Social media management tools help us save time and get more of our work done faster. Social media sites are often a one-way street for brands to disseminate information, but it doesn’t have to be like that. Using the best free social media management tools out there, you can turn the tables on your personal brand, connect with users and grow your influence – while making it look really easy at the same time.
The internet is full of social media management tools, but many of them don’t support automation, which means your team is stuck doing all the work. Your time is valuable and shouldn’t be wasted on scheduling posts, checking comments and managing all of your followers. The free social media management tools listed below offer automation so you can spend a lot more time doing the work you are paid to do.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is one of the best social media management tools overall. It provides all the key functionality you need in one user-friendly interface. It works great for individuals and teams alike. And if you’re not ready to invest straight away, it even offers a limited free plan.
If you’re looking for a full-featured social media management tool to replace your entire stack, there’s no better choice.
Aside from giving you access to powerful publishing tools (including bulk scheduling, post categories, labeled content, automated rescheduling, and more), Agorapulse also offers:
- Powerful unified social inbox. Track all your communications with social media users across platforms in one unified inbox. Automatically apply labels and assign conversations to specific team member roles and make use of saved replies to save time.
- Social listening. Unlimited social listening searches enable social media managers to monitor key conversations and uncover insights about their brand.
- Collaboration tools. Agorapulse is one of the best tools for agencies and teams as it’s jam-packed with useful collaboration tools. You can assign team member roles, delegate tasks, share internal notes, and more.
Plus full analytics and reporting capabilities, fast support, and much more!
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business (on Pro plans and above), LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Key features:
- Social inbox with automation rules
- Scheduling + publishing
- Analytics + reporting
- Social listening
- Team management + workflows
- Mobile app
Pricing: Agorapulse offers a Free plan that includes basic features, up to 3 social profiles, and 1 user. If you want to unlock premium features and additional profiles or users, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts from $79/month.
You can also try out everything included in the paid plans for free with a 30-day free trial.
Social Pilot
Simple & cost-effective social media management tool for teams and agencies
Prices: $10, $24, $40, $80 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 14-day free trial)
Description: I like how Social Pilot fit many of the social media management tools (such as scheduling and analytics but not monitoring) into a simple dashboard and offer it at very affordable prices. With its client management feature, I believe it’s great for agencies that work with several clients.
Unique value: Social Pilot curates and suggests content from several industries (such as tech, education, and health and fitness), which is great if you want to find relevant content easily.
Another valuable feature is its white label reports, which are especially handy for agencies.
Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar offers a single $49 paid plan after a 14-day trial. That plan includes all their features, and you have the option of whether to pay monthly or annually (for a month’s discount).
Meet Edgar is excellent for businesses that want to concentrate on queuing and delivering content. It doesn’t offer any social listening capabilities, nor does it have an in-app inbox.
At its core, Meet Edgar helps you schedule different categories of posts across your social networks. Categories are the heart of Meet Edgar. There are default categories; however, you can add to or adapt them to match your posting style.
You create a weekly recurring schedule for each of your social accounts, deciding on the post category for each slot. There are multiple ways you can source content to fill these slots. You can create original posts, or you can import content by connecting an RSS feed for your favorite blog or importing a CSV spreadsheet containing multiple posts.
Once you approve enough content, Edgar creates a queue for the next two weeks. It matches your queue to your schedule and categories. By default, Meet Edgar selects the newest content in each category first; however, you can click the Shuffle button on a category to reorder the posts into a new random order.
Meet Edgar doesn’t have social listening, a centralized inbox, or much analytics, but it should do the job for people more interested in intelligently scheduling their posts.
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 platform 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.
CoSchedule
#1 marketing calendar
Prices: Starting at $0 – 20, $40, $60, $210, $300, $1,200 per month (with a 14-day free trial)
Description: CoSchedule is more than a social media management tool; it’s a powerful calendar to manage many aspects of your marketing. With CoSchedule, you can manage and collaborate with your team to create your social media posts, content, events, and tasks.
Unique value: CoSchedule is great for marketers who want to organize all their projects (social media, content, events, emails, etc.) in one place.
Their ReQueue feature helps you automatically find optimal posting times and fill gaps in your social media schedule with your best posts.
MavSocial
Streamlined social media management
Prices: Free, $19, $78, $199, $499 per month (with 7-day free trial)
Description: MavSocial is a social media management tool with a focus on visual content. For the higher-priced plans, it seems that you can also manage your Facebook ads with MavSocial
Unique value: On top of the common features (such as scheduling, monitoring, and reporting), MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use, and edit your multimedia for your social media posts and a search engine where you can browse through millions of stock photos.
If you wish, MavSocial can also help you repeat your social media posts for a specified duration.
Conclusion:
When it comes to social media management, there’s so many tools out there to help manage your accounts. But with so many options, picking the right one for you can be a challenge. You want something that’s easy-to-use and doesn’t break the bank.