Social media marketing is an inevitable part of each and every online marketing campaign. But going random on social sites is similar to the journey you don’t have a map for. That’s why we would like to supply you with a solid pack of free social media marketing tools that will make your trip enjoyable.
Should I answer the question why social media marketing plays such an important role today? Yes, I know that all or almost all of MonsterPost readers are web design & development professionals and the process of creating websites involves SEO optimization, promotion and marketing skills. However, let’s have a look at the numbers; they will vividly demonstrate us the power of social sites and the necessity to put our hopes on them when we struggle for traffic.
As you see 2,31B people are active social media users. The number of prospective customers is impressive.
The above bar chart displays which of the social media platforms are the most popular among the internet users. Do you pay enough attention to promotion of your company/service/product there?
The tools we’ve collected below will help you get deeper insights into your social marketing campaigns, find their strong and weak points, optimize your workflow without too much sweat. There are almost 50 of them, so I grouped the tools according to their purpose, although, a lot of their features are similar or even coincide. You’ll find tools for beautifying your posts, content curation, analytics, monitoring and sharing and others right under this text. All of the presented social media marketing tools are tested by experts, so they will help you by all means. And don’t forget the sweetest thing about them – they are totally free or have a free plan or at least a free trial period which means that you can improve the conversion of your site without paying a cent. We wish you good luck in your efforts!
Tools for beautifying your posts
Canva
What you can do with Canva: design presentations, social media graphics, and a heap of other things with thousands of beautiful layouts. It has everything you need for catching designs. Millions of stock photographs, vectors and illustrations. You can also upload your own visuals. Canva has preset filters and advanced photo editing tools to modify pictures. It gives you the possibility to use icons, shapes and elements, thousands of them. Hundreds of fonts perfect for every design are also ready to go and accessible within Canva.
Adobe Post
Adobe Post was created to give you a powerful tool to differentiate among the competitors and engage your followers with eye-catching posts. Create stunning social graphics in seconds with it. Get started quickly with handcrafted remixable design templates made for social sharing. Resize your text – beautiful typography will be automatically applied on-the-fly. Transform your text and photo into professional-looking graphics with a single tap.
PromoRepublic
The tool allows you to manage all your social media activities in one place and save time while keeping posting consistent. You can connect multiple profiles in five networks to your profile and organize content for all of them in a content calendar. If you preset posting time, it is scheduled and posted automatically. Also, the tool offers a library of Post Ideas with 6000+ editable visual templates, a built-in Graphics Editor and integrated photostocks. You can create amazing content in literally five minutes. Additionally. PromoRepublic has a White Label solution for enhancing brands with their own social media management tool.
Content curation tools
Buffer
All of us are short of time. That’s why we list Buffer among the other social media marketing tools. Buffer is a great way to drive traffic, increase fan engagement and save time on social media. It allows you to create a posting schedule for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages all in one place, creating a queue. That’s really helpful.
The tool is paid, but has a free 30–day trial period. Bundle Post is a content curation tool that aggregates and schedules social media content efficiently. Search, edit and schedule with a browser plugin or social media dashboard, then add hashtags. Keep your audience engaged and get results.
Babbly
Babbly is an awesome platform of quality content owners. It works as simple as follows: give a share – get a share. Share others content to get shares to your content. Share to multiple networks at once by just one click. Pause & play your content. Control when your content is visible to others on Babbly. Control when your content goes live. Schedule your posts. Schedule when your posts go live on babbly and your social media. The tool helps you in reaching the target audience at the right time. Relax and don’t worry about flooding your follower base again. Auto spread shares to your social networks to go out in timed intervals.
MavSocial
MavSocial allows users to communicate easily and effectively. The tool removes the hassle, saves its users time, and makes their online activities more successful. It helps the users access a solution that’s free, intuitive, saves time and easy-to-use, store and organize their digital assets all under one roof without the need for multiple tools, plan posts around social media campaigns rather than just networks, make it easier to publish to multiple pages and networks. In a word, MavSocial tackles problems and provide solutions that other social media software platforms don’t address for free!
Sprout Social
The tool offers a free 30-day trial period. How it can benefit your business? Build and maintain your community by easily starting, monitoring and joining social conversations. Delight your customers by quickly responding to questions and resolving issues across networks. Successfully reach your audience with the tools to execute and optimize social marketing plans. Increase your clients’ return on social media and manage your whole portfolio from a single tool. Sprout’s collaborative platform ensures smarter, faster and more efficient social communications. Measure performance and analyze all your social efforts.
