Social media is a crucial marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. People nowadays turn to social media to find information on topics that interest them. If you don’t give them the content they want, they will simply stop following you and move on to the next source.
The only way to keep your followers and get even more subscribers, is to publish new content, regularly and on time. To do this, you need the right tools to automate content creation and content sharing.
Take a look below at some of the most relevant free tools that you can use to post content to social media platforms.
1. Hootsuite
Plans:
Free
Professional: $19/month+ 30-day free trial
Team: $99/month+ 30-day free trial
Business: $499/month + demo
Enterprise: pricing + demo upon request
Hootsuite has paid plans and a free plan. The free plan is perfect for you if you run a sole proprietorship and you handle multiple social media accounts. Hootsuite allows you to:
Manage multiple accounts. Instead of going from one social platform to the next, you can manage a maximum of 3 accounts from within Hootsuite.
Preschedule messages. You can pre-schedule 30 messages, engage with your audience in your three accounts and
Track growth. Use the free analytics tool to track growth and content performance.
Integrate other apps. If you are already using other apps, you don’t have to worry about integration as Hootsuite integrates with more than 150 free apps, including MailChimp, SoundCloud, YouTube, among others.
Hootsuite makes content management even simpler for you by allowing you to log into all your accounts with one password.
Other useful features you get with Hootsuite include:
- Ability to run contents to help you capture leads
- Community forum to provide on-demand help and answer all your questions.
- Free courses on social media management.
Get Hootsuite Now.
2. Buffer
Plans:
Free plan,
Awesome $10/month + 7-day free trial
Small $99/month, + 14-day free trial
Medium $199/month, + 14-day free trial
Large $399/month + 14-day free trial
Buffer is great for social media management and is loved by individuals and businesses alike. Notable brands like shopify, business insider, about.com, among others, use Buffer to automate content management.
The great thing about buffer is that it allows you to remove guesswork out of your scheduling, to apply parameters that give your content the most exposure. It does this by using follower activity to predict the best times for targeting them with content.
Under the free plan, you can manage a maximum of 1 account per platform. This means that you get 1 Facebook account, 1 twitter, 1 LinkedIn, 1 Instagram account and 1 google+ account (with the exception of Pinterest, which is available with the paid packages).
You get to schedule up to 10 messages per account at any one time. with the chrome extension, you can schedule content that you discover while browsing.
Note however that under the free plan, you cannot add team member accounts nor can you access the social analytics capability built into buffer. To access these features, you have to subscribe for the paid packages.
Get Buffer Now.
3. Tweetdeck
Plans:
Free
A business that relies heavily on tweeter accounts to do business needs tweetdeck. Without it, you would have to sign into each account to post content and engage with audience members. Tweetdeck makes this process easier by allowing you to manage all your content from one dashboard.
It is free for tweeter members, making it very affordable for managing many team accounts. Additionally, since tweetdeck is owned by twitter, you get access to twitter’s helpful features such as twitter searches, twitter lists and custom timelines, all of which allow you to handle a large bulk of scheduling in lesser time.
All you have to do is log in with your twitter account to start using the free tweetdeck plan.
Get Tweetdeck Now
4. Socialoomph
Plans:
Free
Paid plans available on request
Socialoomph originally started as a scheduling automation tool for twitter (original name was tweetlater). In 2009, the company decided to widen their scope, making it possible for users to automate scheduling, monitor activity and follow others on other social media platforms like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Plurk, Tumblr and Facebook. Users can also use Socialoomph as a blogging automation tool and to aggregate RSS feeds.
Socialoomph’s free plan is only available for tweeter users, and comes with features such as:
- Schedule posts to go out even when you are not at your computer.
- Schedule posts to target international audiences
- Receive automatic alerts about keywords you are tracking
- Save drafts for later use
- Url shortening and performance on your Urls
- Schedule deletion of old messages from your inbox
- Clean your twitter account without losing contacts.
You can do all these for free for a maximum of 5 twitter accounts.
Get SocialOomph Now
5. Friends+Me
Plans:
Free $0
Individual$7.50 year, billed annually + free trial
Small$24.17 year, billed annually+ free trial
Medium$49.17 year, billed annually+ free trial
Large $215.84/year, billed annually+ free trial
Friends+Me is a social network management and scheduling tool that makes it easier to schedule and share content within Google+ and to other platforms. At any one time, you can schedule up to 3 messages per platform to post at a time of your choosing.
