If you’re looking for free social media marketing tools, then you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve compiled a list of the best free social media marketing tools out there so you can focus on what matters: building your brand and expanding your reach.
There’s no need to spend money on expensive software when there are plenty of options out there that are just as good. We’ve done all the research for you, so let’s get started!
Free Social Media Marketing Tools 2021
In less than 10 years, social media has become an essential part of our lives. The platforms you started sharing your clubbing photos on have since been taken over by baby pics and your mum.
Great social media doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s not just a sprinkle of mentions and a pinch of evergreen content. There’s no magical social media recipe, sadly. Great social media is like any other marketing strategy – carefully crafted, measured, managed, and founded on a strong and clear strategy. To deliver on your strategic vision you need to be up-to-date with the latest trends, practices, and tools.
Social media schedulers make staying active and engaging on social media easier for us mortals, making our load easier and paving the way for greater impact.
If you really want to get your social channels in shape in 2021, you should seriously consider adding the following tools to your marketing toolkit.
- Biteable
Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain ol’ text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level.
With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio-quality quickly without needing expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.
Biteable was created to be super easy to use and one of the cheapest tools of its type on the market. Most features are available even with free accounts (it’s pretty cheap to upgrade to Premium anyway) so why not add a bit more excitement and spark to your social media content by creating some short, super-shareable videos?
- Buffer
Buffer started off as a scheduling tool for Twitter. Today, it supports all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google + (for the one person who still uses it.) Let’s take a look.
You can do some pretty neat things with Buffer:
Use the chrome extension to add articles and content from the web to your Buffer queue or share content on the go.
Automatically shortens links you share. If you’re Bitly user, you can connect your accounts.
Upload custom photos and videos (or use ones pulled from the article you shared).
Access complex analytics to track your content’s performance.
Create a posting schedule so your content gets spread out throughout the day.
Reply to posts from inside Buffer.
Add team members.
A social media dashboard like Buffer helps you fill your social media feed with relevant and exciting content without spending half your life logged in to Facebook and Twitter.
- Buzzsumo
Research is a crucial part of marketing. If you want to do well and leave your competitors in the dust, you need to understand what they’re doing and if what you’re doing is working or not.
Buzzsumo is a research tool which tells you how your content is doing and who’s spreading the word.
Sometimes when you sit down to create content, you’re on fire. Other times it’s like pulling teeth and you’re just grateful to have met a deadline. It’s impossible to guarantee success, but a tool like Buzzsumo can help you increase the odds.
One of the most powerful research tools on the market, the functionality includes:
Find content that’s most shared on social media channels – you can enter your own or someone else’s domain and see what’s been shared socially.
Find influencers related to particular topics.
Get alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name, or domain.
Track competitors and do an analysis based on their content.
Use it to research keywords and trending topics your audience is interested in. You can use it to find interesting new posts to share or to search for content ideas based on what’s performing well.
And, if you’ve got some cash to splash, Buzzsumo Pro is a powerhouse for competitor research.
- Missinglttr
Social media promotion is vital to success in the online world, but the act of scheduling posts may not be the reason you bounce of bed every morning. Even if you use a tool to help you speed up the process of blasting all your channels at once, you still need to manually input the text and images for each post. Rinse and repeat to re-promote the posts.
Missinglettr helps you automate the process of creating social content by scraping your blog post content and creating a year’s worth of social content for you: nine individual posts dripped out to your social channels over a year.
This means you can focus on writing long-form blog posts while someone else takes care of the creative side of social promotion and the scheduling of posts, so there’ll be one less thing on your to-do list.
With templates for content creation, scheduling, and facilitating client approvals, plus a custom URL shortener to export campaign assets so they can be used in other marketing initiatives, Missinglettr has some great features that’ll lighten your load. You even get a weekly report so you’re on top of your marketing performance.
- MeetEdgar
So you need a content manager but you’re already a one-person-band responsible for evergreen content creation, tech support, and design? Meet MeetEdgar.