Clear Voice
Clear Voice will push the boundaries of your content marketing. The tool is about refined content; about connecting brands with creators who can be their voices. It is about stories and the people behind those stories. It is tech with personality; a platform and services team to facilitate and streamline strategy, discovery, development, and distribution.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule gives you a 14-day free trial period. It offers the best way to plan your marketing and save a ton of time. More than 10,000 bloggers, editors, and social marketers trust the CoSchedule editorial calendar to plan their blog, content marketing, and social media. CoSchedule puts your blog and your social media on the same drag and drop calendar right from WordPress.
News filtering tools
Nuzzel
Nuzzel is an easy way to see news from your friends. It has been created to solve the problems of social overload. Use Nuzzel to discover the best news stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter without being overwhelmed or missing anything.
Feedly
Organize, read, and share all the content that matters to you and your team at a single place. Don’t miss a beat from any of the publications you trust. Dive deeper by following blogs from the latest movers, shakers, and thinkers. Follow any one on the web. See new videos from the YouTube channels you follow. Monitor news about your company, your product, your craft, and your competitors by plugging in Google Alerts. Crunch through more content in less time by organizing your feeds into easy-to-read collections. Secure access to private content from your company’s internal portals, content management systems, and SaaS applications. Let the web work for you by arranging the content you rely on into easy-to-read collections. And do much more with Feedly.
Monitoring & sharing tools
TweetDeck
Tweetdeck is a popular tool for both businesses and individuals looking to manage their Twitter accounts in depth. The tool allows you to post and schedule to your Twitter accounts, as well as stream all of your feeds in real time. It can be easily integrated with Buffer, for more detailed management. It can also be downloaded as desktop software. Tweetdeck is fully accessible for free, with no limits to the number of Twitter accounts used. It also allows you to stream some more advanced feeds, such as the feed of a specific user or a feed of trending content.
Cyfe
Did you know that businesses spend up to 80% of their time collecting, monitoring, analyzing and reporting data? The problem is that the bigger your presence is online, the more data you have to manage. Cyfe offers a cloud based service that solves this issue by allowing you to easily monitor and share all of your vital business data from one single location in real-time. So, you can come back to your strategic business decisions.
Social Clout
SocialClout gathers relevant conversations and metrics from social web, blogs, forums, etc., helps to monitor your brand’s mention across Facebook and Twitter in real-time, provides insightful reports with metrics that can help you understand your social health and take informed decisions, helps you analyze competition, gauge where do you stack up against your competitors, shows how are you doing with respect to your competition on social media, what’s your share of voice in your industry, helps to plan and run your social campaigns and generate leads that are low in your sales funnel, collects feedback from users to co-create/improve products/services, shares information about upcoming products the world needs to know about, allows users to search for mentions of keywords from Twitter.
Agora Pulse
Agora Pulse works like a Facebook page barometer. Get to know if you are beating Facebook EdgeRank, if your pages are performing above or below average, which metrics require your attention, run unlimited free contests on your timeline (quiz, photo contest, sweepstakes), learn Facebook marketing: how moderation tools work, get rid of spam on your page, manage admin roles, understand your Facebook page statistics…
Hootsuite
Hootsuite gives you the ability to manage all your social networks and schedule messages for future publishing. It gives you a wide scope of your social media activity. You will be aware of what’s your audience saying about your brand. Hootsuite’s social media analytics give you an in-depth view of how well your social media efforts are being received, so you can run with what’s working or change directions. Adding multiple team members makes sharing the workload easier. Social media management and being a voice for your brand is everyone’s job. Team members make that possible. Security is no joke either. Reputations, assets, and financials are all at stake. Hootsuite’s secure logins, profile protections, and permission levels keep your organization protected. Increase your social reach and productivity with their App Directory – a collection of 80+ applications like Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Marketo, right in the social media dashboard.
Likeable Hub
Get access to thousands of engaging content ideas to share. Share stories with thousands of content ideas & news posts. Generate referrals & leads with your Likable Hub site. Manage your reputation with streamlined social listening. Amlify your reach with TURBOPOST technology & reverb. Save time and resources with Likable Hub scheduling & features. Measure your growth with success analytics.
Click to Tweet
Click to Tweet is the easiest way to promote, share & track your content on Twitter. Write the message that you want others to share in the box. Click the “Generate New Link” button to create a custom link. Share the link and track the activity of each link over time. Whoever clicks on the link will have the message automatically added to their Twitter status box – they simply click to tweet.
IceRocket
This is a free tool to help monitor specific keywords. When the real-time search engine launched in 2004, it was used mainly by bloggers to keep track of mentions of their blog. Over the years, IceRocket has expanded to include social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can now track mentions of all three together or separately. IceRocket offers a trend report, which is useful. All you have to do is enter the terms you want to see mentioned and you’ll get a graph illustrating how many posts a day the term appears as well as the total amount of blog posts over a 30 day period.
