Free.In is a social media tool that helps brands and influencers manage their Instagram accounts. It’s a beautiful, easy-to-use dashboard that gives you access to all of your follower information—and it’s totally free!
We know you’re busy, so we’ve built this tool to help you focus on what matters: creating awesome content and growing your account.
Table of Contents
Free.In Social Media Tools
Time-consuming. That’s one way to describe posting to social media, reviewing analytics for each platform, and handling other aspects of social media marketing manually. No wonder social media management tools are in such high demand.
But with so many to choose from—and some with hefty price tags—you may struggle to figure out which tools are both good and affordable. This list will end that struggle, breaking down both the zero-cost features of the best free social media management tools and their paid options.
Best free social media management tools in 2022
Buffer
Friends+Me
Later
CoSchedule
Hootsuite
Crowdfire
Tailwind
Buffer: Best for scaling
Buffer is one of the top contenders in the social media management space.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 3
Platforms supported: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest
Scheduling: Available for up to 10 posts per channel
best free social media management tools – buffer
Noteworthy free features
Buffer’s free plan includes:
Posting schedules. Set the next content in your queue to automatically publish on the next scheduled day and at the time you choose.
Shuffle queue. Especially if you create social media content in batches on the same topic, you may want to shuffle your posts so that they’re published in a random order and add variety to your feeds.
Google Analytics Campaign tracking. See how much traffic your social media posts are driving so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Start Page. Create short landing pages to tell people about your business, direct them to your website and content outside of social media or provide information specific to your latest social media marketing
While the free version is fairly standard, Buffer is a great tool to start out with if you plan to scale your social media marketing efforts up. Take a look at some of the perks of its paid options.
Paid plans & features
As your social media marketing needs and team change, Buffer can grow with you.
Essentials at $6 per channel per month: Includes unlimited social media channels with up to 2,000 scheduled posts per channel features, custom video thumbnails, multi-channel campaigns, and more.
Team at $12 per channel per month: Includes unlimited users, exportable and branded reports, custom access and permissions, and more.
Agency at $120 per month for first 10 social channels ($6 per channel per month for additional channels): Includes Google Analytics integrations, custom UTM parameters, and approval workflow tools.
Friends+Me: Best for beginners
Friends+Me is a lesser-known social media tool but a good one if you’re looking for a simple tool to get you started.
Number of users: 2
Number of profiles: 2
Platforms supported: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest
Scheduling: Available for 5 posts per queue (2 queues included on the free plan)
best social media management tools – friends and me
Noteworthy free features
Free features of Friends+Me include:
Bulk scheduling. Upload several posts to a queue of your choice at once to save time on manual scheduling.
Flexible usage. Use the browser extension, desktop app or mobile app (Android or iOS) to share content easily.
Zapier integration. Automate actions like creating and scheduling new posts or streaming new content from RSS feeds to your Friends+Me account for publishing.
Since the number of profiles, platforms supported, and scheduled posts per queue are relatively low compared to some other free plans, Friends+Me is good if you’re just getting started building a social media presence. On the bright side, even the free plan allows for team collaboration with up to one member, which is uncommon among free social media management tools.
Paid plans & features
If you need a more flexible Friends+Me plan, you have four options.
Individual at $9 per month: Includes up to five queues, 500 scheduled posts per queue, 10 additional team members, and priority support.
Small at $29 per month: Includes 15 queues, 1,500 scheduled posts per queue, and 20 additional team members.
Medium at $$59 per month: Includes up to 30 queues, 3,000 scheduled posts per queue, and 30 additional team members.
Large at $259 per month: Includes up to 120 queue, 5,000 scheduled posts per queue, and 50 additional team members.
Later: Most platforms supported
Later, which started out solely as an Instagram scheduling tool (when’s the best time to post on Instagram anyway?), is now more of an all-in-one social media scheduler.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 6 (1 per platform listed below)
Platforms supported: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn
Scheduling: Available for 10 posts per profile per month
best free social media management tools – later
Noteworthy free features
What are some cool features you’ll have access to in Later?
