Keen to find out our favourite tools for efficient content creation? If so, check our video below where Vittoria explains more…
Today we’ll speak about social media content creation and how using the right tools can help you make this process so much easier and more successful.
Speed up content creation by using the right tools
A lot of our clients struggle with keeping their social media channels updated with fresh and engaging content. Lack of time and graphic design experience is generally the most common issue! However, using the right tools can help speed up parts of the process, help you gain inspiration from other people’s work (by using templates, for example) plus, help you create better-performing content.
We’ve rounded up our favourite tools for efficient content creation. This is a huge area – so, we’ll split this into the following 4 areas…
- Visual content creation tools
- Video content creation tools
- Written content creation tools
- Content research & planning tools
Let’s start by listing what we believe are the best and most useful visual content creation tools:
1. Visual content creation tools
Canva
Our favourite, and certainly one of the most popular tools for creating awesome social media graphics is Canva. Canva allows you to create amazing graphics using pre-designed templates, layouts and already-made design elements. The free version of the tool is super comprehensive, but you can get a few awesome extra features for as little as £8 per month. A few things we really love are:
Canva’s library of templates! You can use them as is or add unique elements/colours to make them your own.
The interface is super useful, friendly and intuitive.
You can share your designs directly to any social media platform! Plus, Canva integrates with many other apps and platforms which can really simplify your life.
Crello
Similar to Canva is Crello. Another easy-to-use design tool that offers more than 10,000 free design templates, 65 million stock images and more than 11,000 design elements (which is more than you’d find on Canva). Crello also has a free plan, which is less comprehensive than Canva though! The good news is that their plan starts at $7.99 per month.
Piktochart
An amazing tool for Infographic lovers is Piktochart. We love infographics so much! They are an amazing way to visualise data and re-use old blog content. However, if you don’t have a graphic designer in your team, infographics are tricky to create!
Piktochart is an amazing tool that offers an incredible variety of templates that are beautifully designed and look very professional! There’s a free and paid version for those looking to manage their brand and visuals in a scalable way.
Mojo App
Next on our list is Mojo App. This is an awesome app to create vibrant social stories that look remarkable and professional. You’ll find hundreds of templates designed and animated by top creatives to capture the user’s attention and help viewers stay engaged until the end. We’ve used Mojo a lot in the past and, trust us, it’s pretty simple and intuitive to use. Once you’ve picked the template you like, you can add your photos and videos, save your design to your phone or share it directly to your social platforms.
Motionleap by Lightricks
Another app we love is Motionleap. With this app, you can easily animate and bring your photos to life! You can animate one element only, or several. You can also add elements & overlays and you can adjust the speed of your animation.
Snapseed
Last but not least, Snapseed. An awesome photo editor app developed by Google and available for both iPhones and Android.
Snapseed comes with an impressive menu of tools, and you can make very fine and detailed adjustments that aren’t possible with most other apps. We genuinely love this app as it gives an incredible level of control without being overly complicated to use. Score: A+! Snapseed is the best photo editing app we’ve seen and used for enhancing photos.
Let’s move on to our list of video content creation tools!
2. Video content creation tools
Teleprompter With Video & Audio
We have talked about Teleprompter With Video & Audio before.
Do you remember our top tips on how to self-record videos using your smartphone? Well, this app allows you to read your script whilst recording a video clip from the front/back-facing camera of your phone. The text is strategically placed on screen so that your eyes are looking at the camera. You can change the text scrolling speed, which is a handy feature indeed.
We really enjoy using this app as it means we don’t have to memorise a script and it makes us look a little more confident!
InShot
InShot is an all-in-one visual content editing app that allows you to create videos, edit photos and create image collages.
You can easily trim clips, change the speed of your footage, add filters, music and text. You can also flip and rotate footage which is a cool feature that many other apps don’t have! If you’re looking for a mobile editor that’s comprehensive and easy to use, then this is your app!
Cool! Have you taken loads of notes? Ready to go through our top 3 tools for written content creation? Let’s dive in.
