Social media profiles are essential to maintaining an online presence, growing a customer base, and growing your business. Depending on the audience you’re trying to reach, creating posts on multiple social media platforms can help you grow your customer base.
To help you save time, there are apps that will allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance.
Below, you’ll find some apps that can help you create a stronger social media presence. These apps will either be free or have a limited free account with a cheap plan.
Table of Contents
Later
Later is a social media management platform that allows you to schedule publishing posts on multiple popular platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Once you’ve connected your social media profiles, you’ll be able to schedule when your posts publish by using Later’s easy drag-and-drop scheduling calendar.
The free plan is sufficient for solopreneurs or small businesses and comes with:
- 1 User: The person who can log in and manage posts
- 1 Social set: The social profiles that you’ll post from. A social set will contain all of the social platforms listed above
- Linkin.bio: A mini website for your Instagram profile where you can create a shoppable feed, feature your latest Instagram posts, and track the posts generating the most sales
- 10 scheduled photo or video posts per month, per social platform
- 3-months of analytics for Instagram posts
- Saved Captions
- Visual Instagram Planner
The paid plans come with additional features that can really help boost growing an online audience, such as more posts per months, scheduling Instagram stories and reels, more social sets, and additional analytics features (which can help you understand when and what to publish for increased engagement).
I’ve also found Later’s paid plans more affordable and reasonable than some other popular options (like Hootsuite), which is definitely helpful when taking your social media management to the next level.
What I find really cool about Later is that it’s already synced with Unsplash. Although you can definitely upload your own photos for your posts, Later makes it easy to find free images from Unsplash to place in your photo library. I also love their scheduling tool; with Later, you can schedule the exact time you’d like your posts to publish in their easy, user-friendly calendar.
If you’re ready to give Later a try, sign up for your free account here.
OneUp
OneUp is a really interesting social media platform that is worth looking into. The free plan allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, Pinterest, and LinkedIn! Similar to Later, OneUp allows you to easily select the images you’re looking for from sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels.
The free plan is sufficient for solopreneurs or small businesses just starting out, and comes with:
- 1 User: The person who can log in and manage posts
- 2 Social accounts: you can post from 2 of the 6 profiles listed in their free plan
- 6 Scheduled posts: posts that are scheduled at the same time
- Schedule Twitter threads: 3 tweets per thread
- Category creation for your posts
- A calendar to view when posts have published or when they’re scheduled
- Connecting to your bit.ly account (to shorten links)
The paid plan comes with some additional features to help grow your social media presence such as scheduling: TikTok posts, YouTube videos and shorts, Instagram reels and stories, images (via Chrome extension), multi-image posts, and repeating posts.
The paid plans also include bulk uploading, importing posts via CSV, automating posts from RSS feeds, adding first comment on LinkedIn posts, and tagging/mentions, all of which are definitely helpful to grow your social media presence.
My favourite thing about OneUp (free version) is that it allows you to essentially created unlimited posts, so long as you’re not scheduling more than 6 at a time. If your business or its growth relies on Twitter, it’s also neat that it allows you to schedule Twitter threads.
If you’re ready to give OneUp a try, sign up for a free account here.
Buffer
If you haven’t heard of this platform already, Buffer is a popular social media management tool that allows you to schedule posts on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Business profile, Pinterest — all for free.
What’s unique about Buffer is that they also allow you to post on something they call a Start Page, which is a landing page where you can showcase various aspects of your business.
The free plan is sufficient for a small business and comes with:
- 1 User: The person who can log in and manage posts
- 3 Social Accounts: you can post from 3 of the profiles listed in their free plan
- 10 queued posts per channel
- Connecting to various channels (some must be business profiles)
- A link shortener
- Twitter hashtag suggestion
- Facebook and Twitter mentions
- Twitter threads
- Browser extension & mobile apps
- Integrations for easy media upload (Canva, Onedrive, Google Drive)
- The Ideas feature: Allows you to easily capture and store ideas for use later on
The paid plans come with additional features such as increased posts per channel, reporting about the performance of your posts, suggestions to improve your audience engagement, custom video thumbnails, multi-channel campaigns, Instagram stories scheduling, and engagement/comment detection. These are all features which can definitely help you grow your social media presence as your business grows.
My favourite thing about Buffer is that it’s really focused on everything needed to grow the online presence of your small business.
If you’re ready to give Buffer a try, sign up for a free account here.
Crowdfire
Whether you’re a solopreneur or have a few employees, Crowdfire helps you discover content, schedule content, and manage all your social accounts from one place. The free version allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram.
But what’s unique about Crowdfire is that it also allows you to curate content and posts from your own blogs, YouTube videos, and Shopify or Etsy shops.
The free plan is sufficient for soloprenuers or small business and comes with:
- 1 User: The person who can log in and manage posts
- 3 Social Accounts: you can post from 3 of the profiles listed in their free plan
- 10 scheduled posts per social media account
- Post curation from discovered articles
- Post curation from your blog, YouTube video, and Shopify or Etsy shops
- Hashtag recommendations
- Preview posts for each social platform
- Analytics: 1 day of data
The paid plans come with additional features such as scheduling posts on Pinterest, increased number of scheduled posts per social account, custom posting schedule, video posts, and multi-image posts. They also come with more robust reporting for analyzing the performance of your posts.
Their paid plan is not only quite affordable, but the additional features will definitely help you to create larger following, which could lead to increase engagement and increased sales.
My favourite thing about Crowdfire (free version) is that they make it easy to for you to find things to post about by suggesting interesting articles based your interests. Once you select topics you’re interested in, they’ll suggest articles that you can share with your audience on your selected social media platforms.
I also love that they can suggest the best time for you to post, which can help to increase your engagement (and thus, increase your online presence).
If you’re ready to give Crowdfire a try, sign up for a free account here.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a platform more focused on growing your audience on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, but is still a very interesting platform for solopreneurs and small business owners.
It isn’t just a social media management platform, but it’s also an e-mail management platform. By unifying the social media and e-mail marketing process, it allows you to more easily create a robust marketing plan so that you can grow faster.
What’s great is that all plans (free and paid) come with photo and video posts, bulk uploads, smart scheduling, unlimited e-mail contacts, and 200 e-mail sends per month.
The free plan is sufficient for soloprenuers or small business and comes with:
- 1 User: The person who can log in and manage posts
- 3 Social Accounts: one profile from Pinterest, Instagram, and a Facebook page.
- 20 photo or video scheduled posts per month
- 20 post designs per month
- 10 Ghostwriter credits
- 5 Tailwind communities
- Instagram link in bio tool
- Basic analytics
The paid plans come with additional features such as increased social accounts, increased number of posts and post designs per month, more ghostwriter credits, and advanced analytics to track your post and e-mail performance.
My favourite thing about Tailwind is that they have a built-in post creator. Their feature, Tailwind Create, allows you to quickly transform your images into personalized designs on brand for your business.
I also think their Communities feature is interesting. Tailwind Communities allows you to find and join like-minded people in 4,000+ niches to share relevant content and grow your reach, which can definitely help you create a stronger social media presence (leading to increased engagement and ultimately, increased revenue).
If you’re ready to give Tailwind a try, sign up for a free account here.
Found any of these tools interesting or helpful? Leave a comment below and let me know! I’d love to know how you’re using them, and what your thoughts are so far.
Need further assistance? Book a consultation with me!
About Cami C
Cami C is a consultant who creates blog posts and videos for small business owners. Her blog Cami at Home provides readers with suggestions and information to increase efficiency in their business. Book a consultation.
