Blogging on Social Media
Custom social media content is a powerful tool to have in your marketing toolset. That said, it’s not always the best option for every situation. Sometimes you need a little more space and freedom to develop your ideas than social media can give you. So where do you draw the line? Should you use Twitter to write about something that would work better as a blog post? Or should you write a blog post about something that would be better as an Instagram caption?
There are no hard-and-fast rules here! It all comes down to which platform will be most effective at spreading your message, and how comfortable you are with the constraints of the platform.
If you’re looking for some tips on when to write a blog post instead of using social media, we’ve got you covered. There are lots of different options for custom social media content, but these are our favorites!
If You Need To Explain Something In Depth
Custom Social Media Tools
A picture is not just worth a thousand words—on social media, pictures are worth many, many shares and likes too.
As a small business owner, you know the importance of using images in social media posts, but you might wonder if it’s possible to create eye-catching social media images without hiring an army of designers or learning Photoshop. The answer is you totally can!
We create all images for the Buffer blog and social media accounts using a few easy-to-use image design tools. In this piece, we’ll share a few tools and resources we use to create images for Buffer, as well as some new and interesting tools to try. The best part? You don’t need extensive training to use any of these tools. Most of these social media image makers include handy templates and drag-and-drop builders to help you get started.
Whether you want to create an image from scratch, make memes from your photos, or simply want a cool background photo, we bet you’ll find an image creator here that can help.
Copy of Quick Wins Social Media (3)
How to Create Images for Social Media – Tools
- Canva – A start-to-finish design program perfect for non-designers
canva templates
Probably our most-used image tool at Buffer, Canva makes image creation super easy (especially for non-designers) with their premade templates, custom image sizes for every social media channel, drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and more. Almost every original image you see shared from our social accounts was made in Canva.
Tip: If you know the exact dimensions of the image you want, create a custom size before clicking into any of the premade templates.
custom dimensions
Buffer offers a Canva integration for all plans, including the Free plan. When you post an image with Buffer, simply click on the Add image from Canva option and use the Canva editor to create a new design, right inside Buffer. You can also import existing designs from Canva into Buffer and post directly from Buffer.
- Skitch – Screen capture and annotation
Skitch screenshot
Our go-to screenshot tool, Skitch pops up with a quick keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+5 on Macs), then you can click and drag over the area you want to snip. We keep coming back to this tool because of the awesome and easy annotation features. You can circle things, point to things, blur things, and add text with just a couple of quick clicks. A product of Evernote, Skitch lets you save and store all screengrabs into an Evernote folder of your choosing.
Tip: Use the blur feature anytime you’re sharing an image with your email address or personal details.
blurred skitch
- Projector — Collaborative all-in-one design tool
Projector lets you create not just images for social media but also presentations, GIFs, videos, and email banners. To get started, choose the type of social media graphic you want to create, choose a template, or build your design from scratch. Apart from text, images, and icons, add professional effects to images like animations, text, transitions, gradients, and shadows. You also have access to a library of stock photos, icons, and GIFs from tools like Noun Project, Unsplash, and Giphy, right in Projector.
The cool part is you can collaborate on designs with your team simply by sharing a link to edit.
- Snagit —Screen capture software for Windows
Snagit by TechSmith is a screen capture and recording tool for Windows users (it also works with Mac, by the way). The Snagit desktop app lets you capture and edit images in different ways. You can capture part of your screen, the full screen, or scroll and capture a long webpage or chat history.
Add shapes like arrows, lines, and callouts to your screenshot, as well as text to annotate screenshots. What’s more, you can also replace words or change the font, size, and colors of the text in a screenshot without redoing the entire image.
- Snappa — Remove image backgrounds with a click
Whether you want to spruce up selfies with custom backgrounds, remove backgrounds from product images, or use a custom background for images from the web, Snappa lets you do it all with one click. Simply choose an image from your gallery, from Snappa’s online gallery of pictures, or any picture from the picture and swap the background with stock photos, custom backgrounds, and more.
Snappa isn’t only an only background remover, though. It also lets you design high-quality graphics for social media from scratch using templates, text, graphics, royalty-free stock photos, and shapes.
- Giphy – GIF maker
Whether it’s congratulating a coworker on a job well done or seconding a tweet that resonates with you, you’ve likely used a GIF or two on social media. Giphy lets you create funny, inspirational GIFs from images and video clips.
