4 Must-Have Tools to Help You Create Amazing Social Media Content

As a marketer, you generally have a range of different goals that you’re concurrently working towards at any given time. Those could include boosting brand awareness, generating more leads, increasing conversions, etc.

In a social media context, in order to achieve the best results, you need great content. The digital space is highly competitive, and in order to grab and hold attention, you need to consistently create new and engaging material, likely in a variety of formats.

And the importance of such efforts can’t be overstated. These days, some 54% of social browsers use social platforms to research brands and products.

With great social media content, you can gain attention, build trust, and increase brand awareness among your ideal audience – and ultimately, with the right strategy and the right content, those efforts will help you boost sales and grow your business.

It’s your content that’s the first step, and in order to create great content for social media, consistently, you need the right tools.

Here are four must-have tools that will help in your social content efforts.

1. Animoto.com

Video is the most shared, and most engaging content type, on average, across all social media platforms. These days, most platforms incorporate autoplay video, which can help to grab attention as people scroll through their feeds, while it’s much easier, in general, for consumers to take in a short video summary, as opposed to a written blog post.

As such, you need to be considering if and how you can utilize video in your approach – but creating marketing videos can seem daunting at first.

With Animoto, however, you can start creating professional videos for your social media campaigns, even if you don’t have a big budget or design skills.

First of all, Animoto provides templates for different needs. Some of the templates available on Animoto include:

• Behind the scenes videos
• Explainer videos
• Product and service promotion
• Testimonials
• Tutorials

After finding the template you want to customize, Animoto has a simple editor that even a first-time user won’t have problems using. It’s incredibly easy to upload videos, images, and music to create unique videos.

And even if you don’t have video clips and imagery to use, Animoto has a library of over a million videos, images and licensed music that you can use to create a unique video.

When you’re done creating your video, Animoto enables you to share directly to your social media pages. And with options to share on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and 10 other channels, you won’t even have to leave Animoto to share your video.

Alternatively, if you’re creating a video for a future campaign, you can download your video content in 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p resolutions.

 

2. Canva.com

You’ve no doubt heard that an image is worth a thousand words. Well, there’s that – and there’s also the fact that images perform better than text-only updates on most major social networks.

A Buffer study found that tweets with images, for example, see 150% more retweets, and 89% more favourites, than those without.

Tweets with images beat tweets without images on every engagement metric, and the same is true for pretty much and social network.

So you need visuals – and fortunately, there are now numerous, easy-to-use tools to help in your image creation process.

Canva is one of the best in the market, and with over 8,000 templates for social media posts, you’re bound to find templates for any occasion.

Canva’s templates are grouped under different social media channels, enabling you to easily create images which meet the size requirements of each social media platform. You also have the option to upload your own images to edit them.

Editing your images is easy, even for a non-designer, as Canva’s drag-and-drop editor enables you to customize images and add text. And the best part is that you have access to all these features with a basic, free account

Canva also enables you to add up to 20 teams to a profile, with each team comprising up to 3,000 members. You can also assign roles to each team member.

3. 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.

4. Feedly.com

As a social media marketer, you also need to stay up to date with industry news – while at the same time, it’s worth keeping tabs on what your competitors are publishing and learning from their approach.

You can, of course, just look up the individual websites for each, every day, but Feedly can save you a heap of time by delivering a stream of the latest updates in one single feed.

You can create feeds based on your preferred topics, and after that, you can add sources to your feeds. Using the content from your sources, Feedly will make suggestions of similar sites.

Consequently, content discovery becomes easier for a particular topic. In addition, Feedly allows you to save articles to Pocket and Evernote.

And apart from catching up with industry trends and competitors, Feedly is useful for social media content curation.

To make content curation easier, you can connect your feeds to Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, or IFTTT. This makes it easy to add relevant content to your social update queue. If you work with a team, Feedly also enables you to share your lists with team members.

Conclusion

To achieve your social media campaign targets, you need to create and share amazing content with your audience. This is the best way to build trust, and ultimately, to drive your audience towards taking further action.

The tools in this list all help with different aspects of the content creation process. Find the right ones for you and start creating social media content that gets results.