Free Social Media Scheduler: 15 Best Picks for 2023

It’s no longer news that most of your target audience is on several social media platforms. This means that you also need to increase your social media efforts to reach these people.

But how can you do this adequately and efficiently, considering the fact that you have other aspects of your business to think about?

That’s where a free social media scheduler comes in! It’s an automation tool for scheduling social media posts in advance. That way, you don’t have to log in to your account before publishing a post.

These tools have been designed to help you with anything you need to maintain a strong reputation on social media without even trying too hard.

From content creation to scheduling, engagement, monitoring, and more, a social media management tool will ensure you don’t fall short in any area.

If you’re about to get started, continue reading to check out the 15 best free social media scheduling tools.

Benefits of Using Social Media Scheduling Tools

Here are some top advantages of incorporating a social media scheduling tool in your online activities.

Improved Efficiency

Social media scheduling tools allow you to create and schedule different content simultaneously.

Instead of wasting time publishing one update at a time, you can have several contents ready for posting in no time. This makes you more efficient with your time.

Time Saving

Since you can schedule social media posts in advance with a scheduling tool, you can save yourself the time you’d be wasting if you had to log in to individual accounts to publish content.

That way, you can have time to focus on more important aspects of your business.

Consistent Presence

Scheduling your posts is a surefire way to stay consistent on social media.

You don’t even have to log in to your accounts, as you’re sure that your social media management tool will ensure that your posts are published at the right time.

This will help you build your online presence and increase engagement with your business.

Better Content Planning

Scheduling posts will give you ample time to develop better content ideas and plan them more effectively.

It removes the stress of thinking of ideas on the spot and coming up with something shallow that might not add value to your followers.

Increased Reach

Scheduling your posts to fly when your target audience is most active will help increase your visibility and make it easier for people to connect with your brand.

Top 15 Free Social Media Scheduling Tools

To help you get started, here are the top 15 free social media scheduling tools with enough features to meet your needs.

1. Hootsuite – Most Popular Scheduling Tool

Hootsuite is one of the most common social media management tools; you can see that in its 18+ million users.

The tool boasts everything you need to manage your social media presence, from team management to post scheduling, content calendar creation, campaign planning, and more.

You can also launch Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads from Hootsuite.

Due to the wide range of activities you can perform with Hootsuite, anyone, including freelancers and large businesses, can always use it for their various needs.

This software features five plans, including a free plan. With the free plan, you can manage two social media accounts as well as schedule about five posts at a time.

2. Crowdfire – Most Popular Alternative

Crowdfire is another free social media scheduler on par with Hootsuite in terms of popularity. For one, it has over 19 million followers and offers top scheduling features to make your online marketing strategy easier.

With its free plan, you can link up to three social media accounts and schedule up to 10 posts per account. Even better, Crowdfire’s paid plans will let you link 25 accounts.

There’s also a hashtag suggestion feature that you can use to discover the most relevant and used hashtags for your posts easily and quickly.

This social media scheduling tool has auto-customize content for each social media platform, so you can spend less time creating several posts across various platforms.

With Crowdfire’s bulk upload feature, you can schedule about 50 social media posts at once, saving effort and time.

3. Tailwind – Best for Instagram and Pinterest

If Instagram and Pinterest are your top social media platforms, Tailwind should be your go-to scheduling tool.

This tool comes with a marketing toolkit that allows you to schedule social media posts at your convenience, discover content ideas, make beautiful pins in no time, increase your reach, monitor conversations, and also measure results.

Tailwind allows you to schedule several pins—hundreds of them—within a few minutes. That means you don’t have to spend endless hours researching new content for your social accounts.

Even better, with the app’s analytics tools, you can always see which pins are doing well, as well as referral traffic, top pins, organic activity, followers, etc.

4. Zoho Social – Top Pick for Team Collaboration

Zoho Social is another social media management tool that allows agencies and businesses to schedule posts, create custom dashboards, monitor mentions, etc.

With it, you can prepare unlimited posts, receive notifications when anyone shares something about your business on the internet, create custom reports to see how your accounts are doing, and track your social media activities.

The best feature of Zoho Social is team collaboration. It allows you to assign roles to team members to let them work on different projects.

Zoho Social also comes with a free version that allows one team member to publish on seven social platforms, as well as a zShare browser extension. Of course, you can get more features on the premium plans.

