16 Free Social Media Marketing Tools

Source: Business 2 Community

Running a social media marketing campaign can be a daunting and time-consuming task. With so many platforms available, and with each one often requiring daily attention, you may not know where to start.

Luckily, there are plenty of quality tools available to help you manage your social media marketing. From multi-platform scheduling tools to blog idea generators to graphic design apps, you can find everything you need to get started in this list. And best of all, you don’t need to spend a cent, if you don’t want to.

All of these apps are either free or have a generous free tier that isn’t overly feature-limited. Let’s get started.

1. Buffer

The key to successful social media marketing is posting consistently and frequently. According to studies, the average number of Tweets per day for maximum engagement is three, and on both Facebook and Google+, sharing two to three times per day is recommended.

To do this in real time, every day, can take a lot of effort and planning. Buffer is a scheduling app that allows you to set when you would like posts to be shared from your accounts – and then does the sharing automatically for you.

About.com says the app saves them, “one to two hours a day,” has doubled their Facebook followers, and has increased Twitter followers by 60% in the past year.

The app is compatible with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest and you are allowed to add one account from each platform for free.

Buffer also offers some insightful analytics on your posts such as comments, clicks, reach, and shares.

2. Hootsuite

Like Buffer, Hootsuite also offers post scheduling.

But its most useful feature is that it allows you to consolidate all your social platforms’ streams into one place. You can easily navigate between timelines, notifications, messages and more for each platform with a single click.

Hootsuite was originally designed for Twitter but now it is compatible with Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Mixi and most recently, YouTube.

The free version also offers a social media report, giving stats on most popular links, top referrers and more.

3. Circloscope

Circloscope is a management tool for Google+ that has everything you need for managing your circles. It comes as an extension for the Google Chrome browser and lets you:

• Remove inactive profiles
• Remove profiles not circling you back
• Add users from shared circles and posts
• Find and add influencers

The free version is fully functional, but if you want to add and remove people in bulk, a $47/year Premium upgrade allows you to do just that.

4. Followerwonk

Followerwonk by Moz is a one-stop shop for Twitter account management. The web app has a multitude of functions to optimize your Twitter account and marketing. You can:

• Track followers
• Organize followers by certain characteristics such as influence, keywords or number of tweets
• Analyze accounts, including those that don’t follow you
• Track when followers are most active

Being able to track when your followers are the most active is a powerful feature. The lifespan of a tweet is finite with some researchers saying 18 minutes and others saying 24 minutes.

In any case, with such a small window of opportunity, you need to make sure your tweets are being seen by the maximum number of followers – and this functionality lets you pinpoint the prime time for posting. It also features Buffer integration to create a posting schedule based on your optimal times.

The free version does have some limits, and to manage multiple accounts or for more advanced analytics, upgrades start at $29/month.

5. ManageFlitter

It’s all well and good having a big following on Twitter, but this does little for business if the majority of your audience is unengaged.

ManageFlitter is a Twitter follower management tool. It helps you to analyze your audience to see who is engaged and who is not. The app displays your followers in order of who has followed you most recently and displays statistics such as if they are following you and when they were last active.

You can go through the list and remove accounts that are inactive, spammy or offering little engagement. The free plan lets you unfollow 200 accounts a day. For more features, reporting and unlimited unfollows, paid plans start at $12/month.

6. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media management app similar to Buffer and Hootsuite – aimed specifically at online stores.

The free version of the app allows you to schedule posts and even offers content suggestions, but its unique selling point is the integration it offers with your online store.

It allows you to send out branded Facebook posts and pictures of products directly from your site. Connect Pinterest, Instagram or other image-based sites to maximize product sales.

7. Zapier

Zapier describes itself as an app that “moves info between web pages automatically.”…

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