3. Written Content Creation Tools
Grammarly
A ‘never without’ tool for Saltoria Marketing is Grammarly!
This is an all-in-one spellcheck and grammar tool that works literally everywhere. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your website and almost anywhere else on the web…Grammarly scans your text for common and complex grammatical mistakes and it supports the busy professional with writing mistake-free copy! This is a free plugin for individual users – with paid features also available.
Hemingway App
Another cool and useful tool is the Hemingway App as it helps create more readable and shorter content.
After scanning your copy, the app will give you several suggestions for making your copy bolder and more engaging for your readers.
Typeform
You’ve all heard of Typeform before, right?
Typeform is a simple and user-friendly form builder to help you engage with your audience through image-based, multiple-choice, short answer, yes or no quizzes.
You can share your quiz or survey across multiple social media networks in the formats that work best for your audience. You get 10 questions and 10 responses free per month and Basic, Plus, and Business versions with additional features are also available.
Finally, let’s look into a few content research and planning tools that can help you streamline the content creation process!
4. Content research & planning tools
Postoplan
Have you heard of Postoplan before?
Postoplan is a smart social media marketing platform that helps businesses create, organise and promote content across multiple social networks. What we really like about this platform is that:
- There are over 700 post ideas in their built-in content calendar. You can use them as hooks for your posts if you’re struggling to find inspiration!
- The interface is very clear and simple to use and offers a variety of features like multimedia content, a centralised dashboard, graphics editor, image library, calendar, performance analytics and more.
- You can get a lot from its free plan and you can connect an unlimited amount of accounts, like Facebook Business pages, Telegram, Twitter, Google My Business and channels in Slack. Plus, their paid plans are all quite reasonable.
- Postoplan is also a good social media scheduler that allows you to automate stories too, which is really useful.
Days of the year
Days of The Year’ is another great source of inspiration.
This website collects all the funny, bizarre and cool holidays around the world. You can use the ‘search’ function on the top menu to search for national/international days related to a specific topic.
AlsoAsked.com and Answer The Public
Next on our list are AlsoAsked.com and Answer The Public.
If you want your content to resonate with your audience, you should know what your audience wants to know in relation to the topics you’re keen to talk about! This is where these tools come into action and give very useful insights into what people are searching for on Google.
People Also Asked data
AlsoAsked.com is a free tool that returns the “People Also Asked” data, giving you an insight into long-tail searches. What is the ‘People Also Ask’ Box? It’s a feature in Google search engine that contains a set of questions related to the original search query. When you click on a question, the box expands to display a text snippet with a brief answer to the that question. More importantly, AlsoAsked.com defines the relationship between topics and questions. For example, if we type in the words ‘content creation’, we’d get a number of results such as:
- What is content creation?
- How do you create content?
- What does a content creator do?
- What are good examples of content creation?
And so on…
Suggested data from Google auto-completes
Whilst ‘AlsoAsked.com’ shows results from ‘People Also Asked’ data, Answer the Public returns results from Google Suggest data and shows combinations of auto-complete searches. How does Google Suggest work? Google uses an algorithm based on popular searches to predict a user’s search query as it’s typed. It then provides a dropdown list of suggestions that change as the user adds more characters to the search input.
Suggested data from Google suggests
If we open up Answer the Public and type ‘content creation’, we get tons of results. For example:
- How to get into content creation?
- Why is content creation important?
- How does content creation work?
- How much does content creation cost?
- What is content creation on Instagram?
We recommend using the two tools together to supercharge your insights and research!
Hashtagify.me
Hashtagify.me is another great free tool (with paid add-on features) that allows you to search for hashtags.
You can search for a hashtag and determine its popularity and how it’s used. For example, you’ll get a list of related hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, but you’ll also see the top influencers for that hashtag and the recent tweets using that hashtag.
That’s it! We hope you’ve enjoyed our suggestions and found this list of tools useful.
If you’ve liked this video, please like it – leave your comments below and shout about it!
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