There are a lot of free social media scheduling apps that claim they can help you with your social media needs. That looks great on paper but it doesn’t always end up being what you want. Also, most of these websites constantly want access to your login info which makes some people uncomfortable. We’ve searched the internet and brought together all of the best social media scheduling apps that we trust and use to do our own work on our company blogs, websites and social media accounts.
If you’ve been looking for free social media scheduling apps, you’ll have come across at least a few services that require a credit card to get started. Don’t let that put you off.
Kontentino
Kontentino comes with a 14-day free trial. And if you’re after a team tool, it may be what you’re looking for. Like others on our list, it offers a strong collaborative feature set. From creating post creation checklists and workflows to tagging team members and assigning tasks, you have all you need to ensure that content ideas never fall through the cracks. And if you’re worried about how content ideas have evolved over time, you’ll love Kontentino’s change tracker. It tracks version control during the social media planning and approval processes.
Kontentino also comes with a drag-and-drop social media calendar, making updates and planning easier, especially for larger teams with multiple social accounts to manage. Speaking of management, you can get better at tracking and finding posts by labeling them. You can create any label of your choice and add them to posts as a way of tracking content produced for different purposes like entertainment, education, or selling.
Core features aside, Kontentino adds a few nice-to-haves that you’ll find yourself enjoying. One is the UTM tag builder. If you’ve been at social for a while, you know how painful switching between tabs can be as you build UTM-rich URLs. To simplify this process, Kontentino has a UTM tag builder that easily fits into your workflow. Another is logo and branded frames. With this feature, you can easily add logos and branded frames to images without going the long route of creating a request for your designer to make the update.
ContentStudio
ContentStudio gives users a 14-day free trial. It also does a little more than most social media platforms. For example, influencer marketing is big business, but it often means resorting to manual web research or investing in a separate tool to find the best influencers to partner with. ContentStudio has identified this challenge and solved it with an influencer discovery feature.
It works for Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Results show how many posts an influencer has published, how many followers they have, how many accounts they follow, provide an interaction value for every thousand followers, and score each influencer out of a 100%.
Content discovery is a feature more platforms offer today, and you’ll appreciate how ContentStudio’s works. You can search by keyword, topic, or identify sources. And if you want to get granular, you can build queries that include identifiers like “MUST ALSO”, “NOT”, “EXCLUDE”, and “LIMIT”.
ContentStudio has also taken a stab at automating content publishing social and blogs. This feature lets you identify sources or keywords and set auto-posting to push content to channels of your choice. Content can be reviewed if you’d like to personalize or approve it before publishing.
Unique features aside, you get all the must-haves. ContentStudio has a beautiful planner, offers post scheduling, analytics on every channel, and an RSS feed reader. A team inbox is available to handle direct messages, along with collaboration tools to create workflows, tasks, and checklists.
Creator Studio
Sometimes, the easiest way to schedule social media posts for free is to stay on-platform.
A prime example of this is Facebook’s Creator Studio. This free content management tool lets you create and schedule content for Facebook and Instagram. You draft posts with Creator Studio just like publishing a post on your Facebook page or Instagram account, except you can schedule them. Like other social media marketing tools, you can view recent comments and engage with your followers right from Creator Studio.
And, in true Facebook fashion, analytics is the name of the game. Creator Studio lets you track stats like:
- Total minutes viewed for videos
- Follower growth
- Total engagement
- Audience demographics
Video content is a focal point of Creator Studio. Firstly, you can actually make money with your video content if videos are at least three minutes long and show ads. Plus, you can create and schedule videos for IGTV. Support for Instagram stories is also coming.
Tools like Later and Buffer are faster for creating mass amounts of scheduled content. But if you want to avoid third-party software and rely heavily on video, I’d stick with Creator Studio.
Post Planner (Best Budget Choice)
Free social media scheduling platforms either limit your scheduling capacity or how many social networks you can use. And, for most bloggers, this probably means switching to a paid scheduling tool at some point.
But if you still want to keep costs down, Post Planner is your most budget-friendly option.
The Starter Plan is only $4 per month and includes:
- Three social profiles (includes Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter)
- 300 scheduled posts
- 12 posts per social profile per day
- One user
Post Planner also lets you republish evergreen content, so you don’t even have to rework your schedule queue too often. More expensive plans let you curate and reshare other social media content within your niche automatically to keep your feeds more active.
If you’re a blogger who wants to post to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest a few times per day, this $48 per year plan has you covered. You have to pay upfront for the entire year which is the only downside.
SocialBee
SocialBee isn’t technically a free social media scheduling tool since the only free plan is a 14-day free trial. But it’s what I use here at Hit Publish and it’s an inexpensive yet comprehensive way to schedule social posts and repost your evergreen content.
With SocialBee, you create content categories to automate social media posting. You create a schedule and feed in the different categories and SocialBee pulls from the designated feed at the set time.
For example, if you’re a food blogger, you can make content categories for different types of recipes, cocktails, and desserts. You could set it to pull from the “quick and easy recipes” on Monday, “tacos” on Tuesday, “product reviews” on Wednesday, “chicken dinners” on Thursday, “cocktails” on Friday, and “desserts” on Saturday.
You can set posts to publish over and over on rotation through the feed, or only publish a set number of times. SocialBee also lets you add post variations like new images or text to refresh your content.
SocialBee works with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and even Google my Business.
What makes SocialBee a useful social media scheduling tool is how much time you save on content creation. You can upload posts with a CSV file and from a RSS feed of your recent blog posts. The CSV upload takes a bit of getting used too since it’s entirely text-based, but it’s the fastest way to beef up your content calendar.
For pricing, SocialBee’s cheapest plan starts at $19 per month and includes:
- One user
- Five social profiles
- 10 content categories
- 1,000 posts per category and evergreen reposting
According to SocialBee, this saves eight hours per week on average. If various free social media scheduling platforms fall short, SocialBee is the best paid solution to try.
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.
Conclusion
Using free social media scheduling tools can help you meet your marketing and communication goals. Using social media tools can help you create and distribute your content, find new audiences, and monitor conversations in real-time. Download a free social media scheduling app from the options below to make the most of your time on social.