It is a great tool for team members to collaborate on content creation and sharing. With Friends+Me, you can:
- Publish to google+ profiles, collections, communities and pages,
- Publish to LinkedIn, Facebook, Tumblr and twitter
- Use Mobile apps, desktop apps and extensions that work across main browsers, for faster discovery and sharing of content
- Integrate with 3rd party applications like Zapier
- Use bit.ly and Goo.gl for link shortening
Get Friends+Me Now
6. Mavsocial
Plans:
Free
Advanced: $19/month + free trial
Pro: 1st user $59/month + free trial ($24 per each additional user)
Agency: starting at $199/month + free demo
Enterprise: call for pricing + free demo
Mavsocial is a handy tool to have if you run visual marketing campaigns on your social media platforms. With features like its free chrome extension, you can find content and publish it straight from your browser. The app also supports multiple languages, making it ideal for global teams.
Though mavsocial’s free starter kit will not give you access to some of its useful capabilities such as bulk uploading or social media analytics, it is a great social marketing and scheduling tool to use for individuals or if you want to test drive it before you upgrade.
Most of mavsocial’s features like the post manager, RSS feeds, Facebook tagging and link shortening, are all designed to save you a ton of time while managing your content.
- With the post manager, you can create one post and publish it across multiple accounts with little to no tweaking.
- The Facebook tagging capability makes it easier to target the right audience with the right content.
- The RSS feature also makes Mavsocial a great content discovery tool, which saves on the time you would have to spend browsing the web to find new content.
- Instead of having to use other platforms to shorten links before posting to twitter, you can do it within Mavsocial and save even more time.
If you are ready to radically streamline your social media campaigns, sign up for the free plan.
Get Mavsocial Now
7. Likeable Hub
Plans:
Free
Expert: 299/month
Pro: 599/month
Concierge: Call for quote
Fresh content is important for keeping your audiences satisfied and engaged. But coming up with fresh content takes time and effort. Given how fast things move in the online world, time is a luxury you don’t have. While you are racking your brains trying to manually find content, your competitors could be finding and sharing all sorts of engaging content by the hour.
With just a few clicks of your mouse, Likeable Hub will automatically create and share new content for you. The app will also aid in your social campaigns, social listening, lead generation and analytics.
Other amazing capabilities that come with the free plan include creating landing pages to aid in your lead generation, and managing content on the go with the mobile app.
With this tool, you no longer have an excuse for running out of content. Simply sign up and start using Likeable Hub.
Get Likeablehub Now
8. Later bro (Twittimer)
Plans:
Free
Originally known as Laterbro, Twittimer is handy if you want to schedule content to post later on Facebook and twitter. You can set your schedule to recur if you want to post at the same time each week.
The migration to Twittimer came with added features that allow users to post and edit videos and images. Twittimer also now allows you to post to LinkedIn, a capability that wasn’t available to Laterbro users.
With Twittimer, you can type 1 message and share it across platforms by simply linking multiple accounts. You can also make your posts more engaging by attaching images or videos. Each post has a limit of 1 video or 4 images.
If you are running low on fresh content, you can use the RSS feeds feature to aggregate content from different platforms and websites. The message archives feature allows you to store and manage old messages. Performance tracking is also made easy by the built-in analysis tool and via bit.ly and Goo.gl, which allow you to track performance of the shortened links.
This tool has a clean dashboard and is really easy to use. Get your free package today and start growing your audience.
Get Twittimer Now
9. Hubspot
Plans:
Free
Starter: $50/ month
Basic: $200/ month
Professional: $800/ month
Enterprise: $2400/ month
Hubspot is a full suite CRM, sales and marketing tool. As a social media marketing tool, it is instrumental for saving time spent scheduling and sifting through message streams. It is a great tool for creating a holistic marketing approach.
This is because it allows you to manage your social networks on the same platform you use for creating your marketing campaigns.
Some of the things you can do with HubSpot include:
- Content scheduling, with prime time suggestion. This way, you can plan to share content even when you’re not at your computer.
- Share all the content that appears in your campaigns, such as landing pages, call-to-action and blogs
- Ensure your fresh content posts to social media at the same time as it appears in your blogs
- Monitor and connect with people interested in your brands
- Deep link to your data base to better understand and segment your audience
- Keyword monitoring for deeper engagement with teams and audiences
- Email alerts to sales staff members when keywords they are interested in are mentioned.
