Social media is one of the best things that ever happened to marketing. Whether your business depends solely on social media or if you’re not sure what it is, there are some free social media management tools you can use to make your life easier.
Social Media is one of the most popular topics of the 21st century. It has become a core part of the marketing plan of every small, medium or large business. What is even more exciting is that more social media management tools are being created every day. Are you looking for the best social media management tools which you can use to maintain more than one social media profiles? If yes, then you can look into free social media management tools.
Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. You can use it to schedule posts, receive in-depth reports, and collaborate with your team members, thanks to built-in teamwork features. It enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what your customers are saying. There is a free limited plan available for 3 social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages.
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.
Loomly
While Loomly doesn’t provide a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its cheapest plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year up-front). That Base plan permits two users and a maximum of ten social accounts.
You can connect all your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to Loomly. It is a simple process, although, like all social media management software, you have to live within limitations set by the social media networks, e.g., you can post to Facebook business accounts, but not personal profiles.
Loomly asks you to set a workflow that matches the way you run your accounts, whether you are part of a team, or operate your accounts solo.
You can select from three views in Loomly:
- Calendar view – shows all posts spread over a calendar month.
- List view – displays all posts as a list and includes essential information for each
- Post view – allows you to examine individual posts
You can do more than just schedule posts in Loomly, however. It offers an interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle @-mentions.
Analytics are available for each of your social accounts, as well as Loomly’s main dashboard containing an overview.
Friends+Me
Friends+Me is another prime player in the social media management tools family. While Friends+Me puts the highest emphasis on Google Plus features, many other social platforms are supported. Friends+Me appears to get rave reviews from users, and has a beautifully designed website with plans available based on the size of your business. And yes, there is a free plan!
While the free plan is not super robust, it still allows for two queues (which is a destination to publish posts), the ability to schedule five posts per queue at one time, link shortening, browser extensions, an integration with Zapier, as well as standard support. The free plan can also be used for a variety of social platforms like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Pinterest and Instagram are supported as well, but you will need to upgrade. Plans range from $7.50 to $216 depending on if you decide to utilize monthly or annual billing.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is definitely not your tradition social media management tool when it comes to scheduling posts, but it is an effective tool when it comes to understanding your audience at a much deeper level. Followerwonk allows you to dig deep into Twitter bios and compare various accounts to find the most relevant influencers. With this tool, you can analyze your current followers – by location, bio, accounts they follow, and more – and contrast relationships with competitors. This will help you improve your social content by matching your activities with gains and losses of followers.
This tool is definitely worth exploring, because having a lot of followers is meaningless if these followers are not relevant and actually engaging with your brand. Luckily, Followerwonk offers a free account, as well! Like many of the others on this list, the free account does come with several limitations, but you will still be able to connect one profile, view authority rankings, see followers and their locations, see when followers are active, and access several other details to further analyze your social audience. If you are interested in more capabilities their plans are still decently affordable ranging from $29 to $79 per month.
SocialPilot
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Pinterest
G2 Ranking: 4.3 out of 5
SocialPilot is a fully integrated social media management tool geared towards digital agencies or medium sized businesses who manage multiple clients or multiple accounts.
If your team is mostly interested in creating workflows with permission settings, collaboration tools, and custom reporting for clientele, SocialPilot is worth a look. While SocialPilot does provide the basics, their tool also includes a full social inbox feature allowing them to engage with their audience in addition to auto posting.
They do not have an influencer search feature but they do provide a social monitoring and listening feature which is becoming an important hero feature required amongst most businesses as we shift focus to remote environments.
Pricing ranges from $30-$100 per month.
Conclusion:
It’s no secret that the social media management tools you choose to use are an important factor in getting your brand ahead of your competitors. But it can also be nerve wracking to keep up with the latest tools, because it seems like they are being launched every day. If this sounds familiar to you, then you’re not alone.