Spending hours learning how to implement the smallest improvements on your social media performance is my biggest source of frustration. Hands down the biggest for me.
You probably understand how important it is to give your visitors a great reader experience.
And to do that, you need to optimize many areas of your social media as well as your blog.
I love to read, learn, and try new things. Like new apps for my smartphone and iPad. Often, I’ll see something that I want to try, save, and connect with other new apps I am using.
Ideas that come from previously unconnected planes of thought.
There are many apps for workers looking to improve social media performance that can be a big help in this regard. And less wasted time? Yes, very good for that also.
Related: 12 Extraordinary Graphic Design Tools You Should be Using
Ponder for a moment … the iPad, Cloud computing, and Apps. A few years ago, they barely existed. Now they’re an integral part of our lives. That swift journey from nonexistent to indispensable seems to happen a lot these days.
But it gives us unlimited access to improve our learning and utility for things like through apps and idea connection.
This makes you think: What social media apps were you not using two years ago that today you can’t imagine living without today?
Here are my favorite of these very essential apps. They will help you either create content faster or create content that wasn’t possible before.
Snov.io is the perfect all-in-one cold outreach automation platform you never realized you needed. With it, organizing your cold email campaign is streamlined to the max.
Snov.io Email Finder will find prospects’ emails on any website or a professional network in seconds – all you have to do is simply add them to the list. An inbuilt email verifier tool checks the emails for validity to boost the delivery rate.
Once your list is ready, it takes only a few minutes to create your first automated email campaign with triggered follow-ups. Snov.io’s Cold Email Sender with a drag-and-drop campaign builder lets you add triggers, delays, goals, and create personalized emails right in the campaign builder. You can watch the campaign statistics in real time: open, click, and reply rates are presented as nice visuals with percentages.
And for email marketers who want to pay special attention to specific clients and know exactly which ones are interested, Snov.io offers an Email Tracker – a forever free browser extension that doesn’t add any signatures, links or logos in the email body, and integrates seamlessly into your Gmail to help you monitor email opens and link clicks. A reminder feature has just been released with the latest update.
Buffer has been one of the first social media marketing tools we have been using on a regular basis and it kind of stuck with us.
Buffer simply is awesome for scheduling tweets. And it has a free version that allows you to schedule up to ten tweets – that will get you far especially when you are just starting out on Twitter.
Buffer can also schedule posts for Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I rarely use this function, however.
Either there are better ways for me to schedule posts for these networks, or I do not use a scheduling tool for them at all.
But for scheduling on Twitter, Buffer is simply the best there is. Also, take a look at the analytics part of Buffer which is great if you want to test headlines or tweet images.
Another one of those simple design tools is Pablo.
This one is made by the same people behind Buffer. Pablo is extremely simple to use but focuses especially on social media images.
However, there’s no reason why you can’t use these in your blog posts as well.
Having images optimized for being shared on social media sites will increase the re-shares and, consequently, the traffic you’ll get.
On the right side menu, you have three sizes of images to choose from. For a blog post, you’ll probably want the “wide” picture or the square one:
Pick the size that corresponds with the image size used within your most important social network. This will change the size of the canvas in the middle.
Next, you’ll want to pick a background from the left side menu:
Finally, you can click the default text and type whatever you’d like.
Social media performance … Canva
Canva is my go-to tool when it comes to creating images for my online marketing. I am a design-moron. I admit it. When I started creating images for Pinterest, Facebook, and co. the first attempts simply were ugly.
And then I discovered Canva and the design templates they provide for free. And I learned a lot from them: About combining different color schemes, typefaces, and images.
Canva sets you up with the right dimensions for many different purposes like Pinterest posts, Facebook adds or Twitter headers.
They provide a couple of templates, some free, some for a fee. You can use a ton of elements in your design process and play around with filters.
The free account of Canva gets you far, if you need more templates or elements for your designs, you can pay for each element as you need them.
If you need more features, the Canva for work option may be for you.
If you need something to get started with designing graphics, you must try Canva’s design school, also free.
ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter is easily the best tool I know for managing your Twitter following. You can find accounts to follow; they help you find accounts you should unfollow.
