4 Free Social Media Management Tools to Make Your Life Easier
Are you looking for Instagram tools that can help you grow your following and boost your brand presence on social media? With over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram is no longer a social network for scrolling through cat memes or pictures of food.
It’s a serious social network that influencers and businesses are using to drive significant revenue.
But how do you optimize your account to have the biggest impact? We’ve got you covered – here are Four Free Social Media Management Tools that will help you with scheduling, analytics, reporting, hashtag research, organic follower growth, and more.
#1 - Later
Later is a super helpful app for scheduling Instagram posts – as they’ve grown, they now also support 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 images or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all 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.
#2 - 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. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule posts directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates.
#3 - Buffer
Buffer is also one of the best apps for managing your social media presence and scheduling your posts. The app comes with robust analytics tools that enable you to track your audience’s activity and optimize posting times to get the best engagement. We especially love their Chrome extension, which integrates seamlessly with your browser and never gets in the way yet is always there when you need it. It’s a more straightforward and effective way of managing your social media accounts, and you are never more than a few clicks away from setting up anything you want. Buffer supports over 7 different platforms – you can add up to 4 on the free plan.
#4 - ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. You can share ideas, create approval workflows, build your content plan, and then publish that content to multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). ContentCal’s analytics will help you understand your content performance and the latest ‘Respond’ features act as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media.
One of ContentCal’s star features is its ability to integrate with over 2000 other applications – allowing you to create the perfect social media workflow by connecting ContentCal to tools you are already using (think of things like Slack or Trello) and distribute content to channels beyond social media, like emails and blog posts. The best content is created together. Involve your team (and clients) into the content creation process, share ideas, gain feedback, and watch your content performance soar!
Recap:
While managing your social media presence and getting your content to reach a wider audience is a challenging task, there are a few simple things you can do to make yourself more successful. Relying on apps to help you optimize, prioritize, and improve your posting strategy is a great way to take a few things off your plate when building out a roadmap. We hope you find these apps as helpful as we do!
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