11 Free great social media tools?

Social media strategy can be hard to set when bombarded with apps and factoids (download a social media strategy checklist here). Even with a proper strategy you'll need to master many tools, might as well be free!

Here are our 11 favourite free social media tools, picked also for their 80/20 quality (max. return / vs. min. investment in time or resources).

We’ve ranked them in “chronological” order, in the social media cycle:

• Social listening: Discover your core audiences, what they care about, and in what words they express that interest. Monitor feedback.
• Social influencing: Producing and promoting content targeted to your core audience.
• Social networking: Leveraging your extra visibility in expert endorsements, back-links, etc.
• Social selling: Converting traffic into leads, and closing these leads. RoI.

Social Listening and Monitoring:

1) Talkwalker (www.talkwalker.com) 

This was a hard one to pick. There are now dozens of apps, most free on trial or limited version, to help you track your mentions online (of your company) or that of a core keyword that your core audience may use.

We’ll single out quickly www.mention.com (though you need to pay after your trial), www.hootsuite.com or www.buffer.com (though they are full size Social Media Management Systems so much larger than listening), www.moz.com (SEO related free keyword social listening tool), www.tweetdeck.com (see below, we clumped it with crowdfire), www.feedly.com (aggregates keywords and phrases matches anytime they come up on any blog you selected), etc.

We picked www.talkwalker.com for its ease of use, and the fact that it has no time restriction, you can use the limited, but effective free version for as long as you need, before upgrading.

 2) Crowdfire: https://web.crowdfireapp.com

Twitter’s main benefit is, in our opinion, to help you do social listening. Build a great followership, relevant to your products, and you can then track the #hashtags they use.

But you must build that large, relevant followership first to see what is happening in your ecosystem.

Crowdfire is a free app that tracks your Twitter, Instagram stats. Packed with useful tools (daily digest of who has followed and unfollowed you, auto following another user’s followers, auto unfollow, etc.) inactive users, admirers and more in one shot, and works with Instagram as well.

A similar app is Tweetdeck. Native and free on Twitter. May be an even easier introduction to using Twitter for social media listening: https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/

3) Google Alerts / Analytics: https://www.google.com/alerts#

Alerts: Simple but flexible and effective. Set up 2 or 3 alerts around the keywords of your audience, and enjoy the daily intelligence briefing on what’s happening online, right now, on that topic / audience. Still the main workhorse of most social listening activity.

Google alerts is not the most sophisticated social listening tool, but it’s simplicity of use to set up, and to receive daily digests, make it powerful. Entirely free.

Analytics:             Substantially more complex to master at expert level, but for those of you who are clued up on basic SEO and GA functionalities, this is, evidently, a great tool to help you see what keywords drive most traffic to your website, and what traffic brings the most lucrative / likely to close traffic to your website.

4) Survey Monkey: surveymonkey.com

“We were struggling to find out the actual interests and challenges of our clients, so that we could give them better content,” says Vivienne O'Hanlon, Marketing Coordinator at start-up incubator Launch 22.

“Surveymonkey allowed us to simply email, 100% freely, a flexible questionnaire with open and closed questions, to our entire database, to openly ask them what they cared about, what brought them to be entrepreneurs, what issues and interests they had.”

“The insights it gave us were amazing, and allow us to understand our client types, our core audiences, and to produce content that will genuinely help them. Obviously, that also means that our blogging is now much more engaged with, which gives us a boost in SEO, in visibility, in expert-branding.”

Couldn’t have put it better!

Social Influencing:

5) Boomerang (Instagram): (Get it here: https://goo.gl/52pEH6)

Text is dead.

Well, text alone is dead anyway. It is now considered as genuinely “archaic” in the entire online marketing world, as a content form. It needs to be spruced up with a picture. Or a video.

There are many apps out there to help you create easy overlay pictures. Boomerang is a tiny application, with a very limited use, but one that can definitely spike your visibility.

Shoot a few frames of video and Boomerang will loop them. It will take you a few attempts to make something worth watching, but nowhere near as what it would to create any kind of video in the traditional way. Obviously for lighter posts. The free version allows for 1-second of forward / then reverse play. Get creative!

