Ideas are free but making them work can be pricey – unless you’re smart. The open source software revolution has been a boon for marketers and nowadays we have a huge choice of free and low-cost marketing tools at our disposal. The challenge is finding the best free tools to schedule our social media updates, create graphics for our blog or automate our reporting.
Whether you’re looking to save money on social media scheduling or smarten up your email campaigns, we’ve compiled a list of the best free small business marketing tools for you. Most use the freemium model – up to a certain level is free before you should pay for a subscription, excellent if your marketing budget is small or you want to try before you buy.
Four budget social media scheduling tools
Social media scheduling tools save you a great deal of time and allow you to plan your content properly. The four tools below will let you schedule content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as well as Instagram and Pinterest too.
Here are our favourite low-cost social media tools:
BUFFER
The simplest and easiest social media scheduling dashboard that’s available for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram (and Google+ if you like…).
The free version of Buffer allows you to add one account per social network and schedule 10 updates per account. From there it’s $10 a month for 10 accounts and unlimited updates or from $99 you can have unlimited accounts, team logins and advanced analytics.
HOOTSUITE
A reliable all-round tool for social media scheduling and social media monitoring.
We find the interface a little fiddlier than Buffer, but it’s established and easy to use. HootSuite supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Google+. You get a free 30-day trial when you sign up, and if you want to continue using the free version you’ll get 3 social profiles, from there it’s £16 a month for 10 social profiles.
TWEETDECK
A super simple monitoring dashboard with basic scheduling, and it’s always free!
Tweetdeck is the ideal social media dashboard for monitoring hashtags and lists – useful for customer service, monitoring sentiment and keeping up with industry news. You can manage multiple accounts with Tweetdeck and schedule updates too. The column layout is easy to use, and we think it’s a great free social media scheduling tool for beginners.
MEET EDGAR
Write a lot of blog posts? Meet Edgar, from the team behind Buffer, is a great way to get more views on your blog posts – it helps you recycles old content and easily schedule it to your social networks.
You start by creating a library (write a series of evergreen posts with links to your content) and then Meet Edgar will recycle these posts according to your chosen schedule. That way your fantastic web content won’t be ignored! You can even connect an RSS feed to make updating your social networks even easier.
Do make sure you regularly check and update this though, otherwise you risk repeating the same posts too often. It’s free for 30 days and then it is $49 per month.
Social media analytics
Social media is only useful if you track your results. Thankfully there’s plenty of free social media measurement tools to ensure you’re getting the best ROI from your marketing.
Most social networks come with their own analytics tools now, so do use those as the first port of call, but here are some of our favourite third-party social media analytics tools:
FOLLOWERWONK
We wish this had a better name, but thankfully the software is good.
Followerwonk is for Twitter only, and you can use the tool to analyse any account. It is an excellent way to benchmark your Twitter account, as you can look at your account and your competitors’ accounts too.
You can analyse up to 50 Twitter accounts each day for free, or for $29 a month you can see unlimited accounts, create reports and see engagement reports for individual tweets. Followerwonk will show you:
- The location of your followers
- When your followers are active
- The keywords your followers use
- The gender of your follower
- The audience size (follower count)
- How active your followers are.
AGORAPULSE BAROMETER
Agorapulse Barometer is a simple piece of browser-based software that acts as a Facebook EdgeRank checker and benchmark tool – allowing you to see how your page is performing against others. You can see your organic reach, your engagement levels and even your viral reach. While it’s not a deep dive into your Facebook Analytics, it provides a quick way to measure your success.
ICONOSQUARE
A fantastic free tool to manage your Instagram account – everything from tracking follower growth to community management. You can use Iconosquare to track follower growth on Instagram, for moderation and community management and even plan and schedule content.
It has another string to its bow too: it’s an Instagram influencer marketing tool. The inbuilt search function helps you find Instagrammers in your industry that you can work with. Iconosquare is free for 14 days and then prices start from $9 a month.
Analyse your web traffic – three free tools
The goal of the majority of marketing campaigns is to drive traffic to your website, and from there make a sale or create a customer enquiry. And once a customer is there, you need to know how they behave on your website. This can tell you everything from whether your website is easy to navigate to what kind of blog content people like to read.
SEO is also a key factor in your website’s success – does your web content send out the right signals to Google and other search engines? If not, why not?
We’ve chosen three of our favourite web and SEO analytics tools which can help you map out the journey your website visitors go on.
Read the rest of this post on the Sookio blog.