Add these 40+ tools to your social media content creation process
my go-to tools to save time (and headaches) when creating social media content
Writing captions
- Hashtagcounter.com to check how close your caption is to Instagram’s 30 hashtag limit
- Lettercount.com, perfect for those of us who have a tendency to write long captions
- Bonus: this W3.org article features a great list of tips to help you write alt text for your images on websites, newsletters, social media.
Finding content topics
- Answer the public and Google Trends to find out what people are searching for to help find content topic ideas
- For even more topic ideas, I also like Hubspot’s Blog Title Generator, and of course the various AI options like Copy AI and ChatGPT.
Tools & sites to create graphics
- Hootsuite’s Social Media Image Sizes Cheatsheet to make sure you’re creating your graphics in the right format for each platform
- Canva offers plenty of design templates to customize. The paid version is at €109.99/year and gives access to a variety of stock illustrations, photos, and videos as well as other useful features but the free version is already a good place to start.
- For mode advanced photo-editing, I like Snapseed (mobile app) and Lightroom (mobile or desktop – requires Adobe account creation with many paid features)
- The mobile apps Over + Mojo feature fun, aesthetic Instagram story templates (some free, some paid)
Video editing apps
- CapCut, VN, and InShot are my 3 favorite video editing apps. Even their free versions feature tons of helpful functionalities, filters, and transition effects. They have desktop versions but I find them less practical than the mobile app versions. Bonus? There are plenty of helpful YouTube tutorials you can follow to learn how to do specific things in these apps. I’m particularly fond of Collin Michael and Kevin Stratvert‘s channels for CapCut tutorials.
Content scheduling platforms
- Meta Creator Studio (favored by the Instagram algorithm but we can’t program stories in it for the moment)
- Later (possibility to program Reels and Stories now / exists in free or paid version, on computer and mobile)
- Planoly (possibility to program the Reels too / exists in free or paid version, on computer and mobile)
- Tailwind (more for programming Pinterest content but also have a tool for Instagram in free or paid version)
- Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprinklr are other good tools but more for programming content for Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
My favorite combination is generally Creator Studio (for Instagram/Facebook) + Hootsuite (for LinkedIn).
Royalty-free stock photo/video sites
- Unsplash, Pixabay & Pexels are my 3 favorites
- Rawpixel
- Stockio (photos, videos, pictograms, vectors, typos…)
- Stocksnap
- Pxfuel
International events + world days
tutorials + inspiration
- The Reels Tutorials Instagram account (featuring music + clip duration tips)
- Curious Chitra’s Instagram account (transition tutorials + product Reels)
- The Design With Canva YouTube channel to find out about new and less obvious Canva features and how to use them
- And if you’re relatively new to Instagram, this guide to stories ads features a good tutorial on creating stories in general
A few more favorites:
- SEMRUSH‘s free social media tools including their social analytics and their social tracker (for benchmarking)
- Meta’s Ad Library lets you “search all the ads currently running across Meta technologies” by advertiser or keyword (a great tool for inspiration to make sure your ads stand out from your competitors)
- Flick.Social (paid tool) for Instagram hashtag analytics. They’re also expanding beyond Instagram and now also feature a content scheduler and overall account/post analytics.
- In addition to its YouTube analytics (free + paid versions), VidIQ also features an AI YouTube title generator. A helpful tool if you want to focus on building your YouTube presence.
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