Here are the top free social media management tools and software of 2021. These free apps will allow you to easily manage multiple social media accounts across several different platforms and IP addresses.
The free social media management tools in this report will take your organization’s content marketing to the next level. We’ve scoured the web and picked out 55 of the best free social media management tools to help you save time, budget, and get you closer to your business objectives.
Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Prices: Forever free plan, $5, $10, add $10 per month per social channel connected (with a 14-day free trial).
Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by small businesses and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place
Prices: Free plan, $29, $129, $599 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies.
There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
Sprout Social
Real people. Real brands. Real connection.
Prices: $99, $149, and $249 per user per month (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.
Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.
Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
BuzzSumo
Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month
Details:
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.
Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.
This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.
Google Trends
Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/
Pricing: Free
Details:
Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.
Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.
You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.
Buffer Publish
Website: https://buffer.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $15/month)
Details:
Buffer is a suite of brand building tools designed to make it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule social media posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.
For example, Buffer Publish allows you to set up a schedule for your social media profiles, and after you add content to your Buffer queue, it will publish at the times you’ve designated.
In addition to our web application, we also have both Android and iOS apps as well as a fantastic Chrome Extension that’s great for Buffering while you’re browsing the web or on the go.
Hootsuite (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome)
If you’re looking for a complete solution to all of your social media management needs, Hootsuite will cover all your bases. The app is compatible with over 20 social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. More network connections are available through the Hootsuite app directory, though they can be hit or miss.
Hootsuite includes a full scheduler for queuing posts at times of your choosing. You can create your own schedule or use the AutoSchedule function to schedule your updates at optimal engagement times. By uploading a CSV file with prepared updates using the Bulk Composer, you can fill your queue for days, weeks, months, or the duration of an entire social campaign. Once you’ve filled up your queue, it’s easy to view your outgoing posts from the Planner and reorder your update schedule with a simple drag and drop.
One of Hootsuite’s strongest areas is analytics, though you need one of the more expensive plans to get the full suite of them. The tool helps you understand social results by drawing on more than 200 metrics to measure performance. Once you’ve generated reports, you can export them as Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV files for use within your organization. You can run similar reports to measure team or individual performance.
Hootsuite can also help you monitor the social web with custom social streams. These customizable feeds let you watch the social web for mentions, new followers, search terms, hashtags, engagement, and more. You can construct precise streams that include or exclude specific keywords, post types, locations, and languages. As an example, if you’re in the business of selling custom portraits, you could target the search term portrait :( filter:images to find negative posts that mention the word “portrait” with an attached image. You could then target these users with your own business.
For bigger businesses, you can assign different levels of access to various team members to avoid handing out passwords. Your team can use Hootsuite’s included content library to compose updates with on-brand assets of your choosing. Hootsuite includes free stock photos and GIFs courtesy of GIPHY, or you can connect Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive to draw on your own resources, or your paid account with services like Adobe Stock. You can even assign tasks to your team members (like responding to comments or incoming messages), then approve the outgoing responses before they’re sent.
Hootsuite also integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically thank new Twitter followers or create new messages directly from your task management app.
Hootsuite Price: Free plan includes one user, three social profiles, and 30 scheduled updates; from $39/month (billed annually) for the Professional plan that includes one user, 10 social profiles, and unlimited scheduling; team plans start at $129/month (billed annually).
Conclusion
Social media tools are a must-have for every business! When it comes to boosting your company’s brand with social media, you can’t do everything on your own. Fortunately, there are plenty of free social media services out there that can help you.