Visual content tools for Social Media Marketing
The workhorse tools of any good social media marketer, having the ability to create content on a range of different platforms to keep social media accounts interesting, visually appealing and most importantly “on brand”
You may outsource your design to an external graphic designer or to your in-house team, you may even need to produce content yourself. Whatever you do all good social media marketers need an array of tools to make posts interesting.
What better place to start than the nominees for the Social Media Marketing Awards:
In no order here are the tools that Social Media Marketers nominated as the visual content tools they cannot do without:
Canva
Canva is a graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It has a drag-and-drop format. You can access a variety of pre-made templates that can be customised, upload your own visual assets or choose from the free or paid library available.
Animoto
Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows.
Vidbuild
Create videos that look professional using an archive of footage from some of the largest picture libraries, add text and download in several formats. A great tool if you are not comfortable editing yourself.
Design Wizard
Design wizard is another graphic design tool that is very easy to use, yet produces some fantastic results.
Giphy Cam
Create GIFs anytime using GIPHY Cam, this is an app you can download and use on your own phone or device to quickly greate gifs.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a free online and mobile graphic design app. Easily create beautiful images, videos, and its slightly different from other graphic design apps that you can create web pages as well.
Snapseed
Snapseed is a photo-editing application owned by Google, users can edit pictures using swiping gestures to select different effects and enhancements. Alternatively, users can opt for an "automatic" adjustment of colour and contrast.
Pixlr
Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools for photo editing, the tools are beginner friendly with some that would even help a professional photographer save some time.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services from Adobe that gives subscribers access to a collection of software used for design, photography, video and web along with a set of mobile applications. These tools are the choice of many professionals so don't expect to just pick up and play, these require deep learning, but the results can be impressive.
Wordswag
Word Swag magically turns your words into beautiful photo text designs! Easy to use a template based app, which adds great typography onto your images.
PicMonkey
PicMonkey is an online photo editing and design service. It can be accessed from a web browser, or through the PicMonkey mobile app. It offers a best of both worlds, giving you easy to use picture editing tools with the added benefit of graphic design capability.
Over
App-based graphic design tool that allows you to use templates to create anything from social media images to birthday cards. The ability to do this on the move with the mobile is appealing and easy to use.
befunky
Photo Editing & Graphic Design Made for Everyone, Produce stunning photographs and captivating designs with fun, easy-to-use editing tools. They also have a tutorials section to help you get to grips with the tools.
Biteable
Biteable allows everyone to be able to create animated videos, a big archive of ready-made animations and video for you to simply write in text. you can drag and drop frames to create your video.
Powtoon
Cloud-based software for creating animated presentations and animated explainer videos. Drag and drop to set up your scene with templated characters and props. A great tool for first steps into animation will though take some time to get familiar with how to use.
Pablo (Buffer)
With Pablo, you can create beautiful images easily to make your posts pop, so they say at Buffer, this template based tool has pre set image sizes ready for social networks, pick a style or image and simply add text to flow straight into your buffer feed.
Easel.ly
Easel.ly is a simple infographic maker that lets you visualize any kind of information. For the times when only an infographic will do to illustrate content.
Meme Buddy
Meme Buddy is a simple experiment by Mike Bodge that lets you create memes using your voice. Open the Google Assistant on your phone and say "Talk to Meme Buddy." Then ask Meme Buddy to find a photo and give it a caption. Or, ask it to make a random one for you.
GIFMaker
GIF maker allows you to instantly create your own animated GIFs by combining separated image files as frames. You can also upload animated GIF or WebP images, they will be split and delay times preserved. That way GIF maker can also be used to edit, shorten or merge together
Snappa.io
Graphic design tool aimed at those without the Adobe skill set, you can create online graphics in a snap. Whip up graphics for social media, ads, blogs, and more without Photoshop or graphic designers
Typorama
Typorama lets you create amazing visuals by "automagically" transforming your text and photos into beautiful typographic designs. No design skills needed!
Placeit
A slightly different tool, this one lets you create product mock-ups, and drop them into images and videos, great for selling merchandise and products to help customers visualise the finished product.
All of these tools are shortlisted for Visual Content tool of the year at the Social Media Marketing Awards, you can click here to vote for them.
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