Social media management tools freeware

Like, a lot of time. The best way to manage your engagement across multiple channels and social media platforms is through the use of social media management tools. Social media management tools allow you to not only keep track of your posting and engagement with prospects; you can also develop social media post ideas and create thoughtful content, schedule your posts across multiple channels, monitor any mentions of your company, track and analyze performance, and much more.

The variety of social media management tools out there can be a bit overwhelming, for both the novice and the advanced user. How do you choose the best management tool to meet your needs?

How do you know what features to choose? You may be wondering if using social media management tools is really worth it. After all you do have to download more tools and take the time to figure out how they work.

So, why can't you just use the social media apps to post manually every day? It is now easier than ever for customers to connect and engage with their favorite brands. They can ask questions, voice criticism, or praise the brands they interact with.

Many individuals take full advantage of this direct channel to provide brands with feedback. When you respond to customer messages, it shows that you care about their experience. And the best way to show you care is to not only respond, but to respond as quickly as possible. Keeping up with all of your messages and mentions from various social platforms can be tough. Using a social media management tool can centralize all of your messages to make it easy for you to sort through messages and reply in a timely manner.

Social media pages are kind of like chips. It is hard to have just one for your marketing strategy. This means you likely rely on multiple social profiles and networks, which makes them much more difficult to manage.

Social media tools help you keep all of your necessary social media information and messaging in one spot. This saves you the time and effort needed to continuously log in and out of accounts multiple times a day.

Every customer you have is special and unique in some way, and it is important for you to treat them that way. Social media tools can help you keep track of those that you have interacted with and what conversations you've had so you can personalize each experience with your customers. Customers who complain or mention your brand may not tag your page directly. Many customers may mention your brand without the expectation that you will respond.

Helpful social media tools provide you insight into what people are saying about your brand using keyword monitoring. If you were to try to do this on your own and search every possible hashtag and keyword, it would take you an eternity. Planning your social media campaigns and strategies should involve looking at the past to improve in the future. You need relevant data from your social networks to conduct a thorough analysis to figure out what works and what doesn't.

Social media analysis tools collect key metrics you can use to develop and continue optimizing an effective social media strategy. Working with one large social account or various small social accounts often requires a team to manage them. This can cause some problems if you manage each social media platform separately.

For instance, you may not know who replied to what or who posted what picture and when. This can cause things to slip through the cracks. Using a tool allows you to streamline your work because you and your team members are able to work from a shared inbox that displays correspondence between your team and your customers on social media. These free social media management posting tools will help you track and manage multiple social media profiles in a single interface by allowing you to schedule your posting for future release.

ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. It's essential for creating social media content production workflows and managing ongoing projects. You don't have to provide any credit card information to get started with their free trial. You can also sign up for their Hobbyist plan, which is free for single users to get access to four social profiles, one calendar, and 10 posts per month. Their features cover all the bases, from planning and publishing content to reviewing analytics and responding to conversations.

For creating content, your team uses the content hub to collaborate on all ongoing social media content initiatives.

You can integrate with all your favorite tools, including Trello and Slack, and the pinboard makes filling your calendar as easy as dragging and dropping posts.

This platform also includes snippets to save commonly used phrases and a web clipper tool so you can grab resources you want to share while you're browsing the internet. Like many of these tools, Hootsuite offers both free and premium plans. Their free plan is pretty robust and allows you to:.

The free plan also includes some basic analytics to help you track followers, various growth and content stats, and two RSS feed integrations. Not too shabby for a free tool. We love using this tool to schedule out our social posts because of the way it's organized — a visual calendar dashboard shows you what you'll be posting and when. Now that's organization. Another incredible all-in-one platform, SmarterQueue covers all the bases you need for planning, publishing, and analyzing.

Their free options include a reporting tool to help you identify your top Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts. The free social reporting tool helps you determine your best types of content, hashtags, mentions, posting times, and more, so you can optimize all your social media marketing efforts. They also offer an Instagram Top Nine tool, so you can pick your favorite nine posts to share as a collage — these always get lots of engagement at the end of the year.

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.

Later has a highly visual focus. Although it allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, its main emphasis is on Instagram. Later does offer a free plan, with one social account per platform, one user, 30 Instagram posts, 50 Twitter posts, 30 Facebook posts, and 30 Pinterest posts per month. You can schedule photos and upload unlimited images to their Media Library, see your basic Instagram analytics, can search and repost user-generated content.

Unlike all the rest of these social media managers that start with a social message and then allow you to add an image, Later requires you to start a post by uploading a picture. You then add suitable text to the image. The heart of Later is its Media Library. You can add notes and labels to your media items and add a Star to any image you wish to highlight. You can filter your images by Label or Star, by media usage, type of media, and by the time frame in which you uploaded your media.

You can store unlimited media, even on the free plan. The free plan limits you to scheduling static images, but the higher plans add videos, Instagram Stories, and multi-photo posts.