A social media management tool that handles both re-sharing your content and optimising your social traffic, MeetEdgar is your handy automated content manager.
Working with your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles through a web plugin, you can keep your social channels populated with posts and check in from wherever you are using your mobile.
MeetEdgar allows you to schedule content re-sharing and monitor traffic while boosting engagement and optimizing the ROI of your digital assets.
By putting your evergreen content out there on the regular, you can increase your traffic and boost engagement. With an automated auto-refill queue, you won’t run out of regular posts. It also features a category-based scheduling tool allowing you to mix different content types so your audience never gets bored.
MeetEdgar also features a URL shortener with in-app click tracking which means you can follow your clicks.
- Hootsuite
In the chaotic world of social media, Hootsuite handles multiple social media accounts, bringing them under one login into a single dashboard, and you can sign up free of charge.
One of the most popular social media management tools around, Hootsuite allows for collaboration across team members and an approval process. Alongside the major benefit of seeing all your comments and mentions in one place, you can also assign tasks, plot a social media calendar, and schedule updates.
Through Hootsuite Podium you can check out free online social media courses to develop better social media management skills and learn the fundamentals of social media marketing.
Beyond that, for the more experienced digital marketer, its tools integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, giving you an in-depth breakdown of your analytics and allowing you to interact with prospective customers.
You can even integrate other community-based platforms including Reddit, Tumblr, and Storify, which helps gather even more feedback and customer data.
- Mention
Mention is an extremely comprehensive social listening tool. Monitor mentions of your brand, your products, or your competitors in real time.
Staying on top of the conversation is easy: you can respond to social media comments and mentions from inside the platform, and you can use Mention to find relevant influencers for influencer marketing campaigns and analyze your competitors.
- Sumo
Sumo has a whole suite of useful traffic and social media tools that can help improve your marketing strategy. The most relevant for social media is the social shares feature, which makes it easy for visitors to your site to share your content to social media, and it keeps track of the number of shares. - IFTTT
IFTTT: If this, then that. This tool lets you set up rules that make running your social media marketing empire much easier.
Create rules that trigger specific actions when something happens. For example, you can create a rule that means every time you get a Google notification for a specific alert, it gets added into a Google doc so you can check it all at the end of the day.
These rules can eliminate some of the manual back-and-forth, and help you streamline your process in a way that emphasises and enhances individual productivity.
- Zapier
Zapier is another tool that encourages automation and does share some similarities with IFTTT. One writer summarized the key differences rather well. IFTTT is easier to learn and great for light automation, while Zapier is a great tool for businesses that want to take their automation to new heights. A lot of marketers use both for different tasks. As an extra bonus, Zapier plays nicely with most of the tools on this list.
If you’re looking for some neat automation ideas, to get you started the Zapier team have a list of suggestions about how you can use Zapier to better manage your social media accounts.
- AdEspresso
Social media advertising is complex and can feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark. That’s where AdEspresso, the master of the A/B test, comes in.
A tool that allows real-time analysis of Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads, AdEspresso takes the guesswork out of how your ads are resonating with your audiences in accordance with your campaign name and targeting details.
You can create and manage ads for all three platforms in one place and then see what’s working (and what’s not) while your campaign is live. You systematically test different images, headlines, ad copy, and so on, until you find the perfect combination.
Ad creation and optimisation is quick and easy, with a customizable dashboard which allows you to view the most important metrics in a single place. You’ll end up with always-on campaigns that will monitor your Facebook Pages and immediately promote new posts, and use smart filters to define what’s going to be promoted and for how long.
And rather than manually syncing your Lead Ads into your CRM or email marketing, you can keep your leads, contacts, and audiences synched with your Facebook Ad Account.
If you want to take the guesswork out of a complicated system and streamline your efforts, give AdEspresso a go this year.
- Bitly
Bitly is the Rick Moranis of the URL world – honey, I shrunk the URL. Bitly is a link shortener, taking lengthy URLs and shrinking them into much smaller ones.