Upload an image or video into Giphy and add animations, text, and stickers to create a GIF. You can also add effects like spooky, dreamy, or black-and-white to stylize your GIF.
- TouchRetouch – Remove objects from images
TouchRetouch lets you remove unwanted objects or distractions from your photos, like telephone cables or photo bombers.
Select the object you want to remove with the Brush or Lasso tool or tap any vertical or horizontal line with the Line tool, and voila—it disappears from the picture. You don’t have to be too precise when selecting objects. Roughly trace them with the Brush, and they’re gone.
- Quozio — Quote maker
Who doesn’t love some #MondayMotivation or quick #TuesdayTips while scrolling through social media? With Quozio, you can create beautiful quote-based images to inspire your social media followers.
Enter a quote in Quozio, mention who said it (this is optional), and choose a template to create an image from your quote. The app offers several scenic backgrounds with different fonts to design your quote.
- Adobe Spark – Free blur backgrounds
Blurring backgrounds is a good way to put the spotlight on the star of your image—people, products, or logos. Adobe Spark lets you easily blur image backgrounds – for free.
Choose an image from your library, stock photos, or a template from Adobe Spark. Select the Blur menu and blur your image as much as you like. Add filters, animation, text, or borders to your picture to make it unique.
10.PowerPoint– Easy image software (meant for something else)
Presentation software might not be the first thing that comes to mind for image creation, yet a large number of amateur designers get great use out of creating images via the templates and tools baked right into PowerPoint.
Think of slides as images. And then consider how easy it is to edit slides in PowerPoint. You can set photos as slide backgrounds, add text and colors, and place icons and graphics. When you save the slide in PowerPoint, choose to save as an image, and you’ll be set.
Tip: HubSpot offers some excellent starting templates for building infographics with PowerPoint. Here’s an example of what’s possible:
11.Easel.ly– Drag-and-drop infographic creation
Easel.ly’s interactive layouts allow you to embed charts, photos, and more. You can get started with a prebuilt template (and then customize yourself) or you can go truly bare-bones and build the entire infographic however you see fit. Easel.ly comes with a huge number of icons, shapes, and objects that you can drag and drop into your editor.
12.Placeit– Integrate your website or app inside cool stock photos
For creating beautiful images that feature your home page, blog, app, or service, Placeit provides some neat integrations with your web address and their photography and video. Choose a background from Placeit’s library, then upload a screenshot or give Placeit an URL to grab in order to insert your site into the image.
Placeit does the rest. You can download or embed your new creation anywhere.
Tip: The Interactive Video option at Placeit will embed your full website into the window, and users can scroll through the site just as if they were visiting the page in their browser.
13.Social Image Resizer Tool– Ideal image sizes for every social channel
A huge number of different sizes and aspect ratios work best on different social networks. Twitter photos are best at a 2:1 ratio. Facebook prefers images to be more square. Pinterest and Google+ love vertical images.
You can keep this all sorted with an image resizing tool like Social Image Resizer. Upload your desired image, then choose from a huge drop-down list of options and places where you might like to use the image. You can move and scale the selected area to grab the optimal look for your image.
Here are the social networks the tool supports:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google+
Pinterest
Instagram
YouTube
Tip: You can click and drag to create a custom image size as well. Image Resizer informs you of the new dimensions as you move and resize the borders.
- TinyPNG — Image compression for quick uploads
If you use a lot of large images on your website or social media, you need a tool like TinyPNG. The image compressor reduces file size for images while maintaining quality. Smaller images make your website faster and upload quickly on social media.
Choose an image file you want to compress (PNG, WebP, or JPEG formats) and the tool will compress your image to an optimal size. Save your compressed image to Dropbox or your computer.
- Photovisi — Collage maker
Image collages are big business for Instagram, and they’ve found their way to Twitter and Facebook, too. The latter two social networks have collage tools built-in. If you’d like a little more control over the way your collages are handled, a tool like Photovisi would work wonders.
There’re many different templates to choose from, and you can customize not only the photos you use but also any text, backgrounds, or graphics you wish to add to the collage.
16.Infogr.am– Charts and graphs
When you write data-dense blogposts or research-backed articles, you might find yourself wishing to share data as an image. One of the best tools I’ve found for this is Infogr.am, which helps create infographics along with boasting a pretty robust charts and graphs editor.
You can choose the type of graph you wish to use and then edit the table cells and values directly from within Infogr.am.
