List Of 50 Free Social Media Tools | 50 Free Social Media Tools for SEO in 2015
List Of 50 Free Social Media Tools
It is always exciting to use online tools for your business especially when they are worthwhile and free. In the past we have discussed about many such tools in posts such as 10 free tools to track social media marketing success and 10 free Twitter tools. Today, however, we are going to club all the free social media tools that are actively being used by social media marketing pros as well as social media marketing beginners. This list is an extensive and categorized list of 50 free social media tools. The categories are as follows:
- Social Media Monitoring Tools
- Video Tool
- Infographics Tool
- Content Discovery Tool
- Graphics Tool
- Social Branding Tool
- Similar Site Search
- URL Shortening and Tracking Tool
- Social Media Management Tools
- Mobile Apps
- Forum Tools
- Analytics Tool
- YouTube Tools
- Twitter Tools
- Facebook Tools
Without any further ado, let’s start with the first category.
Social Media Monitoring Tools:
1. BuzzSumo
More than a social media monitoring tool, this could also be used as a content marketing tool. As a business, you can research topics related to your business that gets a lot of buzz in your industry. I have included this under the social media monitoring tools as it helps you identify and monitor popular content in your niche as well as the social media popularity of that content in platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.
In other words, BuzzSumo is the social media version of Google, but with different search filters. You can filter content by type such as, articles, guest posts, inforgraphics, giveaways, interviews and videos.
Shown below is the sample user interface of this popularly used tool.
2. Social Mention
Social Mention is a real time search engine for content on social media platforms. You can search for your brand or your name or your target keyword and track its mention on various social media websites. These social media websites fall under categories such as blogs, microblogs, bookmarks, comments, events, images, news, video, audie and Q&A.
3. IceRocket
Track mentions of your brand or your target keywords in blogs, Facebook or Twitter, individually or all together. The tool also gives you a trend report of your target mentions. This report helps you analyze the success of your social media marketing efforts within a time period.
4. WooRank
The WooRank Website review gives you social media stats such as comparative social shareability report with three competitors, Twitter account details and Facebook page details. This helps you monitor the social stats of yours as well as your competitor sites.
Take a look at the sample screenshot of the Social Shareability stat from WooRank’s Website Review.
5. HowSociable
Track your brand communications with this tool. You can also check your own brand influence in social media as well as your competitors. Just like the name suggests, this tool tells you how sociable you are on the web.
This tool is best suited for those businesses who handle their social media marketing efforts without a dedicated social media team or social media manager. This tool helps you check your brand’s social media pulse to get your focus on track whenever you see lack of improvement. The free version, however, is very limited.
Shown below is a screenshot of a sample HowSociable report.
6. Addictomatic
This is a one-stop-shop social media monitoring tool for your own brand or keywords or your competitor’s brand or keywords. It gives you a one page summary as well as preview of the mentions of brand or keywords on platforms such as, Twitter, Bing News, Google Blog Search, WordPress.com, YouTube, Friendfeed, Flickr, Blinkx Mainstream Vid News, Delicious Tags, Twingly blog search and Ask.com News.
7. Google Alerts
If your business receives a good amount of traffic from Google, it is wise to have Google alerts activated for your brand. It notifies you via email of the latest relevant results around the keywords or brand name you set in your account. You can use this to also monitor your competitor’s marketing strategies.
8. Topsy
This can be used to track brand names, keywords and hashtags. It gives you a sentiment score and also a quick Social Analytics graph for the trends around your keyword.
Take a look at a sample social analytics graph on Topsy, shown below:
9. Keyhole
Keyhole is a handy free social media tool that helps you monitor the performance of brand name, keyword or hashtag of yours or your competitor website. It gives you stats such as impressions, reach, top sites, share of posts, most influential users, demographics, top sources and more.
Shown below is a sample report.
10. BuzzBundle
BuzzBundle is a freeware from linkassistant.com that tracks brand mentions in forum, blogs, Q&A sites, social networks and video sites. Based on the keywords you set, it finds related content. The setup takes only a few seconds and you are good to go with this free social media tool.
There are some impressive features to the tool. For example, you can schedule unlimited number of tweets, LinkedIn and Google+ and Facebook posts. You can create new social profiles right from the software.
Take a look at the screenshot of the tool dashboard below:
11. FreeReviewMonitoring
As the name suggests this tool lets you track and monitor online reviews about your brand. It gives you free email alerts of the your online reviews on sites such as Yelp, FourSquare, CitySearch and a few more.
