Nowadays, the number of social networks has grown almost exponentially. You see a new social network showcasing itself every time you refresh your newsfeed. Each of them has their own ups and downs. Some are good for organizing events; some work well for campaigns and promotions. The competition gets so fierce that some social networks disappear before they can get famous. Despite all that, there are many great social media management tools that do a lot of stuff on various social networks from Facebook to Instagram, be it scheduling or posting with just one click. They have made it possible for us to focus on our core competencies rather than wasting time in chasing the next big thing.
Social media management tools are the solutions that are used to manage the social media accounts and posting of the clients. With these solutions you can update multiple social profiles in one sitting or even tweeting about those accounts, re-posting information and images from other outlets on your client account.
If you’re looking for a way to manage your social media accounts without spending any money, or simply to take the hassle out of sharing your content on social media, then using a free social media management tool might be the solution for you. These tools can help you to keep track of your accounts, schedule posts and find content. Using a free tool like this can help you to save time as well as keep all of your social media in one place. There are many free tools available online that offer these services, but with so many options on the market, it can be hard to know where to start. We’ve done some research into this and have come up with our list of the best completely free social media management tools
Social media is a vital part of your online marketing strategy. It’s not only a way to reach out to customers but also a great way engage with your customers and nurture relationships with them. This makes it important to use a top quality social media management tool. If you are looking for the best social media management tools, here are some of my favorite free ones.
What Should You Consider Before Investing In a Social Media Management Tool?
Social media management isn’t just about posting content three times a week & replying to the comments. It’s more of art and science than that. If companies were driving leads or making money just by curating two or three posts per week, it would be much easier. We didn’t need to write this, & you won’t be here searching for Hootsuite alternatives.
If you’re a marketing manager or social media specialist, your job description is much more than posting & replying on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter.
A good social media management tool can simplify your life, while a bad one can make it more frustrating. The crucial question here is, how can you be sure that the tool you’ve picked is the right tool for your business?
Crowdfire
The Crowdfire platform helps you engage with your fans, followers and customers on social media more effectively. You can schedule posts in advance, so they’re always sure to catch whatever’s going viral at that moment! Learn more about Crowdfire and see if it’s the right fit for your needs
A Design Kit
Want to take your Instagram stories to the next level? A Design Kit from the whimsical team at A Color Story wants to help you do just that. A Design Kit is a free mobile app that lets you add design, fonts, gradient and metallic brushes, stickers, and more. If you’re looking to let your creative flag fly, this is the app for you.
Source: A Design Kit
This app will add that extra bit of pizzazz to your Instagram stories, so you can promote your business, grow your following, and stand out from the status quo. Those brushes though.
Don’t judge my graphic design skills, y’all.
Over
Meet Over, the social media graphic design app of the future. This app is the most graphic-design forward tool on this list. #trending
Source: Over
With 500+ premium fonts, 8K+ editable templates, plus live graphics, Over makes you look like a bold, graphic design trendsetter born at the crossroads of millennial and Gen Z. But the secret power is how simple and easy it is to use.
After 5 minutes in the app, here’s an Instagram story I created from a template:
Ok, a bit more foolproof.
Not bad, right? Over allows you to edit design layers extremely well right on your phone. It also pre-curates layouts, colors, and fonts to really jive with today’s graphic design trends. If you’re looking to mix your Instagram stories, ads, or Facebook posts up, I’d definitely recommend you give this app a try.
Photoshop Express
While we’ve done our share of complaining about the high monthly price of Adobe products (read about them here and here ), did you know they actually offer the PS Express mobile app free? Yes, of course they’ll try to get you to upgrade for $2.92/month to get all the features, but if you’re looking to edit photos on the go, this could be a great app for you.
Not a ton of settings, but a selection of crisp, powerful ones.
Sparktoro
From Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz, comes Sparktoro, a tool that helps you get an insider’s look into what your audience frequently talks about, as well as their most-used hashtags, websites, and follows. Sparktoro’s free plan includes 10 searches/month.
For example: a food blogger might use Sparktoro to explore the search term, “frittata.”
As you can see below, by entering this term, you can determine audience size, social accounts they follow, websites they visit, podcasts and YouTube channels they promote, and so much more. Dive into audience insights like the hashtags used in shared content, as well as frequently used words/phrases in content or bios—so you can connect with that audience on their terms and reflect their world back to them.
PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic also doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. It’s cheapest plan is also a minimal $9 per month.
The critical point of difference for PromoRepublic is its design focus. Indeed it feels like a merger of Canva with a social media management app. You can design and schedule beautiful posts without leaving the app.
You can use it to schedule and share posts with all the major social networks, including Instagram and Pinterest. PromoRepublic suggests a suitable posting schedule for each of your social networks, but you can easily modify this. You organize your posting schedules across a centralized calendar.
It comes with 100,000 post ideas, and these cover a wide range of topics. Most come pre-designed, with eye-catching graphics. You can easily modify and customize their post ideas to suit your business with PromoRepublic’s full graphics editor.
PromoRepublic is currently trialing brand reputation management. You can request beta access so that you can get live updates about your brand from the web and social media.
Monday.com
Monday.com doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. Its Basic plan costs $8/seat/month. That plan is for teams just getting started with managing all their work in one place.
