Article updated on 8th of January, 2020.
Being a community manager means being skillful because of the many tasks you have to deal with. So it’s not always easy to be on all fronts. You have to know the right tools to achieve your missions in your company or for your clients if you are a freelancer.
To help you to make your choice, see below a list of 10 free tools for Community Management to manage your planning, create designs and analyze your content or those of the competition.
Holiday Calendar
Among the free tools for Community Management, the holiday calendar is mandatory to fill in you editorial calendar, Indeed, in addition to your brand or company news, you need to communicate on your social medias during the big events of the year (Christmas, New year, Valentine’s Day, Saint Patrick…). Download the holiday calendar from HubSpot to make sure you don’t miss any event of the year.
Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is an indispensable tool to plan all your publications on the various social networks. There are several options to achieve this.
You can opt for the classic Excel or for more dynamic tools that will allow you to list and categorize your posts by topics and channels. I offer you a free and simple solution: Trello.
This collaborative online application allows you to create tables, which could for example correspond to your different clients. In each table, you can create several columns that will represent the progress of your publications (being written, creating visuals, ready to be published, published). Finally, in each column, you create cards matching to your publications. You can add a title, description, tags (type of social network), add members of your team to follow in real time the changes made to each publication, publish comments…
To view your cards as a calendar, click on “Show Menu” at the top right of the screen and click on the “Power-Ups” button. Then look for the Power-Up Calendar and click “Enable.” Once enabled, a “Calendar” button is now present at the top right of your table. By clicking on it, you will be able to display your cards like in the example below.
As you will have understood, Trello is definitely a valuable tool to add to your toolbox
Content planning
Buffer is a planning tool for your posts on your different social media accounts. There are many others (Hootsuite, planable, Sprinklr…) but Buffer is the one that offers the best ergonomic interface (to my opinion ;-)).
Graphic design creation
Canva is an online tool that makes it easy to create visuals (social media posts, cover image, banner, logo, etc.). It does not require any graphical skill, the tool is easy to handle and intuitive. Many templates are also available.
Graphic ressources
Looking for a visual to illustrate your posts? Freepik offers more than 3 million free photos, illustrations or icons. If Freepik is not enough, you can also consult other free image banks like Pexels ou Pixabay.
Image resizing
Landscape, online tool by Sprout Social allows you to resize all your images in the right format for each social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more).
Video creation
Because videos are the media that generate the most engagement rate on social medias, with Rawshorts you can create videos of explainer animated videos (tutorials, promotion, infographics…) from completely customizable templates. If you want to test another solution, I also offer Adobe Spark which allows you to make powerful videos quickly and easily.
Find the right hashtags
Hashtagify allows you to find the best hashtags for Twitter and Instagram related to your keywords and themes in order to optimize your reach.
Engagement rate
Phlanx allows you to view the engagement rate of your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter account or those of your competitors. You can also use this tool to contact influencers or brands directly.
Benchmark
With Twitonomy, search and get informations about the people you follow and those who follow you. You can also save and export tweets, retweets, mentions and reports in Excel or PDF format.
