Social media can feel like an unruly animal that constantly needs to be fed, but with the right tools, your social media strategy can become organized and easy to manage. It’s important to maintain a constant presence on social media to build brand awareness, but as a business owner, you have a lot of things on your plate, from running your tours and activities to maintaining your equipment and more.

Using a social media management tool to schedule your posts in advance saves a lot of time and helps ensure that you always have great content in your feed. This guide will cover a variety of free social media management tools to help you bring your digital marketing strategy to the next level. 

Whether you’re active on Facebook, have a stunning Instagram feed, or enjoy interacting with people on Twitter, there’s a social media tool out there that will help you improve your strategy. Once you have your social media calendar ready, all you have to do is plug your posts into the scheduler! There are many benefits of using a social media scheduling tool: 

• It helps ensure cohesive content across platforms by planning and scheduling all your posts in advance. 
• It allows you to manage multiple platforms in one place. 
• It gives you access to analytics to help you track and improve your performance. 
• It saves you time throughout your busy week. 

Before we dive into scheduling tools, it’s important to mention that social media is just that — social! Scheduling your posts in advance doesn’t mean you can completely forget about social media for the rest of the week. Make sure you’re constantly monitoring your profiles, interacting with customers and businesses in your industry, and answering any questions that come in through your accounts. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the most popular social media management tools! 

Hootsuite

Manage up to three profiles • Schedule up to 30 posts • Mobile App • Chrome Extension

Hootsuite has been around for a long time, making it one of the most popular social media management tools. The free plan allows you to manage up to three social media profiles in one place, which works well for small businesses. The platform makes scheduling easy with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. With the free plan, you can schedule up to 30 posts in advance, so you can plan at least a couple weeks of content, depending on how often you post. The mobile app also makes it easy to manage your content on the go, and the Chrome extension comes in handy when you see something interesting while surfing the web that you want to share with your followers. 

Buffer Publish

Manage up to three profiles • Schedule up to 10 posts • Mobile App • Chrome Extension

Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer has been around for a while and is one of the biggest names in social media management. The free version allows you to manage up to three social media profiles and schedule up to 10 posts, so you’ll have to schedule your posts at least once a week. The interface is clean and easy to use, and one of the best features is that it suggests the best times to post depending on your followers’ activity. The mobile app and Chrome extension make it easy to manage your posts wherever you are. 

Later 

Manage one account per platform • Schedule 30+ posts • Works best with Instagram

Due to its visual focus, Later is best suited for Instagram or other visual platforms like Pinterest. The free plan is quite robust, allowing you to add one account per platform and upload up to 30 Instagram posts, 50 Twitter posts, 30 Facebook posts, and 30 Pinterest posts per month. Posting on Later always begins with an image, and their media library is one of the coolest features. You can upload unlimited images, organize them with labels, then choose an image from the library to start posting. The free plan only allows you to upload static images, but it’s still a great tool for businesses with great photos. The scheduling calendar is intuitive and easy to use. The tool also offers useful analytics to help you track and improve performance. 

SocialOomph

Manage one profile • Schedule unlimited posts • Works best with Twitter

While SocialOomph’s interface is not as user-friendly as some of the other platforms on this list, the more tech-savvy users tend to enjoy its wide variety of benefits. The free plan only allows you to manage one account at a time, so it’s most useful if you’re focused on one platform like Twitter — which is also the easiest platform to connect with this tool. You can schedule unlimited posts with the free plan (with an hourly limit of three posts). The coolest feature is you can bulk upload a large amount of pre-written posts, but this only works with text-based posts, again making it most useful for Twitter. 

Adopting a social media management tool can drastically change the way you post to your profiles. You can spend less than an hour a week scheduling out all your posts, freeing up your time to focus on all the other aspects of running your business. Remember, social media is all about timeliness, so even when you have your posts scheduled for the week, always leave room to share interesting posts you find while browsing the web or upload spontaneous content, like a great video you just happened to capture on a tour. For more tips, browse our social media guides!