ManageFlitter is the best tool to use in the follow-unfollow routine and help you grow a targeted audience.
One way to make your content a little bit more exciting is by including gifs.
Giphy is a search engine specifically for gifs (like Google is for
web pages). You can type in any broad term and get many gifs as a result.
If you like one and would like to include it in your post, scroll down to the “share” section, and copy and paste the embed code into your post’s HTML tab:
Don’t go crazy with gifs, but one or two now and then can make your audience smile and enjoy the content a bit more.
Here’s another page speed tool, but it’s a bit simpler than most.
It should be used as a starting point, and then you can dig in further with other tools if need be.
Page speed is one of the confirmed ranking factors in Google. They care a lot about user experience, which is why they made this tool in the first place.
Again, enter your URL into the tool. It could be your homepage or a post:
It will quickly give you an overall score, not just for desktop users but for mobile users as well.
If you get 80 and above, you’re doing okay.
It will show the biggest issues (red – bad!; orange – not as bad) that you should address to improve your page loading speed.
More importantly, it also has a “show how to fix” link under each issue, so you get a little guidance to walk you through the solution.
This tool was designed specifically for content marketers. It has a modern design, and it’s pretty intuitive to use.
There are three main functions, which are clearly laid out at the top of each project.
By scanning a post, the tool will compile a list of relevant contacts you could promote it to.
Then, it will find just about anyone’s email address.
The bottom line
Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying. We’ve long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, now we can actually track it. Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real time.
Making your blog the best it can be takes a ton of work, but tools can help you accomplish it faster and easier.
I recommend you start by trying a handful of these tools at a time until you find the ones you have the most success with.
I realize that there are many other great tools out there. Share them in a comment below if I forgot the one that you love.
Need some help in building better customer insights from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer base?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job of growing customer insights and pay for results.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new insights that you have learned.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
When it comes to creativity in design with your social media marketing, I’ve found that there are many areas for improving your designs with these visual content tools. These include automation, communicating, engaging, and more.
When I look for helpful design tools, I often grab ones that make a difference in one or more of these areas.
Each of these social media visual content tools I’ve highlighted below fit into one of these categories. Here’s hoping that a bit of help in each area can unlock some creativity for you.
This author regularly discusses marketing tools, John Jantsch.
The design isn’t something that every marketer feels comfortable doing, but the reality is every one of us will need to design something at some point in our careers. Whether it’s a website, some sales collateral, or an ebook, there will be some design expertise required to finish the project.
The reason why we often get bogged down in it all is that often, we don’t know how to use the tools at our disposal to get high-quality designs. But here’s a little secret, marketers: You don’t need Photoshop to create great designs. Below are design tools even the most design-phobic marketers can use to create gorgeous visual content.
InstaQuote
When I’m on the go or especially at conferences, I use InstaQuote to easily create quotes to share with my Instagram and Twitter followers.
Instead of buying tons of image packs, I use Sunsplash’s free subscription service. It sends you ten new images every day.
All are high quality, and they’re released under CC0 meaning you can use them however you want, no copyrights. (editor’s note: currently it’s ten images every ten days).
PhotoGrid is an app that is used to share to Instagram, but you can use to create graphics to share anywhere. This app allows you to import non-square shaped photos onto a square background, edit backgrounds, add borders, and add text overlays to images to create compelling calls-to-action and motivational quotes to your images for unique and fresh visual content. Available on iPhone and Android.
PowerPoint
This usually gets a laugh or an aha moment. I love this simple software that most of us are comfortable with to create all my own personalized and branded content. It’s easy to use, manipulate, and create your designs without needing fancy software experience or training.
This is a fantastic free plug-in for Google Chrome that allows you to get the HEX color code for any color from a webpage. Very handy when you see a color you like and want to use it in your designs.
Canva
Who doesn’t love a tool that completely simplifies the graphic design process? I have been a fan of Canva since it’s inception and next to Photoshop, this is my daily go-to tool. Now that they’ve taken it from online to the app, it’s the perfect all-around tool.
