5 Mobile Apps to Help You Make Amazing Visual Content on the Go!

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A few years back, creating great visual content without expensive software on a desktop computer & a heap of design skills was virtually impossible. Not so now! There is a huge range of apps available to help you produce creative images, photos & gifs all on your smart phone and for less than the cost of coffee and cake at your favourite cafe. But which ones are worth the download?

With the help of the magnificent Mr. Chan (Clikk’s Creative Director) we’ve put together 5 inexpensive, user-friendly apps that will have you creating content like a pro in a matter of minutes!

Wordswag

This is my Number One go to app for quickly adding text to images on the fly.  It’s a great little app I’ve been using for a couple of years now and is available for both iOS and android. For a $7.99 investment, this app gives you the ability to quickly & easily add text to images directly on your phone using your own custom text or a selection of pre-prepared quotes for super-quick content.

You can choose from images in your phone’s camera roll, or Wordswag gives you the option to select from a wide range of free searchable backgrounds & stock photos from Pixabay.  Once you have selected your image you simply enter your chosen text and edit your font style, colour and position through the super simple interface.

Once you have finished your masterpiece, you can choose to save it to your camera roll, send it in a text or email or share it directly to the major social media channels as Wordswag integrates seamlessly with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr.

Wordswag Sample images

A Beautiful Mess

Another fun image editing app, A Beautiful Mess app is the creation of Elsie & Emma from the lifestyle blog A Beautiful Mess.  This app gives you the ability to customise your photos with fonts, doodles and filters.  It also does a great job of producing photo collages, with heaps of different configurations available.

The app is easy to use and gives fun results that can be created quickly & easily on your phone or tablet, then posted directly to your Instagram, Facebook or Twitter Accounts.

The base app can be downloaded from the app store or Google Play for $1.49, though if you want to unlock all the additional font, doodle and border bundles, you will be paying extra in-app.

A Beautiful Mess Samples

Animoto

Animoto is a super powerful tool for creating high quality videos for your business (or anything else you can think of!) by adding the images & video on your phone to one of Animoto’s premade templates.

Simply choose your style from one of 70 different templates, select your music from one of 5000 different tracks, add captions and you have a professional video that you can share on your social media channels or your website.

Below are just a few of the styles available that you can customise for your business, though you will find more on the Animoto YouTube Channel.

Pricing is based on a subscription model with packages starting at $8 a month, though I would suggest a business account at $22 per month as this allows you to add your company branding, includes extra premium video styles and a much larger selection of music to accompany your video.  This app is available for both iPhone & android so it will suit just about everyone.

Live Studio

Mr Chan demo live studio

GIFs are absolutely everywhere right now, and for the iOS users among us (yep we’re Apple peeps here) creating GIFs on your phone just got a really simple.  Live Studio lets you take Live Photos direct from your camera roll and instantly convert them to GIF format, like the one shown here of Mr. Chan, but will also convert Live Photos to video, if you need a format other than GIF.

Not only that, but it can work in reverse!  Found a GIF that you would like to keep as a Live Photo?  No problem!  Live Studio can convert video, burst images or GIFs back to Live Photos.

This app is only $0.99 from the App Store, so there is no barrier to making your own simple GIF images on your iPhone or iPad.

Adobe Spark

This last one is a little more feature packed, as you would expect from Adobe, but if you’re an iOS user, it could become your next best friend when it comes to creating content for your business online.

Adobe Spark is a super powerful suite of apps that allow you to create high-quality graphics, animated videos & web image sliders via use of its three different iOS apps: Spark Video, Spark Post & Spark Page.

Spark Video allows you to create professional videos using your own imagery, voice overs and music based on a range of different templates suitable for businesses in a wide range of industries.  This is Adobe’s answer to creating quick, low-cost video content on your iPhone or iPad.

Spark Post provides an alternative to apps like Wordswag and A Beautiful Mess, allowing you to add Adobe’s take on text & design filters to your images quickly & easily for use on your social media channels.

Spark Page provides image slider functionality for use on social media or email content.  Spark Page gives you a range of template layouts so that you can arrange and present your images, content & video in a responsive, slideshow style layout and then add them to your pages and newsletters.

All three apps are a fairly quick learning curve and don’t require any extensive design experience like Adobe’s signature Creative Cloud professional design software.

