Social media marketing can be time consuming and expensive, leading to misguided social media posts or marketers giving up on the idea entirely. Luckily, there are various tools and applications available that can aid your social media marketing efforts without costing you an arm and a leg.
Social mention
Social mention is a media monitoring tool that helps to track what consumers are saying about a brand in real-time over more than 100 different online platforms. 
Social mention provides real-time information on; whether or not specific brand/product mentions are positive, neutral or negative, who mentions the specific brand/product the most and if there are popular hashtags in use that relates to the brand/product you are tracking. There are many other features provided by social mention, making it a must have tool for more efficient tracking and marketing efforts.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a must when it comes to scheduling posts and managing your social media platforms effectively, maximizing output efforts whilst minimizing input efforts.
Hootsuite has paid for features, but its free plan allows you to sync up to three social media pages, making it easy for you to manage all your social media platforms from a single dashboard.
Buffer
Buffer is also a very handy social media management tool that helps you to manage and keep track of your social media efforts. 
Buffer also has an easy-to-use dashboard like Hootsuite and allows the user numerous functions on its free plan, such as; the ability to track the success of your social media posts, the ability to schedule posts and plan posts ahead of time and the ability to create campaigns, all of which will aid your marketing efforts and help you to grow your brand.
Canva
Canva is a beginner friendly tool to create beautiful images and web optimised graphics, giving beginners the means to create professional looking pictures and logos.
Canva also has templates to help guide you and is widely used to create various social media posts, flyers, facebook ads, tumblr graphics, etc. Canva also provides all its users with a free video training course to help their users reap the benefits of all the features Canva has to offer.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a mobile, desktop friendly app that aims to increase your social media followers and helps you follow the right people. The free version of Crowdfire can be used on up to two social media accounts. 
Crowdfire helps you by; following people that will be interested in your page by using your competitors’ followers as a cheat sheet, suggesting users to unfollow if they have been inactive for an extended period of time, offering a “let’s give some love back” repost option to show appreciation to your top supporters and by helping you to stay within your follow and unfollow limitations in order to avoid your social media account from being suspended or blocked.
Sharen van Lill 
For my business I make use of Canva and it really is easy to use. I definitely need to try all the other tools such as social mention and hootsuite for my business. I don’t want customers to start conversations about my brand without me knowing about it! Great blog post Sharen
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Hello Kim! I also love Canva, but if you are willing to spend some money then I would suggest you look into PicMonkey aswell. It is a very nice online application. Thank you for all your kind words, have a lovely day!
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Hey Sharen
A very well-developed post. The way you explained each point with necessary details and maintained a good balance between theory and practice is really commendable. I would also recommend Social mention as a media monitoring tool, just like you said in your blog! Thanks a bunch for sharing. Armand
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Hello Armand, I am grateful that you appreciate the time and effort I put into this blog post. Social mention is a very helpful tool and I’m impressed that you’re already familiar with it!
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Hi Sharen. Really interesting content. I didn’t know there were so many social media tools that you can use. I’ll definitely use them in my business in the near future.
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Hello Danielle! I’m glad I could help you with information on freely available tools and links on where to find those tools. Please feel free to share your feedback with me after implementing these tools in the future, as I am very interested to know if you could reap some benefits from these amazing tools.
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wow! thanks Sharen this is exactly what i needed. I had no idea there are so many ways to optimize my social media, and all that for FREE. That’s awesome thanks again.
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Hello Daniel! I’m glad I could help. If you do a bit of internet surfing, I’m sure you’ll come across even more tool that are also free and maybe a bit more tailored to your specific needs. Let me know if you come across some helpful free tools that was not mentioned in this post.
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This is really useful for everybody, because everybody likes free stuff. Small businesses will also find great value in this article. Thanks a lot Sharen ! 👌
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Yes “free stuff” is always a topic that attracts everyone’s attention. unfortunately people often case feel that something is of bad quality if it is free, and thus most people don’t make use of all the free tools available that can boost their marketing efforts! Be sure to share this valuable information with your friends.
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