Media library. Upload or collect your visual content in one place for easy access, organization, and re-sharing later.
Visual Instagram Planner. Drag and drop media onto the Visual Instagram Planner to design eye-catching posts that match your brand aesthetic.
Bio. Add a Linkin.bio page to your social media bios to drive traffic your website and make sales.
Most free social media management tools support three to five platforms with TikTok often left out. Later currently supports six major social platforms—TikTok included! (And the best time to post on TikTok? When’s that?)
Paid plans & features
If ever you consider upgrading for paid features, you can try any of the following plans free for 14 days:
Start at $15 per month: Includes one user, one social set and 30 posts per social profile.
Growth at $40 per month: Includes up to three users, three social sets, 150 posts per social profile, and add-ons for social sets and users.
Advanced at $80 per month: Includes up to six users, six social sets, and unlimited posts.
CoSchedule: Best beyond just social media content
CoSchedule—a popular marketing management tool—finally has a free forever version of it’s Marketing Calendar. It doesn’t disappoint.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 2
Platforms supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
Scheduling: Available for up to five messages
best free social media management tools – coschedule
Noteworthy free features
Some cool features of the forever free Marketing Calendar are:
Messages and campaigns. Schedule a single post across multiple social networks or schedule series of messages to post across multiple networks over time.
Best time scheduling. Let CoSchedule publish your posts whenever they’re most likely to get good visibility and engagement.
Sit back and relax while your evergreen content is automatically reshared according to your publishing schedule.
Historical social messages imports. Upon adding a new profile, CoSchedule imports the last 60 days of messages or up to 100 past messages so that you can measure or reschedule them.
This tool isn’t just great for social media scheduling; it’s built for overall marketing content management. So, if you prefer scheduling content for social media networks, email campaigns, blogs, and so on through a single marketing platform, this is the software you need.
Paid plans & features
Thinking of upgrading to a paid version of Marketing Calendar? Here are your options.
Pro at $39 per month: Includes unlimited social media publishing, bulk scheduling, automation, campaign templates, and priority support.
Business, which requires a custom quote: Includes multi-channel campaigns, workflow automation, asset and file management storage, team performance reporting, and more.
Hootsuite: Best for paid post promotion
Hootsuite, one of the most popular social media tools available, has a solid, reliable free version.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 2
Platforms supported: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest
Scheduling: Available for up to 5 messages at a time
best free social media management tools – hootsuite
Noteworthy free features
Hootsuite’s straightforward free plan includes:
Content customization. You can schedule a post across the most popular social networks simultaneously but tweak the post for each platform.
Streams and boards. For each of your feeds, you can set up boards to monitor activity on your social media accounts or discover new content, conversations, and trends.
Promoted posts. Reach more of your target audience on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram with the Boost Feature.
While the free plan doesn’t have many bells and whistles, it handles the basics flawlessly and, in contrast to many other tools, allows for paid advertising on social. So if promoted posts are part of your strategy but you don’t want to spend beyond your ad budget, this is the go-to free tool.
Paid plans & features
If you’re considering upgrading, these are your options.
Professional at $49 per month: Includes one user, 10 social accounts, access to messages in one inbox, and post prescheduling.
Team for $129 per month: Includes up to three users, 20 social accounts, team access and roles with permissions, etc.
Business at $739 per month: Includes up to five users, 35 social accounts, extended functionality with premium apps, and more.
Enterprise, which requires custom pricing. Includes automatic assignment of posts or comments to team members, quarterly business reviews, Hootsuite Social Advertising, unlimited post promotion, and more.