This tool is especially useful for local businesses who might receive numerous reviews online and are not even aware of it. This tool helps you keep track of your online reputation. Post signup you will receive regular updates and tips on how to handle negative reviews. You can choose how often you want to receive email notifications of new reviews.
12. Rapportive
This is a neat little tool with a different approach to social media monitoring. It is kind of like your own little social spy that fetches social profile and email details from all those who email you in Gmail. You can also connect them on LinkedIn without leaving the Gmail interface. It comes in the form of a free Chrome plugin.
Take a look at the sample screenshot below that appears on the extreme right of the email sent in Gmail using Rapportive Chrome extension.
13. Newsle
This is a free social media monitoring tool that can be used on your various online networks that include Facebook and LinkedIn. You can track any mentions about your friends, peers, competitors from Facebook, LinkedIn or email contacts, as and when it happens. This is not just a notifier of status messages or tweets that mention a particular person, but it is real facts and notable news sources.
Shown below is a screenshot of the user interface of Newsle.
Video Tool
14. Powtoon
Video plays an important role in social media, especially animated videos created with creativity and humor that becomes viral in no time. If you thought creating an animated video for your brand was a costly affair, Powtoon will change your point of view forever, since it is absolutely free. Whether it is brand ads, product videos or explainer videos, create them with ease using this free social media tool and share it on your social media pages.
Infographics Tool
15. Piktochart
This is a fun free social media tool to create colorful infographics. The free version of the tool comes with limited features and also the infographic will contain a Piktochart watermark. There are only 20 free slots for images and limited themes and graphics.
16. Easel.ly
You do not even need registration on this site to use their infographics creation tool. There are many customizable themes to choose from where you can change background colors and drag and drop images.
The tool provides visually appealing themes known as vhemes. The tool is currently in its beta version and hence it is easy to use.
The tool’s dashboard looks like the one shown in the screenshot below.
17. Infogr.am
Create infographics with pre-made themes with this free social media tool. You can also add images, videos, charts and graphs to your infographic. If you have your data in an excel sheet you can easily upload that data directly to your inforgraphic.
Content Discovery Tool
18. Swayy
As a business owner you may not have the time to read and share engaging content on the web on to your social media profiles no a regular basis. This is especially true in the case of small businesses who have not employed dedicated social media managers. In such cases, you can use this handy free social media tool that helps in content discovery. It helps you easily discover news, blogs, videos and infographics based on the engagement, interests and reaction of your social media audience. You can link your Facebook. Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
While sharing the chosen content you can also set a certain number of hours after which you want your content to be shared.
A sample screenshot of Swayy dashboard is shown below:
Graphics Tool
19. Canva
Canva is a free graphics creator tool that allows you to create quick blog graphics or graphics for PowerPoint presentations that can be ultimately shared on popular social media sites like SlideShare. You can also create mini infographs or club multiple graphics from the tool and attach it to your infograhic template.
There is no dearth to the possibilities with this tool. Although the access to free image templates are limited in the free version, it is quite sufficient to create unique graphics for successful social media marketing of your website.
Social Branding Tools
20. Knowem
Before you even register on multiple social media sites you would have to check if your brand name is not duplicated or already being used. Use this tool to check the username availability in over 500 social media sites. This tool will also get you acquainted to many new social media sites that you may have missed out on.
21. CheckUsernames
This tool provides the same function as Knowem and it also happens to be powered by Knowem. It scans over 160 social media sites to check the availability of your username. You can use both these tools to make sure no social media platform is left out in your research.
Similar Site Search Tools
If you are fairly new to online business and may or may not have a physical store, you can easily find out your competition online using tools that allow similar site search.
This would be the first step to knowing your competition followed by research on their respective social media profiles using some of the tools mentioned above.
There are three such free tools that helps you in finding out various websites in a particular niche.
22. SiteSearch
23. Similar Site Search
24. Siteslike
URL Shortening And Tracking Tool
25. Bitly
In your social media marketing efforts, you will be sharing content along with links. Now if you want to track the reach of these links you will require a free social media tool like Bitly. You can track any shortened URL by using this tool. It shows you stats of links shared after a certain period of time.
It also gives you graphical details of that number of clicks that your links were subjected to, the location at which the links were clicked and the number of referrers for the links. Shown below is one such sample graph from Bitly.
