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image of social media management conceptSocial media and “free” kind of go together. Yes, there are plenty of ways that companies like Facebook make money when you use their platform, but at least they don’t charge you to buy it or subscribe to it.

Larry Kim, CEO of Facebook messenger marketing program MobileMonkey, says there are plenty of tools available, many of which have at least free versions of their service, to make social media marketing easier and more effective.

“Just about anyone can get into social media marketing with a smartphone and little to no extra cost,” Kim writes for SCORE. “But as you keep doing it, you’ll want to find ways to make it more efficient, especially as a business owner.”

The tools he lists are:

  • Hootsuite — a good management tool for planning and scheduling posts that’s free and easy to use.
  • MobileMonkey — a free chatbot platform for Facebook Messenger that can help you handle customer service through chat by handling most inquiries.
  • Answer The Public — a free consumer insight tool that compiles search results from Bing and Google.
  • ContentCal — another social media management tool that also has tools for content planning and team management.
  • Screaming Frog — a website crawler to find all the holes in your website that you need to patch up, such as broken links, missing pages and metadata, duplicate content and URLs.
  • Wave Video — a free online service that lets you create your own videos without having to install a video editing program.
  • Google Keyword Planner — if you need a keyword research tool, there’s no need to look further than Google’s own Keyword Planner.
  • Moz Local — a tool that makes it a lot easier to be added to Google, Yelp, Facebook, Yellowpages, and so on.
  • Facebook Audience Insights — an online analytics tool that lets you see how your audience is engaging with your brand.
  • Pablo by Buffer — the stock image service of Buffer, designed to provide images that are best for use in social media.

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