Sara Nguyen

Helping Sassy Solopreneurs Reach more people and get more clients

Social media tools – My top tools for managing and creating social media content

What are some of the best social media apps and social media tools that help you to create content and manage your social media accounts with ease? In this video, I’m going to share my top tools. Stay tuned.

★Get your free social media checklist★: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/social-media-checklist

★Timestamps★:
Design tool: 1:33
Scheduling tools: 4:40
Stock images & video: 9:12
Video editing + Screen recording: 11:56
Project Management tools: 13:46

★Resources mentioned★
Free 30 day trial of Canva Pro (Paid Canva): http://canva.7eqqol.net/bJGgm
Facebook Creator Studio: http://business.facebook.com/creatorstudio
Later app: http://later.com/
Depositphotos: http://depositphotos.com/
Story Blocks: https://www.videoblocks.com/
Screenflow: https://www.telestream.net/screenflow/
Asana: http://asana.com/

Social media tools – My top tools for managing and creating social media content

Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I make tech and social media easier for awesome entrepreneurs like yourself. If you’re new to this channel, consider subscribing for all of the latest product reviews, social media marketing tips and training.

And at any time during this video, check out the description for key timestamps and links to all of the resources mentioned in this video. Social media can be a time suck and overwhelming.

Luckily there are lots of social media tools and apps that will help make your life a little bit easier. Here’s a breakdown of my favourite apps and the tools that I personally use and love.

When it comes to social media apps and tools that are available, it’s really easy to get overwhelmed by all of the options available on the market, but luckily for you today, I’m just going to walk you through the ones that I use all the time and these are ones that I can vouch for because I find them easy to use, economical and really just a great option that helps you create or manage your social media content.

So what am I going to cover? I’m going to cover different tools regarding to design, scheduling tools, some stock library so that you can create beautiful images, editing tools and organisational tools.

When it comes to design tools, a really important part of considering which tool to use is the ability to create graphics for your social media posts and all your other digital image needs. And you really want a tool that has a low learning curve.

So it’s not going to take you forever to learn how to do things because you need to get in there and produce content as quickly as possible. You also want a tool that is as cost-effective as possible.

And the one tool that I highly recommend and use all the time on a daily basis is Canva. I really, really love Canva. It’s a great tool that is free and it also has a paid option as well.

And I’m going to go into Canva and show you exactly how easy it is to use. So we’re inside Canva now and they’ve got pre-made template designs for so many different things.

There’s animated social media graphics, presentations, posters, and you can either access their templates from the home section or you can search for something that you need. So let’s say that I want to create Instagram posts, I’d just search for it in the toolbar here.

And then here it is, all of the different Instagram posts designs. And I pick something that I’m like, ‘Hmm, I could use this’. And the beauty of Canva is that once you choose a template, it’s really easy to change it.

So you can change the design to match your brand colours or to match your personal colour preferences. And all you have to do is select the element that you want to change.

So this red section, I’ve clicked on it and then I can change this background colour to something I like. Let’s say I don’t like the red, it’s not in line with my brand colour. I’m going to change it to pink.

And this is too much pink for me, so I’m going to change this pinky purpley colour to blue. So everything is literally clicking on it and then you get presented with the items, tool items to change it here. So this I selected on the text and now I can just change the text.

I can change images. So this is an image that they have. I can use Canva’s photo library, they’ve got stock images for me to use, which is great. So let’s say I want to replace that with images of this coffee one, so I can drag it and that changes the image out for me.

Alternatively, I can select upload and here are images that you see I’ve uploaded previously and I can upload my own images. So images that I’ve created or images that I’ve bought and then I can choose that as well.

So this is an image that I’ve already uploaded. I can choose that and just click on it and this adds it to my page, like that. So it’s really, really easy to grab a beautiful pre-made design, customise it to what you want.

And then once I’m ready to start using it, so let’s say I’m completely satisfied with this image I go to download on the top right-hand corner here, I select download, and then I can just choose to save it as whichever image file that I want.

Now Canva does have free and a paid option. If you check out the description, I have tutorials on how to use both of them. And I also have a link so that you can access a free trial of the paid version as well.

The next tool that I’m going to recommend is what I use to schedule my actual social media content. And I find it really useful to use social media tools to help you schedule it because it really does keep you organised, and it keeps you consistent because then you don’t have to manually post it all the time in real-time.

You can just schedule it in advance, post every day or every few days and you don’t have to worry about it so much. And it really is about managing the chaos because with social media you typically have a couple of accounts, so you probably have a Facebook account, you probably have an Instagram account, a Pinterest account.

So tools are the best way to manage all of the chaos so that you don’t go mad essentially from having to post everything in real-time. So what are the tools that I actually use? Facebook Creator Studio.

Now people get a little bit nervous when I talk about Facebook Creator Studio because they’ve changed it to be a lot more, I guess, prominent. So you used to be able to do a lot of stuff and not have to use Facebook Creator Studio, but Facebook have moved a lot of the features into this now.

So now, if you want to schedule posts, you have to do it from Facebook Creator Studio. Let me show you how to do it and how to access it because it’s actually a great way of scheduling both your Facebook posts as well as your Instagram posts as well.

To access Facebook Creator Studio, you want to start by going to business.facebook.com/creatorstudio and there you’ll see all of the pages that you own. If you only have one, there will only be one.

