Social engagement is not just for self-oriented purposes. The average customer is already familiar with social media. In one way or the other, expect your website to have some social media functionality to tell their friends, become a follower, or use it to connect with you. Because of the vast array of types of communication that social media entails, it’s good to look at several alternative platforms that provide social engagement features at no cost. Who wants to pay for social media, anyway?

For example, we can have social sharing widgets that enable our visitors to share our content. But if we want to go the extra mile, we can create our social community. We can launch a discussion forum. Or, we can utilize a comments platform that enables social features and a much larger community of members. As you will learn shortly, social engagement platforms come in a variety of ways. Each offers something unique that can help bring you and your customers closer to each other.

If you operate as a freelancer, a small business owner, or simply someone who works with social media a lot, and you are failing to find one of your favorite social media platforms on this list, please be so kind as to leave a comment with your suggestion. We will do our best to expand the list and keep it frequently updated!

AddThis

AddThis was once a simple social sharing widget. It has expanded over the years to include features like custom social media follow buttons. This comprehensive customer targeting platform lets you target specific visitors with popups and recommendations and a separate content recommendation plugin that you can use to expose your readers to more of your content. All tools are free to get started with. Each one also comes with an analytics platform. It will help you better understand social media’s impact on your business and website.

Discourse

Launching a forum community is not something that everyone wishes to do. It’s a lot of maintenance work and work to get the community active. But suppose you already have an established database of a few hundred customers. In that case, Discourse can be a great way to bring this community closer in a tightly sealed yet modern forum community using the latest web technology tools and libraries. Hundreds of businesses and even corporations are using Discourse to power their communities; there is so much inspiration to be gained from!

Disqus

Comments are an essential part of any website. They are one of the most important social aspects of a website that utilizes content in any shape or form. Disqus has grown to become one of the most popular comment platforms. It has features like global login system, social integration, and easy content exposure. It’s no wonder that millions rely on Disqus to share and discuss with their community members.

Embedly

Social media is wonderful for exposing your content to a new audience. But sometimes, you want to do more than expose the post’s title. You wish to share a paragraph of essential facts or good content, and not all social media platforms enable you to do so, especially not between two different websites. Embedly also allows content creators to pull data from other sites and resources and display it in a simple widget. This creates social interaction between the two websites (authors), it also enables the reader to have a more concise and enjoyable reading experience.

Hello Bar

Hello Bar has been one of the most successful social marketing products released recently. By using this website widget, you can add a Notification Bar at the top of your website page. These can be used to attract email subscribers, promote your latest offers, inform people about important news, or maybe share a funny joke that would lighten up the day for your visitors. Hello, Bar is the ultimate social engagement platform for marketers, business owners, and bloggers alike.

Quikly

If you want to get some traction on social media quickly, Quickly is the way to go. It is a nifty tool that will help grow your social presence in the form of active fans and followers. Instead of doing all the hard work by yourself, use tools and machines that assist you on your journey to success. In other words, with Quikly, you get to experience growth with a lot less effort.

Amazing engagement with new and existing followers, social advocacy, insights, and fully customizable experience and heaps more with Quikly. If you would like to proceed with Quikly, you should first schedule a 15-minute demo and go from there. Make the most out of the world of social media and start taking things to the next level.

Social Pinpoint

For a boost in social engagement, Social Pinpoint comes in exceptionally handy. With the tool, you can create options and solutions to connect with your audience. From surveys and forums to mapping, ideas wall, landing pages, budgeting, you name it, Social Pinpoint rocks tons of goodies. Keep in mind all the projects you plan to bring to fruition, you execute with Social Pinpoint’s handy portal. You will not need to do any coding and whatnot.

There are multiple different packages available, covering small businesses to the largest organizations. For your information, you first need to get in touch with Social Pinpoint to set things up and go from there. But you can also benefit from the 14-day free trial and witness what’s possible with Social Pinpoint first-hand.

Buffer

Buffer is a full-blown solution if you are eager to take your social engagement to the next level. With this, of course, you can scale your business to new heights and successes. From publishing to analyzing, Buffer covers all the necessary and then some. To make it even more exciting, you can test things out free of charge to truly understand the power of this remarkably simple-to-use software. Not just that, but you can stick to the free plan, too, which includes three social accounts, ten scheduled posts, and one user.

Planning and scheduling social media campaigns has never been easier. With Buffer, you can keep things as organized as possible, benefiting tremendously from its features. For publishing, Buffer offers three different packages, while it comes with two for analytics. Start on the right track and scale your social accounts to the Moon and then Mars.

AddToAny

AddToAny is a remarkable tool that adds social sharing buttons simply anywhere. It supports any website, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Blogger, Tumblr, you name it. There are also browser tools available for you to take total advantage of. Some of the highlights of AddToAny are floating and image share buttons, share counts, follow buttons and Google Analytics compatibility. Of course, the sharing feature you will add to your website or blog with AddToAny will be mobile-ready.

Moreover, it is also worth noting that AddToAny works without creating an account. Just download and add it to wherever you want. Finally, you can, too, if you would like to brand and personalize the buttons and perform other customization tweaks. In short, the options are pretty much endless, making sure you get the most out of AddToAny with ease.

Nectar Ninja

Do you run an active site? Do you need a way to promote cool stuff over the holiday season? Nectar Ninja is a Twitter-to-website notification platform that lets you post real-time notifications to your website, using their widget. You can do this by sending out a tweet with a specific hashtag of your own choice. It is an amazing widget for anyone who wishes to surprise their visitors (and customers). It would work well with special promotional offers.

SnapWidget

Instagram is gaining a lot of traction among the business community. Thus, it only makes sense that you would want to learn about platforms that allow you to work with Instagram from devices outside of mobile. With SnapWidget, which tens of thousands of users use, you can easily embed your favorite Instagram content or profile within your blog and website in just a couple of clicks. Save yourself some headache from using third-party libraries; use this platform to take care of everything!

Sumo

Sumo has become a household name for many. With many free marketing tools, many socially oriented, this marketing widget has become a standard for hundreds of thousands of businesses, startups, bloggers, and anyone else who operates a socially active website. Sumo provides social sharing options and a viral email subscription widget that can be configured in a dozen ways to maximize the overall conversion rates. Visitor heatmap tracking plugin lets you record your site visitors’ activity in real-time.