Source: Later
Ready to spruce up your Instagram feed? Later is a tool that helps you customize your feed to create an intentional, powerful presence when people click to your channel. Setting up an Instagram profile is 100% free, so you can launch your influencer career by creating (instead of paying). Get analytics for your IG profile as well.
Source: Later
Check this out: Later also gives you Linkin.bio, a way to drive traffic to your ecommerce store right from Instagram. Later’s free plan does give you access to Linkin.bio lite, so you may want to consider making your posts clickable for increased conversions.
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.
Falcon
Although Falcon is not a free social media management tool, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It doesn’t give a price for its more advanced Full Suite plan, targeting larger companies with multiple teams and markets, although it enables you to request a demo.
Falcon emphasizes that it offers 7-days a week support, with a real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. It also provides weekly training sessions, and you can find answers in its help center.
The Essentials plan focuses on publishing & scheduling and social media engagement. You can use an editorial calendar to plan, schedule, and edit across multiple social networks. It offers a content pool, meaning you can store assets for repurposing, plug into your DAM, and use Falcon’s cloud storage. It provides a customizable inbox, where you can arrange multiple feeds to build the inbox that suits you best. If you have a team, you can share notes and add messages to your team members. Existing contacts’ profile cards appear beside their messages. Falcon offers advanced metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The Suite package offers everything available in the Essentials plan (allowing for larger teams and more significant usage) and adds a number of additional features. These include social listening, where you can monitor social media and the internet to discover much information about your business. You can track brands, topics, keywords, and phrases and even refine them with advanced parameters.
With Falcon’s Full Suite, you can benchmark your strategy across all major social networks. Falcon has a database of over 100,000 brands, letting you benchmark your performance on multiple levels. You can also schedule and post ads on Facebook and Instagram without having to leave Falcon.Compare Social Media Marketing PlatformsPopular FeaturesBest forPricingRating
ContentCal
Collaborate with your team and post great content.Simple to use, visual tool with custom approvals for content creation and publishing.Streamlined planning, approval & publishing. Community management, analytics.Individuals, businesses, franchises and agencies$37 – $119+ p/m
Falcon
The Platform for Every Kind of Social Media Marketer.Multi-Channel Scheduling, Analytics & Reporting, Social Listening, Social CRM.Designed for businesses of all sizes$108+ p/m
Monday.com
Manage all your marketing assets and campaigns from planning to execution with monday.comSuggested content, Free media assets, Scheduler, Visual calendarMarketing agency, Marketers and Social media managers$8/seat – $24/month
Loomly
Try out one of the Leading Social Media Scheduling Apps GloballyManage digital assets, Fuel storytelling, Engage community, Measure performanceSocial media managers, from brands to agencies & individuals$26 – $249+ p/m
Sendible
Go-to social media management tool for agenciesTailored Posts with Previews, Canva Integration, Content Libraries, White Label.Marketing agencies and bigger teams looking to simplify and scale their efforts.Agency plan with 3 users starting from $89/month
AgoraPulse
Managing social media has never been easier. Schedule your content, get reports, and engage followers with one simple tool. See why 22,000+ brand and agency marketers have made the switch to Agora
Falcon identifies the visual elements of images from the most engaging branded content. You can even invite your team to collect and comment on highly engaging branded content from other brands.
Key features of the best social media tools are:
1- They offer analytics in one single place.
As your marketing campaigns reach people, it will get harder to keep track of the data. Social media management tools help you to view your comments and shares and track metrics such as retweets and likes.
Some social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter include analytics panels in their apps; still, investing in tools can provide you with valuable data that you can benefit from while running marketing campaigns.
2- You can schedule your posts.
If your company has multiple social media accounts, it will take a lot of your valuable time to post on each platform separately. Instead, use a social media marketing tool that has a feature that displays on all of your social media accounts in a single place. Just let the tool manage all your repetitive and mundane tasks for you.
3- You can engage with your audience better.
Social media offers endless possibilities when it comes to engagement. However, to build a loyal customer base, you must do more than post regularly. You also need to reply to comments and address the user’s issues with your product.
Social media tools allow you to streamline every step of engagement with your audience. You can easily track your notifications across different social media platforms: likes, shares, comments from your Facebook account, and retweets and mentions on your Twitter account. You can use your platform to get feedback from your audience if you’re designing a product.
4- You can increase the efficiency of employees
Every social media tool should have a centralized location that allows each employee to reach and use data. The centralized dashboard allows everyone to report back on their assigned tasks and ensures that people from different departments can work in harmony. A transparent working environment is important for end results.
5- Automated Reporting
Every social media marketing software must have an automated reporting tool that can save you time. You can create personalized templates and use them according to your business needs. Once you set up a template, you won’t need to set it again unless you need a different template and built-in templates are super easy to work with.
6- Location Search Service
Geo-targeting of your social media posts is crucial for finding leads. Your social media marketing software should help you to find the right time to post and get the most engagement on your posts, find new customers in a specific location, and show you the local factors you should pay attention to while creating posts for your target audience.
Most of the marketing tools available today have features to sort social profiles, posts, and messages according to the location. So you can use the data to build better relationships with your customers and turn them into loyal customers.
7- Security
Security is important for all tools, but when you are working with multiple people across different social media accounts, it is even more crucial. Ensure that every one appropriate permission to reach specific accounts and provide your team members with unique IDs so you can track who posts what and when.
Security features are also important to protect your social accounts from getting hacked.
Conclusion
The growth and widespread use of the Internet has led to the rise of online marketing, advertising, e-commerce, and social media. In the past, media and communications were delivered through newspapers, books, magazines, mailers and other print formats. But with the advent of the Internet, it’s no longer necessary to have these types of physical media.
Time. It’s one of the biggest challenges webmasters face in achieving their digital marketing goals. Social media is no different. You could spend hours each day managing your social media accounts that you don’t have time to do something else – like, say, make money with your website by blogging or creating new content.