Someday there is a chance that you will be disappointed to wake up in the morning without a single task to realize for the day. We used to do it when we were kids, then we used to do it when we were teenagers and now, many of us are probably spending our days with no known duties whatsoever. That’s not how things are going to be at least when it comes to managing your social media accounts. This is because some people decide to take over the job by themselves, creating profiles on various platforms and then posting stuff or adding friends on these so-called social networks. If you want to keep up with this trend and offer your followers an array of interesting content that’s shared primarily through social apps, there is only one thing that you can do – invest in free social media management tools uk.
One of the most basic facts about running a successful company is that you need to get the word out. You can’t just hope and pray that people will find your business; you need to go out and tell them where it is. Of course, there are many ways to manage your social media, and we’ve reviewed several of them. But one of the most challenging ways to share information is through automation. That’s why we’ve compiled this list of free social media management tools uk.
Social media management tools are used for managing your accounts on social platforms more effectively. While there are plenty of free social media management tools uk, there are still those that have a price tag associated with them.
If you are looking for free social media management tools uk, be ready for an overwhelming list of modern social media management tools. With the rise of social media (and its developing complexity and importance), new products spring up every day. In this article, we’ll take a look at all of them: from dev-friendly open source software to cloud-based solutions.
What is a social media management tool?
Social media management tools allow you to manage all your social media activities from one easy-to-use interface. From scheduling posts and managing engagement to keeping tabs on competitors and generating reports, these tools can save you a lot of time and help you get smarter with your social content.
For many SMEs, the biggest benefit is the ability to schedule posts. Rather than manually posting your content, you can schedule it in at the beginning of each week or month. Other benefits include:
- Your updates are consistent and on-brand across all your channels
- Many tools are free. You can also pay to upgrade if you want to access more features
- You can build up an understanding of the content and campaigns that work best through reports
- It’s a big time-saver. As well as scheduling posts, rather than posting to each individual platform, you can simply upload to your management tool and it will distribute content across all your social media pages
- Some platforms analyse patterns of engagement to tell you the best time to post
- Some platforms offer a social inbox where all your messages go into one place which makes it easier to keep an eye on queries
MavSocial — Best visual SMM platform
If you need an SMM tool that allows you to shift focus on visuals, MavSocial should be your option number one. It’s more than just a tool, it’s an entire platform that allows the users to engage with the target audience across multiple social media channels, using just one social inbox.
It’s an excellent tool for monitoring and tracking social notifications, messages, and conversations. Businesses use it to allocate employees to personal messages and view prospect comments and replies by profile or platform.MavSocial is mostly used for tagging, sorting, and searching interactions, as well as retweeting, liking and posting replies.
However, its strongest features relate to content scheduling and reporting. You can use it to create campaigns across multiple platforms, reschedule content for reposting/sharing, and use its built-in analytics to measure your performance. The tool supports networks like Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Key features
- Intuitive visual content management
- Flexible marketing campaign
- Seamless social media publishing
- Comprehensive collaboration
- Sophisticated dashboard and reporting
Pricing
- Free trial
- Small business edition – free
- Enterprise and agency solutions – by quote
Friends+Me — Best engagement-increasing tool
One of the best ways to get ahead of the competition curve is by increasing brand awareness. While there are many social media tools that can help a brand achieve this particular goal, none of these tools offers a range of such useful features as Friends+Me.
Aside from brand promotion, this is an engagement-increasing tool that is designed to help a business reach wider audiences but, more importantly, connects with those audiences in the right, meaningful way.
Put simply, Friends+Me makes your online presence more appealing while offering a range of useful features that you can use to further nourish the freshly converted prospects.
Key features
- Mobile applications
- Browser extensions
- Desktop application
- Content cross-promotion
- Team support
- Link shortening
- Bulk schedule
- SEO benefits
Pricing
- Free Plan
- Individual Plan – $9/month
- Small Plan – $29/month
- Medium Plan – $59/month
- Large Plan – $129/month
- XLarge Plan – $459/month
Crowdfire — Best social media scheduler
When it comes to social media marketing, timing is everything. Hence, the increasing importance of having a social media scheduler that allows individuals, solopreneurs, agencies, small businesses, and brands to keep all your social media management efforts in one place.
Crowdfire allows you to schedule and curate your content in advance. Aside from being the best scheduling app, it’s also a post planner and an excellent tool for social media listening. It provides an array of useful features a brand can use to improve social media engagement, analyze feeds, improve social CRM, etc. Automate all social media processes, use the advanced tracking mode for popular keywords, and own your social marketing game.
