All of us tweet, post on Facebook, create content for LinkedIn and Instagram, and pin almost daily. We spend hours creating content for social media channels and this is where these tools come in. The tools that we curate for you in this list make your work easier by helping to create content faster.
Create engaging and interactive Social Media Content that captivates your audience! This app includes tools, templates and best practices for creating social media content.
Canva
A social media tools list wouldn’t be complete without Canva. One of the most popular tools for creating social media graphics, Canva allows users to create high-quality images quickly using layouts, templates and design elements.
The free version of the tool is extremely comprehensive, but those who want more can invest €11.99 per month (up to 5 people) or go with pro or enterprise pricing if it’s the best fit for the business. It is free for education and non-profits.
How to Create Beautiful Graphics with Canva:
- Search Canva’s amazing library of templates and choose to use them as-is or to customize for your needs. There is a section dedicated to social media graphics for an array of content formats across platforms.
- Choose your unique elements to make the graphic your own.
- Share your new visual on any social media platform!
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), animate your designs and choose 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 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.
Lumen5
Turn blog posts into engaging videos
Price: Free or $49 per month
Description: By analyzing the content of your blog post, Lumen5 can automatically create a video storyboard for you. It even recommends relevant images and videos, which you can easily use by dragging and dropping onto the respective frames.
Great for creating: Videos
How to create videos quickly with Lumen5:
A fast way of creating a useful video is to highlight only the key points of your blog post in your video.
After you enter your blog post URL into Lumen5, Lumen5 will display your blog post text on the left side of the app. Select the subheadings of your blog post (which are likely the key points) to add them to your storyboard. Lumen5 will then generate a video according to those subheadings.
BIGVU Teleprompter
A pocket TV-studio
Price: Free, $8.99 per month, or $49.99 per year
Description: If you often retake your videos because you can’t remember what to say, you’ll love BIGVU Teleprompter. It displays your script as you record your video so that you can easily refer to your script. With its web video editor, you can also spice up your video by changing the background and adding captions.
Great for creating: Videos
How to create videos quickly with BIGVU Teleprompter:
In the teleprompter app, you first have to create your script. An easy way might be to draft your script on a desktop and transfer it to your smartphone via Google Drive or Dropbox.
If you want to record your video horizontally, hold your smartphone horizontally before tapping the camera icon.
There will be a five-second countdown once you tap the “REC” button. And the recording will automatically stop once the script ends.
Animoto
Make great videos. Easily.
Price: $16 per month, $42 per month, or $64 per month (Annual subscriptions are up to 50 percent cheaper.)
Description: Animoto helps you turn your photos and video clips into video slideshows with minimal effort. It’s one of the few video tools that let you easily create square videos, too. We have been using Animoto to create many of our social videos (you can check out some of them here).
Great for creating: Short social videos
How to create videos quickly with Animoto:
Use one of the many storyboards provided by Animoto to speed up your video creation process.
Each storyboard is pre-made with a structure, a style, and a song. Once you have picked a storyboard, simply replace the template content with your photos and video clips and edit the text.
Buzzsumo.com
Without data, creating the right social media content for your audience is just guesswork. But with BuzzSumo in your arsenal, you can ensure that you hone in on the exact key topics and content types that resonate most within your target market.
BuzzSumo enables you to find the best-performing content on any topic or website.
Let’s say you want to create a piece of content about how to start a business – you can enter the topic into BuzzSumo, and the tool will return a listing of posts on the subject that have seen the most social media shares over the last week, month, year, etc. You can also filter these results based on content type, word count, and even country.
As you can see in this example, BuzzSumo also provides a listing of the social media channels where each post has seen the most shares, providing you with insight into where to focus your efforts when promoting your content.
Apart from searching for topics, you can also, as noted, search for specific websites. By entering your competitor’s website, for example, BuzzSumo can show you their best-performing content, which again gives you more data insights to base your own approach upon.
BuzzSumo also provides listening tools which can track what people say about your business, industry, or competitors. From these mentions, you can find leads, sales opportunities, customer complaints or buyer’s pain points.
You can also set up alerts for key term mentions, so that you’re made aware of them in real-time.
Conclusion
Content creation can be the most daunting part of building a social media marketing campaign. There are so many vibrant platforms to consider– Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest–and the list goes on. No matter which social media platform(s) you’re using for your business, be it online or brick-and-mortar store, it’s important to remember that content is king. Content creation is a common pain point for small businesses and start-ups because there are just so many aspects to consider: posting at optimal times, choosing the right type of media (text, image or video), finding the right platform(s