Monday.com doesn’t specifically target social media marketing. Instead, its focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your team. It is ideal for marketers and those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.
Boards are at the heart of Monday.com. A board is a fully customizable table for managing your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards that represent your workflow. Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point, one of which targets social media management. That template creates two boards:
- Campaign ideas and requests
- Campaign progress and status
Team members can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. If you decide these ideas are viable for a post, you can use the board to create an efficient and standardized workflow for a social media campaign.
The Campaign Progress and Status keeps track of your campaigns, split into Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed, and Stuck.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s main app focuses predominantly on social publishing. You need to buy a separate app (Hootsuite Insights) if you want social listening capabilities.
It offers a free plan, with three social accounts, one user, and up to 30 scheduled messages. You gain unlimited scheduling with the $29 per month Professional plan, along with a series of other upgraded features.
The core of Hootsuite is Streams. You set up a tab for each of your social networks on the Streams page, and then you add a series of streams for each social account. You can use these streams as a replacement for the individual social account apps. For example, you might have the following streams from your Twitter account: Scheduled Posts, Mentions, your Twitter Home page feed, list of tweets you make, and a stream for each of your Twitter lists.
You have multiple ways of making posts, including the Publisher screen which features a calendar view.
Socialoomph
Socialoomph has provided scheduled social posting services since 2008. It offers three paid plans, as well as a free plan. The Free Plan allows a single user to schedule unlimited posts to one social profile (limited to a maximum of three posts per hour). Even the most expensive Business Suite is reasonably priced compared to competing apps.
Socialoomph has a much more spartan interface than its competitors. It does, however, provide numerous benefits, and techies will love it. Most other people will need to make use of the help files as setting up your social accounts is the most challenging part of the entire process.
A central concept in Socialoomph is that of teams. With a free account, you automatically have one team – called “My Account.”
Socialoomph offers a variety of ways to create posts. You can both schedule and queue posts. You can begin posts from scratch; you can bulk import them, you can set up various queues, and collect content from RSS feeds.
You can also use Socialoomph to post to your blog. You can create content for your blog and publish it at set times using Socialoomph’s queue. You can then use another queue to publicize your blog posts across your social channels.
SocialPilot
Social Pilot targets a broad audience, with pricing options aimed at everyone from small businesses to large enterprises. They don’t have a free plan, the lowest being the Professional plan costing $30 per month or $25 per month if paid annually. They do, however, provide a free content curation and influencer discovery tool. All you have to do is enter a topic, and they will find relevant content for your niche. They also offer a 14-day free trial on any of their plans.
SocialPilot features a clean and organized interface. The management of accounts is efficient, as you can organize each account into relevant groups. It’s easy to post the same content across multiple channels, customizing things as necessary. Social Pilot makes short work of scheduling, queuing, editing, and sharing all your content.
What Should You Look For In A Social Media Management Tool?
Here are four significant questions you should ask yourself or your client before buying a social media management tool:
- What features do you need?
- How many people are going to use this tool?
- What’s your budget to invest in a social media tool?
- Will you get customer support with this tool?
What Features Do You Need?
1. Connecting Your Social Networks
The most important feature is to connect the specific social networks. The core of any social media management tool is to publish your content to multiple networks. So you don’t need to switch tabs & login and out repeatedly daily. Not all tools post to all networks. Pinterest or Google Business Profile is mostly the problem child. Also, it’s good to know how many social accounts per network the tool allows.
2. Scheduling Content
The second important feature you’ll need in a tool is scheduling your content. It will save your time & help you be more strategic with content posting. You need a tool that can directly schedule all your content on multiple networks without any complex process. Further, depending on your needs, you might also want more robust features like queuing content, repeating posts, recycling your content, or creating campaigns.
3. Monitoring & Engaging
Doesn’t it feel good when you ask a question to any business page on Facebook, and they get back to you within a few minutes? If that’s the kind of responsiveness you want for your clients, too, then you should trust a tool that gives you an all-in-one social inbox. As a social media manager, you’re responsible for responding to all the comments, replies & customer queries. Look for a tool that offers you help in monitoring, sorting, replying & engaging with customers on different social networks in a single window.
4. Analyzing & Reporting
What goals have you set to achieve from social media? And to achieve those goals, what kind of metrics would you like to monitor weekly, monthly, or yearly? Are you getting the reports you want? To generate results & make strategic decisions, you need more informed data. Choose a social media tool that has easy reporting. The number of posts on each social network, visibility & reach, likes, reactions, or comments are the basics. If you need more detailed analysis & graphs in the reports, look for a tool that can generate detailed white labeled reports. So, all you have to do is download the report at the end of each week or month, add your client’s logo, and present it to your boss.
If you’re too busy to consider, test each tool, and find the perfect one for you, we’re here to help.
Conclusion
Social media has changed the marketing landscape forever. A Facebook post can reach more people than a televised commercial could twenty years ago. Tools like Google Analytics provide data that we used to pay thousands of dollars a year for but now it’s free. Our online footprint is becoming more important every day, and leaving your online marketing in the hands of amateur social media managers is not a risk you should take.
Even if you’re ready to start spending money on social media management and marketing tools, you may want to try these free social media management tools before you buy.