- Support for multiple languages
With such features, it is clear that Hubspot is not just an administrative tool, but a powerful software for streamlining social media activity, nurturing leads, and ensuring customer satisfaction.
The free starter kit entitles you to some key features and you can unlock more features by upgrading to HubSpot’s paid services.
Get HubSpot now.
10. Social Rank
Plans:
Basic: Free
Premium: $49/month
Market Intel: Quote available upon request
You will only add value to your followers if you know them. But getting to know your followers cannot be easy, especially when we are talking about hundreds or thousands of people. This is where social rank comes in. Socialrank goes beyond just scheduling to cover most aspects of organizing marketing campaigns on twitter and instagram.
With this tool, you can manage your follower base by organizing them into segments provided in the filter section. Filtering options include: most followed, most valuable, most engaged and chronological. You can also pull a complete profile for each user, a feature that comes in handy when you want to identify your most valuable followers or followers whose interests are aligned to yours.
Additionally, if you want to understand your userbase based on hashtags and keywords, simply type it in and specify the location.
These features make socialrank a powerful tool for customizing campaigns for different audience groups, different geographies and around specific keywords. Working with lists outside of socialrank is also possible, thanks to the csv/pdf export feature.
It’s also worth mentioning that under the free package, you can connect as many accounts as you want.
Get socialrank Now
11. Sendible
Plans:
Free: 30 days
Lite: $49/month
Advanced: $199/month
Pro: $499/month
Though the free package offered for Sendible is limited to 30 days, this software is worth listing here because it is one of those tools that does pretty much every content management task for you. From content curation, to scheduling and engagement, Sendible does it all.
Curation
As a content curation tool, the tool searches for and recommends content that it determines your audiences will find useful.
Scheduling
Under the calendar feature, you can schedule new or old posts. The drag and drop function makes it easy to edit and schedule individual or bulk posts in your calendar. If you want to repost old or best performing content at a later date, you can use the smart queue function to recycle it. With the RSS feed function, you can aggregate your audience’s favorite content from multiple resources and have it auto post to your social networks.
Engagement
Sendible is also a good tool for engaging with customers and for managing your tasks. You can access all messages from different accounts in one priority inbox and prioritize action on important messages. This makes it easy to sort out tasks and allocate to team members. All completed actions are removed from the inbox, leaving you with a clean slate.
You can monitor all this activity using the reporting templates that are built into Sendible. This is available in the pre-done reports, or if you want more details, you can customize your own reports. Whatever your choice, you can queue these reports to go out to you and team members at predetermined times.
Over 20,000 companies are already enjoying the benefits of using Sendible.
Get Sendible Now
12. Dlvrit
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: 9.99/month + free trial
Pro+: 29.99/month + free trial
When you post a lot of content to your blog or website, you need to get the same content to as many social followers as possible. Dlvrit will help you do just that. With Dlvrit, you can schedule Rss feeds to post to Facebook, twitter, Myspace, Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Instagram, spacenet, among others.
The features that come with Dlvrit make it a very effortless tool to use.
Everqueue
This feature ensures you effortlessly fill gaps in your posting calendar. When you add your best text or image content to Everqueue, it will get recycled whenever you have a gap.
Content Search & Import
Using this feature, you can easily find new content and instantly share it. Another great feature for content discovery is the chrome browser extension, which lets you find and share content instantly as you browse.
Category manager
This feature lets you customize content scheduling based on the type of content. For instance, you could create a category called ‘news’ and schedule to send it out at 0800hrs daily. Or you could create a ‘fun’ category and share it every evening at 1700hrs.
With brands like CBS, the Guardian, TMZ, Reuters, ESPN and others using Dlvrit, you have no reason to doubt its capability to make your content management efficient
Under the free plan, you can manage up 10 posts and 5 RSS feeds on 3 social media platforms.
Get Dlvrit Now.
Bottom Line
The main advantage emphasized under each of the tools discussed above, is their capability to save time. The most successful brands in the market use most of these tools, with much success.
Instead of sitting down for hours to look for content, type it and schedule it, get yourself one of these social media content scheduling tools and your work will become a whole lot easier. Whatever time you save, you could put it into developing your business strategy and growing other areas of your business.
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