Social Media Management Tools
26. Hootsuite
This is one of the oldest social media management tools which also happens to come with a free basic version. You can schedule and post updates to all your major social media fan pages. You can manage all your social profiles within a single dashboard. Also get real-time data of everything you share in easy-to-understand reports. It comes along with an URL shortener tool Ow.ly.
27. BufferApp
This is a great free tool to publish blogs as updates in your social media accounts. You can schedule these posts which in this particular tool terms is known as buffer posts. Connect Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts with buffer, schedule your posts, get recommendations of new posts, get your URLs shortened by Bitly and track the posts that receive maximum interactions using Bufferapp Analytics.
28. Yoono
It is a browser and desktop app that brings with a collapsible sidebar that contain your various social media icons for Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Flickr and other chat apps. The tool sends pop up alerts when there is an update or message to all those you are connected too. You can also update your status across multiple channels at once. However, unlike other social media management tools there is no scheduling option in this tool.
Shown below is a sample screenshot from the browser app.
29. Postific
This is a fairly new social media management tool that was introduced in December 2013. You can connect unlimited social accounts to this tool and just like other popular tools in this genre, you can schedule your posts and track their performance in an analytics tab. You can also send direct Twitter messages in bulk to 50 of your contacts. The tool also tracks your inbox so you need not check up on your messages every hour or every day.
The tool may be of particular interest to those companies that focus on LinkedIn marketing as it introduces auto-post feature to LinkedIn groups. It has a mobile version so you can manage your social media accounts on the go.
Although, the website says that they have a 60-day trial period, there is no pricing plans specified. The tool is being improvised and developed and for now it seems to be free.
30. IFTTT
This is a unique tool in it’s genre. It allows you to create different recipes of how you would like to manage your social media profiles in accordance with each other. To create a new recipe you must fill in the phrase ‘if this then that’, where ‘this’ is one of your social media profiles and ‘that’ is another. The tool gives you triggers to choose from to create the recipe. The following is a sample recipe I created for my profile to send email notifications of every new follower on Twitter.
This app may need some prior social media apps user experience to follow and create new recipes. As an alternative you can utilize existing recipes made by other users.
31. Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is Twitter’s own social media management tool which has a desktop and web version, a Chrome and a Mac version. You can view your Twitter in columns that are categorized under Home, Notifications, Messages, Activity. You can add multiple Twitter accounts and schedule your tweets. You can also manage your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts with this app.
32. Klout
You can create and schedule your post updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and FourSquare. You also get a Klout Score that tells you how influential your Twitter profile among others. You also get content suggestions that follow recent trends so that you save time in content discovery.
Mobile Apps
33. Tweetcaster
It is a mobile app to manage your Twitter page. Your tweets, favorites, retweets, lists, mentions are categorized into separate tabs. There are pre-made filters that allow you to filter through photo or video content. But these filters are not customizable. You can save tweets as drafts and send them at a later time or send your tweets to your buffer account and have them automatically scheduled. Tweets can also be shared via SMS, Facebook and email directly from within the app.
34. Everypost
Everypost is a free social media mobile app that helps you manage multiple social media accounts such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and others. It has both iOS and Android app versions. It comes with a built-in URL shortener. You have access to unlimited posting to multiple social media channels. You can post text, photos and videos, search and post videos from YouTube, photos from Flickr and music from Grooveshark.You can also send your posts via email to all your email contacts.
35. UberSocial
UberSocial is a a mobile Twitter app available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry phones. You can view videos and other forms of rich multimedia without having to leave the app. This saves a lot of your time while on the go. You can cross post your tweets to your Facebook page. Although these features are not jaw-droppingly appealing, there is one feature that is yet to be introduced in this app which lets you type more than the limited character Tweet. It is called UberSocial Full Text.
Forum Tools
36. BoardReader
If your social media marketing strategy also includes forum marketing, this is a good research tool for you. Boardreader is sort of a dedicated search engine for content found in forums. You can also search for your brand mentions in forum and include yourself in the discussion within your user community.
Analytics Tool
37. Google Analytics
Under the Acquisition tab of Google Analytics you can find options Overview andChannels that give you social media analytics for your website. You can track the social media accounts that are sending direct traffic to your website. This will help you prioritize and improve your social media marketing efforts. If you have setup a online marketing campaign you can integrate URL builder into your Google Analytics and track them. To do so you need to setup your campaigns on Google analytics and check the Campaign tab under Acquisition.
