I’m back again with another tips posts! Today I am sharing with you some of the best free tools online that you can use for scheduling your social media posts. If you haven’t yet read it, you may find my time management tips post also useful (where I lightly touch on scheduling tools for blogging).

But, back to the matter at hand and the reason you clicked through to this blog post…

How To Schedule Your Social Media Posts For Free

Here is a run down of the best free tools to use for scheduling your social media posts; you might want to grab yourself a nice cuppa before starting this one….

HootSuite

I am mentioning this platform first, simply because it is the social media scheduling tool I use both on my laptop and via their mobile app too. Hootsuite offer both a free version (which I use and has limited numbers of 3 social accounts you can add) and a paid for option, which you can manage up to 100 social media accounts with. This would be useful if you were managing a multiple of sites social media channels, which I am guessing most of you are not.

(You can read more about the plans available here)

You simply connect up your chosen social media accounts, then you can begin writing and scheduling social media updates at your chosen time. Or, you can use their handy ‘autoschedule’ tool that picks the best time to post your update. You can also view your latest social updates and interactions across various streams that you can decide to add to your dashboard (again this is limited in the free version).

I mainly use Hootsuite to schedule social media updates for blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. So I don’t have to worry about sharing my posts during the week, whilst I am at work. You can connect with over 35 social networks, now also including Youtube and Instagram. But, this will require a paid plan. So, if you are happy just managing 3 social accounts, the free version will do the trick for you.

Latergramme

If you have been looking for a free service that will enable you to schedule your Instagram posts, then Latergramme may be the answer! Latergramme enables you to manage and schedule the pictures and captions you wish to upload to your Instagram feed. With ease.

However, this will not automatically post to Instagram for you: After you have selected your photo, written your caption and chosen a date and time to post. When the time comes a reminder will pop up on your phone and upon opening this, you need to manually open in Instagram. The scheduled image will show and your pre-written caption will be pasted, leaving you to edit and tag as you see fit before posting.

You can use Latergramme from your Computer, iPhone, Tablet, or Android. I have only used Latergram on my iPhone, so I am not 100% sure if the above process differs from your computer, but I am guessing it works pretty much the sam across platforms (don’t quote me on that!)

Again, there are free and paid for options. But, if you only want to manage a maximum of two Instagram accounts, schedule up to thirty posts per month and photos only (no videos). Then the free option will do everything that you want it to do.

I find this app especially helpful when I have scheduled an outfit post and want to remember to upload a photo to Instagram, the day of, or before, the posts goes live on my blog.

Buffer

Similar to Hootsuite (mentioned above), Buffer and it’s ‘Individual’ option, allows you to schedule a social media update to five of your social accounts – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ – which will be shared at the best time of the day to reach your followers (unless you select the manual scheduling option).

Like Hootsuite you can include a photo, link, hashtags and add media to your scheduled posts. However, Buffer also has the option to track clicks on your social posts, which is something I am not sure that the free Hootsuite platform is yet to offer (please correct me if I am wrong!)

I have only just started using this myself, as Hootsuite also has it’s best time to post option. So as of yet, I can’t state whether or not I think Buffer is a better tool…But, this is perhaps something I can cover in a future tips post after some more use.

TweetDeck

As you can probably guess from the name of this tool, TweetDeck is specifically for managing your Twitter account/s. TweetDeck offers real-time tracking, organising and engagement tools for Twitter. To start you just simply log in with your Twitter log in details.

TweetDeck will only let you manually schedule your Tweet times, allowing you to also attach an image. So, it doesn’t offer the optimal scheduling tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. But, if you want to see your tweets, interactions, direct messages etc all in one place, alongside what is trending, mentions and who is liking your tweets. Then you may find this tool a handy edition to your social media dashboard.

WordPress Yoast Plugin

If you are a Blogger or Squarespace user, you might want to skip my last choice. Or, you may be intrigued to know more about what you are missing out on with WordPress. I switched over to a self-hosted wordpress site last year and I couldn’t be more happier with the fact that it has helped to improve my rankings, increase traffic to my site and allows more control over my blog design. One added benefit of WordPress is Yoast SEO.

The Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress offers a fabulous number of tools. One being, it’s social media sharing tool. When creating a new post in draft, you can choose whether you want to display an alternative title, description and image for your Facebook and Twitter.

Now, you might be thinking: why is this in your social media scheduling tools post? Well, as you can schedule when you want your blog post to go live on the WordPress CMS. This means that your chosen social promotion message for your blog post will be scheduled at this time as well, which is why it makes the cut for today’s post.

Have you got a favourite free social media scheduling tool not listed?

So, there we have my five favourite free social media scheduling tools, which you can start using today. If there is a free scheduling tool not listed that you think deserves some praise, let me know in the comments section below or by tweeting @CharlotteLewis_. And I will be back very soon with another tips post for you all soon.