In this day and age, people turn to social media to learn more about your brand, what you do daily, and how your products and services fare against your competitors — juggling all those channels can be difficult, this is where social media management tools come in.
Social media plays a crucial role in increasing brand awareness and provides a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy. However, with so many different social channels to manage — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and more — it takes a ton of work. From planning, creating, and up to the actual scheduling and posting of content, engaging with your audience, and analyzing performance. These are just some of the tasks involved in building a significant social media presence.
Fortunately, there are a lot of social media management tools available, and many of the amazing ones are even free to use! Whether free or paid, social media management tools offer a lot of assistance in lightening the workload and saving you a great amount of time in developing your business.
To give you an idea of the options, we put together a list of our top free social media management tools. All the tools are 100% free permanently, with no credit card required.
What are social media management tools?
If this is the first time you’ve heard about social media management tools, then you’re in for a ride! Social media management tools are utilized to make publishing, managing, and analyzing your social platforms much more effortless.
Whether you’ve been in social media management for some time or you’re just starting, social media management tools are easy to navigate and manage. You only need to connect your social media account, and you can immediately begin scheduling posts and responding to comments through a consolidated dashboard.
Social media managers find management tools indispensable in their line of work because:
- You can manage multiple social media accounts in one place; that is, you don’t have to log in to each of your accounts just to post content.
- Some social media management tools give you access to a comprehensive and informative dashboard.
- You can easily engage with your audience and followers.
- It gives you insightful reports that you can use in order to grow your brand.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the longest-running social media management tools out in the market, and they’re giving you access to their powerful tool for free. As one of the most popular names in social media management, Hootsuite helps people connect on the top social platforms.
Its industry-leading features and resources help simplify the process of planning, creating, and promoting content. Hootsuite’s free plan includes all the tools to get you to social media success.
Some of Hootsuite’s appealing features include the ability to schedule posts up to 30 days in advance. So you can conveniently plan a month’s worth of content across your social media platforms and easily see any content gaps using the built-in planner. You can also easily connect with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, and LinkedIn, as well as access to other free Hootsuite apps.
Not only that but there is also a free platform certification course on Hootsuite. Improve your knowledge about social media management with their series of 45 video tutorials and receive an industry-recognized certification.
2. Buffer
Like Hootsuite, Buffer has been in the social media management space for a long time. Buffer is a platform that allows you to manage multiple social media profiles easily and includes many of the same features as Hootsuite.
This platform organizes your scheduled posts in a queue list format so you can quickly scroll and monitor the posts that will go out on your various social media accounts. Buffer also allows you to schedule content while browsing the web with Chrome extensions.
One of Buffer’s amazing features is its ability to monitor user activity and then suggest the perfect time to post based on your followers’ activity. That’s pretty handy when it comes to raking in followers!
With a basic free Buffer account, you can link three social media accounts and ten scheduled posts at a time.
3. Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a social media management tool tailored exclusively for use with Twitter.
It specializes in providing the most in-depth and useful tools on this list. Followerwonk will help you analyze and optimize your Twitter audience. It does this by suggesting the best people for you to follow, ultimately helping you grow your base. If Twitter is part of your social media marketing campaign, this tool is a must-have.
4. Later
Later is a marketing tool that works best with Instagram. However, its visual capabilities can also be used on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
As a member of both the Instagram Partner Program and the Pinterest Marketing Partner, Later lets you do visual scheduling, media management, marketing, and analytics features.
With Later, you can schedule 30 posts per month. Simply drag and drop your photos and videos onto the calendar together with your ideal date and time of posting. Check how they look on the grid preview, then wait for them to publish.
Later’s Linkin.bio Lite feature lets you add one link to each Instagram post, turning your feed into a clickable, optimized landing page. In addition, their Instagram Analytics Lite feature enables you to get the insights you need, such as current follower count, highlights of your top five best-performing posts, and a summary of the number of engagements you lately received.
5. SocialOomph
SocialOomph has been around for more than a decade and is considered one of the firsts to offer social media management tools.
The platform was built to increase one’s productivity through their advanced social media post scheduling tools. Ideal for both individual players and teams alike, SocialOomph offers a solid set of features. They have user-friendly tools in scheduling posts and queues to avoid posting too much or providing outdated information.
SocialOomph offers a free plan which includes the following features:
- Schedule an unlimited number of posts – No limits as to how many posts are in your queue, as long as it doesn’t exceed three posts per hour.
- Free plans can connect to Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, Mastodon, Discord, and StockTwits, as well as WordPress, Shopify, and Tumblr.
- Bulk upload your content onto the platform (not images or videos), schedule content to publish at a specific date and time, and even set them to self-destruct. So none of your feed is outdated.
Since SocialOomph was originally built for Twitter, it is a great choice if this is the social media account you want to manage.
6. Visage
Your social media management “war chest” wouldn’t be complete if you didn’t have any image optimizer in your arsenal.
Every social media campaign needs optimized images. Thus, Visage is an important tool to help companies design social media graphics that are perfectly optimized for each platform.
Visage’s extensive graphics templates make it easy to manage your brand’s style and tone even if you’re a newbie in social media management. With their tools, you can ensure consistency across all social platforms. Their designs are also easily customizable and editable. You can always choose to collaborate with your team to update and remix graphics, with restrictions set by role.
7. Canva
Aside from Visage, Canva should be on your list of awesome and free social media tools every marketer needs. This convenient web-based tool lets you create compelling images for your campaigns. Use it to spruce up your content so that more people will like and share your posts.
Best of all, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to use Canva. It comes with tons of ready-made templates and cool graphics you can use. This means you can create an attention-grabbing featured photo with just a few clicks and edit.
Canva is available for free, but you can always avail of their premium tools if you want to optimize your Canva experience. It is a very good investment and only costs $12.95 a month.
8. Bitly
Have you ever seen social media posts where they’re able to squeeze in several links to their content without bearing the entire web address? We have always thought of that as a fantastic feature, and we have Bitly to thank for that.
Bitly allows you to shorten any URL so that it fits nicely across your social media channels. What’s amazing is that these shortened URLs work with any platform. Bitly even lets you track your performance with individual link analytics. This will help you optimize your marketing efforts by basing on the insights you’ll receive.
9. Rafflepress
Who doesn’t want some freebies? No one. Whether they’re just passing by your account or they’re there to stay, everyone wants to win something via raffle.
RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin (exclusive for WordPress users). You can easily come up with fun online contests as a way to engage your audience with Rafflepress’ drag-and-drop giveaway builder and lovely giveaway templates.
What’s great with RafflePress is its verified bonus actions feature. With this feature, you can easily reward users for performing specific actions like following you on Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., viewing a Facebook post or video, subscribing to your YouTube channel, sharing your giveaway on social media, and much more.
10. LastPass
Last but certainly not least, in our ten free social media tools list, is LastPass. With all the apps and tools we mentioned, it would be a pain to remember the private details (AKA passwords) you used for each of your accounts.
Of course, you don’t like the idea of working so hard to build your social media presence only to lose it to some hacker. Thus, LastPass is going to be your best friend.
LastPass saves your passwords in its encrypted password vault. You can also let it create ultra-strong passwords for social media. We’re talking about total random passwords here that you cannot possibly make yourself.
You can unlock the LastPass password vault using a master password. Every time you’re logged in, LastPass will automatically enter your login details each time you try to log into a social media site.
The benefit of using LastPass is that you only have to keep one password—your LastPass password—while securing multiple strong passwords for all your social media sites.
There you have it, ladies and gents! We hope that you give the tools and apps on this list a try. The moment that you do, you’re on your way to social media stardom in no time!
