Social media is not just a passing fad of the 21st century. It’s here to stay. Social media has become an integral part of everyone’s daily life, whether we like it or not, and with this in mind, businesses have had to adapt their marketing techniques to keep up with the ever-changing ethos of social media. This is where free social media management tools shine through, allowing you to create content on a daily basis that fits seamlessly into your overall marketing strategy.
Gone are the days, when social media was limited to just Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Today we have multiple platforms like Snapchat, Youtube, and Instagram vying for our attention. With so many social media networks flooding our newsfeeds, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage them all. In order to make social media management more manageable and efficient, you can use some of the best free social media management tools available online.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most popular tool for managing social media platforms. 18+ million social media marketers use it, and it has everything you need to manage your team, schedule posts, measure results, plan upcoming campaigns, etc. From freelancers to large businesses, it’s the perfect tool for anyone who wants to grow their social media presence the right way.
Hootsuite comes with five different plans, including a free plan. The free version plan allows you to manage two social media accounts, schedule up to 5 posts at a time, and allow one user.
You can easily create, schedule, and customize posts for all your connected networks from their beginner-friendly dashboard. Plus, you can connect to more than 20+ different social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and more.
One of the key features of Hootsuite I like is the Engage. Using this option, you can quickly access all the incoming messages across your social networks.
Pricing: Hootsuite offers five different plans. Additionally, they also offer 30 days free trial on professional and team plans.
- Free Plan: One user, two social accounts, five scheduled posts
- Professional Plan ($49/ mo): One user, ten social accounts, unlimited scheduled posts
- Team plan ($129/ mo): 3 users, 20 social accounts, custom branded URL
- Business plan ($599/ mo): 5 users, 35 social accounts, content library, campaign planning
- Enterprise plan (custom): 5+ users, 50+ social accounts, team productivity reporting, social selling add-ons
Buffer
If you want an app like Hootsuite, Buffer would be a great alternative. In fact, it’s much cheaper than Hootsuite.
Buffer offers two different plans – free and essentials. The free plan is limited to one user, allowing you to add three social media accounts, schedule 10 posts per social channel.
With Buffer’s powerful publishing tools, you can schedule posts across all major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc. You can also schedule posts in advance, so they get published when it’s convenient for you – and automate them based on your RSS feeds.
This comes very handy when you run a large website. For example, let’s say you published a post about best SiteGround alternatives, and then the RSS feed will automatically add the post to Buffer.
Another feature of Buffer I like is its Chrome extension that lets you easily share any page, link, or video from any website directly into Buffer without opening up another tab in the browser.
Pricing: Buffer offers two different plans – free and essentials. Plus, you can also try their essentials plan free for 14 days.
- Free plan: 1 user, up to 3 social accounts, schedule 10 posts, basic publishing tools.
- Essentials plans ($5-$10/ month): unlimited channels, unlimited schedule posts, advanced publishing tools.
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.
Falcon
Although Falcon is not a free social media management tool, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It doesn’t give a price for its more advanced Full Suite plan, targeting larger companies with multiple teams and markets, although it enables you to request a demo.
Falcon emphasizes that it offers 7-days week support, with a real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. It also provides weekly training sessions, and you can find answers in its help center.
The Essentials plan focuses on publishing & scheduling and social media engagement. You can use an editorial calendar to plan, schedule, and edit across multiple social networks. It offers a content pool, meaning you can store assets for repurposing, plug into your DAM, and use Falcon’s cloud storage. It provides a customizable inbox, where you can arrange multiple feeds to build the inbox that suits you best. If you have a team, you can share notes and add messages to your team members. Existing contacts’ profile cards appear beside their messages. Falcon offers advanced metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The Suite package offers everything available in the Essentials plan (allowing for larger teams and more significant usage) and adds a number of additional features. These include social listening, where you can monitor social media and the internet to discover much information about your business. You can track brands, topics, keywords, and phrases and even refine them with advanced parameters.
With Falcon’s Full Suite, you can benchmark your strategy across all major social networks. Falcon has a database of over 100,000 brands, letting you benchmark your performance on multiple levels. You can also schedule and post ads on Facebook and Instagram without having to leave Falcon.
Falcon identifies the visual elements of images from the most engaging branded content. You can even invite your team to collect and comment on highly engaging branded content from other brands.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the more professional social media management platforms, and it lacks the free or cheap plan that most of the other platforms reviewed have. It does offer a 30-day trial for its free paid plans, however. The paid plans range from $99/user/mo to $249/user/mo, varying by the number of social profiles you can manage, along with additional features on the higher plans.
Sprout Social has a clear and intuitive interface and is logically laid out. It features a Smart Inbox that collects all your social messages. You can combine your social inboxes in any way you wish.
It features a Listening module that works similarly. You track mentions of your brand, your competitors, or selected keywords.
Sprout Social makes connecting your social accounts effortless, even for the usually complicated Instagram. It includes tools enabling all your team to collaborate. You can efficiently allocate tasks to each member.
Every time you enter Sprout Social, it presents you with a Dashboard offering suggestions of what you should do next.
It has one of the most comprehensive and intuitive systems to create posts. You can customize your posts to meet the best practices of the different social networks and set your posts for multiple time frames. You can access content from many sources, which you can import and then reschedule or add to your queue.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse focuses on the organization and team collaboration. Their unique social media inbox feature is known for helping to eliminate chaos. Providing top-notch customer service with friendly support is their mantra. Agorapulse offers a free trial, and no credit card is needed. Pricing starts at $99 per feature per month, and there’s also a free version.
Animoto
Animoto is a social media tool that allows creators to easily make videos. They make it easy for you to drag and drop using their custom video templates. Stock images and a music library are also available for you to add to the content. No video experience is necessary, and you can create unlimited videos for free. Animoto offers a $15 professional plan and a $39 team plan.
Conclusion
Social media has become a mainstream marketing channel for small and large businesses. The rapid growth in social media usage and the subsequent requirement for effective marketing on social media has led businesses to try any tool that promises to help manage their social profiles. This rapid expansion creates a highly fragmented market where software vendors are rushing to build tools that claim to satisfy the ever-growing need of a growing market. The success of these solutions depends on how professional they are and how well they fit into your existing operational processes.