Crowdfire: Best for curation
Crowdfire is a great free social media management tool if curation (and redistribution of your own content) are part of your content marketing strategy.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 3
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram
Scheduling: Available for up to 10 posts per account
best free social media management tools – crowdfire
Noteworthy free features
Some standout features of Crowdfire’s free plan include:
Unlimited article and image curation. Easily curate and share your own content, as well as high-quality content produced by others. This will keep your profiles and your audience engaged while also easing the pressure to create all social media content from scratch.
Advanced analytics. Although you can only access one day of advanced analytics data, it’s better than nothing. Most free social media software plans only allow access to basic analytics!
Chrome extension. Share articles with your followers on the fly without having to open Crowdfire or the social network of your choice to create and publish a post.
This tool is best if you’re interested in curation. It reduces the manual legwork, helping you find owned and unowned content based on the topics you typically cover.
Paid plans & features
Crowdfire has three paid versions to choose from.
Plus at $9.99 per month: Includes up to five accounts, 100 scheduled posts per account, 90 days of advanced analytics data, and more.
Premium at $49.99 per month: Includes up to 10 accounts, bulk scheduling, calendar view, up to 15 RSS feeds, the ability to track and reply to mentions, analysis of two competitors per account, and so on.
VIP at $99.99 per month: Includes up to 25 accounts, 800 scheduled posts per account, up to two team members per profile, priority support, and more.
Tailwind: Best for visual platforms
With no credit card required, you can create a free account with Tailwind, which has a focus on post design for visual platforms like Instagram.
Number of users: 1
Number of profiles: 3 (1 per platform listed below)
Platforms supported: Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook
Scheduling: Available for up to 20 posts per month
best free social media management tools – tailwind
Noteworthy free features
Some great features of Tailwind’s free plan include:
Photo and video support. Stop users mid-scroll with eye-catching images and videos. (Most other social media management software only allows video and images for paying users.)
Post designs. Upload images and Tailwind Create will automatically design professional-quality posts according to your brand colors, fonts, and logos.
Bulk uploads. Stop copying and pasting posts into the scheduler one by one and save tons of time with bulk uploads.
Does your social media strategy involve a lot of visuals and videos? If so, and if you don’t use more text-based platforms like LinkedIn, Tailwind is a great pick for you. Especially since you can create multiple post types from a single design, which is a huge time-saver.
Paid plans & features
Tailwind’s paid options are as follows:
Pro at $19.99 per month: Includes up to 100 posts per month, 200 post designs, advanced analytics, and more.
Advanced at $49.99 per month: Includes up to two accounts each for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, up to 1,000 posts per month, unlimited post designs, two users, and the list goes on.
Max at $99.99 per month: Includes up to three accounts per social network, unlimited posts, and up to five users.
Which is the best free social media management tool?
As you can see, there are several good, free social media management tools out there. The seven we’ve covered here are worth looking into especially if you plan to expand your social media efforts in the future. Starting with a tool that can grow with you will save you the hassle of switching and adjusting to a new tool later.
But where should you start? Here’s a recap of our list.
Buffer: best if you plan to scale your social media efforts for scaling.
Friends+Me: best if you’re just getting started with social media.
Later: best for scheduling posts to most of the major social platforms.
CoSchedule: best if you want an all in one platform for social media and other marketing campaigns.
Hootsuite: best if you want to schedule organic posts and have a budget for promoted posts.
Crowdfire: best if you’re interested in curation as a way to keep your social media calendar full and heighten engagement.
Tailwind: best if your focus is on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
best free social media management tools
Social media has exploded into a world of digital living. It now becomes an indispensable part of digital marketing. However, just because over 3 billion people are using social media worldwide, doesn’t mean it’s easy to leverage social media to its potential.
Success in social media depends much on users. Their habits are ever-changing, and new platforms come into existence. So many changes to catch up on, so many channels to manage, and it can be pretty overwhelming for social media managers.
But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with the following best tools for social media management.
Table of Contents
What is social media management?
