**Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you choose to make a purchase.
There are so many social media automation tools out there. Each has its own merits, benefits, and pitfalls. As I've managed my company's social media as well as my own. I've learned a ton from a variety of different sources. Abby Lawson's Building A Framework has been super helpful as well as Blog by Number by Suzi at startamomblog.com. They both go through the how, what, when and why of starting a blog including of course some about social media.
So far, it has seemed to me that there are a couple of go to's for bloggers/social media planners. There is Hoot Suite, Buffer, Sprout, Tweetdeck, along with countless others. When I first started blogging 10 years ago (gasp!), I used Hoot Suite and Tweetdeck. You could schedule your posts and it was easy peasy. Images weren't quite as common and it was mostly text and links.
Fast forward to today
Everything has images and there are a lot more options. I picked some of the less mainstream options to review primarily because they offer a pretty good if not great free option. Mind you, Hootsuite still offers a good option with 30 scheduled messages, but I personally don't like its layout. Tweetdeck is a fantastic totally free alternative, but similar to Hootsuite, it uses a column and row layout.
Enter Crowdfire, there is not a column type layout and it allows you to retrieve content based on the topics you choose. With the free plan, you can choose 3 topics. I have picked journaling, bullet journaling, and DIY/Crafts. You get unlimited curated content (articles and images) on those topics which is great. However, the algorithm they use isn't as effective as some other tools. I have to scroll a while in order to find stuff that I find interesting and want to post. That being said, it would be much more difficult to search Google trying to find interesting stuff to post. You can have 10 scheduled posts at any one time but are not limited in the times you post per day. You would just have to keep topping up your queue to keep on posting. 
These are the most important sections/features Crowdfire offers. The article recommendations which I mentioned previously as well as image recommendations. It also suggests people you should follow, feeds you should follow to get better content, feeds/people you should unfollow, etc.
Full list:
• non-followers
|
• all following
|
| • fans | • competitors' followers |
| • recent unfollowers | • keyword search |
| • recent followers | • friend check |
| • inactive | • whitelist |
Then, you have your Post Schedule. Pretty self-explanatory - it lists the post and time it will be posted. Lastly, they have analytics but it only tells you what happened the day before which is nice if you are rather obsessed with stats (like me). This won't tell you how you are growing over time and really provide much real insight into your social media trajectory.
One great feature is the bookmarklet which allows you to post directly from Chrome. The benefit of this is you can top off your queue on a very regular basis; so you can fix it and forget it!
I wouldn't say Crowdfire is my favorite go-to social media automation tool, but I've found some good content and it keeps me posting without me having to do much but click share which I love!
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