For small businesses, hiring a digital marketing agency to do social media marketing for them may not be a first option due to costs, concerns over control or other issues. Good thing that there are free tools available for small businesses that they can use for their social media marketing that can make their life easy.
It's just as important for small business owners to look after their social media presence as it is to provide fantastic material for their audience. Small business owners may be able to communicate with their audience through their social media channels, receive useful comments and topic ideas, connect with other individuals in their businesses, and reach out to influencers, among other things, in addition to sharing valuable information with them.
However, because there are so many popular social networks to join – and new ones are always being added to the mix — manually managing all of those accounts is practically impossible. Fortunately, there are numerous free social media management and scheduling applications available to help simplify things for a business owner.
1. Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Later began as an Instagram scheduling tool, but they've now expanded to include support for other social networks and are constantly introducing new features. The app puts a lot of emphasis on visual material. Later supports all of these possibilities, whether you want to plan in-feed picture or video posts, stories, or carousel posts. Later offers a free subscription that you can use indefinitely, but pricier plans include features like statistics, stored captions, scheduled stories, and more. Paid plans start at $9 per month.
2. TweetDeck
TweetDeck will appeal to those who rely on Twitter to communicate their message. TweetDeck is a free programme that lets you manage numerous (unlimited) Twitter accounts from one centralised location. You may customise your own social media dashboard to send and receive tweets, as well as manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. TweetDeck is available as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop software. TweetDeck may be configured to send out pre-scheduled tweets, create Twitter lists, and more. Plus, the best part is that it's always free.
3. Canva
The visual aspect of social media is becoming increasingly important. Canva is a fantastic tool for anyone in charge of social media accounts. You can use any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have to generate designer-level marketing assets. You can now link your social media accounts and publish or schedule content directly from Canva. They feature a free version that allows you access to a good number of pre-made layouts. For only $12.95 per month, the pro plan gets you access to all of the templates.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a well-known and widely used programme for social media scheduling and marketing. Thanks to built-in collaborative tools, you may use it to schedule postings, receive detailed reports, and interact with your colleagues. It allows you to monitor what your consumers are saying while simultaneously seeing various streams. A free restricted plan with three social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages is available.
5. Buffer
Buffer is also one of the best tools for managing and scheduling your social media postings. The app also includes analytics capabilities that allow you to monitor your audience's behaviour and determine when the best time is to post in the future. Its Chrome extension, in particular, is one of our favourites since it easily integrates and never gets in the way, yet it is always there when you need it. It's a more simple and effective method to manage your social media, and you're never more than a few clicks away from getting everything set up. Buffer supports over seven different platforms, with the free plan allowing you to add up to four more.
6. ContentCalculator
The ideal tool for bringing your company together is ContentCal. You may collaborate on ideas, set up approval protocols, construct a content strategy, and then publish your material across numerous platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). The latest 'Respond' capabilities work as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media, and ContentCal's analytics will help you understand your content performance.
One of the standout benefits is that ContentCal interacts with over 2000 other apps, allowing you to build the ideal social media workflow by linking ContentCal to existing tools (think Slack or Trello) and distributing information to channels other than social media, like as emails and blog posts. The best content is developed in collaboration. Involve your staff (and clients) in the content development process, share ideas, get feedback, and watch your content perform better than ever.
7. Monday.com
Monday.com does not have a free plan, however it does provide a 14-day free trial. Its most basic package costs $8 per month per seat. Who strategy is for teams that are just getting started with centralising their work.
Monday.com isn't focused on social media marketing explicitly. Instead, it focuses on increasing your team's productivity and workflow. It's perfect for marketers and those who wish to organise their social media accounts into a logical workflow.
Monday.com is built around boards. A board is a fully customised table that you can use to organise your projects, workflows, and daily tasks. You create visual representations of your workflow on boards. Monday.com has a number of templates to help you get started, including one for social media management. Two boards are created by using this template:
On the Campaign Ideas and Requests board, team members can make proposals for upcoming social media posts. You can utilise the board to construct an effective and standardised workflow for a social media campaign if you feel these ideas are viable for a post.
Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed Campaigns, and Stuck Campaigns are all tracked in the Campaign Progress and Status section.
8. Falcon
Falcon is not a free social media management platform, but it does provide a 14-day free trial, with the cheapest subscription (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams. It doesn't list a price for its more complex Full Suite package, which is aimed at larger businesses with many teams and markets, although it does offer a demo.
Falcon highlights that it provides help seven days a week via real-time in-app chat, email, and phone. It also offers weekly training sessions and a help centre where you can get answers.
The Essentials plan focuses on social media involvement and publishing & scheduling. An editorial calendar can be used to organise, schedule, and modify content across several social media platforms. It has a content pool, which means you may save assets for repurposing, connect to your DAM, and keep files in Falcon's cloud. It is a configurable inbox that allows you to organise numerous feeds to create the inbox that best meets your needs. You can exchange notes and add comments to your team members if you have one. Profile cards for existing connections appear alongside their messages. Falcon provides advanced Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter metrics.
The Suite bundle includes everything in the Essentials plan plus a few extra features (allowing for larger teams and more significant usage). These include social listening, which allows you to watch social media and the internet to learn a lot about your company. Brands, subjects, keywords, and phrases can all be tracked, and advanced parameters can be used to refine them.