Social media management techniques
Quality first
Data tracking and analyzing
Automate repetitive tasks
Use essential tools
10+ Best free social media management tools
Top 1. Circleboom Publish
Top 2. NapoleonCat
Top 3. SocialOomph
- Zoho Social
- Ubercircle
- Buffer
- Friends+Me
- Sprout Social
- Later
- IFTTT
- ScheduGram
- Hootsuite
- SocialPilot
- Tweetdeck
- Social Champ
What is social media management?
Social media management encompasses many moving pieces in the process of managing online interactions and content on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Twitter. It’s to create the online face of a company, promote and sell products.
A social media manager is in charge of handling social media activities with many tasks, from creating, scheduling content to analyzing data, and engaging with the audience.
Therefore, social media management goes beyond just posting things to your company’s social media accounts. It starts with determining which person you want your company to represent on social media. Then you’ll need to create appropriate content, engage with the audience, and look for new opportunities to increase visibility as well as reach out to more people.
Social media management techniques
Social media management can be time-consuming and irritating. It’s also a job that requires a wise investment and considerable efforts. And if you want to be a top-notch social media manager, here are a few of the best tips:
Quality first
Consistency is the key to social media content publishing, but it would be better to have nothing rather than nonsense posts with invaluable content. Having a constant flow of updates is no more important than sharing content that delivers value. You’ll want to make sure that your content is excellent or appealing enough to be re-shared or retweeted, and your brand name is mentioned.
If you can create content that stays relevant and useful for your audience over time, there would be an influx of engagements. This tip is a way more effective to gain the audience’s attention and build a long-term bond with them across social media channels. After all, content is the core of social media marketing.
Data tracking and analyzing
Data doesn’t tell a lie, it shows your social media strategy is hitting the mark or not, which content is favorable and which one is falling. You will not know your posts have reached out to how many people and the engagement rate if you don’t look at the numbers! Therefore, tracking and analyzing data plays a vital role in social media management.
Many tools help to mine social media data quickly, such as Buffer – useful for analyzing tweets or looking at Facebook insights. You’ll get to know metrics related to every goal you’ve set for your social media strategy.
Automate repetitive tasks
Getting bored with overwhelming and mundane tasks that need to be done on social media day by day? You can stop wasting time on those repetitive tasks and save time by automating your social media efforts.
But how? Many tools can ease your social media management by various automation recipes. They are not only available for automatically sharing posts across many platforms at once, but also enabling you to find new content. One of the most recommended tools is IFTTT that we’ll discuss more in the next section.
Use essential tools
You can maximize your social media efforts by using multi-functional tools. These tools can help you manage your social media campaigns more effectively, streamline your workflows, and save hours of fulfilling your social media feeds.
Social media management tools have various functions ranging from scheduling to tracking and analyzing data. You may use different tools for your social media activities, depending on the purpose and requirements of your social media strategy. Whatever tools you use, make sure it fits your business in terms of price, functionality, usability, and efficiency. It can waste time and money if you’re using the wrong tool.
Luckily, most of the social media management tools are affordable and even free, so it makes sure to have a solution for you.
10 Best free social media management tools
Top 1. Circleboom Publish
Circleboom publish
Circleboom Publish
Circleboom Publish as the most comprehensive social media management tool supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile. You can connect and manage your multiple accounts on these social media platforms from the same, simple Circleboom dashboard.
Thanks to its intuitive scheduling tools, you can share your social media posts immediately or schedule them for a later, planned time. Also, you can set time intervals and send your social media posts continuously by using queue scheduling.
Circleboom Publish enables you to create and design your social media content on its own dashboard. Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy come as built-in tools and help users to organize their social media posts easily. Canva provides ready-to-use social media templates for each platform so you don’t need to mind image size requirements. You can enrich your social media content with handy photos, animations, filters, effects, fonts, and many other useful elements and tools on Circleboom.
Last but not least, you can connect multiple RSS Feeds to your multiple accounts. So you can keep your social media accounts always fresh and posting even while you are sleeping. And, the “Discover Articles” feature makes you find amazing articles from reputable magazines all over the world, based on your interests, and share them with your audience.
