The Best Free Social Media Tools For Small Businesses
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Co-Schedule’ Headline Analyzer
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Yoast
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Socialrank
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Hootsuite
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Tweetdeck
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Ritetag
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DrumUp
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Canva
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Pixabay
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Pexels
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Mockdrop
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Later
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Website Grader
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Uprank
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Ad Parlor
By leveraging the right small business social media tools you can ensure awesome results from your strategy – and these are the best tools around.
You could say that a social media strategy was only as good as its best social media tools. It’s not true; a social media strategy is ultimately only as good as the marketer who devises and employs it – but you could say that all the same.
Why? Well, every social media marketer makes use of social media tools to help streamline their processes and maximise the amount that they can achieve. For small businesses, this process can save heaps of precious time and energy that can be much better invested elsewhere.
This index of free small business social media tools is an updated version of a previous list that we compiled back at the beginning of 2016. Each of these small business social media tools previous Giraffians have tried and considered worthy of mentioning.
1. Coschedule’ Headline Analyzer
Nothing boosts a social media marketing strategy quite like the addition of an awesome content marketing strategy. That’s our jam here at Giraffe. Seriously, if you want to get more from social media, start writing awesome web content that your audience will value before posting and promoting it. You can thank us for the results later.
Coschedule’ Headline Analyzer provides quality scores on the strength of article titles and headlines in relation to social media engagement, particularly the likelihood of shares. It also helps to determine the likelihood that a blog title will be beneficial to your SEO.
2. Yoast WordPress Plugin
Yoast is the number one search engine optimisation plugin for WordPress. Users set their chosen keyword for each article they post and are given simple tips to increase the likelihood that they will rank well for that keyword. These include increasing the frequency of the keyword throughout different parts of the content such as headlines and alt text for images. It also gives you little coloured dots which signify the strength of each aspect of your article – and nothing compares to the feeling of turning all those tiny specks green.
Technically it is an SEO tool…come to think of it, both of the first two examples weren’t really small business social media tools. However, articles put through Yoast commonly experience more click-throughs from social due to the optimisation, so it’s certainly worth using. Plus the extra benefits are definitely not to be ignored.
3. Socialrank
Socialrank is a simple to use platform that allows you to identify, organise and manage both Twitter and Instagram followers. As small business social media tools go, this is one that will help give you genuine insight into the strengths of your following such as who your best followers are and what they are about. With the use of filters, you can see, amongst other things, who your most engaged and influential followers are.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the preferred social media management tool of millions that allows you to schedule, engage with and grow your audience across all of your social networks from one place. It also offers social analytics. Free features are limited but there is a selection of affordable pro plans available.
Although I have used Hootsuite in the past, it isn’t currently in our arsenal of in-house social media marketing tools. This is mostly down to the pricing structure which can escalate quickly once you start to add extra accounts and services. However, as small business social media tools go, the free version can certainly be useful if you only have a few channels to manage.
5. Tweetdeck
If Hootsuite isn’t for you, that’s completely fine. There are plenty of other social media scheduling tools out there of varying quality. While scheduling for Instagram may be a serious task (there are ways, but they are difficult), Facebook’s in-built scheduling tool is perfectly adequate. It may hiccup every now and then, but with that many users you can be sure that it will be fixed soon enough.
For Twitter, Tweetdeck is a great tool that allows users to create and schedule Tweets, alongside a bunch of other features like creating custom feeds. These can come in really useful for spotting opportunities for interaction. While it may not have as many advanced analytics as Hootsuite’s paid version, that doesn’t stop it being the preferred choice of many social media marketers.
6. RiteTag
Hashtag strategy – what is it? Well, it’s using hashtags. Sounds simple, right! It’s not. What makes RiteTag one of the best small business social media tools is that it gives instant feedback on your chosen hashtags to help you decide which to use as part of your strategy.
Using the right hashtags is integral to seriously expanding your reach, but left to our own devices we are all guilty of having a few that we always use. We do so mistakenly thinking that they are powerful when they are actually just a waste of characters. If that’s you, I can’t recommend RiteTag highly enough.
7. DrumUp
Depending on how important external content (that is, content from other websites) is to your social media strategy (and the likelihood is that it will be to some extent), DrumUp can be a great tool. It has multiple functions which recommend content for you to share or curate based on your keywords, direct to your dashboard.
The dream is that your content marketing strategy would eventually become so good and so frequent that you would never need to go looking for content to curate – you would always have a steady stream coming from your blog. But until then, DrumUp is a great tool.
8. Canva
I’m pretty sure we are sponsored by Canva at Giraffe… If we aren’t and you are from Canva, get in touch. We are always raving about it. Absolutely everyone in the office makes use of it to create professional looking graphics for social media posts. It’s simple, easy to use and comes with a whole host of graphics, layouts, fonts and images. Power users – hit up either of the two below resources to get more out of it…
9. Pixabay & 10. Pexels
If Canva is the sword of Giraffe Social Media, Pixabay and Pexels are the shield and… force-field? Something like that. Anyway, these two sites are perfect for finding images under Creative Commons CC0. In laymans terms, this means you can do absolutely anything you like with them. Seriously, anything. And you won’t have to thank anybody.
There are a few things to consider when making use of stock images though. Ideally you only want to make use of them as one-off graphics – don’t make them key to your brand such as a permanent placeholder for the homepage on your website. The reason is that many consumers have seen the majority of them before and can spot them a mile off., so one-off use is ideal.
However, you can also find images under Creative Commons CCo on Unsplash and Freepix, if you’ve used up all the pictures on the others.
11. MockDrop
Mockdrop is extremely useful for those who want to put images of their app or desktop software onto stock images. All you have to do is upload a screenshot of your site or app interface and MockDrop will upload it onto a stock image and integrate it onto computer screens, mobile phone devices and even iPad screens.
12. Later
Marketed as “The simpler way to plan your visual content marketing”, Later is a scheduling tool for Instagram that allows users to schedule and manage their posts ahead of time. Is it that? Well, it is true that Later allows you to spread out and create a steady stream of content – but it does take some investment. That said, if you use Instagram a lot then these kind of small business social media tools can be a God-send.
13. Website Grader
Hubspot’s Website Grader gives a full report on the strength of your marketing efforts across all of your digital channels. This includes, you guessed it, social media, but also content and SEO. Certain information can seem a little iffy from time to time but it is still really useful if you are strapped for time and looking for immediate direction.
14. Uprank
Uprank is an advanced research tool that analyses and provides data on the strength of your brand’s digital marketing, including website architecture, SEO and social media. It then generates and delivers a digital marketing strategy tailored to your site in the form of comprehensive tasks. Great as a starting point – but lacks the creative and innovative aspects needed to develop an awesome social media posting strategy.
15. AdParlor
AdParlor lets you create free mockups of ads for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. This can give you a much better idea of what your finished campaigns will look like to users on these networks. The brand new interface is sleek and easy to use. As small business social media tools go, this is one that can be perfect to help develop your social media advertising strategy, with scalable and downloadable mockups, instant previews and in-line character limits.
