Social media content is one of the cheapest ways for companies to market themselves. However, it’s easy for this marketing method to drag or get repetitive. That’s why it’s helpful to have a tool that can automate social media content creation. Take a look at this app that lets you create content and monitor your social networks in one place.
What makes a great social media image app?
When testing and evaluating apps, I had a few key criteria that each app needed to meet to be included:
- Is this app easy enough for amateur designers? In most cases, your company’s designer (should you be lucky enough to have one) is not who will manage your social media. Thus, I wanted to make sure these apps could be used effectively by people (like me) with minimal knowledge about design and design tools.
- Is this app suited well for social media marketing? Some apps are awesome, but have too many features when all you want to do is put together a good image to go with a social promotion. These apps are geared toward simplicity, so you don’t have to spend agonizing hours designing every single graphic.
- Is the app experience smooth? When trying to design something in a web app, a major factor is how smooth and fast the web experience is. Some apps might have passed muster, except that the web experience was consistently frustrating (freezing screen, slow to load designs, not saving or accepting changes, etc).
- Are the design assets professional? There are a lot of tools that offer templates—just not the kinds of templates and assets that are going to help you represent your brand well. This list features apps that are ideal for companies and individuals looking to represent their brand with professional-grade social media images. (To be honest, this criterion weeded out the most apps.)
- Is this app multi-purpose? While images for social media marketing may be your key reason for seeking out a graphic design tool, you’ll ultimately be more productive if you only need to learn and use one tool for multiple marketing design purposes, such as creating email banners, postcards, flyers, blog images—you name it. The apps that made it into this roundup feature templates and tools for designing more than just social media images.
MuseCam
MuseCam is a great app to help you shoot and edit your photos on iOS. It features a bunch of professional feeling camera presets, manual camera controls, and advanced tools like HSL and Curves.
Boomerang
Instagram’s Boomerang app takes a series of photos and creates a GIF-like image. However, there’s one subtle but super important difference between Boomerang and a GIF. A GIF loops a video over and over again. Whereas a Boomerang, plays a video forward, and then backward, and then loops that continuously.
VSCO
VSCO (formerly VSCO Cam) enables you to capture, edit, share and discover photos. The app features a bunch of high-quality filters to help you get the look you want and also offers a host of free editing tools like fade, clarity, skin tone, tint, sharpen, saturation, temperature, and more, each with manual adjustments.
VSCO also has a VSCO X membership, which costs $19.99 per year for exclusive presets, more editing tools, and educational content.
Halide
Halide is a unique camera app that focuses heavily on enhancing the experience of taking photos on mobile.
Manual
If you’re looking for the ability to customize your photo-taking experience, Manual could be a great option. Manual enables you to adjust shutter speed, ISO, and exposure values to create the effect you’re after with ease. Manual also gives you the option to capture images in RAW format, JPEG format, or both. If you choose RAW capture, you’ll be able to save images without compression, resulting in a higher-quality photo.
Crello
Similar to Canva, Crello is a graphic design tool that makes it easy for certified social media marketers to create stunning graphics without a lot of design knowledge.
Crello’s advantage over Canva is that it offers more than 30,000 free design templates, 180 million photos, 32,000 videos, and 15,000 illustrations. You can also design as a team by inviting members (up to 10), animating your designs, and choosing from a music library. Like Canva, a variety of different image types are offered, including templates specifically for social media. Crello is free for users, with limited usage, and the pro plan starts at $9.99 a month.
How to Build Graphics Quickly with Crello:
- Use Crello’s ‘Create’ tab to find a free design template or templates that work for your brand.
- Simply click on a design template you love, and customize it using the Crello editor.
- Save your finished product, and/or share it across your social media sites.
Hashtagify.me
Hashtagify.me is a free tool (with paid add-on features) that allows you to search for hashtags. Once you’ve searched for a hashtag, you can determine its popularity and how it’s used. The tool is simple to use: in the search box, type in a hashtag you are curious about, and search to find out its performance and related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. You’ll also see the top influencers for that hashtag, as well as recent tweets using that hashtag and other demographics. Paid users can sign up for alerts on particular hashtags, track influencers and usage patterns, and more.
Prezi and Flipsnack
Prezi allows you to create stand-alone presentations, appear alongside a presentation, and design awesome interactive graphics and charts. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, presenting and collaborating from home has become hugely important and the platform has capitalized on its technology to make it seamless while looking good!
Prezi can be integrated with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webdex and has an ‘Inspiration’ section where you can see what other brands have done to engage their audiences. You can also get reusable designs and templates so you don’t need to start from scratch. An individual subscription starts at $3 a month.
If you’re looking to take your PDFs or ebooks to the next level, look no further than Flipsnack (previously known as SlideSnack. This tool has a flip bookmaker that allows you to create, share and embed online flip-page formats.
For your mobile visitors, you can convert PDFs to HTML5 to make a book that’s fully mobile responsive and create mobile-friendly content that engages.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an all-in-one spellcheck and grammar tool. It helps users write error-free copies on Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and almost anywhere else on the web.
Grammarly works by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to scan your text for common and complex grammatical mistakes, including everything from subject-verb agreement to article use and modifier placement. It also goes beyond regular checking to provide users with explanations and helps them improve their writing skills. The plugin is free for individual users, with premium and business plans also available.
Impresso
This app allows you to create animated Stories and offers a lot of customization options with frames, templates, layers, font, and color options. You can create professional and on-brand content with this powerful mobile app.
Impresso lets you create a square, landscape, portrait dimensions and allows you to customize content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Impresso is available on the App Store and offers monthly or annual subscription options.
Over
This app is like having Photoshop at your fingertips.
Over offers many convenient tools for content marketers.
You have access to many templates, decorative elements, editing and blending tools, as well as fonts. If you have a Mac computer, you can also Airdrop your fonts into the app — which is a major plus.
InShot
Need to create a video while covering a live event? InShot has you covered.
You won’t need any other video editing app after you use InShot because developers make it easy for you to edit a video quickly and easily.
You can stitch videos and photos together and edit a video on your mobile or tablet device.
InShot also allows you to add in music, stickers, and your own fonts to produce a video that aligns with the look and feel of your brand.
Conclusion
Social media has become an important part of marketing. But in all the noise, how can you make a difference? The right social media tools can be your foundation for an effective social media strategy. And there are many tools out there that make that job easier. You just need to know where to look.