The best thing about all three apps: they are free to download from the App Store (though there are a few in-app purchases for a whopping $1.99.)

You can check out some samples from all three apps at the Adobe Spark Gallery

So now that you have the tools, get out there and create some amazing content!

 

 

4 Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Facebook Page

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Most people who have been running a Facebook Business page over the last few years will have noticed the gradual decline of organic reach on Facebook.

For those new to running a Facebook business page, organic reach refers to the number of people you can reach in the Facebook newsfeed for free by posting to your page.  This number dropped from 12% reach in October 2013 to 6% in February 2014 according to an often-quoted research paper produced by Ogilvy & Mathers, and is now less than 2% for many businesses as of June 2016.

So what has caused this massive crash?  Well, there are three main reasons, though other factors also come into play.

Firstly, Facebook has grown into a bit of a monster!  There are now over 1.65 billion ACTIVE monthly users on the platform as of Q1 2016 and 50 million Facebook Business Pages as of December 2015.  Thats a huge number of people & businesses posting an enormous amount of content ,daily.  As a result, competition in the News Feed is getting fierce.

The second reason is the facebook algorithm.  Of the average 1,500 posts a user could see when logging into Facebook, the algorithm presents users with the top 300 posts ranked in order of importance – still a huge number of posts!

The third, but by no means the least, is that Facebook is a public company that aims to pay dividends to its shareholders. Like every business, it aims to make a profit, with estimated revenue from Facebook Ads expected to be in the realm of $22.37 billion this year according to eMarketer

So is Facebook now only open to those willing to Pay to Play or is it still possible to gain some benefit from posting organically on the social media giant?

According to Facebook’s Brian Boland, head of the Ads Product Marketing team at Facebook:

Organic content still has value on Facebook, and Pages that publish great content — content that teaches people something, entertains them, makes them think, or in some other way adds value to their lives — can still reach people in News Feed. However, anticipating organic reach can be unpredictable, and having a piece of content “go viral” rarely corresponds to a business’s core goals. Your business will see much greater value if you use Facebook to achieve specific business objectives, like driving in-store sales or boosting app downloads.

Like TV, search, newspapers, radio and virtually every other marketing platform, Facebook is far more effective when businesses use paid media to help meet their goals. Your business won’t always appear on the first page of a search result unless you’re paying to be part of that space. Similarly, paid media on Facebook allows businesses to reach broader audiences more predictably, and with much greater accuracy than organic content.

Simply transalated?  If you want guaranteed reach, you need to invest some money in paid ads, but really exceptional organic content may still be rewarded with increased organic reach.

So how does a small business and get the most benefit from posting organic content?  Here’s what we suggest:

1 – Post Exceptional Content

Rather than post content of less than exceptional quality just for the sake of posting something on your page, post less often, but make sure that every post you create adds value to your fans in some way.  Whether it’s an educational video, a thought provoking blog post or even just a funny gif, make sure that it is of the highest quality.

2 – Use Audience Insights & Organic Post Targeting

Facebooks Audience Insights can be found on your business page and can provide you with a wealth of information about your fans: when they are most often online, where they are from geographically, their age & gender.  It can also give you insights into what type of posts your fans engaged with most, so that you can tailor future posts around their preferences & choose the hours your fans are most online to schedule your posts.

Using organic post targeting can further increase your chances of penetrating the news feed, by targeting people who are specifically interested in the topic of your post, or selecting segments within your fans who are most likely to engage with the post baseed on location, gender, age or other factors.

3 – Engage With Your Audience

Make sure you are present on your page! Social media is not a set it & forget it type platform – it’s social and that means interacting with your fans.  Always respond to comments & reviews on your page both positive or negative. Thank people who give you positive reviews.  Ask people who give you bad reviews what you can do to fix the problem.  Search for people who mention your brand or products without tagging and comment or tag them in return.

Encourage engagement from your fans by being engaged yourself.

4 – Consider Adding Paid Facebook Ads Into Your Mix

Like it or not, Paid Ads on Facebook are becoming a necessity, but it doesn’t have to mean a massive injection of cash into your ad spend.  A small investment into promoting key content can give a post the little extra hand it needs to make its way into the newsfeed, and potentially stimulate further organic engagement.

Organic is still an important component of your inbound marketing mix, what’s the point of having followers if you don’t reward them with great content?