It is a great a la carte platform – you have free options for templates, icons, and backgrounds; you can pay $1 for some images and backgrounds, or you can upload your own.
They also make the design process a little easier with templates already sized for each of the social networks, as well as suggested layouts that you can purchase or use for inspiration.
Canva is your one-stop-shop for easily creating customizable designs. You can search for a library of images, layouts, backgrounds, or upload your photos to include in your designs.
Then all you have to do is drag and drop your images into place, resize them, and voilà! Your images come to life.
Over
Over is an app available for Android and iPhone and one of my original go-to apps. While I love Wordswag as well, Over keeps me coming back with features that give me far more flexibility over the design.
QuotesCover is a busy marketers dream! This online tools take the ease of Canva and marry it with the built-in templates and fonts of Over and Wordswag.
There are no design skills needed with QuotesCover. Simply add your text, choose your background and font and voila, you’re done!
The NounProject is your best source to find all the icons you could ever dream of needing for your next design. All you have to do is search for the icon, and a few suggestions will come up with icons that you may be interested in.
The majority of these icons are free, but there are some you need to attribute if you use it (don’t worry, they provide clear instructions for each icon).
Selfie Stick
Part of the power of digital photography is that it allows us to experiment and have fun with our surroundings. It’s not just about selfies either. You can completely change the perspective of your images with this simple, quirky accessory.
Quick
When I want to add text to an image (again on mobile) the fastest and easiest way to do that for me is Quick. It’s from the same people who created Over (formerly Overgram) and for iOS users integrates into the native editing function so you can access it right from the edit screen in your photos app. Available on iOS and Android.
This is where I keep my digital ideas. I use it on my smartphone, tablet, and laptop as well as with the Chrome Extension. No matter what device I’m on, I can easily locate what I need.
I like to create notes that have images, links, and sometimes just the title to build on while I’m thinking of my content.
Pictaculous
Pictaculous is a color palette generator and allows you to upload any image and get a matching color palette within seconds. If you have ever wondered what colors to use with a specific image, this will solve that problem.
I love Wordswag because I can create amazing graphics on the fly, from my phone! Recently, Wordswag updated their app to include a transparent background option. I love this upgrade because now I can use that transparent “text” on any photo.
ColorPicker
ColorPicker is a great tool to explore different colors that you may want to use in your design. Simply slide the arrows on the right bar up and down, and move the circle within the square from side to side to find the perfect color that you want to use. You can also save multiple colors at the bottom if you want to access them later.
ColorPicker provides the RGB and HEX colors so you can use the exact color while designing on other programs. It is a great tool to explore new colors and figure out exactly what you want to use in your designs.
It’s awesome because it’s easy to take a screenshot. You can take a screenshot of some parts of your screen or the whole screen.
I love the built-in editor! You can add arrows, add text, draw on your image, pixelate, and add a marker or highlight some parts of your screenshot without noob-looking output. It’s like a premium ”˜paint’ tool.
Skitch might be one of my favorite design tools ever. Using Skitch, you can easily take screenshots and then annotate them. In the example below,
took a screenshot of the Skitch website (meta, I know), added an arrow to CTA to download Skitch for Mac, added some text on top of the image, and added a box around the sign-up CTA.
This program is great for any marketer who may be providing feedback on someone’s work or taking screenshots of content that need annotations.
This is a favorite iPhone photo collage editor app! It’s awesome because…
It’s slick. I love the design, and they don’t put too many ads, unlike other apps.
Lots of awesome features are available. You can adjust the frame, the background, add text and inject some cute stamps (really cute ones!) on your photo.
Super easy to use! You can save it to your camera roll, other apps and you can easily share it via Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr.
At some point in every marketer’s life, there comes a time when they need to take a screenshot to be used in a real-life scenario.
That’s where PlaceIt comes in. PlaceIt allows you to upload your screenshots and videos to be automatically inserted into various screens. This program makes it infinitely easier to provide professional-looking screenshots in real situations.
HubSpot Image Editor
Now live today for all HubSpot customers is an image editor right within your HubSpot account. Crop your images to dimensions for Twitter, Facebook, or any size you want. Add text, stickers, or frames, and draw anything you want right over the picture.
