Free Social Media Marketing Tools and Apps – 7 Free Solutions for 2018
Social media marketing tools and apps are essential to any digital or social media marketer; they not only help us save a lot of time, but they also help us improve our results.
However, while there are a lot of great and easy-to-find desktop tools and software, it’s not as easy to find great ones when it comes to phone apps. In this blog post, I’m going to share top 7 social media marketing tools and apps for managing your social media on the go.
Social Media Management Apps and Scheduling Tools
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that works with most major social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, and YouTube.
Built as a companion app for the desktop version, this social media marketing tool lets you fully manage your accounts: checking your social inboxes (i.e. the mentions and comments for each of your accounts) and responding to mentions, as well as publishing and scheduling updates.
However, there are a lot of other small features that can make a big difference: you can collaborate with your teammates, tag content, and send it for approval, create different categories of queues at the times you want to publish each of them (as opposed to the usual unified queue for all your evergreen content), and schedule directly to Instagram business accounts.
Plus, you can also use it as a social media monitoring tool to monitor your brand name, competitors, hashtags, and so on.
Buffer
Buffer, a big favorite with many social media managers, also has a free social media marketing tool for iOS and Android devices.
It works with several big social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ – and it has one big (and very useful) feature: scheduling your social media updates. If you look at Instagram it requires regular management to keep boosting your account. Users may look for an answer to How to Get 1k Followers on Instagram in 5 minutes? But it’s not easy to get the target audience.
Plus, apart from scheduling, you can also check your accounts’ analytics to help you improve your content strategy on social media.
In terms of scheduling, you don’t have to schedule each post; instead, you create a daily schedule, add content to the queue, and the posts will be automatically scheduled.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Content Creation
Canva
Canva is a free app, perfect for social media marketers. Because in many cases, it’s best to use visuals when sharing an update – it’s more eye-catching, compelling, and engaging.
What this free content creation tool does is help you easily create social media marketing images and other designs, as well as other types of designs that are useful for marketers (like flyers and posters, blog images, invitations, and logos). What’s so great about it is that you have access to numerous templates, free images, and all kinds of customizations – and you don’t need to be a designer to create something compelling.
BeFunky
If you’re active on Instagram or Pinterest – or, really, most any social network – and thus posting images frequently, you need a reliable photo editor to help you customize your images.
BeFunky is a photo editing app and one of the coolest social media marketing tools available on desktop, iOS and Android, that lets you create photo collages, as well as edit and customize your images; for example, you can add text to your images (and chooses between a plethora of fonts), use any of 32 different photo effects, add stickers to your images, as well as make edits like cropping or sharpening your images.
Once you’ve finished an image, you can easily then share it on most major social networks.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
Brand24
Brand24 is a web and social media monitoring tool; although the desktop version is more powerful (which is the case with most tools in this list), the phone app is a very handy companion tool for monitoring your social media presence whenever and wherever you may be.
Use it to create multiple monitoring projects that you can easily check from your phone so you can stay on top of any relevant mentions; plus, set up push notifications to be alerted of important mentions and conversations that you need to act upon and easily send your teammates any mentions or comments that need their attention.
Tip: While keeping an eye on your social media, make the most out of a URL shortener service. They allow you to turn long URLs to short and sweet ones. You will always find free shorteners, like Rebrandly. Using link management services, you’ll be able to generate branded links and monitor their click data.
Social Marketing Tools for Content Curation
Feedly
A very important aspect of a strong social media presence is sharing quality curated content to your audience; and although this can also be scheduled, it’s best to also check for new content to share with your audience.
Feedly as well as other social media marketing tools helps you do just that; you can use it to sign up to follow the latest posts by any publication you want, as well as find new publications to subscribe to by researching different topics relevant to you.
Plus, you can organize your content sources into different folders and categories, and search for articles with keywords and hashtags and once found, easily share the articles across your different social accounts.
Another great example from our collection of social media marketing tools for discovering amazing content is Flipboard; this app is similar to Feedly in the sense that it’s all about getting the latest news and content in your favorite topics and niches, but at the same time, it has a very different feel to it.
To get started, explore different interests (there are a plethora of them in all kinds of categories) to start following them and get news and other content. Each one of your interests will be then separated into different ‘different magazines’ – kind of like folders if you will.
Additionally, you can also make your own magazines by collecting relevant content and adding it – which can be public or private. The private version is great for keeping track of your own content, as well as to curate relevant content for yourself, while the public version is great for content curation for your audience.
Flipboard also shares some similarities with social networks, as you can use it to discover other people that you can then follow and leave likes and comments, as well as share their content with your own audience.
Conclusion
I do hope you’ll find some interesting and useful social media marketing tools in this list and share some of your own favourites; since we spend so much time in our cars, commuting, or simply out and about, it’s important to be able to handle important social media tasks wherever and whatever you’re doing.
Most importantly, you need to be able to monitor your social media presence in order to stay abreast of any important mentions or customer service issues, as well as able to manage your social media presence, publish and schedule posts, create content to share, and find quality content that your audience will love.
P.S.: We have recently come up with a cool social media marketing video which can help you take a rest and relax after such an onformative article. Grab a popcorm and have fun! And don`t forget to share your thoughts concerning the Movie 😉
Leave a Reply