As a small business, you may not have an IT team on hand to help with your social media marketing strategy. So, for the most part, you have to rely on yourself when it comes to keeping up with Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Fortunately, there are some great social media management tools that are available both online (free) and offline that you can use to help make your job a little easier.
Social media management tools are one of the most important aspects when it comes to running a social media campaign. You need to get your news and updates directly from your social media page, carefully monitor the engagement and sentiment of your audience, and then finally influence people with proper content, etc. Social media management tools tend to help you in this regard. In this article, we will discuss some free yet effective mangement tools in detail.
While you may not have the budget for paid software, there are some great options for free social media management tools. One of the best parts about these tools is that they can meet your needs without modifying your current workflow. Using these tools can help you run your social media marketing campaigns with more efficiency.
The best social media management tools for free and paid users. This tool improves their productivity, workflow, and engagement by managing all social media accounts from one platform and in a single place.
What are Social Media Management Tools?
Social media management tools are important platforms for making it easy for you to handle social media accounts. Workflows can be easily streamlined by the users when using these platforms.
These tools also help in assisting with creating the right content and publishing it. Various tools even operate your work without costing anything.
These tools have multiple categories including paid and free. You can also use these boxes according to the size of your business. For small businesses and large enterprises, there are different rates.
The specifications and prices are reasonable for all of these tools and you can easily find the perfect one for you.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule offers a 14-day free trial, something you should consider trying if you’re shopping for a powerful tool. It’s more than a social media management platform. It’s a marketing solution that syncs with your website, email, and social media. At a glance, this sounds a little messy but it’s really smart. CoSchedule’s content calendar is where the magic happens. It’s an overview of all communications with your audience. From blog posts to be published to your next Facebook post, everything is easily viewed from your calendar.
As for features you’d expect from a social media management tool, CoSchedule packs a lot of value. You can schedule content across social media accounts, track the success of your posts and campaigns using a range of reports, and access conversations through a team inbox. Like evergreen posts? CoSchedule offers ReQueue as a way to reshare your best stuff.
CoSchedule’s true power is that it’s a powerful collaboration tool. Social can be a complex beast, and more so with a team. In CoSchedule, you get project management and collaboration features that cover workflow (think drafts, edits, approvals, etc.). It also makes creating content easier with templates. Once created, producing posts and publishing content becomes streamlined. And this optimized approach carries through to campaigns.
Tracking how well your email and website content performs alongside social posts for a campaign means pulling data from various platforms. In CoSchedule, it’s all in one place. And, if you have content like images and copy stored in different places, CoSchedule integrates with tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, and comes with an asset library.
e-clincher
As social media platforms go, it’s not uncommon to find a tool with tons of features. And while most features can sometimes feel underdeveloped, there are tools that deliver the goods. E-Clincher falls into the latter category and comes with a 14-day trial to boot. In addition to common features like post scheduling and a visual content calendar, you get powerful analytics and reporting, a media library, can publish content using Smart Queues (an auto-posting feature), and have the option to publish content from your RSS feed.
E-Clincher also comes with a URL shortener (with tracking) and a content curation feature. These prove how versatile the platform is, but there’s more that social media marketers and influencers will love about this tool. Take its reputation management and listening tool. It helps you keep tabs on conversations around your brand and content. And there’s the social inbox that stores all interactions in one place. You can also track mentions through listening feeds. Work with a team? E-Clincher handles workflows, too. Create and manage all stages of your content creation and publishing processes and get stuff done like clockwork.
Iconosquare
Social media is a data-driven game and Iconosquare makes it easier to win. You can test the waters with a 14-day trial to see if it’s right for you, and it’s worth the effort. While Iconosquare only caters to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it has all you need to peel back the layers of your content and audience engagement to generate results. Reporting gives a look at content impressions, and average and individual post reach (including average reach rate by post).
You also get Instagram Stories analytics. These show impressions, story completion rates by story type, and the best time to post Stories. Reporting is easy. In a few clicks, you can automate reports and include hashtag tracking, and keep tabs on competitors.
A feature that many will love is Iconosquare’s profile activity tracking. It tells you which links in your profile drive traffic to your site — a great way to tie social to ROI. Analytics aside, you get a social media scheduling tool that helps plan your post rollout effectively. Engagement on social is the goal, and to help drive as much for your content, Iconosquare also offers a “first comment” feature. First comments are posted along with your post, making your social activity look and feel organic and personalized.
Later – $19/month
Best for saving multiple Hashtags for your content and amplifying it
This tool has the most amazing focus for Instagram feeds. This tool is the best selection for most of the brands and companies that want to thrive in less time. It helps in allowing a graphical approach and lets you connect with your customers. You can easily make media notes in the media library offered by only this tool.
