Social media marketing is central to any online marketing campaign.
To be successful, you need the right tools. The following are a number of free tools that have extensively tried, tested and reviewed by customer and experts. When we say, we don’t necessarily mean that they are all completely free. While some are totally free, a good number of them have a basic free plan or a free trial period allowing you to take the tool for a test drive.
The tools in this list are categorized into 7 broad categories as follows:
- Visual enhancement tools
- Content curation tools
- News filtering tools
- Monitoring & sharing tools
- Content creation tools
- Analytical tools
- Lead generation tools
Visual enhancement tools
As the name suggests, visual enhancement tools add some eye candy to your posts. They include tools that help you create visual content or edit visual content such as images, presentations, infographics and so forth. In this category we have the following:
Canva
The main features of Canva include:
- Design presentations, social media graphics, and a bunch of other things with dozens of beautiful templates.
- Millions of stock photos, vectors, and illustrations.
- Upload your own images.
- Comes with preset filters and advanced photo editing tools
Adobe Post
The main features of Adobe Post include:
- Tools to create amazing social graphics within seconds
- Comes with handcrafted re-mixable design layouts
- Resize text and eye-catching typography is automatically applied on-the-go. Quickly transform text and images into professional-looking graphics
Content Curation Tools
Content curation tools help find organize, schedule and post content on social media sites. They help you save time and provide you with deep insights about your social media posts. In this category, we have the following applications:
Buffer
The main features of Buffer are:
- Create a posting schedule for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages all in one place, creating a queue.
- Get insightful post analytics such as optimal scheduling times, most popular content and much more.
Sprout Social
The main features of Sprout Social are as follows:
- Has a free 30-day trial period.
- Easily start, monitor and join social conversations.
- Quickly respond to questions and resolve issues across networks.
- A collaborative platform ensuring smarter, faster and more efficient social communications.
- Measure performance and analyze all your social efforts.
News Filtering Tools
As the name suggests, news filtering tools help you sort through everyday “noise” coming from news sources and identify news items that have an impact on your brand, business, competition, and industry. In this category, we have one social media tools.
Feedly
The main features of Feedly are:
- Easily organize, read, and share all the content from one place
- Follow anybody on the web.
- See new videos from the YouTube channels you follow.
- Monitor news about your brand, product, competitors and the industry by creating Google Alerts.
- Browse through more content in a shorter time by organizing your feeds into easy-to-read collections.
- Arrange content you rely on into easy-to-read collections.
Monitoring and Sharing Tools
Monitoring and sharing tools help you do just that, monitor, and share your content. In this category, we have the following social media applications:
TweetDeck
The main features of TweetDeck are:
- Post and schedule to multiple Twitter accounts
- Stream all of your Twitter feeds in real time.
- Easily integrate with Buffer, for more insights management.
- Fully accessible for free, with no limits to the number of Twitter accounts.
Cyfe
The main features ofCyfe is its cloud-based service that allows you to easily monitor and share all of your critical business data from one single dashboard in real-time.
HootSuite
The main features of HootSuite include:
- Manage all your social networks and schedule messages for future publishing.
- In-depth social media analytics g
- Add multiple team members
- Secure logins, profile protections, and permission levels
Other social media tools in this category include:
- SocialClout
- Agora Pulse
- Likeable Hub
- Click to Tweet
- IceRocket
Analytical Tools
Analytical tools help you make sense of all the social media data. They include:
- Followerwonk
- Google Alerts
- Social Mention
- Twazzup
- Addict-o-matic
- SA
- Brand24
- Quintly
- Keyhole
- CrowdBooster
- Over-Graph
- Fanpage Karma
- How Sociable
- Kred
- Onalytica
- Facebook Insights
Lead Generation tools
Lead generations help convert social media audiences into actionable leads. Amongst the leading tools in this category are:
- Socedo
- Socialoomph
- Social Pilot
- Rapportive
- Qzzr
- Storify
Conclusion
While the tools on this list have the potential to put radically improve your social media marketing, a word of caution. Don’t fall into the trap that many novice social media marketers fall into, being wowed by the tools and using too many of them. Focus only on what you need and you will reap maximum results.