Social security tools
Secure My Social
The tool addresses the business, regulatory, physical, and human risks of social media by providing real-time warnings as problematic material is posted so as to ensure immediate removal. It uses patent-pending technology to scan as its subscribers use social media, and warns them in real-time of activity that may expose them to real-world physical, financial, professional, and/or personal harm. The system is simple to use and so non-intrusive that most people won’t even know that it is running except when a problem arises that they certainly want to know about.
Analytical tools
Followerwonk
Find, analyze, and optimize your social growth with Followerwonk. The tool helps you explore and grow your social graph. Dig deeper into Twitter analytics: know your followers, their location, time they tweet. Find and connect with new influencers in your niche. Use super-actionable visualizations to compare your social graph to others. Easily share your reports with the world.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free and versatile tool that allows you to discover which social sites are driving traffic and conversions, among other things. With Google Alerts, you are notified every time your brand or keywords are mentioned on forums, news sites and blogs. It’s a powerful tool that costs you nothing.
Social Mention
A free, real-time platform that allows search and analysis of social media, organized into a single stream. Influence is measured by Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach. Covers 100+ social media sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google.
Twazzup
Search for a brand name, keywords or a hashtag to find real-time monitoring and analytics. The tool shows top influencers, all recent relevant Tweets, top photos and top links. Basic, but free.
Addict-o-matic
A free, easy to use tool. Simply enter the name of your brand or product, or that of your competitor, and Addictomatic will return results for a variety of sites. Allows customization of the sites shown.
SA
A powerful data analytics tool that allows your customers to view all of their data in one simple, easy-to-use visualization. Social media, email, and traffic data all come together to provide a complete view of your business activity.
Brand 24
The tool is paid, but has a 14-day free trial period. It serves for getting social insights. Discover what people are saying online about your brand. Brand24 gives you instant access to mentions about your brand across the web, from social networks to influential publishers. Therefore you can reach customers fast, react and engage quickly to real-time comments made about your brand, follow-up on positive comments from your brand ambassadors, or respond to a dissatisfied customer before the story gets ahead of you. Detect sales opportunities. 80% of consumers do research or ask online before making a buying decision. Brand24 gives you the listening tools to find these leads, identify where to promote products and find customers before they find you.
Quintly
The tool has a free 14-day trial period. So, how can it help your social media marketing? You will be able to get instant benchmarks for all your social media channels, find out which content works best in your social media strategy, optimize your decision making process based on visualized data, receive centralized social media analysis, track Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn,YouTube and Google+, connect your Facebook Insights and compare all your own pages, get more than 250 different inbuilt metrics to analyze every aspect of social media, get tailored social media reports based on your custom dashboards, receive social media reports that automatically adapt to your dashboards, add any given metric, table and chart to your reports and define your recipients, create custom dashboards tailored to your clients, specific goals and more, bring dashboards to the big screen with ‘mission control’ mode, share any custom dashboards as a live-feed with your colleagues, measure your social media performance across all major networks, track social media KPIs like your overall fan growth, find out how engaging you are as a brand on different networks, identify key influencing social media user, get detailed information on social media key influencers, receive accurate information on their behavior, build beneficial relationships that help to advocate your brand, easily export any single metric or dashboard, use CSV and Excel exports to get the raw data of any metric, download any given metric as JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX or as a live-feed link and so much more…
Keyhole
You can try the tool for free straight away. Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating. Keyhole tracks the most influential people engaging with your keywords. Reach out to them to promote your content and increase your brand’s reach. Keyhole dashboards are easy to read and share so you will be able to show the value of your work. Prove how well your campaign is doing by sending a link of your dashboard to your colleagues & clients or download a printable PDF to share around the office.
CrowdBooster
The tool offers a 30-day free trial. Measure & optimize your social media marketing with it. Improve your online presence. Have the right tools to make data-driven decisions. Save time on reporting, get real-time data that’s always up-to-date, quickly report your key performance metrics, share them with your dashboard. Export graphs & tables, their dashboard creates editable, beautiful graphs & tables for you to view. You can export to CSV then drop the raw data in your own custom report. Schedule unlimited tweets posts for the most optimal time. The tool recommends the best time for you to get the most engagement out of your followers and fans. Find your most engaged fans & followers, learn to quickly adapt to your audience. CrowdBooster’s technology provides your audience insight, suggests who you should engage with, and how to improve the content.