How to Create Images for Social Media – Resources
- Buffer’s Social Media Image Sizes in 2021 Guide
Reference this guide for the best image sizes to use for five major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You’ll learn the best image sizes to use when sharing images on social media, so your photos aren’t cropped or pixelated. We also offer advice on how to crop and resize images to fit different social networks.
- Iconfinder – Free, searchable icons
Discover the perfect icon for adding to your social media images. Search by keyword, then refine by format, style, size, and more. Apart from the premium icons, there is a huge selection of free-with-attribution icons to use.
iconfinder
- Noun Project – Huge library of icons in a minimal, glyph style
If you’ve read much of the 99U blog (one of our favorites!), you’ve likely noticed their cool icons that make for the cover image on their posts. Each one is made with Noun Project icons! The Noun Project library contains an incredible number of visual images that represent tons of words in the English language. With most available as a free download, the Noun Project makes attribution very clear and easy.
noun-project
- Subtle Patterns – Patterned backgrounds for free download
These pattern backgrounds are intended for websites, but I like to grab them for quick-and-easy image backgrounds, too. Find a favorite and screengrab the tiled background preview from the site. Then upload and add to your image editor.
Subtle_Patterns
21.Pattern Library– Fun, free backgrounds
Like Subtle Patterns, the Pattern Library is also website-first. You can do the same trick here with the backgrounds you enjoy. Screengrab and use in the images you create. The Pattern Library offers full-tiled background previews to make screen grabbing easy.
patternlibrary
- Colourlovers – Color palette and pattern inspiration
One of the top web resources for colors, you can find any shade, tint, or hue here. And the community has placed these awesome colors into palettes and patterns.
colour-lovers
- Stock photos – 53+ free image sources
You may find yourself needing some free imagery to use as well. We came up with an extensive list—more than 50 options—of free image sources where you can find professional images for free. A few of my favorites:
Death to the Stock Photo
Startup Stock Photos
Pexels
Unsplash
what are social media tools
Marketers are faced with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. From social media marketing to customer experience and advertising, it can be a challenge to stay on top of everything.
Luckily for us, there are a plethora of great social media tools on the market to help you succeed in your role and stay productive.
Tools for content curation, discovery, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and more can be used to enhance your effectiveness.
This week on The Science of Social Media, we’re exploring the top 10 social media tools brands are using to succeed in 2019. Utilizing these tools in your daily workflows will help improve results across the board.
Let’s dive in!
The 10 top social media tools to try in 2019
Here are some of the most-used social media tools used by some of the world’s top brands:
1: BuzzSumo
2: Google Trends
3: Buffer Publish
4: Canva
5: Unsplash
6: Animoto
7: Feedly
8: Buffer Reply
9: Native Analytics
10: Todoist
Honorable Mentions
- BuzzSumo
Social Media Tools: BuzzSumo
Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month
Details:
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.
Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.
This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.
Similar tools: Ahrefs, Meltwater, Mention
- Google Trends
Social Media Tools: Google Trends
Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/
Pricing: Free
Details:
Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.
Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.
You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.
Similar tools: Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, WordStream
- Buffer Publish
Social Media Tools: Buffer
Website: https://buffer.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $15/month)
Details:
Buffer is a suite of brand building tools designed to make it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule social media posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.
For example, Buffer Publish allows you to set up a schedule for your social media profiles, and after you add content to your Buffer queue, it will publish at the times you’ve designated.
In addition to our web application, we also have both Android and iOS apps as well as a fantastic Chrome Extension that’s great for Buffering while you’re browsing the web or on the go.
Similar tools: Hootsuite, Falcon.io, Sprout Social
- Canva
Social Media Tools: Canva
Website: https://www.canva.com/
Pricing: Free (Canva for Work starts at $12.95/month)
Details:
Another fantastic tool that absolutely every brand or business online should know about is Canva.
Many times social media managers and marketers need to be able to create beautiful images without a designer. It’s what makes up part of a great social media strategy.
Canva is the tool so many marketers rely on for making great-looking social media images quickly. You can use the ready-made templates, icons, and illustrations to make your images look professional without having to do much of the actual design work.
Canva has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface plus a massive library of over two million graphic elements.
Similar tools: Crello, Buffer Stories Creator, Bannersnack
- Unsplash
Social Media Tools: Unsplash
Website: https://unsplash.com/
Pricing: Free
Details:
One of our favorite tools in the design, photography, and video space is Unsplash. Unsplash is a massive library of free professional photos you can use — free!
Unsplash photos are really popular with many social media marketers because they can help give your content a professional, polished look.
