The simple management of your social media is the most basic need of the business marketer. Face it, a lot of marketers cannot handle the power they have in online marketing. This article will show you why and give you the top free social media management tools to help manage your social media.
Managing your social media presence can be tough. From planning to sharing, it takes time and skill to build a following for your business. That’s why we’ve put together a definitive list of social media management tools to help you connect, engage, and grow your audience.
Sprout Social
Hey, don’t take our word for it.
Sprout customers – from small businesses to enterprise companies to agencies – rave about the ability to effortlessly plan, organize and deliver content and campaigns across social networks.
Sprout is an excellent tool that helps us better plan and organize all our social content. With the help of the calendar and scheduler tools, we’re able to save time by scheduling and publishing the same post across multiple profiles in just one simple step. Ana Laura Montaño González
Community Manager
For starters, jumping back and forth between networks is a huge time-sink. Consider how the bulk of brands out there are publishing content to multiple social platforms. With Sprout, you can publish your latest Facebook post, Instagram photo or Pinterest Pin simultaneously.
In addition to its industry-leading scheduling tools, interactive calendar and asset management library, Sprout also simplifies collaboration. User-level permissions provide specific access to marketing managers, writers and everyone in between to contribute to your publishing strategy.
And once your content is scheduled and published, Sprout makes it easy to measure success and refine your game plan going forward.
You can easily apply custom tags to messages to better organize and report, then use Sprout’s easy-to-use social media analytics to evaluate impressions, engagement, follower growth and much more.
From analyzing hashtags to identifying top-performing content, Sprout represents the ultimate optimization tool for brands looking to fine-tune their social presence in addition to scheduling content. You can even count on Sprout for social ad reporting to boost ROI from the paid content you’re scheduling.
I like to go into each platform and look at what posts performed really well and which ones didn’t. Directly from here, I’ll schedule out new posts with similar content or test different times—another great way to beef up our editorial calendar! Erin Supinka
Assistant Director of Digital Engagement in the Office of Communications
While Sprout gives you ultimate control to plan your publishing strategy as you see fit, it also makes it easy to automate the process to maximize results.
Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology helps you hone in on the optimal posting times for your audience, replacing guesswork with guaranteed engagement.
CoSchedule
The common thread between pretty much any social scheduling tool is the same.
Saving time.
CoSchedule emphasizes efficiency for marketing teams and individuals alike. Integrating with company blogs via WordPress, the platform allows brands to publish and push content to social media simultaneously.
Additionally, CoSchedule provides a comprehensive “Top Content Report” which documents social shares and engagement. This is a fantastic feature for content creators looking to figure out which pieces are resonating most with readers.
Unlike other social media scheduling tools, CoSchedule primarily focuses on content versus solely social performance. Features such as the “ReQueue” Bucket allow teams to recycle and schedule their best messages automatically without having to lift a finger. This results in more fresh content in your brand’s feed faster.
Feedly
There’s no denying that one of the biggest challenges of social media scheduling is content curation.
Digging for fresh pieces of content can be both time-consuming and tiring. Meanwhile, you don’t want to solely post your own stuff over and over, right?
That’s where Feedly comes in.
Feedly’s platform automatically curates content to fill up your social media calendar. Instead of scrambling for news or relevant pieces to publish to your audience in-between your own scheduled social media posts, Feedly does the legwork for you.
Again, managing your social feeds shouldn’t eat up all of your free time. Tools like Feedly take the pressure off of marketers to constantly save and bookmark content for future sharing.
Oh, and Feedly integrates instantly with Sprout Social. Nice, right?
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate content calendar and social media scheduling platform that helps thousands of individuals, businesses, and agencies with their content planning and social media. The platform also defines user permissions and streamline the approval process, manage multiple accounts in one centralized location, and communicate and collaborate with your team on upcoming content. With ContentCal Analytics and Respond you can also keep tabs on content performance and learn how to improve for the future.
Features of ContentCal include social media post scheduling, keyword filtering, collaboration, feedback analysis, reporting, project management, and more. Content creators can use the application to design visual content by modifying the layout and adding a header color and personalized logo. Additionally, employees can create and store posts as drafts, receive feedback from collaborators, and preview posts before publishing.
You’re able to save time, collaborate with team members or clients, and create even better social media content. This platform is perfect for agencies, distributed organizations, or anyone who needs to manage and participate in multiple social media accounts. It could not be any easier, which is perfect for teams with varying degrees of ability. And, the ability to create custom workflows and approvals that reflect your unique governance plan is unmatched. Not only is ContentCal well priced but it is also one of the leading social media schedulers in the market today.
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.
Conclusion
People who use social media as a tool think of it as a full-time job. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as Workplace Social Media Management software like there is for Project Management software. So with tools like Hootsuite and Buffer, your business identity reflects you across thousands of social channels instead of a handful of social profiles you manage yourself.