Key features
- DM marketing
- Twitter analytics
- Follow competition
- Search by location and keyword
- Android and iOS apps
- Engagement optimization
- Copy followers
- Track recent unfollowers and inactive users
- 3in1 scheduler
- Viral hashtag tool
Pricing
- Free trial
- Quote-based plans
OptinMonster
OptinMonster helps you engage visitors at exactly the right moment. It gives you the ability to create beautiful onsite marketing campaigns complete with templates, a campaign builder, laser-focused targeting, and seamless integration into websites.
Cost: $9/month for the basic plan, $19/month for the plus version, $29/month for pro, and $49/month for grow.
Notable customers: Harvard University, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, and Cub Cadet.
RafflePress
RafflePress is a giveaway plugin for WordPress equipped with a drag-and-drop giveaway builder and templates. It’s used to help businesses grow their email lists and generate website traffic.
A noteworthy feature is its verified bonus actions feature, which is designed to reward users with extra contest entries for things like following you on social media and sharing your giveaway.
Cost: Rafflepress offers a plus version for $49/year, a pro version for $99/year, a growth version for $199/year, or a lifetime version for $449.
Notable customers: Single Grain Marketing School and Blogging Wizard.
Smash Balloon
This social media tool allows you to embed social media feeds directly onto your WordPress site. By doing so, it helps transform your website visitors into social media followers.
Cost: Smash Balloon offers 5 different plugins for just $98/year for a personal version, $198/year for a business version, $398/year for the smash version, and an all-access bundle for $598/year.
Notable customers: Chick Fil A, Coca Cola, and Clorox.
Audiense
This social media tool allows you to discover new target audiences, understand them, segment them, and then optimize them using tracking and reporting.
Cost: Audiense offers a limited version of its audience insights and twitter marketing plan for free, or you can purchase the twitter marketing plan for $39/month or the audience insights plan for $696/month.
Notable customers: Deloitte, Ogilvy, PepsiCo, and Apple.
Buffer (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
Buffer is one of the longest-running social media tools aimed primarily at scheduling posts, although it’s gone through multiple updates, shifts, and iterations. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. Free users can connect up to three social accounts, including Facebook Pages and groups.
When you first connect a social account, Buffer will create a schedule for you. By default, Buffer creates four slots per day: in the morning, around noon, late-afternoon, and later in the evening for the time zone you’ve selected. Head to Settings > Posting Schedule to tweak this at any time, delete or add time slots, or disable an entire day. The more slots you have, the more updates you’ll need to schedule, but scheduling updates is easy with Buffer’s intuitive dashboard, mobile apps, and browser extensions.
For scheduling content from the web, Buffer offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Click the Buffer icon in your toolbar (or use a keyboard shortcut), compose your update, and click Add to Queue to schedule. There are also mobile apps available for both iOS and Android, so you can schedule on the go.
While Buffer’s free plan is good enough to get started, if you want a more complete social media management solution or to control more than three social media accounts at once, you’ll need to pay $6/month per social channel for the Essentials plan. This gives you access to detailed analytics and engagement features, which let you interact with your audience directly from Buffer. (Also, if you want to bring team members on board, Buffer goes up to $12/month per social channel.)
With Zapier, it’s easy to link any other service you use to Buffer. For example, you can automatically add new blog posts to your schedule, either directly from WordPress or through an RSS feed.
Buffer Price: Free plan includes one user, three accounts, and 10 queued posts per profile; from $6/month per social channel for the Essentials plan that offers unlimited queued posts per profile; from $12/month per social channel for the Team plan that offers unlimited users.
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).
How do I choose a social media management tool?
When choosing a social media management tool for your small business, you should hone in on these five important aspects. To get in your good books, the right tool should tick the following boxes and criteria:
- User experience – consider how friendly and accessible the software is to use. Think about if you need training or advanced knowledge, or if you can simply set it up and start scheduling
- Features – assess the features each tool offers: do you need the basic elements, or a package with plenty of options? You should also ensure that your chosen tool works with all major social networks
- Price – will it work for your startup’s budget? And more importantly, does it offer value for money?
- Customer support – find out how you can contact customer service, as well as how responsive and helpful the team is
- Goals – think about what you are hoping to achieve with social media marketing. Why you are looking for a social media management tool?
Conclusion
A lot of businesses have a presence on multiple social media platforms, but you don’t get management tools with each platform and it’s challenging to manage multiple accounts. So what can you do? You can use free social media management tools.
There are a lot of online management tools available which can help you easily monitor multiple social media platforms and boost your online presence. But some of these tools can be expensive or require you to pay every month to use them. If you are wondering what are the best management tools that will cost you nothing and allow you to schedule posts and publish content directly from these platforms, then use our list.