Social Media plays an integral role in today’s public relations; the Sunny Bird PR team make it our business to be social media gurus so we can get the best results for our clients (and us!) from the wide array of social platforms.
Engagement is the key to building and maintaining a social media following, and visuals can play a crucial role in enhancing and growing engagement. In fact, a recent study found that posts with images have a 37% higher engagement rate.
You don’t need to be a graphic artist to come up with engaging images for your social media posts – we’ve tried and tested a whole host of image making tools and we’ve included some of our favourites here.
Another important element of engagement is measuring and monitoring results so you can analyse your posts and learn how to optimise them effectively. Facebook and Twitter have inbuilt analytics which are very user friendly but what about Instagram? How can you measure that? We’ve tried a few monitoring tools for Instagram and we’ve included Rian’s favourite below (a.ka. Instaqueen).
We hope the tools suggested help you get the most from your social media platforms, if you would like additional support contact the team on 01202 293095 or hello@sunnybirdpr.com.
Lucy’s Favourites
A Beautiful Mess
This is my favourite app to create any image to ensure its social-media- ready! If that be overlaying text, creating a frame or even have three images within one frame. Creating quotes or images that include text is no challenge for A Beautiful Mess. Choosing from many colours, text fonts, shapes and decorations gives you the endless opportunity to create beautiful image.
Repost It!
I’m sure there’s been a time when you have found a picture on someone else’s Instagram that you love and want to share – if that be a quote, an image of a stunning view from the Maldives or a picture of a cute cat!
But Repost It! has made it quick and easy for you to repost an image from someone’s feed and credit the image back to that person who took the original image. The image displays a bar at the bottom of the image clearly stating that you have reposted that picture and it states the name of the account you took it from, therefore crediting that person.
Rian’s Favourites
Planoly
One of the best visual planners for instagram. It is the perfect app for those who love to create a consistent instagram theme as it allows you to drag and drop your images so that you can arrange them all before posting them live to instagram. Planoly also enables you to analyse the likes and comments that your instagram channel is getting and will let you see which posts are getting the most engagement.
Pictapgo
A simple, easy to use, photo editing app that enables you to layer photo filters on top of each other to create the perfect photograph. The app remembers your most-used filters and saves them into a ‘photo recipe’ so that you can access it easily each time and keep you photo finish consistent.
Lizzie’s Favourites
Over
Make your images more interesting by adding text to them with Over. This iOS and Android app lets you pick any image that you have saved on your device and add text to it.
Customise the font, colour, and text size to get the best results.
Ease.ly
Infographics are all the rage right now, and you can get in on the action with Easel.ly. The idea of creating infographics might seem daunting, but you can use templates with this tool. You can go with a standard template and customise it to your liking or you can build your infographic from the ground up. Regardless of which option you choose, you'll have objects, icons, and shapes at your disposal. Just drag and drop them into the tool and watch your infographic grow right before your eyes.
