6 free tools to save hours of social media management

Businesses today face a constant need to project a credible social presence to maintain their competence and ensure sustainability in the market. Social media marketing has become so crucial that the past year alone witnessed around $9.2 billion investment exclusively on social media advertising. This number is projected to cross $15 billion by the end of the decade.

The popularity of social media, however, brings with it qualms about its tedious and time-consuming management. What businesses can do instead of draining valuable time manually posting on such sites is use the right social media management tools to do so. These tools are handy, easy-to-use, reliable and, more importantly, free.

1. BUFFER

With its simple, clean and easy-to-navigate format, Buffer tops the list of social media management tools. Features like analytics, custom scheduling and browser extensions make the reception, posting and sharing of reports a lot easier. The Buffer extension enables easy multiplatform scheduling while browsing. It successfully tracks social media and determines the perfect moment to schedule tweets, thus maximising exposure and helping your business stay on top of the prevailing trends.

1. HOOTSUITE

With its many significant features including the multichannel social media listening tool, RSS feeds, analytics and reporting , Hootsuite stands as a trusted giant in the social media tools space. It is best known for its social listening tools and RSS feed capabilities that spans across more than 30 popular social media networks. Hootsuite enables easy access to analytics providing an insight into the progress and growth of your social media community. It helps in assignment management for the team and campaign management for all your social networks among other such useful features.

1. MAVSOCIAL

MavSocial is a cross between ‘Maven’ and ‘Social’ and boasts a trusted expertise in managing social media content for business. This tool has a special feature that enables content creation in multiple languages. As a software promising visual content management and social publishing, it can easily be used to upload and manage all brand-consistent multimedia content to meet your digital marketing needs.

1. EVERYPOST

Everypost is yet another tool that has, with its easy-to-access features, gained much traction among businesses. It can cluster multiple social media accounts without any hassle and simplifies business flow by perfectly choosing what updates to post and when. It has a separate menu reserved for archives, analytics, post creation and scheduling.

1. OKTOPOST

It is a social management tool designed mainly for B2B marketing. Oktopost lets one plan, implement and measure the effectiveness of large-scale campaigns across multiple networks and includes integration with third-party platforms. What is special about this tool is its content recommendation engine that discovers new content to create based on the most successful previous content.

1. SPROUT SOCIAL

This management tool is plainly based on the idea that communication and engagement between businesses and customers should be better and more open. This vision makes it stand out among other such tools. It simply works in making the buyer-seller communication more transparent and easy to manage. It uses smart search to find keywords that the customers might be using and employs these words to communicate with customers about current hot trends.

These social media management tools are a boon to all businesses. They effectively manage social media engagements of business groups, maintain their relationship with the world around and keep them going.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)