Often, the original links can be impossible to remember and tricky to share, while short URLs look better and are easier to remember.
How many leads did you drive? How many sales did you convert? Traffic? Every marketer wants to hit the mark and to be able to prove it. You want to make sure you’re using the right campaign tracking tools to capture the list of critical metrics.
Who clicked on what, when, and where – Bitly will tell you. More than just a pretty face, Bitly is a powerful online marketing tool used to track clicks, view site referrals, and pinpoint geographical locations with the most clicks. In fact, it’s proven so handy that Google has built it into their Google Campaign URL Builder to shorten links and track campaign performance.
- Rebrandly
Rebrandly is the most advanced link shortener for creating branded links and custom short URLs. Behind every piece of valuable information you share online, there’s a link. Every one of those links is an asset to your company. With Rebrandly you are able to put your brand on your links.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Rebrandly:
Branded links can drive a 39% higher click-through rate.
Enhanced brand awareness and visibility.
Increased link trust.
This is how the insights of your branded link will look like within Rebrandly and some examples of things you can do with the tool.
Some of the more interesting features that Rebrandly offer marketers include:
UTM builder
Editable destination URL
QR codes
Traffic routing
Link retargeting
50+ app integrations
API
- Sprout Social
As you’d expect in the ever-changing digital landscape, 2018 saw a lot of change and growth, with a huge shift from traditional content to video, and that’s only going to get bigger this year.
Thankfully, the days of scheduling a social media campaign across each platform are over. All-in-one social media management tool Sprout Social provides engagement, publishing, analytics, and team collaboration tools.
You can improve engagement by making it easier to start, join, and monitor social conversations. You can improve client relationships with speedy response times and you‘ll stick to your social marketing plans by using a range of optimisation tools.
You can connect and engage with customers and fans quickly and easily, staying on top of trends and keeping an eye on competitors. You can track internal data, including reply time, the total number of replies, and sentiment.
And if you want to grow your knowledge, Sprout offers additional resources and support through conferences and webinars.
- AddThis
The point of creating content is for people to see it! AddThis is widely known for their social share buttons and makes it easy for your readers to share your content to their favorite social media channels. The best part? It’s free.
You can connect to 200+ global social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, and more. The tools are completely customizable so you can select the type and match the colors to your branding.
The Smart Sorting feature also automatically displaying readers’ most recent and frequently used social media channels first. This can boost sharing up to 20%!
- ShareThis
When you want to get your content in front of a larger audience and make it easy for your readers to share it on their favorite social media sites with social sharing buttons, you should also consider ShareThis. They’re easy to install in just minutes, and when installed, it takes just a single click for visitors to share your content with all the popular social media networks.
Choose the type of buttons you want to use, easily customize the design so they perfectly complement your site, and then add the code to your website. It’s that simple! Prefer to design your own? You can even create your own fully customized buttons from scratch.
With ShareThis, you can install share buttons from 40 of the most widely used social channels, including the usual suspects like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and WhatsApp, along with popular channels like Pocket, Evernote, Instapaper, HackerNews, and many more. With seamless WordPress integration, they’re a fast, easy, and totally free way to scale your website traffic.
- Design Wizard
Design Wizard is another tool that’s good for making visual content, with a reasonably simple and intuitive interface.
Like Biteable, it has a host of features available with the free plan and some good premium content if you can spare a couple of dollars to upgrade.
With over 10,000 free design templates pre-optimized for platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and over 1.2 million stock images, Design Wizard is great for lazy marketers who want most of the work to already be done.
- Social Status
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics and reporting tool that provides multi-channel dashboards and helps automate your social media reports.
While the social channels themselves provide some analytics, Social Status goes much more in-depth and provides full-funnel metrics for all the main social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You can access live dashboards and see individual metric performance for all your paid and organic content, including audience demographics breakdowns, competitor analysis, full ad campaign performance metrics, and the ability to track your influencer marketing campaigns.