Adjust the brightness, take out red-eye, or add filters. The image can then be inserted right into your blog, web page, email, or social posts. If you want to make other changes to the original file, it will still be available right within HubSpot.
We all need to mix it up with what fonts we use every once in a while. Well, did you know that Google offers hundreds of fonts that you can download for free?
You can even preview how the different fonts will look with whatever text you want. If you are putting a new headline on your website but want to see how it looks with your slogan, you can do that.
Or if you want to start experimenting with different fonts in your next design, you can download the font and immediately start using it.
GIFBrewery
You may have noticed that a cool thing you can do in your email marketing is to use animated GIFs to explain something or delight your subscribers. But many marketers don’t have the necessary software to create animated GIFs.
That’s where GIFBrewery comes in. It allows you to create GIFs from your screen recordings easily — and you can even crop the images, add commentary, or apply filters.
The bottom line
These are interesting tools, many of which we already know, of course. They are not rocket science and shouldn’t be. This list of little things simply reminds us of what we have forgotten.
Then it is up to us to put these lessons (or reminders) into daily use through persistence and practice. Remember … Your learning trumps all!
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
Those of you who have been reading my blogs for a while know I’m a huge advocate of using visual content to enhance my blog posts. In addition, to achieve enhanced graphical content, images can improve the performance of your articles. That’s because blogs with pictures receive 94% more views than posts without them.
According to a recent study from the Content Marketing Institute, 73% of marketers say their top priority is to create more engaging content.
And 55% of these content creators are prioritizing visual content.
If you haven’t been using images to enhance your content, you should consider starting with these tools.
That’s because Research shows people follow directions 323% better if the directions include both text and illustrations.
Here are my favorite tools for enhancing graphical content:
Canva
Canva has plenty of design tools for you to take advantage of. It is my most used tool for enhancing graphical content, by far.
Those of you who are a little bit more advanced will enjoy the graphic design features offered on this platform.
One of my favorite elements of the Canva platform is the versatility it offers. You can use it on the Internet as well as your iPhone or iPad.
They specialize in a photo editor, color palette, and font combinations. But their infographic building tools are just as good, if not better. You don’t need to have a design background to figure it out.
Unlike some of the other Canva tools, the infographic builder is free to use. All you have to do is create a Canva account before you get to work.
Their library has more than one million photos, illustrations, and graphics for you to choose from. If you’re not happy with their selection, you can also upload your images. What options that give you.
Once your image is uploaded, you can select a font from over 130 options. They make it easy for you to change the background and color scheme too.
After you’re satisfied with your custom layout, you can save these unique templates to your account. This makes it easy for you to repurpose the same layouts for your future infographics. It’s one of my favorite time-saving marketing tools.
If you’re not satisfied with all the elements in the free Canva library, they have premium elements available for purchase.
But unlike some of the more expensive infographic tools we’ve seen, the Canva premium purchases cost only $1 at most. It’s an extremely cost-effective way to enhance your infographics.
Creately is a platform specializing in creating unique diagrams for your business.
Although they aren’t the same, diagrams and infographics are very similar, which is why I thought it was worth adding this tool to my list.
I recommend Creately for businesses that have multiple designers producing content at the same time. It is very useful for collaborative work.
With this software, you can collaborate with up to 20 team members on the same project with real-time updates, edits, and changes to your design.
They have over 1,000 diagrams for you to choose from. Even if you don’t want to publish your diagrams, you can use the tool for in-house projects such as building a customer journey map.
Infogram
Infogram is another one of my favorites. The platform allows you to customize every element of each infographic you create fully.
In addition to infographics, you can also use this software to create:
reports
charts
maps
dashboards
Infogrames also helps you build images specially designed for your social media channels.
Their platform has more than one million icons and images, all royalty-free.
What I like most about Infogram is their editing tool. You can drag, drop, and move every element on the screen to fully customize your design.
If you have data that needs to be imported, it’s easy for you to upload spreadsheets from Excel, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. You can even use a cloud service or their API to set up live data integration.