You may assess your strategy across all major social networks with Falcon's Full Suite. Falcon's database has over 100,000 brands, allowing you to compare your performance across numerous dimensions. Without leaving Falcon, you can also schedule and post advertising on Facebook and Instagram.
The aesthetic aspects of photographs from the most engaging branded content are identified by Falcon. You can also ask your employees to collect and comment on other firms' extremely engaging branded material.
9. ContentCalculator
A 14-day free trial of ContentCal is available. It's a programme that's similar to CoSchedule in terms of features. It has a robust set of capabilities to assist you in managing our complete content marketing strategy. It's divided into three sections. Here's an overview of what they do:
Publish: Here you'll brainstorm on content ideas with team members, develop workflows, and publish articles, emails, and press releases. Web Clipper, a programme that captures content you find on the web and stores it to your content library for later use, is also included with ContentCal.
Analyze: Examine how audience interaction with content and campaigns has changed over time. Keep an eye on hashtags, stories, top-performing content, and competitors to understand what's working and how you can improve your own. Analyze allows you to see data for paid and organic analytics across platforms and export your results in PDF or PPT format, which is an important part of driving growth.
Engage: Use ContentCal's team mailbox to communicate with customers. You can assign questions to certain teams, depending on the size of your organisation, and they will handle communications from all platforms. For consumer messages, Engage also has a notes option. Team members can add these to create a comprehensive and successful answer to customers.
ContentCal is also developing IQ, a fourth function. It's an AI-powered intelligence solution that provides more in-depth information. It will assist in determining channel performance, assigning a content quality score, measuring competitors, associating income with campaign performance, and providing industry benchmarking.
10. Loomly
While Loomly does not offer a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its most affordable plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year in advance). The Base plan allows for two users and up to ten social accounts.
Loomly allows you to connect all of your social media accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. It's an easy process, albeit, as with other social media management tools, you must adhere to the social media networks' constraints. For example, you can publish to Facebook corporate accounts but not personal pages.
Loomly requires you to create a workflow that corresponds to the way you manage your accounts, whether you work in a team or on your own.
In Loomly, you can choose from three different perspectives:
Calendar view - displays all posts over the course of a month.
List view – shows all posts as a list with important information for each one. Post view – allows you to look at individual posts.
However, Loomly allows you to do more than just schedule posts. It has an interactions function that allows you to manage comments, messages, and @-mentions from social media handles.
Each of your social profiles has its own analytics, as well as an overview on Loomly's main dashboard.
11. AgoraPulse
Despite the fact that AgoraPulse offers a large 28-day free trial, it is one of the most professional, and hence more expensive, social media management tools once the trial period has ended. The $99 per month Medium package is the most affordable.
It comes with a very user-friendly User Interface.
AgoraPulse's unified Inbox is it's beating heart. It displays all of your social accounts' comments, mentions, discussions, and reviews. You can use the Inbox Assistant to create rules that clean up and arrange each account's inbox automatically.
It contains a Social Listening module that allows businesses to listen for mentions of their brand name on social media (or any other term).
AgoraPulse allows you to post material in a variety of ways. The default Publishing page opens a calendar with all of the social messages you've scheduled, queued, published, submitted to approval, assigned to you, or failed to publish. When you use AgoraPulse's bulk publish feature, it's at its most powerful. This allows you to convert a group of photographs into posts by importing a series of posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or a CSV file.
It generates a wide range of reports, both for your entire social media account and for specific pieces of content.
12. Sendible
On all programmes, Sendible offers a free 30-day no-credit-card trial. The Micro plan, which costs $24 a month and includes 12 services for one user, unlimited pst scheduling, and up to 10 queues, is the lowest. Other options include more services and users, as well as more features.
Sendible's main point of differentiation is, indeed, "Services." They're similar to channels or profiles in that they let you choose the features you want to use within your Sendible account.
Sendible has been in operation since 2008 and has evolved over time. You may use it to schedule content for your social media channels as well as to create and publish pieces on all of the major blogging platforms. You can either generate your own material or utilise the Sendible Chrome Extension to publish or schedule content you find while exploring the web. Sendible's content tool, RSS feeds, and Google Alerts can also help you identify high-quality content to share with your audience.
Sendible can also help you centralise your social media administration, including Facebook moderation (automatically eliminating comments and posts from your Facebook Pages containing terms or phrases you select) and uploading and scheduling Facebook Page cover photographs to fit your marketing campaigns.
Although, unlike PromoRepublic, Sendible does not offer an in-built graphics editor, it does include Canva integration, which allows you to design social media graphics in Canva and schedule them to your profiles and pages.
13. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic does not provide a free plan, however it does provide a 14-day trial. Its most basic package is also only $9 per month.
PromoRepublic's design focus is a key area of differentiation. It does appear to be a combination of Canva and a social media management programme. Without leaving the app, you can create and schedule attractive posts.
It allows you to schedule and share content across all major social media platforms, including Instagram and Pinterest. PromoRepublic recommends a posting schedule for each of your social media accounts, but you can quickly change it. You keep track of your posting schedules on a single calendar.
While maintaining a social media presence and ensuring that the material reaches a bigger audience is a difficult undertaking, there are some things a small business owner can do to make it simpler. By using these apps to assist small business owners with tasks that do not require them to use their creative abilities such as scheduling. We hope that you find these apps to be useful.