Social Status can export your reports to CSV, PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides formats and reports can be completely customized and white-labeled.
- Postoplan
A proper schedule is vital for successful social media marketing. When you upload your posts at the right time, it positively impacts engagement and keeps your community interested. In some cases, a post made at the right time can even go viral.
If you run several social media accounts, use Postoplan to create content plans and schedule posts. And, if you feel like you’re running out of content ideas, just turn on post suggestions – Postoplan generates fresh social media post inspiration every day.
There are a few other awesome Postoplan features you will definitely enjoy:
Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business, and WordPress. Integration with messengers, including WhatsApp, Telegram, and Slack. An unlimited number of accounts, users, and projects with the free trial. Bulk scheduling. Communication with followers via Social Inbox.
Bonus: Some platform-specific tools
If you’re a heavy Twitter user, FollowerWonk can give you an in-depth look into your analytics. The tool is part of the Moz toolkit, so if you use Moz for analytics reports, this is definitely worth having a look at.
If you’re a heavy Pinterest user, check out Tailwind and Buffer’s new Pinterest scheduling feature.
For Facebook users, Facebook Audience Insights is a must if you want to understand your clients and community better, and create irresistible social media marketing campaigns.
Your toolkit is a personal (and living) thing
There are a lot of great tools out there, with new ones popping up all the time.
The key is to find tools that support your marketing efforts, and invest the time in getting to know them. Don’t be afraid to add new tools to your kit, but don’t discard the old ones just because something fresh and shiny has turned up.
free marketing tools
What tools do you use to get your online marketing work done?
Can you do all the same work of a digital marketer, and do it for free?
The list of tools you use—often referred to as a marketing stack—probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more.
Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent?
It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, to find free alternatives to popular paid tools and services. I’m grateful for all the amazing companies out there that offer such value for so little. Here’s the list I came up with for free alternatives to paid tools. I’d love to know what you think!
free marketing stack
What’s in the stack?
The $0 Marketing Stack: Free Alternatives to Paid Tools
For a quick overview, here are the tools I found that seemed to be great, free options for some popular paid services.
Buffer
Canva
Google Analytics
Hotjar
Simply Measured
Open Site Explorer
Charlie
HubSpot Email Marketing and HubSpot CRM
WordPress
Crowdfire
Medium
Wistia
SumoMe
Segment
Peek
Google Scholar
Google Trends
Blog Topic Generator
Content Idea Generator
Readability
Hemingway
Onpage Optimization Tool
After the Deadline
Readability Test Tool
Save Publishing
Followerwonk
Latest.is
Tweriod
Must Be Present
Conversation Score
Wolfram Alpha Facebook report
LikeAlyzer
Fanpage Karma
Facebook Page Barometer
Quicksprout
Website Grader
SharedCount
Newsle
Rapportive
MentionMapp
Down For Everyone Or Just Me?
- Social Media Scheduling: Buffer
buffer
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar
Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.
How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.
We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.
Also free:
Hootsuite (free for your first 3 social profiles)
- Design: Canva
Canva
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign
Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.
How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.
Also free:
Pablo
Gimp
Pic Monkey
- Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics
Google Analytics real time stats
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat
Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.
How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.
Also free:
Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)
- Website optimization: Hotjar
Hotjar analytics
Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg
Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.
How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.
Also free:
Inspectlet (free for 100 recorded sessions)
SumoMe Content Analytics
- Reports: Simply Measured
twitter followers report
Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports
Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.
Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:
Twitter Follower Report
Twitter Customer Service Analysis
Facebook Fan Page Report
Facebook Content Analysis
Facebook Competitive Analysis
Facebook Insights Report
Instagram User Report
Social Traffic Report
Traffic Source Report
Google+ Page Report
Vine Analysis
Phew! That’s a lot of reports!
How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Also free:
Followerwonk
SumAll’s free version
- SEO: Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro
is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.
