Category: Cool Tool

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: StreamYard

Posted on by Editor

I’m preparing to go Live on LinkedIn this week to mark World Cancer Day on Feb 4. It is my first time going Live and I’m excited to do so. I’ll be using a third-party tool that I’ve used before for Facebook Live videos and it’s this week’s cool tool recommendation. 

StreamYard is a live streaming studio which runs on your laptop or desktop. You can use it to stream directly to Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and other platforms.  It’s  great for live interviews. You can have 6 people in the stream. Up to 10 people can enter the broadcast studio (with a paid version of the tool) so you can swap people in and out if you’re doing a dynamic talk show.

Other cool features include the ability to show viewer comments on screen, add a call to action, upload your logo, images, GIFs, and even videos.

Another great feature is the ability to pre-record your “live” stream 

This is a great option if you:

  • have a high stakes stream, and can’t afford mis-steps

  • are nervous about going live

  • can’t be online, or schedule a guest, at your normal show time.

StreamYard has both free and paid versions of the product. You can remove the StreamYard logo and upload your own. You can also add overlays and backgrounds, and use the restream integration. Full details are on the pricing page.

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Twchat

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 I’m recommending  Twitter chat manager – Twchat.

For those who may be unfamiliar with Twitter chats, they are a public chat, moderated by a host that happens live on Twitter. To filter all the conversations a specific hashtag is used. This hashtag allows you to follow the discussion and participate in it.  Most Twitter chats are recurring and focus on specific topics introduced by a moderator.  The chats usually last one hour and a transcript of tweets is often made available after the chat has ended.

Twitter chats move fast, which is why using a third-party tool is useful. Twchat allows you to create real-time chat rooms based on Twitter hashtags. TwChat monitors the hashtag and creates a simple, clean interface similar to a chatroom. You can see new messages, send your own, and have total control over the content you see.

Do you use this tool or a similar one? Do you find it helpful?

For more information on Twitter chats, read How Does A Health Care Twitter Chat Work? #Twitter101

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: VSCO

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 favorite tools with you at the start of each week.

This week I’m recommending – photo editing and media sharing tool, VSCO.

The free version gives users access to standard editing tools, such as white balance, exposure, contrast and a sampling of the available presets.

VSCO saves all the photos you edit into a “studio” for you, so you’ll never lose track of any images you want to post. Users can share their images and videos to the app’s feed and/or share them directly from VSCO to other social media.

Check out a review of the app’s other capabilities here. 

 

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Wordtune

Posted on by Editor

I love learning about new tools that can help make social media marketing more creative and effective, and I’d like to share them with you as well.

This week’s cool tool recommendation is Wordtune – an AI writing and editing tool designed to help you write better content. 

Let’s take a look at some of the great features of this tool

First up is the rewrite feature.

Wordtune suggests alternative ways of expressing what you want to say. You simply choose the suggested rewrite you feel best suits you.

It will also suggest enhancements to improve my writing, in the example below it suggests alternative words to “best” (from my sentence above).

So I’m going to go ahead and change “best” to “ideally”.

Wordtune suggests alternative ways of expressing what you want to say. You simply choose the suggested rewrite you feel ideally suits you.

If you need to paste text from another source into your writing piece, Wordtune automatically blends the text into your piece, making it sound (and read) natural.

Wordtune’s browser extension works across popular platforms such as g-mail, google docs, slack, and more.

Pricing

With the free account, you get 10 rewrites per day.

Upgrade to premium for unlimited rewrites and added features such as tone of voice, and shortening or expanding content.

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Listen Notes

Posted on by Editor

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Image Source: Listen Notes

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 Listen Notes  – a free podcast search engine.

With this tool, you can not only search the whole Internet’s podcasts, but you can also curate your own podcast playlists. (Note that the Listen Notes search engine is designed to help you find content such as people topics, not specific shows.)  If you’re researching a specific person or topic, the search tool can help you find related episodes from a range of podcasts. You can then add results that interest you to a playlist.  After you create a playlist in Listen Notes, you receive a playlist URL that you can copy and paste into your favorite podcast app so you can listen to that playlist. You can also use the URL to share the playlist.

More cool features include the clipping feature which lets you annotate, save, and share audio clips from podcast episodes.  You can add individual episodes to Listen Later playlists and bring these playlists to your podcast player apps via RSS.

The tool is totally free and if, as many people are these days, you are a podcast fan, you will want to add this tool to your toolkit.

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: VistaCreate

Posted on by Editor

I love learning about new tools to make social media marketing more creative and effective, so I am sharing some of my favourite tools with you at the start of each week.

This week I’m recommending VistaCreate– a graphic design tool to create eye-catching designs for social media posts.

Whether you are creating Instagram Stories, Facebook and Instagram ads, Twitter headers, YouTube thumbnails, VistaCreate gives you access to thousands of editable templates to create your design.

There is a host of other features too such as the ability to remove the background from any image, add speech bubbles, frames, text, and frames to photos. .

Pricing

The free plan allows you to download 5 designs per month. Paid plan starts at $7.99 per month which lets you download designs with no limit.

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: QuillBot

Posted on by Editor

This week’s cool tool recommendation is writing tool, QuillBot.

QuillBot’s paraphrasing tool helps you rewrite and enhance any sentence, paragraph, or article using state-of-the-art AI.

One of the tools I frequently use in my writing is an online Thesaurus, so I am loving Quillbot’s Thesaurus feature. Simply click on any word in your writing to find the right synonyms and help you find your perfect word.

QuillBot integrates directly into Google Docs and I also have it installed as a Chrome Extension.

Here’s a sample piece of text that I inputted to the tool and the suggested amendents. As you can see from the top bar in the screenshot there are some other features to improve your writing further – such as expanding or shortening your sentences, but these are part of the tool’s Premium feature. 

Would you be interested in trying this tool? Do you think it would be useful to you? Drop me a comment below to let me know your thoughts.

Here’s to our writing success!

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: Zoomerang

Posted on by Editor

This week’s cool tool recommendation is music video editor tool – Zoomerang. 

Zoomerang is a video creator designed for iPhone. No sign up or account required. Share it on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat or other platforms right from the app, or save your video to your camera roll to share later.

Cool features include lots of step by step tutorials and templates, transtions and effects to enhance your video creation.

The app is free with the option to upgrade to Pro account after a free trial period. 

 

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Monday Morning Cool Tool: Mailmunch

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This week’s cool tool recommendation is website lead generator tool – Mailmunch.

Looking to grow your email subscribers?

Mailmunch enables users to create a variety of pop-up email forms for their website, giving you a choice of popovers, covers, scroll boxes, top bars, and embedded forms.  Although they are often viewed as intrusive and annoying, website pop ups nonetheless have been been shown to work when it comes to increasing signups on websites.

Pricing

Start for free; upgrades from $13.99 per month

Posted in Cool Tool

Monday Morning Cool Tool: LastPass

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This week’s cool tool recommendation is password saver – LastPass.

With so many logins and passwords, both personal and client-based, I couldn’t manage without this super-useful site. It allows you to create and save unique passwords for multiple websites thus enabling secure easy login and password management.

Another useful feature is that it allows you to safely share passwords without sending  via text or email.

The free account is perfectly adequate but if you require more features, you can upgrade for a small fee.