Here’s one of Jack at Launch22 doing a quick video to commemorate the death of the Greatest: https://twitter.com/Launch22uk/status/740129536151523328/video/1

6) Hootsuite: hootsuite.com

(NOTE: Major Social Media Management systems such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or Hubspot cover all 4 quadrants of social media, from listening to selling, so we had to split them largely artificially)

There are many players in the field of social media management systems. These apps allow you to centralise your social media activity: You can post once and the software will post on all your platforms. Save time. Schedule. They also allow you to centralise your social media view of what platforms work well, at what time, which ones are engaged in etc. Centralised posting. Centralised view. So in that sense they are great for social listening but also social influencing (most of these platforms are also automated so as to post your content at the best possible time for maximum mileage).

Other famous ones also offering free, limited memberships are: Sprout Media (https://sproutsocial.com/), Buffer (see below: www.buffer.com), Hubspot (very powerful, for larger co and more CRM ready – www.hubspot.com) to name but a few.

The best free software out there in our opinion when it comes to social listening. Obviously premium membership avails more functionalities but Buffer is a great place to start.

7) GIF Maker: https://gifmaker.me/

GIF are the worst kept dirty secret of viral content marketing, particularly for services or companies with a lighter edge. Most marketers now know that content types are not equal:

• Text alone = Obsolete
• Picture or Text + Picture = Minimum required nowadays.
• Video =  Current best practice for most.
• AR / VR =  Future explosive content growth.

HOWEVER, video can be intimidating, and/or time-consuming if done the traditional way, and without prior knowledge.

GIF’s are a simple way to boost your content engagement. They introduce an easy, eye-catching dynamic. They are not for all audiences, and tend to perform better, for products or services or companies that can be promoted with a pinch of humour.

Or for more personal, weekend posts.

8) Buffer: buffer.com

Buffer is probably the most famous social media management system out there, largely because it is the most affordable and probably the easiest of use. It is not as advanced or complex as Hootsuite or Hubspot, but that simplicity is also a great source of powerful effect. It is a great choice for beginner social media, with a powerful, yet clean and intuitive interface.

Paying version start at a very affordable $10 per month.

Free version main benefits:

• Hook up 3 social media accounts (say your LI, FB and Twitter accounts)
• Optimal posting time and date functionality included automatically
• Ability to load up a content queue, that will be posted out at the times you have pre-set.

Social Networking:

9) Kred https://home.kred

Kred will allow you to find out who likes your posts, who shares them, and plenty other important information to help you leverage further your content production.

Another close enough app is www.klout.com

Have a play around with their free versions and figure out what works best for you. But take good care of the main influencers in your network…

Social Selling:

10) Hubspot Academy hubspot.com

We certified in it, and think it is the best training out there for social media and inbound marketing.

It does everything. It allows you to do some amazing social listening, influencing, networking and selling, even has its own smart email server capability, providing an perfectly seamless integration at every stage of social media. It is the most comprehensive and most expensive platform, coming with support, a full CRM, I mean, the Cadillac of social media management systems.

However, it can be a bit pricey for the beginner in social media, so we isolated their amazing training course, which will teach you, at your own pace, the fundamentals of inbound marketing, social media and core audiences, leads capture and generation, smart emailing, social selling, etc..

11) Mailchimp mailchimp.com

Smart email campaigns remain the #1 tool to close email leads into paying customers. Yep. Good old email. You control the channel entirely. You can send content, or sales and online payment options. You can segment it according to any criteria you see relevant (geography, job title, etc.)

Using a pro mail server has HUGE advantages over typing hundreds of names in an excel spreadsheet with your podgy fingers and then trying to send all from your work email.

It will show you hard bounces, soft bounces, open %, who are your email promoters (who forwarded where, who shared your email links, etc.), who visited the website from which newsletter, etc.

If social media can turn into a lead-generation turbine, it is essential that you capture these leads as emails, and conduct smart email campaigns to close, and RoI.

Mailchimp has an amazing pricing structure: They let you play with their software as long as you want, as long as you do max. 12’000 send outs per month. Gives you plenty of time to get used to the software.

Click here for your free social media checklist, to design a safe, sound and striking social media strategy.