Over-Graph
Over-Graph is one single solution to unite all your audiences. Keep all your Facebook and LinkedIn Profiles and Pages, Twitter and Instagram accounts, as well as your Youtube channels at the same place. Run and analyze your Social Network campaigns better. Edit your content once and publish it to infinity of different accounts / profiles / pages. Manage all of your conversations (mentions/tags, comments, messages, inbox, DM, etc.) at a glance and 1 single interface. Over-Graph processes raw data and turns them into readable values; providing you with enhanced flexibility to monitor and measure performance indicators and results.
Fanpage Karma
The tool has 14-day free trial period. Fanpage Karma is an online tool for social media analytics and monitoring. It helps social media managers and agencies to engage fans better and reach a growing community in the social networks. Fanpage Karma provides valuable insights on posting strategies and performance of social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
How Sociable
Add your social media accounts, or that of your competitors, to receive a score for each platform based on that week’s usage. The at-a-glance data shows which networks are performing well and which need more attention. The free version shows metrics for 12 social sites, for $3/month adds a further 24 including Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
Kred
Kred is a good entry level tool for those new to influencer marketing. It assigns a score to influencers, based on their mentions, retweets, replies and follows and their willingness to post other’s content. You can get one free year by sending a tweet.
Onalytica
With Onalytica you will know the most relevant digital influencers for your content, which will give you a competitive advantage to influence their sizeable networks. You can share your content with them safe in the knowledge that they are posting very similar content and are therefore more likely to share your content with their social media following. Onalytica matches the proportional usage of nouns in your content against an aggregate of what an influencer has posted on Twitter over the past 12 months to return the most relevant influencers. This will identify many more relevant influencers than keyword searching across social media listening tools.
Facebook Insights
If you’re marketing on Facebook, you might be concerned about the competition and the question whether the advertising there is worth the investment. We think you should be using Facebook Insights. One of the most beneficial features of this tool is that it can help you understand the behavior of your customers. For example, you can create a schedule based on the time or day of the week that your customers are most active on Facebook. Other informative features include being able to track likes, post reach, and engagement metrics. And, you can even keep tabs on your competitors Facebook activity.
Persona creating tools
Personapp
Would you like to visualize your audience? Personapp allows you to create and share quick, lightweight personas using a simple lean framework. It’s useful to create these low–fi personas with your clients at your kick-off meeting for a new project. It also allows you to start the process for user involvement at an early stage without any friction. Once you’ve created these personas (usually 4 or 5 to start off with), you then validate these through in-depth user interviews and then re–visit them after your research to determine which assumptions still stand and which can be binned. Rather than doing these on paper or hacked using Word, Fireworks or similar, it would be useful to have a simple web interface to create these and collaborate on them with clients (remotely if necessary).
BuzzBundle
Create and manage multiple personas for all people you have to present. BuzzBundle supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, forums and blogs. Comment in blogs or forums, retweet, reply, and send private messages. Quick-search your conversations, remove any messages; customize the data to display and more. Schedule any number of posts and announcements for them to appear when needed. Hide your real location id if you don’t want it to be detected. Join conversations incognito from behind a proxy.
Lead generation tools
Socedo
Socedo is an automated social media lead generation tool. It helps you find your target audience, engage them with one click, and fill your funnel. Socedo discovers the social prospects that match your custom criteria then further qualifies them via predefined engagement workflow. This brings relevant social prospects into your sales pipeline. Do you think you know a much larger audience is talking about your product, your competitors or industry thought leaders on Twitter? They may be interested in your product but didn’t make it into your sales funnel. Socedo brings those social prospects that match your custom criteria to you. Once you approve a prospect, Socedo automatically looks up their other social profiles and engages with them automatically on Twitter using a customizable workflow. By approving prospects, you build a pool of qualified social leads every day. Social Lead Performance Report Socedo provides critical business insights into your custom criteria and your engagement with your social leads. You will be able to fine-tune your criteria and engagement workflow to get even higher quality leads over time.
Socialoomph
Boosting your social media productivity doesn’t have to be a manual time-consuming process. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, RSS feeds, blogs, Plurk, and App.net – easily schedule updates, find quality people to follow, and monitor social media activity with Socialoomph. Schedule tweets, track keywords, save and reuse drafts, track your clicks, View @Mentions & Retweets, purge your DM Inbox & keep it tidy, purge your Twitter Tweets, secure Twitter access, run up to five Twitter accounts for free.
