Social media management tools can be hard to manage in-house. A number of small business owners begin outgrowing their in-house resources in terms of time or expertise (or sometimes both). This is when they start looking for outside help in the form of social media management tools.
These tools are specifically designed to be used by social media marketing teams to plan, publish, and measure content that is optimized for social media marketing campaigns. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the top three best free social media management tools for small business around 2021.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is an affordable social media marketing platform that offers you the tools to manage all your social profiles from a single dashboard and automatically find and schedule effective social content.
Engagement
Crowdfire uses the inbox format to manage engagement via the Mentions tab. You can view each mention, like, reply and assign tasks to your team within the dashboard. With the Crowdfire mobile app you can also reply instantly on the go.
Scheduling
With Crowdfire’s scheduling feature you can maintain a 24/7 presence on social media. Once you have a content schedule, it’s easy to add new posts to fill the gaps. For instance, you can set your custom best times to post on social media or select Crowdfire’s automatic best time based on recommendations from each account.
Your Queue Meter will make you aware of how much content you need to fill up your calendar so your accounts look active for the next 7 days.
Reporting
Crowdfire comes with 3 reporting features: report builder, analytics and competitor analysis. These features will help you measure, track and understand how optimized your social media strategy is, and allow you to compare to your competitors.
Crowdfire lets you export your reports in a variety of formats including PowerPoint and PDF, and schedule weekly or monthly exports directly to your email.
Networks
Crowdfire connects with popular social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
Pricing
Crowdfire has a range of subscription plans designed around the number of users and social profiles you want to connect. They also have a limited Free plan that’s designed for one user and includes 10 scheduled messages per account for three social profiles.
- Paid plans start from $9.99/month and increase depending on the amount of social profiles linked. Annual discounts available.
MavSocial
MavSocial is a Social Media Management platform with a focus on visuals.
Engagement
MavSocial lets you engage with your audience across all your social networks from one convenient inbox. From its Social Inbox you can:
- Track and monitor social conversations, messages, and notifications
- Allocate team members to individual messages
- View follower replies and comments by network or profile
- Search, sort, and tag interactions
- Post a reply, like, or retweet directly
Visuals are an important part of social media engagement. The MavSocial Digital Library lets you upload and manage your photos and videos, plus anything you purchase from their Stock Images Store.
There’s even a built-in photo editing tool where you can add filters and text overlays before posting your content.
Scheduling
With MavSocial you schedule your content through campaigns. You can create campaigns across one or many networks and view your schedule in the calendar. From there you can drag-and-drop content to change the publishing dates and times if needed.
You can reschedule your content by creating cyclical campaigns. For example, you could have campaigns for blog posts, quotes, promotions, and events. Either add your content once and let it repeat cyclically or create variations by modifying it.
MavSocial includes an RSS reader, so you can pull in your content as well as other favorite industry content, giving you ideas of what to schedule. And if you find something while browsing the net you can use the handy Chrome extension to add that into the calendar, too.
Reporting
MavSocial’s built-in social analytics lets you track the performance of your social content. The Reporting Dashboard displays visual data for engagement statistics, detailed follower insights, your top-performing posts, plus the best times for posting.
You have the option to export the graphical reports via PDF or download the data in CSV format. You can run the reports based on time, campaign, network, or individual post, so you know what’s working.
Networks
MavSocial supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr.
Pricing
MavSocial has several pricing plans based around the social profiles and features you need.
- Prices start from $19 per month
Sprout Social
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Pinterest
G2 Ranking: 4.1 out of 5
Sprout Social has positioned their scalable platform to large organizations and teams known favorably for monitoring, scheduling posts, analytics, and team management with approval workflows. Those interested in employee advocacy will also enjoy this social media management tool.
This simple yet powerful platform is user friendly and offers all of the basics that you’d expect in addition to any customized features upon requests. One such feature is the individual statistics for each post.
Sprout offers post approvals and administering permission settings, which caters to digital agencies in addition to medium sized businesses.
There is a social inbox tool that is great for communicating and engaging with your audience, in addition to a social monitoring and keyword search feature. Unfortunately, it does not have the Auto Post with queues feature or an influencer search feature.
Pricing begins at $99 per month up to $249.
Hootsuite
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Pinterest)
G2 Ranking: 4.1 out of 5
Hootsuite was first on the social media marketing scene and has been around since 2008. Hootsuite is the most blogged about social media platform out there and you will find they exist on most listicles.
They are well known for content curation, organization, scheduling, monitoring, and RSS integration and have a notable reputation. We feel a lot of teams large and small start with Hootsuite and then scale to other services that might meet their needs better.
But, what we can genuinely appreciate is the sheer size of Hootsuite, their marketing prowess, their educational Hootsuite Academy that helps you learn social media marketing and allows you to pay for certifications to arm you with the skills you need to be successful.
Hootsuite social media management tool allows for bulk scheduling, meaning you can upload several posts at once in addition to client management support. They do not have an Auto Post feature, social inbox or influencer search.
However, it is highly well-known for being a fully integrated tool that has a great social listening feature. They also offer a 30day trial.
Pricing is from $29-$599.
Sendible
We chose Sendible as best for integration based on the sheer number of platforms you can use it with. As a Sendible customer, you can integrate with Meta, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business (GMB), YouTube, WordPress, Canva, Google Analytics, Google Drive, and so much more. In total, Sendible allows you to integrate with 17 different platforms or tools.Pros
- More integration options than some other providers
- Useful social media dashboard lets you monitor your social game in one place
- Starter plans start at $29 per month
- You can save 15% if you pay for a year of management upfront
- 14-day free trial available
Cons
- Basic plans are for one user only
- No free option available
Sendible earned the top spot in our ranking in terms of integration since it lets you sync with all the top social media networks and popular tools like Canva, Google Analytics, and more. This lets you manage almost all aspects of your social media strategy in one place, saving you time along the way.
Sendible offers four plans for companies of different sizes:
- Creator: $25 per month
- Traction: $76 per month
- Scale: $170 per month
- Expansion: $340 per month
However, you do have to pay for a year of software access to secure these low prices, or you’ll pay about 15% more for your plan on a monthly basis.
All plans from Sendible include at least 10 queues, content publishing, workflow tools, bulk scheduling, keyword tools, and an inbox for engagement and monitoring. However, more expensive plans include more queues and users, and the ability to include a larger number of social profiles for management purposes.
The good news is that all social media management plans from Sendible offer a 14-day free trial. You can also cancel at any time.
Conclusion:
Social media is no more an everyday hobby; rather it is more like an essential obligation for every business worldwide. Many business owners look up towards social media as an effective way to boost their brand’s visibility online, by making good use of the various free social media management tools available on the internet.