5. TweetDeck – Best for Twitter

As you can guess from the name, TweetDeck is that free tool you need to manage your Twitter accounts with no hassle.

Using it guarantees that your Twitter page moves from a regular account to a powerful dashboard with a trending tab, easy inbox access, instant timeline updates, and much more.

On top of that, you can customize your homepage with likes, new followers, mentions, lists and collections, and mentions and messages for all your Twitter accounts.

And while you’re setting up posts, you can include trending hashtags so that your posts will reach more of your target audience.

And the best part? TweetDeck is completely free. All you need to do is log in with your Twitter account, and you’re good to go!

6. Post Planner – Most Budget Friendly

At some point, you’d want to upgrade to a paid plan to access more features on a scheduling tool. In this case, Post Planner comes out on top as one of the most budget-friendly options.

Its Starter Plan costs just $4 per month and includes one user, 300 scheduled posts, three social profiles, and 12 posts per social platform daily.

However, the price isn’t the only great thing about Post Planner.

For one, you can republish relevant content with the software. This means that you don’t always have to create new content all the time.

And with costlier paid plans, you can gather and reshare content within your niche from other social media channels.

7. Later – Top Social Media Calendar

Although Later was initially created to schedule and publish posts on Instagram, it has become a scheduling tool for other platforms.

The tool comes with several pre-made templates that you can use to create content, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

Essentially, Later is a social media calendar where you drag and drop content onto a posting timeline.

You can also get hashtag suggestions on the platform and the best times to publish your post.

So, you don’t have to run out of content ideas, as Later doubles as a hashtag research tool through which you can find content and hashtags for different posts.

Finally, there are advanced analytics tools to view how well your posts are doing on the platform.

8. NapoleonCat – Best for Social Media Marketing

NapoleonCat is a social media marketing tool with everything you need to build your social media presence, from content scheduling to analytics, reporting, and comment moderation.

The app has a Publisher which helps with content creation, scheduling, and publishing.

Furthermore, you can post across multiple accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google My Business.

The best part is that you can share a post on different channels simultaneously and modify it according to each platform. This is a huge plus for people who manage their businesses on various media.

NapoleonCat’s plans come with free access for two weeks, after which you’d have to pay to continue using it. Luckily, the software is budget-friendly, so you won’t be breaking the bank.

9. SocialOomph – Best Free Plan

One of the reasons SocialOomph made it to this list is that, unlike most free social media schedulers, this one allows unlimited posts with just a free account.

Yet, the free plan only allows you to connect to just one social profile, and you can only post a max of three posts each hour and access basic posting features.

Upgrading to a paid plan will allow you to connect with Tumblr, Shopify, and WordPress blogs.

You can always schedule posts based on your convenience, using the time and date in your time zone.

In addition, the platform works with several social media platforms, including Discord, StockTwits, Reddit, Mastodon, etc. However, SocialOomph doesn’t support Instagram.

A top attribute of the scheduling tool is self-destructing messages, which automatically deletes messages after a while.

While the dashboard is clean and simple, adding social accounts might be a little tricky.

10. Buffer – Best Integrations

As with several scheduling tools, Buffer is the platform you need to schedule posts for major social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

This tool allows you to engage your followers and reply to comments without logging in to your social media accounts.

In addition, Buffer utilizes a calendar-style scheduler where you can create content, include it in your post schedule, and handle all your social media accounts from one dashboard.

It also has Chrome and WordPress integrations. The software supports Android and iOS, so you can always schedule posts with your smartphone.

The platform has a free plan where you can connect three social channels and schedule 10 posts per channel.

Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t include Instagram stories and hashtag research, which puts Instagram and Pinterest users at a disadvantage.

11. Combin – Instagram Pick

Unlike several social media scheduling tools that allow you to manage different social accounts, Combin only focuses on Instagram posts.

It’s the ideal tool for users who want to increase engagement and followers on Instagram.

Combin has two different plans – Scheduler and Growth. The Scheduler is free and allows you to manage up to 15 Instagram accounts. You can also upload bulk images and tag locations and users with the plan.

This scheduling tool helps you find influencers in your industry or niche to increase your exposure. Account promotion is also available on Combin.

On the Growth plan, you get additional features that let you monitor audience activity, discover users who don’t follow you back, and much more.

