So you’re looking for the best free social media posting software. Well, to be honest with you, the best social media apps are those that allow you to post to multiple social networks — one platform at a time.
Social media is an essential part in a successful online marketing campaign. But it can be difficult to keep up with all of your social media profiles across the web. In this article, I will discuss some of the best social media posting applications to ease this process and improve your social media management skills.
Loomly
The first thing you notice when using Loomly is its clean, uncluttered interface. The first time you use the social management app, Loomly launches a well-structured, helpful wizard, that is effectively a guided tutorial.
As you go through the wizard, you will begin by setting up a calendar, giving it a time zone, and selecting the most appropriate industry. You can choose whether you wish to use Loomly for your posting, or whether you would prefer to integrate a Buffer account. You set various preferences, so Loomly clearly understands the type of posts you like to share.
Calendars are central to the successful operation of Loomly. One of the essential stages of setting a calendar up is to decide on your preferred workflow. These are the steps you go through when making a post. If a single person autonomously creates your posts, you might have a simple workflow. If you use a team for your social posting and require approval at various steps, your workflow will be involved.
When it comes time to create and schedule posts, you will go through various steps (the exact sequence depends on your preferred workflow):
- Set Post Details
- Select Social Channels (from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google My Business)
- Define “base” content – content that you’ll be able to tweak for each platform in step 4.
- Fine-Tune Each Channel
- Target Audience & Promote – Facebook (Optional)
Loomly provides a detailed dashboard, giving all the analytics you need about your posts.
Loomly also offers an Interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle mentions (through tagging).
Falcon
Falcon claims that over 30,000 marketers use their social media posting app for their social media management and list some high-profile clients, including Diesel, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Tui, Greenpeace, and Columbia University.
It clearly targets serious social media users, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129/month after a 14-day trial. The Essentials plan offers you a content calendar and campaign planner, advanced analytics dashboards, community management, and in-app support. As the plan’s name suggests, small to medium-sized businesses will find all they need to run social media campaigns across most social platforms, although restricted to one user and five channels.
Larger businesses may prefer the Full Suite, which has customized pricing. You can ask for a demo of this before deciding whether the additional features will benefit your organization. The Full Suite gives you all the features of the Essentials plan, but it allows unlimited channels, reporting, and teams. Also, it adds in social media advertising (which you can set up, organize, and monitor your social advertising within Falcon), competitor benchmarking, collaboration & approval flows, custom onboarding, and 24/7 support.
Falcon’s content calendar provides a view of all scheduled content. It shows your posts scheduled by date, clearly identifiable by social platform. You can plan, schedule, edit, and post across multiple networks.
You may prefer to use Campaign Planner, in collaboration with your team members if you have the Full Suite. You can use this to map, create a brief, roll-out, and collaborate on campaigns across all your social platforms.
Falcon supports image, video, Instagram Stories, and Facebook carousels. You store all your content in Falcon’s version of a shared media library called the “Content Pool.” Your Content Pool integrates with your preferred digital asset management tool or favorite cloud storage platform.
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.
NapoleonCat
In the 7+ years that they’ve been in business, NapoleonCat has built an impressive client list that includes brands like the World Wildlife Foundation, Avon, and Allianz. One of their claims to fame is that they can help social media marketing teams to win back up to 70% of their time and energy. Even if this is not the case, just looking and interacting with its beautiful platform will make work feel less of a chore.
All in all, it’s easy to use and set up. One feature that deserves a special mention is that when you set up your social media accounts after signing up, it also gives you the option to keep tabs on your competitors. You just type in the competitor’s social media account name and add it to your watch list. You can also set it up so that each team member gets assigned specific permission. This is useful if you want to control who may create content.
With regards to posting and scheduling specifically, you can use it to schedule and post your content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business simultaneously via a single dashboard. It also generates post previews as you create them which is more useful than it sounds. Then, after your content has been posted, you can use its performance analytics to monitor your reach, engagement, and click-throughs.
While its list of features are pretty much the same as other social media tools, its approach to pricing is different and a lot more flexible. Unlike the majority of tools, NapoleonCat actually lets you select the number of social media profiles and users, making it an ideal tool for smaller teams.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a fully-featured social media management program. This means that you can use it for considerably more than just a social media posting app. However, its price reflects this, so you are unlikely to use AngoraPulse if you simply want to schedule your social posts.
The heart of AgoraPulse is its Inbox. It shows your comments, mentions, conversations, and reviews relating to each of your social accounts. It also includes a social listening function, where firms can keep track of mentions of their brand name.
AgoraPulse offers multiple ways to publish content. You can schedule a post by clicking the appropriate time slot in a calendar. It also provides a bulk publish feature, where you import posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or as a group of pictures to transform into posts. You can use these to create a queue (dropping new content into your queue as needed).
It gives you the ability to take a close look at your fans and followers. You can click on your more active followers, label them however you like, view your past activity with them, and add relevant notes.
Conclusion:
Tools make life better. If you’re someone who wants to manage multiple social media accounts, posting and scheduling content on social media (on a regular basis) can be tough. Thankfully, there are dozens of apps that enable you to do this. There are a lot of social media posting apps on the market — some free and some that cost money.