How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.
Also free:
SEO Book
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Keyword Tool
- CRM: Charlie
Charlie app
Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce
A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.
How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person—social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc.—by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.
Also free:
HubSpot’s Free CRM
Norbert
- Lead generation and pop up tool: HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM
HubSpot Marketing Free
HupSpot Marketing Free allows marketers to easily generate email leads from their website with a free pop up tool.
How to use HubSpot Marketing Free: You can gain a lot of great information about your leads from HubSpot Marketing Free. This pop up tool quickly gathers email addresses from your website and provides key data points like employer and which pages your leads have visited. And if you’re wondering which pages are converting at higher rates than others, it can help with that, too.
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Cirrus Insight
Also free:
Hello Bar
SumoMe
- Landing Pages: WordPress
WordPress pages
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Unbounce, LeadPages
For those who are running their website or blog via WordPress, perhaps the fastest and easiest way to set up a landing page is simply to create a new page. If you blog with WordPress, the blog content you create falls into Posts. The static content for landing pages—“Download our ebook,” “Sign up for our webinar,” etc.—can be made quite easily via Pages.
How to use WordPress: Build a new landing page in WordPress, and use this as the focal point of your social media ad campaign or your social media updates. Certain plugins like WooDojo even let you hide the content in your sidebar for particular pages, which could be a great option for minimizing the look of your page.
Also free:
Unbounce free plan (includes Unbounce branding)
- Twitter management: Crowdfire
Crowdfire
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Crowdfire premium
Twitter has been so generous to open up its app to developers to make some really great tools. Sure, you can manage your Twitter profile directly via Twitter (an always free option), or you can try out tools like Just Unfollow, which allows for bulk sorting and filtering of your followers, along with insights into the demographics of the people in your audience.
How to use Just Unfollow: One way that many experts recommend to keep your Twitter following count in line with your Twitter follower count is to routinely check to see which accounts are following you back and to remove the ones that aren’t. With Just Unfollow, you can do this quickly and easily all from one page—and even whitelist the unfollowers whom you’d like to keep following.
Also free:
Tweepi
Manage Flitter
- Blogging: Medium
Medium
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Ghost
It feels a bit funny to list Medium as a tool (it’s really more of a network or social media site), but when it comes to starting a new blog as cheaply and quickly as possible, Medium can’t be beat.
How to use Medium: Many young startups kick off their blog at Medium, where they enjoy a built-in audience from the start and have networking tools to help their content spread. Plus, one of Medium’s newest features is an email newsletter where you can automatically get in touch with people who follow you by sharing your latest articles.
Also free:
WordPress.com
Blogger
- Video: Wistia
wistia
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Wistia Pro, Vimeo Pro
Once you’ve created an amazing video to share on social media or your website, where will you put it? The default seems to be YouTube, which is quick and easy but comes with less control and potentially some unrelated ads or suggestions. Wistia is made for marketers’ videos because the player keeps people on your page—or sends them precisely where you want them to go next.
How to use Wistia: After you’ve uploaded your video, you can hop into the settings and add things like call-to-action buttons or email capture formsat the end of the video. Wistia also makes it easy to view heatmaps and viewing trends of your videos, like how far most people get through your video, when they pause or click, etc.
Also free:
YouTube
Vimeo
- Share buttons: SumoMe Share
SumoMe
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Easy Social Share Buttons
The ubiquitous share buttons you see along the side of blog posts, many of them come from SumoMe. The any-website buttons (you don’t have to run a WordPress blog to use them) are part of the SumoMe suite of website products. If you’re okay with some SumoMe branding, you can add the buttons for free to any page and customize the networks that appear by default.
How to use SumoMe Share: SumoMe gives you a lot of control over the appearance of the share buttons, both in which buttons are displayed and where on the page they’ll sit. One of the great features also is that they look good on mobile devices, so you maintain a great way to encourage sharing no matter where your audience is reading.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Publish Flawlessly. Analyze Effortlessly. Engage Authentically.
