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Posted in Cool Tool, Infographics, Visual Marketing

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Biteable

Posted on by Editor

Biteable2.png

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week. This week’s cool tool recommendation is  Biteable – a desktop video creation tool which bills itself as “The World’s Simplest Video Maker.”

You can choose from a selection of pre-designed Templates or you can build your video from scratch yourself. Biteable hosts a large collection of video clips and images (many of these clips are included with the free plan) to add to your templates.  It also provides simple animation and claymation sequences to help you produce engaging explainer videos in just a few hours.

Biteable’s free plan allows you to create five projects per month and publish HD-quality video to YouTube and Facebook. The paid plan ($29/month) offers unlimited videos, 85,000 stock footage clips, and no watermark.

For more information on this and similar tools, check out this post 3 Low-Cost Video Tools for Social Media Marketers

 

 

Posted in Cool Tool, Infographics, Visual Marketing

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Ripl

Posted on by Editor

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week. This week’s cool tool recommendation is Ripl is a mobile app (iOS and Android) that lets you create short animated videos with professionally designed templates.

Ripl

Ripl was created to empower every small business owner to build an amazing brand. We made the Ripl app simple, quick and intuitive because business tools should do the work for you, not make more work for you.

You can choose from 200+ animated designs to easily create posts that fit your unique brand. You can add your photo(s) and text, choose a design template, customize the post for your business, and share in one tap to your social media accounts.

Ripl is integrated with the major social media platforms, so sharing your final video is easy. Once you’ve connected your social profiles to Ripl, you can post directly to Facebook, Facebook groups, YouTube, LinkedIn, and more. You can export your videos if you want to use them outside of your social media platforms.

Ripl is free to download and includes an assortment of free designs. Additionally, we offer Ripl Pro—a paid subscription that offers more designs, more music options, logo and brand customizations, scheduling features and more.

 

Posted in #HCSM

The Evolution of Social Media [Infographic]

Posted on by Editor

I’m a real geek when it comes to social media particularly when it comes to its evolution.  It still blows my mind how relatively recent a phenomenon social media is in our lives – relative that is to our age. If like me you are of the Gen X generation than you can easily remember a time when “social networking” was just something you did at parties. For later generations, social media is not so revolutionary.

Social media as an industry is continually evolving, with new networks, updates, and features constantly developing. This continually-changing landscape challenges us to keep up with trends and be ever-more creative in capturing the attention of audiences.

Here’s a cool infographic which charts the rise and rise of social media since the first social network launched in 2002. As you can see LinkedIn preceded Facebook by two years.   I can’t wait to see what the next decade holds for social media!

social-media-timeline-infographic

 

Infographic by Digitalinformationworld

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: ColorZilla

Posted on by Editor

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week. This week’s cool tool recommendation is ColorZilla.

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With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. Colorzilla allows you to get the color of any pixel on the page. You can also pick a color from a palette and get the CSS code for each color.

ColorZilla is available as both Firefox and Google Chrome extensions.

Posted in #HCSM

10 Keys To Find, Grow & Nurture Your Social Media Community

Posted on by Editor

What is a social media community and why should we care about creating one?

A  social media community is a group of people who share a strong common interest, form relationships and interact online. It’s important we draw a difference between a “social following” and a “social community” because sometimes people confuse the two.  Whereas a following is an audience that interacts with you, a community is an audience that interacts with you – but even more importantly with each other.

According to Meltwater, “If you don’t have a community, you don’t have anyone listening to you, and if there’s no one listening to you, it’s difficult to build brand awareness and deliver ROI.”

Want to learn more? My slide-deck from a recent talk on this topic is now available to view on SlideShare. 

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Stencil

Posted on by Editor

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I’ve decided to share some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week. This week’s cool tool recommendation is Stencil, a quick and easy tool to design visuals.

Right within the dashboard you have access to 860,000+ background images. You can add whatever text and/or graphics to these and directly share them on social media. They have 200,000+ graphics and icons. If you like sharing quotes on social media you can take advantage of their ready to add quotes feature. It will save you a lot of time. They also have a browser extension that makes it easy to instantly upload any image from a webpage, modify it and then share it.

You can save, download or share up to 10 images per month, for free. You can upgrade to 500 images per month and unlimited plans after that.

Try it and let me know what you think!