Five Free Apps to Help You Manage Social Media

Save time with these free social media management apps

There's a lot of pressure on companies to have a strong social media presence, but creating regular content for Facebook and Twitter feeds can be time consuming and it's easy to feel like you're not getting results. Here are five useful apps that you can use to reduce the time you spend on social media, but also increase the quality and regularity of the content being shared.

Buffer

Buffer allows you to schedule posts to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ pages from one place. You can set up multiple different post times as well as schedule one off posts. It also gives you suggestions for new content. In essence, it means only thinking about social media once a week or even twice a month if you don't post that often. There are also analytics and weekly email reports showing you how successful your posts are.

The free version will limit the number of accounts and posts to be scheduled in each social account to ten, but it is still enough to keep a small business' online presence active.

Daily

A brand new app (sadly only for iPhone at the moment) by Buffer, Daily is like the Tinder of content. Once logged in with your Buffer account you will be fed a stream of new content ideas that you can instantly add to your Buffer or alternatively dismiss and move on to view the next one. The fact that it's a mobile app means you can find new content ideas to share whenever you have a few minutes to spare.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite began life as a way to manage multiple Twitter accounts and to monitor hashtags. Nowadays, it can be used to do both these things and much more including scheduling content, creating and following specific campaigns and analysing the results.

Again, there are limitations on how many social accounts you can connect to the free version of Hootsuite, but the app is definitely worth having if you like to manage your social media on a tablet as it has a very mobile friendly design.

RebelMouse

If you've spent a long time creating social content relating to a particular topic or campaign using a hashtag you can use RebelMouse to collate all the posts in one place. With a design that actually makes the collection of social media posts look like its own website, it's a nice way to present the results and reach of a social media campaign or just to check who is sharing or engaging with you on social media. It's completely free to sign up and it won't take more than a few minutes to create your page, which will then run itself.

Everypost

If you have multiple social accounts, including profiles on some channels not yet mentioned above, like Tumblr, Flickr and Pinterest, then you may want to check out Everypost as it allows you to share to a vast number of social channels. It's particularly useful if you like to share one-off posts across a selection or all of these accounts - for example, when you're running a limited time special offer - and it allows you to publish posts across as many of your connected channels as you wish. It will also enable you to easily share things you find on the web and there's an option to upload photos and videos directly from your phone. You can also use Everypost to send content by email or to a Dropbox account.

Start scheduling your staff online.

No credit card required, nothing to download, no mailing lists and no surprises.