Social media marketing is an incredibly important piece of a modern company’s marketing strategy. It allows the brand to reach a massive audience and gives the companies unique opportunities to get creative. However, it’s important to remember that social media is still marketing, and just because you can be as creative as you want doesn’t mean you should be .
In order to avoid making mistakes in your social media marketing—and in order to make sure your content is as effective as possible—it’s important to choose the right tools for the job. Today we’ll be looking at ten different tools that are very popular in today’s market.
Table of Contents
Best Social Media Content Creation Tools
To the outside world, creating posts for social media may seem easy. But, marketers and brands know there’s a lot more to social media content creation and editing than meets the eye, particularly in today’s social media landscape.
From choosing the perfect image to representing your point of view, to creating the perfect Twitter hashtag to making a video for TikTok, here are some great content creation tools to help you along the way.
1. 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!
2. 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.
3 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.
4. 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!
Check out this Coronavirus handbook for social media managers to get more insight.
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 book maker 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.
5. Grammarly
Grammarly is an all-in-one spellcheck and grammar tool. It helps users write error-free copy 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.
6. Typeform
Asking questions is a great way to prompt engagement on social media. But sometimes asking one question isn’t enough to get the response you want from your audience. That’s where Typeform comes in.
Typeform is a user-friendly quiz, form and survey builder that allows you to ask your audience questions in different formats, including image-based, multiple choice, short answer, yes or no, and more.
Once you have your quiz in place, you can share it across multiple social media networks in the formats that work best for your audience. 10 questions and 10 responses per month are free, and Basic, Plus, and Business versions with additional features are also available.
7. Anchor
Anchor is one of the most popular platforms for creating, distributing and monetizing your podcast. All for free! It integrates with all key podcasting outlets and free social media platforms for audio. Its easy distribution with Spotify – the great audio disruptor allows you to analyze podcast performance through analytics through engagement insights. We use it at the DMI for distributing our own digital marketing podcast, Ahead of the Game.
With the Anchor app, users can easily create videos and audio recordings that are perfect for sharing on social media.
8. CapCut
There are many free graphics tools that allow users to easily create beautiful images for social media, but most of them aren’t available (or aren’t very intuitive) on your smartphone.
CapCut (previously known as ViaMaker) is a free all-in-one editing app for iOs and Android developed by the creators of TikTok, ByteDance. What makes it popular is the ease of use and a big music library. Like TikTok, the app has advanced filters along with stickers and fonts along with a range of magical effects.
CapCut recently topped the U.S app store so it must be doing something right. Best of all, CapCut is free to use so get editing and sharing!
9. PowToon
Video is the most popular medium on social media networks. The problem is, many companies rely on expensive external agencies to create these videos. The finished product can look too contrived, miss the message mark, and really drain the budget.
A tool like PowToon means you don’t have to be a video master to create engaging videos, especially for presentation purposes. The platform allows you to choose from several templates and customize them according to your business. You can simply plug and play your content and share across your social media networks. Free and paid versions are available from $19 to $99 per month.
Interested in learning more about video? Check out this guide to video marketing on social media.
10. Animoto
Animoto is another great video platform that allows non-experts to create captivating multimedia. Animoto allows you to turn existing video clips and images into video slideshows with little effort. You can either use one of their existing storyboard templates or build a video from scratch depending on how much time you have and your ambition!
Animoto does offer a free version, if you don’t mind having their branding on your videos. Other plans are at €28 or €69 per month based on your business’s needs. Annual subscriptions offer significant discounts.
How to Create Quick Videos with Animoto:
- Use one of the many storyboards provided by Animoto to speed up your video creation process. Each comes with a song, a style, and a particular structure.
- Replace the existing template content with your own text, video clips, and photos.
After you create your video, you can download it in various formats and levels of quality and upload it directly to your social media platforms. There are many ways to use video in your social media marketing, so make sure you do some research to find out the best route for you.
Knowing how to create a great video is one thing but understanding how to create good marketing videos is another. Consider a social media and marketing course to use video to its full potential!
how to become a social media content creator
1. Read news about your industry every day.
Creating great content that really resonates with your target audience requires you to know what’s going on in your industry. And the best content creators scour — not just read, but scour — the internet for industry news and trends. This sets them up nicely to understand the context behind what’s happened historically in their industry and how that shapes their target audience’s mindset in the present.
Get in the habit of reading by putting everything you read in one place. You can set up an RSS feed with an app like Feedly for blogs you know that contain relevant industry news. Also, ask a few colleagues what they’re reading these days and follow suit. Discover where your buyer persona spends time online and snag those blogs, too. Ahead of the game and have a few favorites already? Add ’em to the list.
2. Write on the regular.
If you don’t use it, you lose it. Successful content creators understand the importance of constantly flexing their writing muscles. Doing so helps them work through ideas that might be jumbled in their head and identify nuggets that could turn into fully realized ideas later. Successful content creators may not always be inspired to write, but they know something inspiring can come from their writing.
Get in the habit of writing by doing it daily or every other day. I’m not saying you need to write a polished, 1500-word essay on an industry-relevant topic daily. Rather, I’m talking about setting aside 10 or 15 minutes to jot down some thoughts and ideas. Figure out when your mind is the clearest — for most people, that’s after or during a cup of coffee — and just free-form write. What did you read yesterday that stuck with you? What didn’t you understand? Asking yourself those questions should start the flow.
3. Study your industry’s audience.
One of the hardest pills to swallow as a creative professional is that you are at the mercy of your audience — and the needs of that audience can sap your creativity.
