Social media is one of the most effective tools for connecting with your audience and growing your business. It allows you to shorten response time, promote your products and services, and tell stories that resonate with your customers. However, managing your social media accounts can take time and effort, especially if you focus on multiple platforms simultaneously.
When you manage social media, most of your day is gone between creating the content, reviewing, publishing, and keeping track of its metrics (likes, comments, shares, messages). If you handle all the processes individually on each platform, you may reduce your productivity by constantly switching between 20 open tabs in your browser.
Luckily, there are ways to handle your social media strategy from a single place, reduce the stress of social media’s fast-changing world, and avoid feeling like you waste your whole day posting on social networks. This complete guide will teach you how to choose the right free option for your business.
Most social media management tools offer free plans with exciting features to take care of your social media in one place. They also offer paid plans with upgraded features you may want to consider when your social network workflow grows. For now, let’s dive into what these five tools can offer you without paying a cent:
This straightforward tool works best if you’re just building your social media presence. Friends+Me’s free plan lets you manage up to two profiles: Facebook, X, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Tumblr. You can schedule up to 5 posts in each profile, and unlike other tools, you can add one team member to help with the management in their free version.
With Friends+Me, you can schedule several posts simultaneously and draft your post inside the platform to optimize time. Its straightforward visual design lets you easily track your drafts and planned and published posts from anywhere. It also offers a browser extension to pin and save inspirational content for later.
If you’re new to social media work and are looking for a tool that streamlines your creation and publishing process, Friends+Me may be a great option. With its clear and easy-to-use interface, you can start to organize your content calendar and schedule the posts in advance, so you don’t have to stress about remembering to post on your social media.
In its free plan, Later can help you manage one account on these six platforms: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. It lets you schedule up to 10 monthly posts for each platform, which is 60 posts if you use all six. However, it can only be used by one person at a time.
Born as an Instagram scheduling tool, Later strongly focuses on visual content. Its most noteworthy feature is its on-site visual planner, which allows you to design your visual post inside the platform without needing an external design program. Later, it also has a media library to upload, organize, and reshare all your content, and it lets you add a bio page on your social accounts to increase traffic to your website. Like most social media managers, you can see your post metrics on Later’s analytics dashboard to measure your likes, impressions, reach, and more.
If your business enjoys visual content on mainly visual platforms like Instagram and TikTok, Later can help you centralize your content creation and planning process in a single platform, saving you time when creating and publishing posts.
Like Later, Tailwind is a platform focusing on visual content design. You don’t need to enter your credit card information to create a free account. With this account, you can link one profile from Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, totaling three profiles on the platform, and schedule up to 20 posts monthly. However, only one user can manage the account with their free plan.
Tailwind allows you to create and plan content in video and image format, which is usually included in paid plans on other platforms. Since it focuses on visual platforms, Tailwind can automatically transform your uploaded media into designs with professional quality according to your brand visual identity (fonts, logos, and colors) to save time in design. Besides, you can bulk-upload your content in one set.
Offering a calendar view to keep track of your social media schedule, it recently introduced an AI-powered assistant that can create posts based on your website topics and audience and suggest the best time to post them based on its collected data.
Suppose your social media strategy focuses on video and image content and is deployed in heavily visual platforms like Instagram or Pinterest. In that case, Tailwind can be an excellent pick for your business, allowing you to optimize your design process.
If you have been posting on social media for a while or your strategy involves multiple platforms and engagement objectives, the following tools offer a more complete suite. From content scheduling to managing conversations and replies, these platforms’ free plans can make tracking your accounts easier.
Buffer is one of the most well-known platforms for social media management. Its free plan lets you manage up to 3 accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Linkedin, X, and Pinterest. With Buffer, you can schedule up to 10 posts per channel, but only one user can access the platform.
One notable feature is the Buffer engagement dashboard, where you can respond to your audience’s messages, questions, and comments without leaving the platform. Buffer will suggest the best times based on your metrics when scheduling your posts. Inside the platform, you can also create short landing pages (what they call start pages) to highlight your products, services, or any unique information about your business and collect information from potential customers.
Buffer’s downside is that its free plan doesn’t give you access to specific analytics, so you’ll have to analyze your posts directly from the social media platform dashboard. However, it does report how much traffic your posts drive to your website on Google.
If you aim to scale your social media efforts or streamline your engagement actions into a single platform, avoid stressing over opening each social media account to answer clients’ questions.
CoSchedule’s free version doesn’t disappoint when it comes to managing your social media. It lets you connect up to 2 accounts from Facebook, LinkedIn X, LinkedIn, and Pinterest and schedule up to 15 social messages. However, the number of users is limited to 1.
CoSchedule stands out because it allows you to easily schedule your campaigns, allowing you to schedule a series of messages to post across multiple networks over time. This tool can import up to 100 past social media messages from your connected accounts so you can measure their performance and reschedule if needed. Like Buffer, its AI assistant can suggest the best time to post and maximize visibility and reach.
Another great feature is that CoSchedule allows you to manage and schedule content for your general marketing strategy. In addition to social media posting, it supports email marketing and blog integrations, enabling you to centralize your content marketing operations.
If you’re having trouble keeping up with all your marketing channels, CoSchedule may be the option for your business.
Social Champ’s free version offers many scheduling options, including customized time slots, bulk uploads, and queues. It supports up to 3 accounts from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Google Business, and Threads and lets you schedule up to 15 monthly posts per account. As with the others, it only allows one user to access it in its free version.
However, their free plan gives you access to detailed analytics and two-week reports for individual posts, which can be exported in PDF, CSV, and PPT (PowerPoint presentation). This makes it easier to analyze and measure your post performance. Like Buffer, you can also manage your messages and comments on social media.
If you’re looking for more advanced scheduling options and want to plan, create, and automatize your publishing process in one place, look at Social Champ’s features to organize your social media workflow.
This heavily depends on your business’s social media strategy, the volume of your workflow, and the size of your social media team. Let’s say you’re just starting on Instagram, plan on publishing three times a week, and have another person to help you design the posts. In that case, platforms like Friends+Me, Later, or TailWind may be a perfect pick. They allow you to draft posts inside the platform and schedule them to publish them in all your accounts simultaneously, even if you’re away.
But if your business’s social media presence is already well established, driving high levels of engagement, and you’re already promoting your post, more robust platforms like Buffer or CoSchedule may be better for your team. Since these platforms allow you to connect more than one account on several platforms, they can help you centralize your social media workflow in a single dashboard and avoid the stress of having ten tabs open simultaneously to check on all your accounts.
Regarding the previous top 6, remember that these free versions also have downsides. They all limit the number of posts you can schedule, averaging ten posts per account or monthly, which may be bothersome if your strategy requires you to publish more frequently. They also limit other features that can be helpful if your workload is heavy, like adding more members and getting and exporting performance reports.
If you want to consider upgrading your social media game in the future or think it is worth a shot to invest in any social media management tool, these are the cheapest plans the tool listed above offers:
The most important thing about managing your social media is knowing how to find and take advantage of the ever-changing trends that arise on social media every other day. While these tools are undoubtedly helpful in planning and organizing your content calendar and streamlining all the social media tasks, attempting to do by yourself what an experienced and complete marketing team does can be frustrating at best.
Whatever your social media goal is, from getting more likes to increasing your sales, at Xperience Marketing Solutions, you’ll find a seasoned social media marketing team that can plan and handle a customized strategy to reach your goal. With our comprehensive suite of services, we can manage any social media need you have, whether it is improving your posting schedule or designing better graphics for your post.
