5 of the Best Free Social Media Tools

Social media is an important part of any business. It helps to showcase your brand, legitimize your company, present yourself as an active brand and increase engagement among potential and existing customers. However, it can also take up a lot of time, which is something you may not have much of.

Setting up profiles on your chosen social platforms is just the start, as constant maintenance of these pages is vital in order to make the most of the benefits offered by social. Certain tools can make this easier and ensure your posts are getting as much traction as possible without someone needing to be on social media all the time.

There are a lot of free tools that can make everyday social media marketing simpler and more effective. While they may not be able to develop your business' social media plan, they can ensure you put it into action in the best possible way. Read on to see which tools your company will find useful.

1. Hootsuite

This is one of the best tools for managing all of your social profiles on one platform, making it a lot easier to align all of your posting activity. Through Hootsuite, you can schedule posts, which means you can prepare several posts for numerous channels at once, without needing to visit them individually every day. As Viral Solutions points out, this also helps drive engagement as you can schedule posts outside of your normal business hours.

2. Quick Sprout

One of the most important aspects of social media is analyzing how your posts are performing. This allows you to better understand what works and what doesn't, meaning you can alter your strategy to better engage followers and customers with your content. Quick Sprout creates a report by looking at your Google Analytics data so you have clear and concise recommendations without needing to go into all your data.

3. Unsplash

Imagery is vital on social media, especially as links and posts that don't feature a photo can easily be lost among the hundreds of updates individual users will see every day. In fact, tweets that feature images get around 150 per cent more retweets than those without images, according to Hubspot. Unsplash is a fantastic source for free imagery that has no restrictions on how they are used, meaning you can post them alongside your social media updates.

4. Mazwai

Alongside images, videos are fast becoming one of the most important social media marketing tools, with Animoto finding that 76.5 per cent of marketers and small business owners say that using video had a direct impact on their business. If you don't have the budget to produce your own videos, you can find a selection of free creative commons video clips on Mazwai ready to be downloaded. These can be used in a variety of ways so long as the producer is credited in posts.

5. Lumen5

Video is dominating the marketing space and it’s no surprise that 72% of users prefer this type of content over text when learning about a product or service. Creating video doesn’t require any technical training or experience – just creative input. Lumen5 is a fantastic tool to use to transform existing blog content into engaging videos. Videos can be produced within minutes as it leverages AI to suggest stock images or videos based on text relevancy.