Top 2. NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is an advanced social media management tool. Its flagship product, the Social Inbox, helps brands manage social media engagement and provide excellent social customer service across all major social platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business.
The Auto-moderation feature helps social media managers in managing their profiles hands free. You can use it to filter out and automatically handle the most recurrent questions, and also to protect your social profiles from harmful content, such as comments including abusive language or spammy links.
With NapoleonCat, businesses and individuals can improve their response rates, streamline social communications, and analyze their performance – and it’s all available in one user-friendly dashboard. The tool’s other features include automated publishing, reporting, and competitive analysis.
Top 3. SocialOomph
SocialOomph
SocialOomph
SocialOomph offers a wide range of features for multiple social media platforms, from typical features like scheduling and analytics to some interesting ones like automatically removing outdated Twitter DMs from users’ inbox. According to the statistics by Zendesk, SocialOomph ranks in the top 5% of social media management apps.
This tool has capabilities to manage your activities across many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. For Twitter, it can automate direct messages to new followers to welcome and start building a connection with them. You can also look for high-influencing Twitter individuals by setting up keyword searches.
- Zoho Social
Zoho Social
Zoho Social
Zoho Social offers great support in growing your business, or even agency, by optimizing your brands on social media platforms. The tool features a cohesive function list that allows you to track your social channels’ performance seamlessly at ease.
With Zoho, you can flexibly schedule your posts with your own timeline, or use Zoho’s predictions for the times your followers are the most active to increase the reach rates. The tool is supported by a content calendar that enables you to visualize the posting timeline and organize your posts as you wish. Monitoring your posts on Zoho Social is no longer challenging as there are multiple listing columns provided to keep you updated with what matters across channels. Especially, you can grasp your audience’s insights with the comprehensive analytics tool pack including Facebook lead ads, CRM integrations, and advanced reporting features.
Zoho Social offers some quite affordable plans for individuals, businesses, and agencies, ranging from $15 to $400 per month. Each plan is provided with an equivalent feature list to satisfy specific market needs. You can try these plans for free in advance, and consider your payment later after the trial ends.
- Ubercircle
Ubercircle
Ubercircle
Ubercircle will help to streamline your social media processes and deliver content to your audience effectively. You can save hours of planning, scheduling, analyzing, and reporting on social media networks. It takes only 10-20 minutes a day to get all tasks on set and ready to go live.
Ubercircle allows you to work straight from the web without having to download the app and install anything. That makes things more convenient!
Another noteworthy feature is the ability to organize photos and videos. All your photos and videos will be stored in one place accessible on any device. It’s easy to sync photos and videos from the phone, desktop, Google Drive, or Dropbox. From here, you can also edit your media with a few drag-and-drop operations.
- Buffer
Buffer
Buffer
Buffer has been a popular social media management tool for a long time. It’s an intuitive and dependable place where you can manage your social media networking in a neat and organized dashboard.
The app offers a full package of features for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration. Your scheduled posts display in a queue list format. You just need to scroll down to see which posts already go the status of your posts, whether they go live, platform and time.
On Buffer, you can track your followers’ activity and know the perfect time to publish your content based on that.
- Friends+Me
Friends+Me
Friends+Me
Friends+Me not only focuses on Google+ features but also helps you to achieve goals by boosting your content promotion across all social media networks. Frends+Me enables you to stay focused on the creation of great content to share, which is the best way to increase your brand visibility. It has available plans for businesses of all sizes.
Users can share their Google+ content to other networks effortlessly. It’s flexible and simpler than many other tools.
- Sprout Social
Sprout Social
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.