They have interactive charts and maps at your disposal as well.
Ultimately, if you need a one-stop-shop for all your infographic needs, you can’t go wrong with Infogram.
Enhancing graphical content … iCharts
If you want something a little bit different from the tools on our list so far, iCharts fits the description.
This platform is cloud-based. It’s a visual analytics tool allowing you to organize complicated business information.
You can use iCharts to simplify data from extensive research studies. Since it’s a cloud-based platform, you can access it from wherever you are. Nothing needs to be installed on a device.
They have a feature letting you implement real-time data integration.
This option isn’t a typical infographic builder. But you can still export the charts and graphs to enhance your content with custom images.
Easel.ly
The importance of visual content.
If you want to create an infographic fast and efficiently, Easel.ly is a great place to start.
Above is a sampling of some of their top infographic templates. All you need to do is select the template you want and plugin your information.
They’ve got a template for everything. Some are designed to fit more text on the page, while others prioritize numbers from any research you may have conducted.
It’s free to use Easel.ly, but if you want premium templates, you can access over 500 of them for a fee. I recommend starting off with the free ones to see whether you’re happy with the platform before upgrading your membership.
Another cool feature of this platform is that they have community infographics built by others. You can plug your information into those as well.
The Easel.ly website features an easy to follow guide on how to create content on their platform. They also offer a live customer service chat option in case you have questions or run into any problems with the platform.
Visme.co
A list of visual design tools wouldn’t be complete without Visme.co. The platform specializes in all kinds of visual content, including infographics.
If you need to make an infographic that compares multiple variables, Visme.co has more than 20 charts and tables to choose from.
There are a couple of different ways you can input data into these visuals. Your first option is to type the numbers in manually. But if you have lots of information, you may prefer to import your data.
Another cool feature of these charts is the ability to connect with live data.
All of the templates have customizable fonts. You can change the color, size, and style of your text. Don’t you see a font you like? No problem. Visme.co lets you upload your fonts as well.
This software can help you take your infographics to the next level by making them more engaging. You can add video and audio files.
They also give you the option to embed polls, surveys, and maps. You can even add motion features, like popups, to your infographic.
Once your infographic is published, you can track how well it’s performing. The analytics tools tell you how many people saw your infographic, what type of device they used, their location, and level of engagement.
Skitch
Similar to our last tool, Skitch doesn’t necessarily build custom infographics either. But I use Skitch every day to help enhance my visual content.
Some of you may not be interested in building all your infographics from scratch. That’s OK.
If you’ve got a Mac, you can use Skitch to help you customize infographics from other sources. Here’s how you do it.
Once you download Skitch on your Apple device, which is free by the way, you can use it to take screenshots of infographics. Then you can markup specific sections with arrows, boxes, and text to make it your own.
Regular readers of my blog posts might recognize the pink arrows and annotations from Skitch. That’s what I use to mark up the images on my blog.
Gliffy
If you’re looking for another tool for creating custom diagrams, Gliffy is a great choice to consider.
The software is extremely easy to use. You won’t need any design skills to build your infographics.
Everything is done with an HTML5 editor, so you don’t need to download anything to your devices to use this tool.
If you want to get your project done as fast as possible without building your template, it’s no problem. Gliffy has ready-made templates. All you need to do is plug in your information.
Share your infographic with an embed link, or upload it directly to your social media profiles.
You can also use Gliffy to collaborate with your team members. Grant access to people whom you trust making edits to your design.
The bottom line
Images and visual elements are more powerful than words alone.
That’s why you need to be using infographics to enhance your content. But if you don’t want to search for infographics online, the tools I’ve outlined above allow you to create your own.
Don’t get me wrong: there are dozens of other infographic building tools available on the Internet. But from my experience, these are the best places for you to get started.
There’s something on this list for everyone—it just depends on what you’re looking for.
Some of these tools are free, while others charge a fee. Certain tools are better for charts and datasets, while others specialize in custom images and animations.
Refer to this guide for all your infographic creation needs.
What tools does your company use to enhance your visual content strategy?
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
