In 2021, effective social media management is more important for online businesses and marketing agencies than ever before. To make things even more complicated, successfully managing multiple social media profiles for keeping track of your users has grown more time-consuming and difficult.
Social media management tools are, therefore, a lifesaver if you have burned out from juggling all that activity at your desk. But while there are a plethora of such tools available online, only some of them allow you to try out their features for free and see if they work well with your needs.
Finding the right social media management tools with free trials is tricky if you don’t already have experience. Thankfully, we’ve already found the top free tools for social media management below. Check them out and give them all a chance if you haven’t tried them before!
1. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a robust and versatile social media management tool that allows you to effectively manage team member profiles, schedule posts, research keywords you can use in your content, and much more from a single dashboard. It includes lots of the same features and functionalities that other media management platforms include. But they also have things that distinguish their performance from the pack, like even more advanced reporting tools, lead ads for Facebook, CRM integrations and a browser plugin for SocialShare.
Zoho Social doesn’t just cater to small businesses; they work well for agencies and marketers, too. Pricing between either type of plan is quite varied, ranging from as low as $8.33 to $125 if you have a larger business or agency. They also include a free plan that has most of their main features, such as the URL shortener tool, plus your choice of a single brand to manage.
2. Followerwonk
This social media management tool is far from traditional. But it provides greater depth when it comes to understanding your users and main content audience compared to many other tools online. As an example, it’ll allow you to dive particularly deep into various accounts across Twitter, allowing you to sift the crowds of bots and lurkers and find actual influencers you can use the drive brand growth.
You’ll also be able to analyze the followers you currently have in your stable, and by several aspects: location, followed accounts, and bio are all included metrics. Even better, you’ll be able to check out your relationships with those followers against your competitors. In terms of determining who to target and who to ignore, there’s nothing better than Followerwonk.
It’s especially effective if you understand that followers that are relevant and engaging are much better than high numbers of followers that don’t do anything. To make things easy on you, Followerwonk offers a free account, although it is limited compared to the paid options. Still, the free option is a good choice if you want to try them out before pulling the trigger on a paid plan, which ranges from $29-$80 or so each month.
3. Friends+Me
Out of all the social media management tools, Friends+Me is perhaps the one that focuses the most on Google Plus functions. Friends+Me does work quite well with other social media platforms, of course, and they obviously offer a free plan to let you try out their services before committing.
This free plan doesn’t have the full spread of their features, of course. But it does allow you to utilize two queuing systems for publishing posts and post scheduling up to five per queue. Other tools include browser extensions, link shortening, and a dedicated integration with Zapier. This free option can be combined with all the standard social media platforms like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and more.
While Instagram and Pinterest are supported, you can only include them in your social media management plans with a paid option. This can cost you between $7.50 to upwards of $200 depending on your plan commitment and needs.
4. SocialOomph
SocialOomph offers a huge array of features and functions across a wide variety of platforms. You get all the typical stuff like analytics and post scheduling, but you also have more unique operations you can find across most other free social media management tools. We’re talking things like a DM Twitter inbox cleaner – talk about getting rid of the grunt work of your day! This tool will be particularly useful for businesses that are rapidly taking on followers faster than they can keep up.
There are other specific features for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and more. The managing and scheduling of blog posts are of course supported, and with a clean interface to boot.
SocialOomph does offer a free plan (since it’s on our list), but most of its features revolve around the Twitter stuff mentioned above. It also includes some more generalized tools like URL shortening, keyword tracking, and tweet scheduling. It also lets you manage five Twitter account before you need to bump up to a paid plan.
5. TweetDeck
It’s no secret that Twitter is the lifeblood of many social media efforts in this day and age. If that sounds like you, TweetDeck might be a prime choice. It offers a huge array of Twitter customization tools and management functionalities, like the ability to make and manage your own lists and Twitter searches, the creation of custom timelines, and even the creation of additional team accounts. To make things even better, it’s totally free for any Twitter user. Talk about great value!
Its downside is, of course, that it’s practically useless for any other social media platform. We’d easily recommend it for anyone juggling multiple Twitter accounts at once.
6. Buffer
Buffer is one of the more well-aged social media management tools you can find these days, with a decent review reputation and some significant development time under their belt. They provide a host of standard social media management tools, plus an easy content scheduling system so long as you install their Chrome extensions. They also have a fairly sophisticated post recommendation bot, which does a good job of letting you know the prime time to post based on the history of activity on your site or profile.
The free plan you can try out has a worthwhile collection of features without requiring you to pay a dime. You’ll be able to manage up to three social media profiles and schedule a maximum of 10 posts. Other included functions are things like creating and scheduling image or video content, access to Buffer’s browser extensions, and link tracking and shortening.
7. Hootsuite
Ultimately, Hootsuite is one of the best free social media management tools, bar none. This is partly because it has one of the more robust free plans you can try out. In a nutshell, it allows you to schedule a whopping 30 posts in advance and manage up to three social media profiles on a single screen. You’ll also be able to create your own leads using social contests.
What’s more is the included basic analytics suite, plus twin RSS feed integrations and several content statistics tools. Basically, Hootsuite provides you with all the basic stuff you need to get your social media management project up and running. It’s likely that by the time you are through experimenting with all the free plan has offer, you’ll be more than willing to pay a bit more for their extra features.
Overall, anyone of the above free social media management tools can be excellent when used with the right manager and for the right site. Remember that many of these tools use their free options as tastes for what you can acquire if you commit a little money. Don’t be afraid to try out several of them before settling on your favorite; that’s what the trials are for, after all!
