By Managing Director of Boost Social
Elisha Fiorentino
This is my GIFT to all of the humans out there managing their own social media for business. After trialing and testing the many, many apps designed to simplify the digital realm I’ve compiled a little cheat sheet to highlight the tools that have saved my sanity.
It’s too difficult to rank them in order of preference so here they are alphabetically listed, you be the judge…
Canva
Canva is like having a design wizard at the ready. This online platform is filled with preset templates, layouts and dimensions suited for any social media imagery you could possible dream to create. And what’s more, you can use it on a desktop or on your phone and switch between the two easily.
Facebook Ads Manager
Digital advertising has never been so easy. With the Facebook Ads Manager App you can whip up single image ads, create instant slideshows or even make carousels of images or videos. All you need is the content and Ads Manager will bring it to life. Once your Facebook ads are live you also have access to all of the performance data and conversion tracking ready for easy interpretation.
Facebook Pages Manager
Ever find yourself getting lost amidst the likes, comments, posts, shares, private messages, direct messages and hullabaloo of it all?! *Yes, hullabaloo.* I hear you!
Manage your pages all from one place with simple notifications and reminders across your Facebook page, Messenger and Instagram. You can respond to each interaction from within the app and even mark your activities as ‘done’. It is the most satisfying feeling! The beauty of this app is not only the simplicity but also the stats it displays and the page insights: page reach, engagement, likes etc,. You can also see the breakdown for each and every post making it easy to read your audience and what they do and don’t respond to.
Font Candy
Possibly the coolest of the font family. Font Candy is how you make your words and photos POP with their ready-made text and sticker styles just waiting for you to add your own words and flair.
Plann
The all-inclusive Instagram Management tool that is destined to rocks your socks! Plann helps you to manage the aesthetics of your page, the content of your posts as well as providing your analytics. See Instagram in a new light and save yourself time with the app that helps you to design, edit, analyse and schedule your posts with ease. Plann lets you pre-plan your grid to help you create that Insta-flow and has built-in image editing and text overlay tools too. You can also manage and store your hashtags to save flicking between your notes, previous posts and doing all of the copy and paste jazz!
iMovie
Just for fun or for the pros. You can make any kind of video in iMovie using your very own photos or videos with ease. Create your own from scratch or use one of the iMovie templates for clips that are funny, inspiring or just fun. See yourself as quite the star? You can even create your very own Hollywood style movie trailer with credit rolls and all. Aside from the standard crop, cut and slice tools iMovie enables you to add custom logos, special effects and enhancements and if you consider yourself a bit of a Morgan Freeman you can add your very own voice-overs. Sadly this one is exclusive to Apple devices.
Snapseed
The perfect photo editing app for any skill level, brought to you by Google. Whether you want to simply amp up the colours of your photos without turning everyone and everything Oompa-Loompa-orange or whether you wish to go full-pro with selective brushes and editing focal length-type distortions, this is the app for you! Snapseed needs little explanation as it simply does it all.
Unfold
Instastories made pretty and perfect. Have you ever wondered why some Instastories look so well put together? And how people have the time to do SO many stories that look SO good?… Unfold! Spice up your stories with borders, collages, text and colour on Instagram, Facebook and even Snapchat.
Word Swag
The name says it all really. If you want to spread inspiration in the form of stylish graphics but struggle to channel your inner Gandhi, Word Swag has you covered. These guys have funky fresh templates for days and they’re all there ready for you to tweak, edit and upload. Create yourself some branded content, generate targeted messages for your feed or just borrow some inspiration.
The following aren’t social media specific but I simply couldn’t leave them out as they are absolutely essential…
Asana
Asana is perhaps the most user friendly project and task manager. You can use the free account option quite easily with few restrictions and share your projects with other people who can edit and assign tasks too. Create alerts, set deadlines, assign tasks and conquer the world! I would be lost without this weapon of an app.
Google My Business
If you haven’t already listed your business on Google, get to it! You don’t need a website to be on Google – the listing is free and takes no time at all. Google My Business shows the world a snapshot of your business with photos, opening hours, location (if you have one) and reviews. Reviews, reviews, reviews! I can’t emphasise how important these are to help you generate credibility and trust within the digital realm. Not to mention the customer insights this app gives you access to: who’s talking about you, how many people are searching for you and where they are.