Read this post to know more about campaign tracking for social media on Google Analytics.
YouTube Tools
38. Keyword Tool
If video marketing via YouTube is what you are aiming for, this tool by YouTube will come in handy. Get keyword ideas using this tool using language and country targeting options. The tool gives you monthly search volume data. But the tool isn’t as robust as other keyword tools on the web.
Twitter Tools
39. Tweroid
If you want to know optimum time to post on your Twitter profile, this is the tool for you. It gives you hourly graphs of when your followers are online. It also gives you separate stats for weekends, Sundays, Mondays and the rest of the weekdays.
40. TweetReach
Track tweets, using this tool, that mention your Twitter handle, keyword or hashtag. Get exclusive reports of the reach of your Twitter marketing efforts.
This free social media tool is great for monitoring the success of your hashtags and also for giving a quick analytics round up of your account.
41. Tweepi
Cleanup your Twitter profile with unwanted profiles in your account. You can also increase your followers by following targeted audience using the follow functionof Tweepi. It allows you to view which of people you follow reciprocate to your account with a follow and other activities such as how active users are with their tweets and their klout scores.
You can even safeguard some of your Twitter connections with a security function that avoids accidental following and unfollowing.
This will keep your account active and productive.
42. Twazzup
Whether you want to monitor your brand’s or a competitor brand’s keywords or hashtags this is the tool for you. You get to track the top retweeted links, top influencers, top retweeted photos and a list of all recent tweets that mention the brand, keyword or hashtag searched for.
43. UseQwitter
With UseQwitter you can track your unfollowers and unfollow them, if required. The free version of the tool allows tracking of one Twitter account with weekly updates. However, if you are using tools such as Commun.it and Followerwonk discussed below that includes this function as a package, you need not waste your time using this stand-alone tool to know your unfollowers.
44. FollowerWonk
You do get to know about your followers from the in-built Twitter analytics free tool on Twitter, but with FollowerWonk you can dig deeper into Twitter analytics. Find and connect with influencers in your niche. This is a great tool for Twitter influencer outreach that could lead to many other possible digital marketing outcomes.
45. TagDef
If you are a newbie to Twitter marketing or just confused by hashtags that don’t make sense at the first sight, you can use this tool to understand such hashtags. Sometimes when you demographic consists of the younger generation who happen to be so obsessed with abbreviating everything, you tend to not understand the hashtags they use. This tool comes in handy to understand them as well.
Take a look at the sample screenshot below:
46. Commun.it
This is a relationship management tool for Twitter. It gives you Twitter analytics and the ability to schedule your tweets. It identifies industry influencers, supporters and prospects for you. The tool gives you a filtered and prioritized feed that helps you save time and manage your Twitter profiles efficiently.
The tool also prompts you about actions in the followers sections such asConsider to Reply, Consider to Re-engage, Consider to Follow and so on. It is like having your own private digital social media manager. This tool is also good for brand and reputation management as it helps you monitor your campaign by tracking keywords and hashtags.
I would definitely recommend this free social media tool to all people and businesses connected to Twitter.
Facebook Tools
47. Fanpagekarma
This is more like Facebook Insights which by the way is also free and updated withnew features. It gives you information about best times for posting, best type of posts and best topics, best posting frequency, influencers, fan posts and many more. It gives you extensive and easily interpreted analytics free for one Facebook fanpage.
Shown below is a sample report.
48. Fan Page Barometer
Get to know your Facebook post’s monthly organic reach, monthly viral reach and people talking about this reports. You can repeat your 15-day free trial as many times as you want. No obligation and no credit card required for the same.
49. Conversation Score
Whether it is your Facebook fan page or a competitor’s, you can check the page influence, engagement and performance using this free social media tool for Facebook. It is great for initial research in your Facebook marketing strategy as well as final analysis of your Facebook marketing campaigns. You also get a list of leaders in the list of successful conversation scorers for that particular niche.
50. Post Planner
Post planner is an app on Facebook that helps you post consistently on Facebook. It shows you trending content in your niche so that you post it and your fans share it. It also helps you target fans in a specific location or demographic. It gives you analytics on your posts as well.
These were 50 free social media tools that are being actively used by webmasters and social media marketers of today. Just remember to choose the tool that suits you best instead of using them all, as many of them share similar functions. This is true for especially for those tools that fall under the same category.
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