- Later
Later
Later
Later claims to be the number one marketing platform for Instagram. It’s undeniably one of the most cost-effective and worthwhile tools for visually planning, schedule, and analyzing social media content, especially for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
You can schedule Instagram posts for a week in just 20 minutes with visual calendars, drag-and-drop operations, and automation scheduling. You can also preview your Instagram posts
- IFTTT
IFTTT
IFTTT
IFTTT allows you to unify your posts on different social media platforms. This tool helps you build your own commands to connect various applications so that they’ll perform actions automatically if triggered.
For example, if you post an image on Facebook, then tweet the image to your followers on Twitter. You can also have that image saved in your Dropbox account and shared on Instagram as well. A single and simple process does it with IFTTT.
- ScheduGram
ScheduGram
ScheduGram
Everyone is checking images on Instagram all the time. Having a scheduling tool that helps you to create a constant flow of content posting on this trending platform opens a door for your business to increase brand visibility. ScheduGram is undoubtedly a great solution.
With ScheduGram, you can bulk upload your scheduled posts and manage multiple profiles with ease. You will receive email notifications at the time of posting.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools that can streamline your social media management. With the help of this tool, you can find, schedule, manage, and report on social media with ease. It enables you to keep track of control what’s happening in your social media world all in one convenient dashboard.
It’s an optimal and time-saving tool that creates a constant flow of your social media updates. It keeps your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling hundreds of posts at the same time across multiple platforms. In detail, you can schedule unlimited posts in advance, manage more than three social media accounts in one dashboard, and integrate out-of-the-box with over 150 solutions to enhance your social media efforts.
Customizable and comprehensive reports provide insights that you’ll need to measure your social media results. You’ll know how people are interacting with your content or how your social media campaign is performing. All the good and bad show up in front of your eyes. It’s also easy to deal with keywords, hashtags, mentions, and messages from your audience.
- SocialPilot
SocialPolot
SocialPolot
SocialPilot is a simple and const-effective social media marketing tool. It’s one of the most chosen tool for teams and agencies to streamlize the social media management. Over 115,000 businesses use SocialPilot that enables them to ease social media tasks daily and increase engagement in the community effectively.
Aside from fundamental functionalities like bulk scheduling posts, SocialPilot offers users a wide range of incredible features essential for different types of clients from small businesses and professionals, marketing aganecy and teams to enterprise.
You can keep track of everything presenting and operating on your social media network via a powerful and in-deptgh social media analytics and white label PDF reports. You can make more data-driven decisions to improve your social media strategies and increase engagement.
- Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a free online platform that improves your Twitter usage. It links your Twitter account and allows you to view all customizable streams of information, including tweets, notifications, messages, tags, and scheduling areas at the same time in a single, convenient interface.
Tweetdeck sounds simple and neat, but it’s handy when it comes to handling more than one Twitter account. As an added functionality, it allows you to identify which times resonate best with your audience and get your content active anytime without having to upload in real-time.
- Social Champ
Social Champ
Social Champ
Social Champ is a social media management tool with powerful features and integrations. The feature-rich tool supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Business Profile, and YouTube.
Social Champ not only offers a wide range of scheduling options, including custom time slots, Auto RSS, Bulk uploads, queues, and more, but it has all analytics, planning, and designing features as well. The content dashboard supports a clean UI and an easy-to-navigate flow so that you can plan a huge amount of content in as little time as possible. You can create, edit, design (using in-app visual integrations), schedule, and track all your social media posts using the same dashboard.
Moreover, you can create downloadable PDF reports with graphs and charts ready for your presentations. These charts represent your weekly and monthly performance. Lastly, the powerful Social Inbox allows you to reply to all DM/PM, comments, paid/organic reviews, and mentions from one place!
More tools:
PROOFO: Social Proof & Sales Pop
Magento 2 Social Login
Which tool are you going to choose?
Social media management tools vary in all types and capabilities. Choosing the best tool for your business depends on your social media goals and needs. And how you benefit from the above list is up to your hand. Visit the website you prefer and use your detective mind to find a tool that suits you best. If you know any interesting tool, please let me know!
Conclusion
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