Social Pilot
How SocialPilot helps in social media marketing: more accounts, more posts, affordable price. Share as many as 500 posts and connect up to 200 social profiles from a single account. Share all your posts, tweets and updates without worrying about hitting the limits. Add all your client profiles without managing multiple SocialPilot accounts. Upload hundreds of posts at once in text or CSV format; SocialPilot will do the heavy lifting to make sure your posts go out at your schedules. Flaunt your brand on Facebook on every post that you make. When you post new content on Facebook, you can display “Posted by YOUR BRAND” which will increase your brand visibility. Work collaboratively with your entire team under and share your social media calendar. You can also designate some members as contributors only, while other members as approvers to ensure that only curated content gets posted on your accounts. With SocialPilot content suggestions, you’ll never be out of awesome content to post on your social media accounts. Moreover, you can add all your favorite external feeds and continue sharing content that will be helpful to your network. SocialPilot helps you connect all your social media networks at one central place including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, VK, Xing and Tumblr.
Rapportive
Rapportive allows you to view social profiles in your Gmail inbox. While primarily used for LinkedIn, you have access to the location, job title, and images. You can also view their latest tweets or Facebook statuses as well. This tool allows you to grow your network by searching the web for people with similar interests or careers without having to search the web yourself. This email add-on is compatible with MailChimp, Bantam Live, BatchBook, BookingBug, Brightpearl, and CrunchBase too.
Qzzr
This is a quiz tool that displays both elegance and simplicity. Create graded, checklist, and outcome quizzes, like ‘Where in the world is this?’ and ‘Which Harry Potter character are you?’ Customize your quiz’s look and feel to fit any website or layout. Easily add text, images, and animated GIFs to your quiz. Need to quiz in other languages? The tool supports a myriad of popular translations. Embed & share your quizzes with the world. Embed quizzes with a single line of code. Share it with all the networks you love. Track your results, review stats, analyze responses, export leads, drive business, generate unlimited leads, add links and offers, drive Facebook likes, make it your own. Reduced branding and white-label options are available for businesses.
Content creation tools
Contently
Contently is a decent content marketing platform. It was created by journalists and technologists with a vision of better media world. Their quest is not only to help every company become a quality publisher, but also to empower creative people to build careers and to fund stories that keep democracy alive. Contently is a technology company that helps brands create great content at scale. They provide enterprise companies with smart technology, content marketing expertise, and vetted creative talent – journalists, photographers, designers, videographers, and all things in-between.
Storify
Storify gives you the tools to create the best evergreen and live blog stories, uniting traditional storytelling with engaged audiences: breaking news, up-to-the-minute, non-stop updates from any source, every time, live blogging, conferences, sporting events and award shows, showcase everything that happened, live. Capture and report your hashtag’s results, or curate the best user content. Archive your next discussion with talent for a new show, album and more. You’ll get a real-time collaboration built for the social newsroom, wherever you find it. Allow multiple editors to simultaneously update, review and publish your story from anywhere. Create stories wherever you find them. Post content and shape your narrative on the fly with their powerful mobile app. Craft authentic stories with content from your team and community. Drag and drop content to group audience moments. Quickly search, filter and publish social content from your owned assets and across the web: text, photos, even videos. Focus attention on what matters by pinning content and displaying at-a-glance views of key story events. Sidenotes, social sharing and other engagement features let your community voice their opinion while driving traffic right back to your site. Extend the life of your stories. Storify is built on Livefyre Engagement Cloud, helping you turn real-time content into long-term, reusable assets. Store, tag and organize content in your social library to repurpose your best posts and re-engage readers weeks, months, even years down the road.
Other
Klout
Klout makes you famous for what you love. The best way to have an impact online is to create and share great content. Klout helps you do exactly that. The tool suggests shareable content that your audience hasn’t seen yet. Create content that strikes a chord with your friends, fans, and followers and get a reaction. Track how retweets, likes, and shares change your Klout Score, see the impact.
IFTTT
IFTTT connects the apps you love so they work best for you. The tool is about creating powerful connections with one simple statement: if this then that. IFTTT allows you to make personalized “Recipes” by taking a “Trigger” (the “this” part). An example is getting tagged in a photo on Facebook. The “that” part is then the Action taken afterwards. So, after being tagged on Facebook, then “create a status message on Facebook”. Because IFTTT works with 132 channels that include social media networks and businesses like eBay and Best Buy, it’s incredibly easy to stay connected with both the online and offline world. The tool has already been praised by publications like Forbes, The New York Times, Time and Wired.
That was the last tool on our list and now I have a couple of questions for you. Please take your time and tell me if you consider this compilation useful? Are you going to use any of the tools in your social marketing campaigns? Maybe you are using any of the tools yet? Please don’t be shy to share your experience with the community as well as like and share this blog post. Have I missed anything of value? Your additions are also welcome:). Gracias!