Times Square, New York City. A man approaches two policemen to report a crime he witnessed the night before. Luckily for this brave citizen, these are no ordinary cops. These are social media cops—they’ve been trained to use Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, WordPress, and LinkedIn to help stop crime before it spreads. Download our free PDF guide to learn about 10 Best Free Social Media Posting Tools and the brave cop who’s using them.
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Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month. Later started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool, but since its inception, they’ve added support for other social networks and are continuously adding new features. The app has a strong focus on visual content. Whether you want to schedule in-feed image or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all of these options. Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but you get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans. Their paid plans start at $9/month.
TweetDeck
Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free application that enables you to manage multiple (unlimited) Twitter accounts from a unified interface. You can create your own customizable social media dashboard that allows you to send and receive tweets and manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. You can use TweetDeck as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop app. TweetDeck can be set to post scheduled tweets, build Tweet lists, and more. And the extra special part is that it’s always free.
Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. You can use it to schedule posts, receive in-depth reports, and collaborate with your team members, thanks to built-in teamwork features. It enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what your customers are saying. There is a free limited plan available for 3 social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages.
Monday.com
Monday.com doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial. Its Basic plan costs $8/seat/month. That plan is for teams just getting started with managing all their work in one place.
Monday.com doesn’t specifically target social media marketing. Instead, its focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your team. It is ideal for marketers and those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.
Boards are at the heart of Monday.com. A board is a fully customizable table for managing your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards that represent your workflow. Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point, one of which targets social media management. That template creates two boards:
- Campaign ideas and requests
- Campaign progress and status
Team members can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. If you decide these ideas are viable for a post, you can use the board to create an efficient and standardized workflow for a social media campaign.
The Campaign Progress and Status keeps track of your campaigns, split into Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed, and Stuck.
Falcon
Although Falcon is not a free social media management tool, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It doesn’t give a price for its more advanced Full Suite plan, targeting larger companies with multiple teams and markets, although it enables you to request a demo.
Falcon emphasizes that it offers 7-days a week support, with a real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. It also provides weekly training sessions, and you can find answers in its help center.
The Essentials plan focuses on publishing & scheduling and social media engagement. You can use an editorial calendar to plan, schedule, and edit across multiple social networks. It offers a content pool, meaning you can store assets for repurposing, plug into your DAM, and use Falcon’s cloud storage. It provides a customizable inbox, where you can arrange multiple feeds to build the inbox that suits you best. If you have a team, you can share notes and add messages to your team members. Existing contacts’ profile cards appear beside their messages. Falcon offers advanced metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The Suite package offers everything available in the Essentials plan (allowing for larger teams and more significant usage) and adds a number of additional features. These include social listening, where you can monitor social media and the internet to discover much information about your business. You can track brands, topics, keywords, and phrases and even refine them with advanced parameters.
With Falcon’s Full Suite, you can benchmark your strategy across all major social networks. Falcon has a database of over 100,000 brands, letting you benchmark your performance on multiple levels. You can also schedule and post ads on Facebook and Instagram without having to leave Falcon.
Falcon identifies the visual elements of images from the most engaging branded content. You can even invite your team to collect and comment on highly engaging branded content from other brands.
ContentCal
ContentCal offers a 14-day free trial. Feature-wise, it is a CoSchedule-like tool. It offers a powerful collection of features to help you manage our entire content marketing plan. It’s segmented into 3 tools. Here’s a look at what they do:
- Publish: This is where you’ll go to collaborate with team members on content ideas, create workflows, and publish articles, emails, and press releases. ContentCal also comes with Web Clipper, a tool that captureS content you come across on the web and saves it to your content library for use later.
- Analyze: Dig into audience engagement with content and campaigns. Track hashtags, stories, top-performing content, and competitors to see what’s working and how to improve your content. Reporting is a major component of driving growth, and Analyze lets you visualize data for paid and organic analytics across platforms, and export your u findings in PDF or PPT format.
- Engage: Connect with customers through ContentCal’s team inbox. Depending on the size of your organization, you can assign queries to specific teams, handling messages from all platforms. Engage also offers a notes feature for messages from customers. These can be added by team members to formulate a complete and effective response to customers.
ContentCal’s also working on a fourth feature called IQ. It’s an AI-powered intelligence solution to offer deeper insights. It will help identify channel performance, assign a content quality score, benchmark competitors, attribute revenue to campaign performance, and deliver industry benchmarking.
Sprout Social
Another all-in-one social media management tool is Sprout Social. It provides tools that cover all essential aspects of social media management – ranging from scheduling, drafting, publishing to monitoring and reporting.
Especially, Sprout Social has social CRM tools that help you understand your customers, serve them in a better manner, and establish a strong relationship with them.
Reporting is a superb feature of this tool. All reports for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn are designed so neatly and beautifully that you can use for further purpose without having to edit anything on them.
Loomly
While Loomly doesn’t provide a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its cheapest plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year up-front). That Base plan permits two users and a maximum of ten social accounts.
You can connect all your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to Loomly. It is a simple process, although, like all social media management software, you have to live within limitations set by the social media networks, e.g., you can post to Facebook business accounts, but not personal profiles.
Loomly asks you to set a workflow that matches the way you run your accounts, whether you are part of a team, or operate your accounts solo.
You can select from three views in Loomly:
- Calendar view – shows all posts spread over a calendar month.
- List view – displays all posts as a list and includes essential information for each
- Post view – allows you to examine individual posts
You can do more than just schedule posts in Loomly, however. It offers an interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle @-mentions.
Analytics are available for each of your social accounts, as well as Loomly’s main dashboard containing an overview.
Conclusion
Finding the best free social media posting tools can be a challenge, but one application can do it all whether you want to post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or even Twitter.