Through my job as a publicity assistant and content creator in a local PR company, it’s safe to say I’ve learnt a thing or two about creating social media content for clients. That being said before I started my job, I only had experience with one or two of these tools and have learnt on the job a lot of the way. However, getting used to using these tools now and practising with them is a great way to boost your CV and stand out to potential employers. So here’s my run down of 5 great content creation tools you should be using.
Canva
I feel like everybody and their granny talks about Canva now but surprisingly often when I bring it up I’m met by the response “What’s that?”. Canva is your best friend for creating infographics and stunning digital ads. The great part about it is, Canva is extremely user friendly and easy to get to grips with. You can type in the sort of design you are looking for, be it a Facebook banner, Instagram tile or anything you might ever need to create and it will bring up templates for you. The templates are then completely customisable with your own choice of pictures, fonts and colours. This makes it great if you are working for a brand that already has a clear brand image, as you can create graphics that will perfectly fit in with this by using the company colours and fonts.
Lumen5
Lumen is one of my favourite content tools, as it’s a great way to turn a blog post into a piece of video content that can be shared on social media. You can simple paste the body of text into the control panel and it creates a video for you. It does take a bit of playing around with sometimes to fix the video and the background images it chooses for you, but overall you can create a video in under 30 mins that will promote a blog post and also get you good engagement on your social channels.
Hootsuite
Once you’ve created your content you are going to need a way to get it out there and a great way to do this is through social media scheduling. If you work off a content calendar Hootsuite will be your best friend as you get all your social media posts sorted in one go. You can add all your or your client’s social platforms to your account and schedule the same piece of content to go out across all your channels so you don’t have to do it manually. Top Tip: It’s best not to post on the hour or half an hour, as a lot of people do this and it’s means a lot of content going out at the same time on that platform so less chance of your posts being seen. Choose more random times such as 13:17 or 15:38.
DaysofTheYear.Com
Using Days of The Year is a great way to keep your content fresh and relevant to your audience. You’’ find every single day of the year has a specific ‘day’ such as ‘National Video Game’ or ‘National Hug Your Friend Day’. These days’ range from the ordinary and popular to the most random and obscure things. Posts like this often have great share value as well as people can tag their friends. It also helps if you are in a rut and aren’t sure what to post about, these posts can be fun and light hearted and you can include a call to action for people to get involved themselves. On the day I’m writing this it happens to be ‘World Card Making Day’ as well as ‘World Teachers Day’ there’s endless content possibilities that could be created around these themes.
Pexels/Pixabay
If you create blog or written content, free stock photo websites can be great as you can download royalty free photos to accompany your post. Visual and video content generally does better and is more catching on social media so if you want to promote your blog post or simply talk about something it can be great to add a picture to try and increase your engagement.
Hannah Chambers is a final year BSc in Communication Management & Public Relations student at Ulster University. She can be found on: Twitter – https://twitter.com/HannahC_PR and LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahchambers192/