12. AgoraPulse – Best CRM Tool for Scheduling

AgoraPulse is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool through which teams and agencies can work collaboratively.

You can engage, collaborate, and measure your efforts on all social media networks connected to the scheduling tool.

This tool only supports bulk scheduling, RSS feed, and unified inbox, all to make your social media activities more productive.

You can also label content on AgoraPulse for seamless analysis and retrievals. And since this is a CRM, you can use the inbuilt CRM features to connect with your target audience better.

Finally, Social Inbox is a feature on the platform for creating and assigning customized comments or notes to clients.

Overall, you’ll find everything you need in a social media scheduling tool, from automatic report scheduling to flexible scheduling options, exceptional customer support, ad comments management, and more.

13. SocialPilot – Straightforward Scheduling Tool

SocialPilot is one of the most straightforward scheduling tools out there. Every attribute of this software is geared toward simplifying content creation and scheduling while optimizing your efforts at the same time.

Besides the major social media platforms, SocialPilot lets you post on Google My Business, TikTok, VK, Tumblr, and YouTube.

Furthermore, you aren’t limited to posting regular videos, texts, and images. You can also share shorts, reels, and stories via the scheduling tool.

And for increased engagement, you can always tag collaborators and friends and add all relevant hashtags to your IG posts.

Finally, SocialPilot supports its users through phone, chat, email, and even social media.

14. Sprout Social – Scheduling Tool with Bot Builder

Once you discover that Sprout Social is all you need to access features like customized reporting, full social media analytics, and smart inbox, you’ll realize why it had to be on this list.

With this software, you can integrate tools like UserVoice, Hubspot, and Zendesk for team support and user management, all on the dashboard.

Sprout Social also comes with a bot builder through which you can create and operate chatbots on Facebook Messenger.

Real-time collaboration is available on the app to help you assign projects to team members for increased productivity.

15. Planable – Best for Digital Marketing

Planable is much more than a scheduling tool; it’s a social media collaboration tool for digital marketing.

It provides real-time collaboration as well as four types of approval workflows for greater efficiency: none, optional, required, and multi-level.

This means you can get feedback and approval on each post and even have conversations without issues.

Planable is suitable for every digital marketing agency ready to scale up its activities online. And even better, it can be used by teams of all sizes.

This tool also offers multiple views: calendar, feed, grid, and list view. These view options help you envision content as you create them.

Before publishing, you can also preview posts to see how they appear on your connected social accounts.

Factors to Consider Before Choosing a Social Media Scheduling Tool

To choose the best free social media scheduler, here are some factors you need to consider.

Social Media Compatibility

This is the first thing you need to consider, as it only makes sense to get a tool that’ll cater to all your social media channels.

For instance, it’d be wrong to use TweetDeck when you have accounts on other networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

If you use a social media management tool that focuses on specific platforms, you might end up using more than one tool to schedule content.

Social Media Monitoring

Most times, it’s impossible to keep track of all the messages and tweets coming in. Sometimes, users don’t make a lot of brand mentions or tagging, so it’s challenging to track responses.

However, some management tools allow you to track keywords, competitors, brand names, hashtags, and anything you want to monitor.

You can also check out tools with advanced features to sort mentions based on handles, locations, dates, etc.

Content Calendar and Scheduling

You’re investing in a social media management tool to help you plan and publish content in advance. This is why you must choose a tool that offers easy calendars and schedules.

A suitable scheduling app should be able to:

• Schedule content
• Queue posts
• Curate content
• Repeat posts
• Allow team collaboration

Performance Reports

The only way to know how well your posts and tweets are doing is if you have some form of feedback. Unfortunately, that might not be easy to do on your own.

Therefore, you need to find a tool that can analyze your posts and give you an adequate report on them.

Audience Engagement

A top social media marketing strategy is the ability to engage with the audience, which might be difficult to do on your own. So, any tool you choose must allow you to listen to your audience’s needs.

Such tools must have options for monitoring mentions, replying to the audience, following relevant audiences, and much more.

Frequently Asked Questions

To Wrap Up

Scheduling tools are just what you need to manage your social media campaigns without doing too much.

You don’t have to look too far—any of the tools highlighted above will certainly do the needful.

Still, ensure you check out the factors to guide you before selecting any of the outlined scheduling tools.