27 Free Social Media Marketing Tools to Save You Time and Money

Having a good social media strategy takes time, and if you are a small business that needs to save on this, you will love these tools.

How much time do you spend managing your social networks, creating content, and other tasks at work? If you have a small business, paying for this service can be almost impossible, so in order to do everything you need and in a professional manner, it is essential to use tools that help you optimize performance.

There are millions of tools that you can use on the web, although some make you waste time and others save you time. Here is a list of 27 exceptional for your digital tasks.

1. Feedly

Feedly saves a lot of time since it organizes all the content that a business wants to curate in one place. The ways to organize the content in Feedly in folders depend on your objectives. The content can be categorized according to type, theme, company, etc. just add the URLs of your favorite blogs and websites.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows you to find the most shared, influential content in any niche and run detailed analysis reports, track your competitor's content performance and do detailed comparisons, etc.

3. Tweetdeck

Twitter Tweetdeck with its dashboard allows monitoring of various accounts, Twitter lists, activity, ability to respond quickly to mentions, and programming of tweets. Tweetdeck surely helps you save time and improve productivity without having to log in and out of multiple accounts.

4. Tagboard

Tagboard is another tool for monitoring and analyzing hashtags on the largest platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and Vine. Tagboard saves time by allowing boards to be created with content from each platform.

5. Social Mention

Social Mention is a keyword and hashtag monitoring tool on over 100 networking platforms and offers the most comprehensive keyword research available. It is easy to use and offers analytics for specific keywords. It allows measuring the influence by reach, feeling, passion, etc.

6. IFTTT

IFTTT (If This Then That) allows automation of various activities. It works with recipes that are individual tasks that can be automated. A new tweet can be generated as soon as a new blog post is published. You can choose recipes from the thousands available, connect many channels, and create your own recipes.

7. TrendSpottr

Detecting trends is not easy. TrendSpottr is a tool focused on trending content, keywords/phrases and influencers for any topic of interest before others realize it.

8. Trello

Trello is a web and mobile app for tracking and visual progress. It is based on creating folders for any idea, content on the blog, projects, content already published, upcoming content, brainstorming, etc.

It can be used to organize lists, collaborate with the team, creates for multiple clients, invites collaborators of an unlimited number, plans promotions or launches, etc.

9. Everypost

The Everypost dashboard simplifies things a lot, allows you to add multiple accounts and schedule and choose where to publish your content.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr accounts can be connected.

10. Buffer

Did you know that Buffer is indispensable in a list like this, right? It is easy to navigate if you need a platform for managing your social networks. By creating the account, you can choose the social networks (pages and accounts) that you want to connect. It allows content programming, it has its own analytics and payment plans with more functionalities. Sometimes I am using this to program my tweets and Facebook page posts.

11. Hootsuite

It does not matter if you use the free version or the paid versions (pro or enterprise), Hootsuite allows the management of several platforms of a dashboard. Hootsuite allows you to publish on almost all platforms at the same time and that way you save time. Although it is not a good idea to always do that. Other features of Hootsuite are programming, monitoring, responding to mentions, cutting links, uploading photos, draft posts, streams, etc.

12. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an excellent tool for managing social networks. It can connect with ZenDesk and SalesForce. SproutSocial calculates optimal posting times with the feature called ViralPost. One of the best features of SproutSocial is the Smart Inbox that gathers important messages and alerts in a stream, thereby saving time by answering questions from followers and potential customers.

13. Easel.ly

Creating infographics takes a lot of time or money. But if you use the Easel.ly tool you can create attractive infographics even if you don't have a budget or know-how to design. You have to create an account and select one of the free templates. Then clicking on various elements and making changes to the text or adding shapes or backgrounds you can create a good infographic.

14. Canva

Canva is the best tool for creating visual content if you do not know how to use Photoshop and you are not a designer and you are going to do it in a very short time. The tool has stock images and many templates for all platforms, for blogs, ebooks, presentations, infographics, adding text, using various fonts, filters, etc. If the templates do not help you, you can create visual content with the dimensions that you want. I am personally using this tool!

15. Pablo

Pablo is a Buffer's tool to create visual content without paying anything. Pablo has 3 types of images - horizontal, square, and vertical. You can upload your own images, add text, play with various fonts and effects to create images in seconds

16. PicFlow

Creating videos takes a long time and requires a budget, but if you use PicFlow for iPhone or Android you can mix a group of photos to tell a story, explain something or educate followers. You can add music and share the videos directly to Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram saving you a lot of time in your social media marketing efforts.

17. StayFocusd

StayFocusd is a free productivity extension for Google Chrome that allows you to block distracting websites. When it is installed, you just have to go to settings and choose the sites you want to block. It also has an option called nuclear that blocks all websites for a period of time that you choose. Or you can add multiple websites that take you the most time to the list of blocked sites.

18. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

The title of blog posts is very important and there is a tool that can help you create titles that improve engagement and invite clicks. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer analyzes the titles and gives them ratings depending on the words used, if they provoke emotions if power words are used, etc. and in this way saves time in creating the titles for your blog posts.

19. Google Drive

Google Drive lets you access files from anywhere using secure cloud storage and backups of your photos, videos, files, and more.

20. Dropbox

Dropbox allows users to store and sync files online and between computers, and to share files and folders with other users and with tablets and mobiles.

21. Hunter

Hunter is a very useful tool, you just have to enter a domain name in your search engine and in seconds you get all the public emails associated with it.

22. Brad24

Brand24 gives you the ability to follow what people are saying about your brand in real-time. It includes identification and monitoring of influential people, analysis of feelings through the segmentation of comments into positive, negative, or neutral.

23. Optimizely

Optimizely is the world's top-rated experimentation platform, allowing product and marketing teams to test, learn, and deploy digital experiences to empower their business.

24. AudioBoom

AudioBoom is a global platform for audio distribution and podcasting on demand. It offers services for the radio, media, and podcast industries as well as a direct audio consumer application.

25. Audiense

Audiense is a powerful online social media marketing software that was developed to help users make the most of their social media accounts such as Twitter for marketing purposes.

I am using their limited version of Twitter Marketing and Audience Insights. You can also sign up and connect your Twitter account. Then go to the Audiense Analytics, here you can view your Community Insights and your Best Time to Tweet. You can export your Best Time to Tweet to your HootSuite Schedule or to configure to your Buffer Schedule like what I am doing.

26. BuiltWith

BuiltWith is a tool that provides us with information about any website, just by indicating the URL that you want to investigate.

27. Semrush

SEMrush offers SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research solutions. It is endorsed worldwide by more than 3 million marketers.

Conclusion

If you find, like most SMEs, that your budget is not bulky and is not fully defined, you can start with the ideas I have presented to make it more efficient and start to get more out of it. What are you waiting for!