Buffer is the all-you-need social media toolkit that lets you focus on doing what you love for your business.
Get started for free now
Also free:
Digg Digg (what we use on the Buffer blog)
Flare
- Analytics: Segment
segment
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Usability Tools
I’ve heard Segment described as the one and only interface you’ll ever need for all your third-party apps. And I sure do see it recommended a lot. From what I can gather, Segment makes it easy for anyone—engineer or not—to connect new software to your website; once the Segment snippet is added, you can connect other apps like MailChimp, Google Analytics, etc. just by clicking around in your Segment dashboard. Segment handles all the visitor data for you.
How to use Segment: Rob Sobers put together a really handy guide to how he’s set up Segment for his SaaS business.
- Testing: Peek
Peek by usertesting
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Optimizely, User Testing
When it comes to understanding how people are using your website—A/B testing, user testing, that sort of thing—there are some really fantastic paid options that can give you lots of insights. There’s also Peek, a free tool from User Testing that lets you see and hear a five-minute video of a real person using your website.
How to use Peek: For first-time insights, you may wish to have a person go through your website or blog from the home page. Later on, you might ask for someone to test out a certain flow through your website by starting someone on a landing page. The tests take about 2-3 days to complete, and you can run three Peek tests every month.
Also free:
Optimizely free plan
Even More Free Marketing Tools!
We went hunting for even more top free marketing tools in a variety of marketing categories. These tools – all quick hits you can get started with easily – focus on everything from research and writing to benchmarking and analyzing. Here’s hoping you find the perfect shortcut for your work!
Free Marketing Research Tools
We’ll start at the beginning: researching topics, sites and ideas.
- Google Scholar
I don’t know why more people don’t talk about Google Scholar, but I love this tool for researching science-heavy articles and digging into emerging studies. It limits your search to articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Pair it with a Google Alert to get amazing research on your topics of interest delivered right to your inbox.
Google Scholar
- Google Trends
See what the world is searching for and how interest in concepts has changed over time with Google Trends. For example, I feel like I’m suddenly hearing about “growth hacker” and “growth hacking.” Are you, too? I input those terms into Google Trends and it looks like there is a sudden new interest in the concept.
Google Trends
- Blog Topic Generator
Stumped for ideas? Give HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator a few nouns that describe your content areas and it’ll spit out a week’s worth of post ideas.
Blog Topic Generator
- Content Idea Generator
Enter a keyword for a fun, irreverent suggestion from Portent’s Content Idea Generator.
Title Generator
Free Reading and Writing Tools
These tools offer help with readability, keyword density and spelling and grammar.
- Readability
Drag the Readability bookmarklet to your toolbar to convert any content on the web into a simple, easy-to-read format with an estimate of how long it’ll take you. Also check out the other bookmarklet options here, including one that sends longer content to your Kindle to read later.
Readability format
- Hemingway
Simple, clear writing – we all strive for it. Get a little help with Hemingway. Paste a passage into the app and you’ll get an analysis that highlights overly dense passages, unnecessary adverbs and more.
Hemingway app
- Onpage Optimization Tool
This free onpage optimization tool from Internet Marketing Ninjas is a one-stop look at what’s going on a specific page of your site. Toss in a URL and see stats on keyword density, internal and external links and more.
Onpage Optimization
- After the Deadline
A Chrome extension, After the Deadline checks spelling, style, and grammar wherever you go on the web.
After the Deadline
- Readability Test Tool
Enter a web address or a block of text into the Readability Test Tool for an easy-to-understand analysis of your content. This tools measures a ton of different readability scores, and does a good job of explaining each one.
Readability Test Tool
Free Twitter Marketing Tools
These tools help you maximize your Twitter presence, from timing to sharing to analysis.
