The Abbey Information Exchange: The best free tools to help with your social media strategy.

The best free tools to help with your social media strategy.

Should I or shouldn’t I?

The short answer is ‘yes’. Whether you’re an active member on social media or not, your business should be. One of the most compelling reasons for being involved is that you should be where your customers are. For example, if you had a shop or chain of shops, and a brand new shopping centre opened that was attracting large crowds of your target audience, you would probably want to open up a shop there too. According to We Are Social, in January 2020 3.8 billion people use social media and this is expected to grow to half the world’s population this year. Based on this forecast alone, there’s a slice of the pie for all businesses. Without labouring the point, social media is a powerful tool for driving growth, increasing your site’s traffic, building customer relations and telling your brand story.

If time and resources have prevented your business from being active on social media, then there are several social media management tools available which will help you get organised.  Not only will these platforms make your life easier but if you’re financially restricted, then many of them have free account options. Below we run through the main social media management platforms available.

What are social media management platforms?

Social media management platforms allow you to manage your entire social media from one interface. These tools simplify all aspects of managing your social and will save you valuable time.

What’s on the market.

Hootsuite is great for bringing together all your social media in one place. The split screen enables you to monitor your individual pages – whether it be Twitter, Facebook or Instagram – all on one page. You can see the home pages from your accounts, user engagement and of course all your communication.

Their free account includes:

• 3 social profiles.
• 30 scheduled posts.
• 1 user.

If your business favours Twitter then Tweetdeck is probably best for you. Tweetdeck will only allow Twitter users to use this platform but it’s free. It will allow you to schedule tweets, manage lists and add team accounts. Although it doesn’t accommodate other social media platforms, it’s the ideal tool if you’re managing multiple twitter accounts.


The best thing about Buffer is how straight forward and easy to use it is. It’s one of the best established platforms for scheduling social media posts and we can see why – it’s definitely our preferred platform.

The free version account includes:

• 3 social media accounts.
• Up to 10 schedules.
• 1 user.

Buffer also automatically shortens URLs – great for when you’re battling with those character counts on Twitter. If you want to sign up to Buffer’s free account, you must first sign up to their free trail and once the trail is up, you can then downgrade to their free account.


There are several other platforms out there which we encourage you to look at, including SocialOomph, Zoho Social and Friends+Me but remember, it’s all down to personal preference and what works for you and your business. What’s great about all these platforms, is that they can keep your social media active 24/7 and by designating just 20 minutes of your time once a week to writing social media content and scheduling them, you will be able to give your business a slice of the pie.