If you are managing people for your company blog or are the sole social media manager, then you must be wondering what is the best free social media management tools 2021,or which social media management tools are the top of the line currently.
When it comes to managing social media channels for an organization, you have the option of using a free, semi-free or paid tool. There are so many social media management tools available in the market that it is hard to figure out the best one. When you are buying social media management tools it is very important that you compare them properly.
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.
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. You can share ideas with, create approval workflows, build your content plan and then publish that content to multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). ContentCal’s analytics will help you understand your content performance and the latest ‘Respond’ features act as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media.
One of the star features is the fact that ContentCal integrates with over 2000 other applications so that you can create the perfect social media workflow by connecting ContentCal to tools you currently use (think of things like Slack or Trello) and also distribute content to channels beyond social media, like emails and blog posts. The best content is created together. Involve your team (and clients) into the content creation process, share ideas, gain feedback and watch your content performance soar!
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.
Sendible
Sendible offers a free 30-day no-credit card trial on all plans. Its cheapest plan is the $24 per month Micro plan, which accommodates 12 services for one user, with unlimited pst scheduling and up to 10 queues. Other plans add additional features, along with more services and permitted users.
Indeed “Services” are Sendible’s principal point of difference. They are like channels or profiles that you create within your Sendible account and allow you to select which features you need.
Sendible has operated since 2008, evolving with time. You can use it both for scheduling content to your social platforms and drafting and publishing posts on all the leading blogging platforms. You can create your own content, or use Sendible’s Google Chrome Extension to publish or schedule content you come across while browsing the web. You can also find high-quality content to share with your followers through Sendible’s content tool, RSS feeds, and Google Alerts.
You can also use Sendible to help you centralize your social media management, including such things as Facebook moderation (automatically removing comments and posts from your Facebook Pages that contain words or phrases you specify) and uploading and scheduling Facebook Page cover photos to match your marketing campaigns.
Although Sendible doesn’t have an in-built graphics editor, like PromoRepublic, it does include Canva integration, allowing you to create social media graphics with Canva and schedule them to your profiles and pages.
Later
Platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook (limited), Twitter (limited)
G2 Ranking: 4.7 out of 5
Later’s social media management software is best used for a visual content calendar and scheduler.
Later originally started as a social media posting tool focused on Instagram as the main social channel. It offered content planning to optimize the aesthetic of the Instagram feed but has evolved into a visual calendar incorporating most social media channels. Their offering focuses mostly on visual planning. It does not have a social inbox or an RSS integration but it does provide an analytics feature to optimize your content planning.
If you have seen a Facebook ad for Later, you might be surprised they do allow you to add your Facebook pages to expand your posting schedule. However, the platform is limited for these Facebook and Twitter. If you are focused on Facebook Marketing or on publishing social media posts to multiple social channels, you might want to seek another social media platform since Later is highly focused on Instagram and Pinterest currently.
Pricing falls from $7.5-$41 per month.
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a complete set of social media management tools for independent, agency-based, and in-house social media professionals.
Engagement
With NapoleonCat’s Social Inbox, you can reply to all social media interactions (comments, messages, reviews, etc.) in a single dashboard. Having it all in one place, and without the necessity to switch between tabs, you save your team’s time and energy.
The Auto-Moderation feature will help you handle repetitive questions hands-free, delete spam or inappropriate content, and drive engagement even outside your working (or waking) hours.
Scheduling
NapoleonCat’s new Publisher allows you to prepare your posts ahead of time and set up any publication time. It’s available for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. Most importantly, you can publish the same content to all of these platforms at once and fine-tune the publications to each platform’s specifics (e.g. add links on LinkedIn or tag location on Instagram).
In the Publisher, all scheduled publications are organized into a tidy cross-platform calendar view with color-coded content labels that will help you quickly tell campaigns and content types apart.
Reporting
The reporting feature allows you to design custom social media PDF reports showing key metrics for your Facebook pages and Instagram profiles. You can also stay on top of your progress by scheduling automated weekly or monthly reports that get sent via email.
In NapoleonCat, you can also create competitive analysis reports and easily compare or benchmark a set of pages at once.
Networks
NapoleonCat supports Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and GoogleMyBusiness.
Pricing
You can go either for the Standard or the Pro plan, whereas the second option is better if you handle high volumes of comments and messages. The Pro plan supports the Auto-Moderation feature and PDF reports.
- Prices start at $27 per user/month or $21 per user/month when paid annually.
Conclusion:
Social media management tools are something that every company should have. It helps you to run your social media accounts for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. You can still do social media marketing without these tools but it would be practically impossible to manage so many social accounts at the same time without professional social media management tools.