And there are so many Unsplash collections to explore. We recommend finding a couple of creators whose photos you really enjoy and following them so you can always find their latest work.
Similar tools: Pexels, Storyblocks, Videvo
- Animoto
Social Media Tools: Animoto
Website: https://animoto.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $5/month
Details:
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Animoto is one of our go-to social media tools for quickly creating stunning marketing videos.
Their video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional content in just a few minutes. They describe it as “fast and shockingly simple,” – and we would agree with that.
There are so many benefits to being able to quickly create engaging marketing videos. Video is a content format that we know a lot of people struggle with, but Animoto helps to bridge that gap.
We’ve used it to create quick recaps of recent blog posts for social media, videos promoting a big announcement, and videos around product launches.
Using Animoto, there are plenty of opportunities for you to add value to your audiences’ lives.
Similar tools: PowToon, Adobe Spark, Crello
- Feedly
Social Media Tools: Feedly
Website: https://feedly.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $5.41/month)
Details:
Our next tool is Feedly. Feedly is great for so many things. Maybe you work with influencers and want to follow their blogs, or you need to keep up on industry news, or any other reasons that you might visit several websites. Instead, you can add all those RSS feeds to Feedly and see them there. A huge time saver.
Feedly is also great for content ideation. You can add several of the blogs, writers, and publishers whose content you like to one feed and see them in one glimpse.
It even has a Buffer Publish integration so you can schedule your content to go out right from the Feedly dashboard.
We also want to give Flipboard a quick shoutout here, too. While it’s not an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you can follow topics on Flipboard and it curates the world’s news stories to help you stay informed.
We’ve used Feedly to follow specific influencers and industry news, and Flipboard to keep up to date with bigger stories.
Similar tools: Flipboard, Quora, Pocket
- Buffer Reply
Social Media Tools: Reply
Website: https://buffer.com/reply/
Pricing: Plans start at $50/month
Details:
This next tool is one of our very own at Buffer: Reply. I think we’ve mentioned it a few times on the show but we’ve never gone too deep.
Buffer Reply makes social media engagement easy for marketing and support teams who need to respond to social conversations. It’s all in one inbox.
What’s great is that through Reply you can see social conversations across social networks:
On Twitter, you can see public tweets that @ mention your handle, direct messages, and any searches you have set up for keywords or hashtags.
On Facebook, you can see comments on your Facebook Page posts and ads, visitor posts, private messages, and reviews.
And for Instagram business profiles, you can see comments on your posts and ads as well.
It’s a single inbox where you can see all of these conversations happening. It’s a huge time saver. In our case, our customer support team and social media manager, Bonnie, spend a lot of time in Reply every day, and we know that when someone reaches out, they would be getting an answer from us.
Similar tools: Hootsuite, Mention, Sprout Social
- Native Analytics
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention native analytics for each social platform, which is completely free.
(If you prefer something more advanced, we would love for you to try Buffer Analyze, our social media analytics and reporting tool!)
Let’s quickly go over the top three, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Facebooks Analytics
Facebook Analytics
Under the Insights tab on your Facebook Page, there is just so much information. Everything you ever wanted to know about your engagement, number of likes and followers, how your posts are doing, and, of course, Facebook’s Pages to Watch which lets you compare the performance of your Page and posts with similar Pages on Facebook.
You also get insights for Facebook Groups so if you run a Group definitely check those out.
Instagram Analytics
Instagram Analytics
With Instagram Insights, you can see activity around how frequently users interact with your posts, see how your posts are performing over time, and find out where your audience is from as well as their age range, gender, and when they are online.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics
Starting with Twitter, their analytics can reveal a lot of valuable data about your audience, how well you’re engaging your following, and what your top-performing content is.
All you have to do is go to analytics.twitter.com to log in and start learning more about your audience and their interests.
- Todoist
Social Media Tools: Todoist
Website: https://todoist.com/
Pricing: Free (plans start at $3/month)
Details:
The last tool we want to mention today is related to your productivity as someone managing social media: Todoist.
Specifically, within Todoist, I have created a free Social Media Calendar by Buffer that you can use to make sure that your brand and business are posting to important social accounts on a regular basis.
This type of calendar is important because, by consistently posting great content, you’ll be able to grow your audience, increase engagement, and build a community online.
This sample social media calendar is based on real content and scheduling times from Buffer’s own social media accounts.
Similar tools: Wunderlist, Trello, Any.Do
Conclusion
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