- Save Publishing
Instantly find passages under 140 characters with Save Publishing, a handy bookmarklet that highlights tweetable passages on your screen. Post to Twitter with one click (or Buffer simply by highlighting a passage and clicking the Buffer extension)
Save Publishing
- Followerwonk
We hope you’ve already heard of Followerwonk, one of Buffer’s many partners in amazing social media data. In addition to offering lots of super useful data about timing on Twitter, Followerwonk also has some other neat Twitter features, like the ability to compare followers of different accounts like so.
Followerwonk
- Latest.is
It’s not breaking news. It’s not nonsense hashtags. Latest.is is an automatically generated list of interesting links on Twitter, surfaced through an algorithm that focuses on “the people that always tweet the best links – first” (no, it doesn’t tell you who they are).
Latest.is
- Tweriod
Tweriod analyzes your account to show you the best times to tweet for more exposure and replies. Bonus: Once you get your peak times, you can sync your Buffer account with them!
Tweriod
- Must Be Present
A free tool from Sprout Social, Must Be Present calculates how often and how quickly you respond to comments and questions on Twitter (in exchange for your email address and a bit of other info).
Must Be Present
Free Facebook Marketing Tools
These tools analyze one or more Facebook pages to deliver an analysis or report on your activities – particularly important as Facebook is always changing.
- Conversation Score
Discover any Facebook Page’s influence, engagement and performance with Conversation Score.
cscore
- Wolfram Alpha Facebook report
To analyze your own Facebook account and get lots of interesting data about your connection, the language you use, the times of day you post and more, try Wolfram Alpha’s Facebook report.
Wolfram Alpha
- LikeAlyzer
LikeAlyzer provides you with recommendations and feedback on your company’s presence on Facebook based on metrics including presence, dialogue, action and information.
likealyzer
- Fanpage Karma
Fanpage Karma is all about competition. Compare two fan pages by entering their names or IDs and see which ones comes out on top.
fanpage karma
- Facebook Page Barometer
Agora Pulse’s Facebook Page Barometer keeps track of how your Facebook performance stacks up against the average performance of 6,000+ pages.
agorapulse
Free Website Analysis Tools
These tools give you an overall look at many different facets of your site or marketing strategy.
- Quicksprout
by QuickSprout is a really comprehensive website audit, social media analysis and competitor report, all in one.
Quicksprout
- Website Grader
HubSpot’s Website Grader gives you the overall performance and “grade” of your website based on mobile factors, SEO, security, speed, and performance, plus tips on how to improve your website…
HubSpot Website Grader
- SharedCount
Want to see how your content (or anyone else’s, for that matter) has spread across the web? For sites that don’t display social media share button numbers, just paste the web address into SharedCount. Or use the multi-URL dashboard to enter lots of different web addressed and export a quick report.
SharedCount
Free Relationship Tools
These tools focus on connecting with new people and strengthening relationships with existing connections.
- Newsle
Got some thought leaders or industry influencers you want to keep up with? Sign into Newsle through Facebook or LinkedIn and it’ll track your Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections & email contacts and let you know when they’re in the news.
Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 8.37.38 AM
- Rapportive
Make your email work harder for you by installing Rapportive, a Chrome extension that helps you get to know your contacts better by showing their photo, job, company, LinkedIn profile and recent tweets.
Rapportive
- MentionMapp
See how any Twitter user is connected to others with MentionMapp, which makes all your connections visual and simple to understand and explore.
mentionmapp
Free Miscellaneous Tools
- Down For Everyone Or Just Me?
Is it your Internet connection, or is your site (or someone else’s that you’re desperately trying to reach) really down? Find out with this simple website. Just enter your site:
Down For Everyone
And it’ll let you know if it’s just you or if the site is, well, down for everyone.
Down For Everyone 2
Over to you
Which of your favorite tools would you add to this list?
Did you notice any new ones that might be worth trying?
I’d love to hear from you about the free tools you’ve found most helpful and how you’ve put them to good use. Feel free to add any thoughts at all in the comments below. I’m looking forward to chatting!
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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