Features:
- This tool can set new trends for your influencer and social media marketing.
- The availability of the social media library of this tool has made things easier for you and it will help in scheduling photos.
- It also offers you multiple tools to increase the performance of your website.
- The analytics and marketing data strategies will also be shown when using this platform.
- You can easily connect your Shopify account to this tool because of the multiple integration options available for it.
Socials Managed:
It is currently managing 4 social platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Price:
It is available for free where you have to pay 0$ for having access to a single account and you can do 30 Instagram and Twitter posts. Plus plan starts from $9 per month and it helps in giving you unlimited Twitter posts. For premium business, you can pay $19 per month.
A business starter plan with the perfect solutions is available for $29 per month. If you have a brand and you need unlimited access to post counting, you can choose the brand business plan. This will cost you $49 per month.
Rating:
This tool is rated as 4.2 by the users.
Zoho Social – $15/month
Best for businesses and agencies to handle their needs.
This platform is amazing for providing a complete all-in-one social networking solution for your business. It has one of the most popular trends and tactics for controlling the growth of your business.
You can easily monitor your business by scheduling posts, monitoring the mentions, and creating custom dashboards. This tool also allows its users to keep track of conversations and follow-ups.
Features:
- This tool has the latest version for allowing campaigns and streamlining the work performance.
- It allows the customers to go deep and look for themselves about the data and integration.
- This tool provides its users with attribution and hashtag analytics.
- The best feature of this tool is the availability of the content library and the content calendar.
- You can also schedule your posts and also become creative about the work you do.
Socials Managed:
It is currently handling 5+ Socials along with 40+ suite products.
Price:
There are 5 pricing plans for this tool. The best one starts from free where you will have access to the 1 user account only.
For a standard plan, you have to pay 15$ per month and for a professional and agency plan, you need to pay $35 and $200. You can also customize your plan by using the enterprise plan.
Rating:
This app is rated as 4.6 by its users.
Ubercircle – $11.9/month
Best for brand promotion content and handling of socials.
This tool is popular in the market because of its outstanding software designs. You can easily publish your content across several other sites by using this tool.
Marketing professionals love using this tool for increasing the growth of your business. They are even managing sales by using this platform and making the most out of it. The best features of this platform are given below.
Features:
- This tool has the most amazing integrations with businesses including Google Drive, Drop box, Microsoft, and OneDrive.
- You can add locations and tags to increase the visibility of your posts and enhance your audience.
- You can also add or remove any kinds 9f of watermarks when using this tool.
- It has connectivity with the most famous apps and it helps in improving your selling strategies.
- Users are also able to monitor the strategies of the trending influences for increasing their growth.
Socials Managed:
This tool is currently managing almost 8+ popular Socials including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and many others.
Price:
This tool is one of the best free social media management tools available in the market. It is available for a free trial for 14 days. For the starter plan, you will have to pay $11.99 per month and for the standard plan, you will have to pay $19 per month.
For premium features, users pay $39 per month and if you are a brand and need a large-scale service you can avail of the large business plan. This plan is available for $379.99 per month.
Rating:
This amazing app is rated as 4.3 stars.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a social media management tool that’s ideal for customer service teams. Their unified inbox makes it easy to handle all of your customer communications in one place.
With NapoleonCat, you can communicate with customers across all your social platforms using a single inbox. You can automatically field common inquiries, supercharge your response rate, and drive more conversions.
In addition to communication management tools, it also offers automated publishing and reporting features, a multi-platform scheduling tool, and more.
Pricing:
NapoleonCat paid plans start at $21/month (billed annually) for up to 3 profiles and 1 user. You can also sign up for a free 2-week trial with no credit card required.
Which tool are you going to choose?
Social media management tools vary in all types and capabilities. Choosing the best tool for your business depends on your social media goals and needs. And how you benefit from the above list is up to your hand. Visit the website you prefer and use your detective mind to find a tool that suits you best. If you know any interesting tool, please let me know!
Conclusion
Social media management is a topic that every organization should be concerned about. With so many different channels, it can be overwhelming to track and visually manage everything. From brand building to tracking ROI, social media management tools have become an essential part of implementation for many marketing departments. With the rise of these free social media management tools, you can easily track multiple social media channels in one dashboard.
Managing social media is hard. Any business that’s big enough to need more than one set of hands on the keyboard knows that. But as much as social is a full-time job, it’s only worth doing if you can do it effectively. The good news is, there are plenty of free social media management tools out there to help you with all kinds of different tasks