But, at the end of the day, your audience pays your bills. And if you study your audience deeply enough, you’ll find interests and creative opportunities you wouldn’t have found without them.
The third quality of all successful content creators: They know their audience inside and out. Examine your own readers and viewers: What do they want that you’re not yet giving them? What problems do they have that you can solve for them? Here are some other characteristics of your audience you can identify for yourself or for your employer:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Family size
- Job title
- Salary
4. Establish your own voice.
Quick reality check: You’re not the only content creator in your industry. That means you’re not the only one offering the advice, observations, and thought leadership your industry is asking for. There are lots of things you can do to stand out from the other content creators in your field: diversifying into a new content medium, promoting your content on different channels, and naturally gaining experience and trust over time. But even then, the content producers with whom you’re competing for attention are doing the same thing.
What you can bring to your content, that nobody else can, is your own personal voice.
Readers click on your content for the information, but they come back for the personality. Writing about cybersecurity? Don’t just offer fresh insight on today’s malware; offer analogies and personal stories of data breaches that justify your insights and that only you can offer. The brand you write for might restrict you from opinionated or overly informal content, but that doesn’t mean you can’t indulge in the unique perspective that inspired you to join this business in the first place.
Learn how to blend your employer’s content guidelines with your own creativity, and you’ll become a much more valuable content creator in the long run.
5. Curate other people’s content (when it makes sense to).
here’s no shortage of people curating content these days. In fact, anyone on the internet can take someone else’s content and retweet it, share it on Facebook, pin it — the list goes on. But successful content creators know it’s not enough to take relevant industry news and spit it back out to your fans and followers.
“You must also position yourself as an expert and genuinely interact with your communities,” says Guy Kawasaki, the New York Times best-selling author. Sharing content isn’t enough. Engaging with the content you’re sharing now makes it unique to you.
Get in the habit of curating content when you have something valuable to add. Now that you’ve started scouring the internet on a regular basis for industry news, you probably have a wider depth of knowledge than you think. So be confident, and give your readers additional, useful information or even a thought or opinion when sharing others’ content. Your networks will appreciate it, and the author probably will too (or it could at least spark a debate — bonus!).
6. Understand your KPIs.
The internet is a big place (obviously). In fact, it’s safe to say it’s too big for your content to be discovered by your audience all by itself. In 2018, 61% of professionals stated that generating traffic and leads was their top marketing challenge.
Just because you publish content online doesn’t mean you’ll get the traffic your insight deserves. To get your content discovered, you first need to focus in on a key performance indicator (KPI), and optimize your content for it. A KPI is a specific metric you’ve chosen to measure how well your content is doing against your expectations. Modern KPIs include:
- Social media traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a social media post.
- Direct traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content by entering your website’s URL directly into their browser’s address bar.
- Organic traffic, the number of visitors that come to your content from a search engine result link.
- Submissions, the number of people who visit your website and leave having submitted their contact information in exchange for a resource you offered them (a form of lead generation).
If you or your employer chooses to focus on organic traffic, for example, it’s a good idea to study Google’s search algorithm to find out how it ranks content. Then, optimize your content so that it performs well under the organic traffic KPI. The more knowledge you have of the KPIs available to content creators now, the more successful you’ll be as a marketer.
7. Network at every opportunity.
Successful content creators know their success is due not only to their passion, but also to those who taught them, inspired them, and pushed them to think in different ways.
This is one way content creators grow into successful content creators. They’ve accepted the fact there’s more to learn than what they already know, and they’re open to new ways of thinking. Networking forces you to do just that. It’s a time to listen to others’ ideas and take them into consideration alongside your own.
Get in the habit of networking by seizing the countless opportunities you have to do it. They aren’t called social networks for nothing! Spend some time on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to check out who the thought leaders are in your industry and follow them.
Once you do that, you can ease into in-person networking. If you’re not a natural extrovert, the thought of networking can make you cringe. Make it easy on yourself and start small with colleagues. You already have something in common, so striking up a conversation in the kitchen or at your desks shouldn’t be too scary.
8. Offer solutions, not just commentary.
When you’re just getting started as a content creator, you might already have the knowledge your market is looking for. For successful content creators, however, expertise isn’t everything.
Want your audience to remember your content? Don’t just recite the things you know — explain why they’re important and what your audience can take away from it. The people consuming your content aren’t interested in just hearing you talk. They come looking to satisfy specific needs. Whether those needs are to solve a problem to simply increase their confidence in your industry, it’s your job to put your market observations into terms they can understand and find lessons in.
9. Question everything.
Polished content creators are curious by nature. They’ve learned to be curious about the internal knowledge they already have and the external information that’s being promoted out in the world. It’s the insights that come from this inherent curiosity that makes great content.
“You need to be curious to identify problems worth solving,” says Lorraine Twohill, head of marketing at Google, “and then come up with new solutions.” It’s these proposed solutions to age-old problems that gets content creators on the radar.
Get in the habit of questioning the status quo by constantly playing devil’s advocate. Taking the contrarian view of a piece of content can be difficult at first, but if you start to question why the author thinks this way and what happened in the industry that triggered this viewpoint, you’ll begin to think more critically about the content you’re consuming. And if you didn’t know, critical thinkers make great content creators.
There’s a lot of pressure on content creators — and every inbound marketer, for that matter — to churn out great content as part of their marketing strategy. Just know that being a successful content creator starts with the habits you form, as they’ll set you up to produce some seriously valuable content for your target audience.
Conclusion
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