5 Great Social Media Apps to Create & Share Content
~ Kathy Ellen Davis, NAIBA Communications Coordinator
Save time and create great content.
#1 RFV
This app is a lifesaver. Have you ever taken a video and thought you had it one way but it turns out it was recording in the other orientation? This lets you flip the videos easily! I use this mostly to flip vertical videos and then combine them into a longer video in iMovie (if you try to bring vertical videos straight into iMovie to combine into a longer video, it will cut off some of the top and bottom). I switch them to horizontal, edit them together, save the edited together video, then flip it back to vertical. Boom! Done!
#2 Trello
Trello is great for many things. You can create lists to keep things much more organized within your team, or to plan out your content for the future. I use it to keep all my social media info digitally organized, but I also use it as an easy way to transfer text over to an Instagram caption. I typically write the caption out in 280 character chunks, that way it’s easily transferable to twitter posts, and post it on a new card within a list. I copy and paste the text while I’m sharing to Facebook and Twitter from my computer, but it really saves me time on Instagram. Trello is a mobile and desktop app, so all I do is open up the trello mobile app and copy, then paste it in Instagram. Saves me from typing on my phone!
#3 Life Lapse
Life Lapse allows you to create some great stop motion videos or combine photos to create a slideshow video that plays automatically. It’s pretty intuitive to use and I bet you could have a lot of fun with it!
Examples of its use from Completely Booked Murrysville
#4 Leetags
This app easily allows you to make groups of hashtags and then copy them into your post (or first comment: that’s really the best way to do it. Post your post then comment all your - up to 30! - hashtags). They have a hashtag generator as well but I haven’t found it super useful. I really like that you can save your hashtags, scramble them up if needed, and easily paste them on social media.
Bonus hashtag tips:
This is BY FAR the most used app for me. You can use it on your desktop as well, which is mostly what I do. Canva makes it VERY EASY to create anything you need, graphics wise, for a social media post. They have templates for what sizes you need for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can make banners, flyers, the works! It’s relatively intuitive, and they have tons of backgrounds, photos, templates, and fonts to choose from. You can upload your own photos as well, and drag and drop things around the canvas, making it easy to get things where you want them to be. A paid version allows you to easily switch sizes of content (say if you create something for Facebook but want it in a square version for Instagram) but you can also do it yourself with a little bit of time. Any graphic you see on our social media accounts I made on Canva. It’s wonderful, and is also desktop and mobile.
#1 RFV
This app is a lifesaver. Have you ever taken a video and thought you had it one way but it turns out it was recording in the other orientation? This lets you flip the videos easily! I use this mostly to flip vertical videos and then combine them into a longer video in iMovie (if you try to bring vertical videos straight into iMovie to combine into a longer video, it will cut off some of the top and bottom). I switch them to horizontal, edit them together, save the edited together video, then flip it back to vertical. Boom! Done!
#2 Trello
Trello is great for many things. You can create lists to keep things much more organized within your team, or to plan out your content for the future. I use it to keep all my social media info digitally organized, but I also use it as an easy way to transfer text over to an Instagram caption. I typically write the caption out in 280 character chunks, that way it’s easily transferable to twitter posts, and post it on a new card within a list. I copy and paste the text while I’m sharing to Facebook and Twitter from my computer, but it really saves me time on Instagram. Trello is a mobile and desktop app, so all I do is open up the trello mobile app and copy, then paste it in Instagram. Saves me from typing on my phone!
#3 Life Lapse
Life Lapse allows you to create some great stop motion videos or combine photos to create a slideshow video that plays automatically. It’s pretty intuitive to use and I bet you could have a lot of fun with it!
Examples of its use from Completely Booked Murrysville
#4 Leetags
This app easily allows you to make groups of hashtags and then copy them into your post (or first comment: that’s really the best way to do it. Post your post then comment all your - up to 30! - hashtags). They have a hashtag generator as well but I haven’t found it super useful. I really like that you can save your hashtags, scramble them up if needed, and easily paste them on social media.
Bonus hashtag tips:
- Post them in the first comment under your post immediately, with a bunch of periods on the lines above them (Leetags allows you to add a certain number of periods when you copy). To see an example of this, check out our posts (naibabooksellers). If enough comments are made under your first comment, your hashtag comment will basically be hidden. If you put all of your hashtags in your post, they’ll stay visible. Sometimes you may want to have one or two in the post, but all thirty is a bit much.
- Use 30. Why not? It could help people find you!
- See which ones other people are using. You want to have some hashtags that are very popular, and some that aren’t as popular, so hopefully your content can stand out. My advice is to find three or four sets of ten that work, then combine those sets into different sets of thirty that you can rotate through.
- If you are going post with lots of hashtags, make sure you (or the person managing your social media accounts) spends some time engaging with some of those hashtags too. You can follow hashtags on Instagram and it’s a great way to get content in your feed that you may not otherwise see.
- Use hashtags in Instagram stories too! If you don’t want to bombard the post with them, you can make them match the color of the background or make them really small. They’ll still be there and searchable!
- Consider making some hashtags for your store that are searchable, especially if you post content around a certain topic regularly. Say my bookstore was named Bibbidy Bobbity Books. I could use #bibbidybobbityboardbooks to share the best board books, #bibbidybobbitybooksellers to share interviews with my booksellers, and #bibbitybobbitybookhaul to encourage customers to share their purchases. You can really have fun with it!
This is BY FAR the most used app for me. You can use it on your desktop as well, which is mostly what I do. Canva makes it VERY EASY to create anything you need, graphics wise, for a social media post. They have templates for what sizes you need for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can make banners, flyers, the works! It’s relatively intuitive, and they have tons of backgrounds, photos, templates, and fonts to choose from. You can upload your own photos as well, and drag and drop things around the canvas, making it easy to get things where you want them to be. A paid version allows you to easily switch sizes of content (say if you create something for Facebook but want it in a square version for Instagram) but you can also do it yourself with a little bit of time. Any graphic you see on our social media accounts I made on Canva. It’s wonderful, and is also desktop and mobile.