As its name suggests, the heart of Buffer is a queue of posts. You continually add posts to this buffer, and Buffer makes the posts at your designated posting times. Buffer offers a simple Free plan, where you can schedule up to 10 posts across three social accounts. Post scheduling is part of Buffer Publishing. Buffer offers two other apps requiring separate subscriptions :. You can now also get Buffer All-in-One, which includes all three Buffer products. If you begin using Buffer Publishing by trialing the free plan, you will notice that the main dashboard has a decidedly spartan look, with only three menu items — Queue, Analytics, and Settings along the top, and the social accounts you have attached on the left-hand side.

You can still create and schedule up to ten posts. Although you have an Analytics tab, all it does is list the posts you have made over the last week. They give you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to creating posting schedules which are essential for the buffer to work. A combination of creating original posts, adding content with the Buffer browser add-on, and uploading posts from appropriate RSS feeds, should provide plenty of material for your social accounts.

Crowdfire offers a free plan alongside its premium plans. To find new and engaging content for your audience, Crowdfire curates articles according to search terms you choose. Crowdfire presents a default post with copy and a link.

You can publish posts in this format, but I recommend that you personalize it a little to look fresh and appealing. Something any busy influencer or marketer can attest to is the slog of grabbing links from websites and other, online shops, or other resources.

It can be a painful process. Crowdfire will help give you back that time. By connecting your YouTube channel, WordPress site, Etsy or Shopify store, you can publish directly to your social accounts. Crowdfire pulls new content and you can easily publish content or tweak post copy before sharing. Crowdfire would be incomplete without post scheduling. It will help you identify the best times to share content, allowing you to prep content in advance.

Need attention-grabbing images? It pulls images for posts and automatically credits creators. Crowdfire also comes with the option of adding your own RSS feed and a helpful Chrome extension to quickly share articles you come across.

You also get a solid analytics reporting feature. Gather insights on post engagement, and customize reports with metrics that matter most. Analytics also covers competitors. You can spot which posts perform best, or get an overall view of their performance on social. From blog posts to be published to your next Facebook post, everything is easily viewed from your calendar.

You can schedule content across social media accounts, track the success of your posts and campaigns using a range of reports, and access conversations through a team inbox. Like evergreen posts? CoSchedule offers ReQueue as a way to reshare your best stuff. Social can be a complex beast, and more so with a team. In CoSchedule, you get project management and collaboration features that cover workflow think drafts, edits, approvals, etc.

It also makes creating content easier with templates. Once created, producing posts and publishing content becomes streamlined. And this optimized approach carries through to campaigns.

Tracking how well your email and website content performs alongside social posts for a campaign means pulling data from various platforms. And, if you have content like images and copy stored in different places, CoSchedule integrates with tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, and comes with an asset library. And while most features can sometimes feel underdeveloped, there are tools that deliver the goods. E-Clincher falls into the latter category and comes with a day trial to boot.

In addition to common features like post scheduling and a visual content calendar, you get powerful analytics and reporting, a media library, can publish content using Smart Queues an auto-posting feature , and have the option to publish content from your RSS feed. E-Clincher also comes with a URL shortener with tracking and a content curation feature.

Subscribe to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. The Duct Tape Marketing podcast covers everything from earning referrals to managing time and being more productive. Find a Consultant Become a Consultant. Later Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month.

TweetDeck Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. Canva Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Hootsuite Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. Buffer Buffer is also one of the best apps for managing your social media presence and scheduling your posts.

Download here. Read More. There is hardly a small business owner who is not obsessed with this term: marketing strategy. Listen to Podcasts. Best practice: You can set up alerts for your brand name, brand-related keywords, competitors, and industry terms. This will give you a bird's-eye view of relevant online conversations. You can use this information to customize your marketing strategy and modify your campaigns. Canva is my favorite tool for quick and easy graphic design. With thousands of templates, a simple drag and drop functionality and over one million photographs, anyone can create professional, quality graphic design.

This tool provides custom templates for all major categories — social media Facebook, Instagram , posters, newsletters, presentations, invitations, and more.

While some premium templates require you to pay, there are plenty of free options. Users can upload and create their own custom designs as well. From webinar invitations to informative posts, Canva can be used for a variety of social media updates.

Moreover, it is user-friendly. Even someone with no design experience can create beautiful graphics with this tool. Infographics are amazing visual tools to engage with audiences on social media. Therefore, infographics are the best way to share complex information with users. Creating infographics from scratch can be a time-consuming activity. But Piktochart makes this super easy!

There are several predefined templates to choose from. You can add or remove blocks depending on the information you wish to present. With the free account, users can create up to five visuals. Nothing beats Adobe Photoshop when it comes to image editing. But sometimes you just need quick image fixes.

Pixlr is a great tool for this. From removing backgrounds to adding overlays and icons, everything is possible in a few clicks.