If you have multiple like I do, then you’ll see all of the pages and you’ll be able to access them from there. If you go to content library, on the left-hand side, you’ll see there’s two options. Well, there’s a couple of ways to upload and schedule your content.

You can use the upload videos function, the top right-hand blue button here. And this will allow you to then choose a file from your computer which you can then schedule. Alternatively, you can also click on the bottom plus in the circle here.

So if you select that bottom right-hand corner, blue button with the plus, this allows you to create a post, upload a video, you can also go live on Facebook as well, and you can also post across multiple pages. I have a tutorial on how to schedule your posts from Facebook Creator Studio in depth.

So check out the link to the description ’cause it’s all covered there. But this is definitely a great tool to schedule your Facebook posts in advance and to schedule your Instagram posts as well without having to pay for a tool, and you can do it all directly for free in Facebook.

Later app is another tool that I use to schedule my Instagram posts. And now you might be saying, ‘but you just showed us Facebook Creator Studio, which you can do for free. Why would you bother to pay for another app to do it just for Instagram? and I’m going to show you why I love Later app so much.

With Later app, you’re able to schedule to Instagram and Facebook as well. But the beautiful thing about Later app is that it actually does this magical thing with link in bio.

With Later app, It’s a little bit different to Facebook Creator Studio because I can drag things on to the week goal, the month view, and I can plan out when I want to schedule things and I get to have a visual view of it.

But the thing that I love the most about it that Facebook Creator Studio doesn’t allow you to do, it’s that, you know when people go on Instagram and they’re always like, ‘Oh, I’ve released a blog post, or I’ve released a video, check out the link in bio.’ and you’re like, ‘how do I actually get to that piece of content?’

Well with Later, they give you this link in bio and when someone clicks on it, it takes them to this link in bio page. So they can see all of your posts, but you’re able to link that post directly to your video, directly to your blog posts, directly to your sales page, directly to your products.

And that for me is worth paying for a tool that allows you to drive that traffic off from Instagram directly to your content or directly to your products or services. And this is how I use Instagram to drive traffic to YouTube or drive traffic to my website.

I highly recommend Later. I’ve been using it for months now, and I really love that feature. And I’m able to see the traffic from Instagram to my website via link in bio.

So it’s a really great tool and a great way of leveraging Instagram to get more traffic. When it comes to creating a social media content, having stock images and stock videos to use is extremely useful and very, very valuable. So I use stock images and videos all the time to help me create social media posts.

And I also use it in my videos to kind of cover-up mistakes and, or to add a bit of more ambience or just some more variety to the video so people just aren’t looking at me all the time. I highly recommend having a stock image library to be able to choose from.

And there’s lots of different options out there, but it’s about being able to access a library of stuff so that you don’t have to create all your images and all of the extra video footage from scratch. So this is about saving you time.

And there are two options that I use that I find are quite effective, especially compared to all the other options in the market. The first one is Deposit photos. So I use deposit photos for my stock images, whether that’s photos, vectors, they also have videos as well, but I don’t really use their videos.

I find it a little bit expensive, the pricing for their stock videos, but for images and for vectors amazing tool to use. Inside deposit photos, if I want to find an image or something, let’s just say I want to find an image of cupcakes, whatever it is.

I can choose whether I want to look for just photos, vectors, videos or paintings is a new one that they have, but let’s look at the photo options and then this will bring up a whole range of images that I’m able to use and then I’m like, ‘Oh look at this variety, some beautiful pictures that I can then download and use when I create my social media posts’.

I can also choose between all of the different vector options as well. So if I don’t want a photo, I want like an illustration instead, there’s definitely options for me to use there as well.

With Deposit photos, you’re able to pay for monthly packages. You can also buy image packs and I find the image packs are the most cost-effective option and that’s what I use all the time.

In terms of video options, Storyblocks is the option that I use. With Storyblocks you also get monthly packages, and this allows you to then download videos for that month. You can either choose between small, medium and large packages and I find that their pricing and the quality of videos is pretty good for what you get.

So literally, once again it’s about trying to find in their search bar something. So let’s just say I want a businesswoman video, so I just type for that. I search for it, and then I can choose from all of the stock videos that they have in their library.

And depending on what plan I’m on, I can download it and then I can start using it within my videos as well. Video is a really big part of my social media strategy, and I always get asked, ‘well what video editing software do you use? And what do you particularly use to do screen recordings like the one that you’re watching right now?’ and I always recommend you getting an option that is easy to use and extremely powerful with a low learning curve.

No one wants to spend six months learning how to use software. You want to be able to access it and start creating videos straight away. And the option that I use and highly recommend is ScreenFlow. It is Mac only.

The equivalent for PC is Camtasia and I love it over and above using Adobe Premier or learning how to use iMovie or any of the other free video editing software because it allows you to record your screen and also allows you to edit the videos and you can also record like you see now face to camera as well.

So I can do all of that in one place. I can record, I can edit and then it’s all in one place for me as well. So let’s have a look at ScreenFlow. So this is ScreenFlow and this is the actual ScreenFlow, I guess, file that I’m using to create this content right now.

And as you can see I’m able to record myself and I’m able to change where I appear or the face to camera component appears, which is very handy. I’m also able to record my screen and then edit out any mistakes as well.

So right now I’m recording and it’s such a great way of creating content and editing it all in one place and I highly, highly recommend it as a tool to help you create content really, really easily.

And the last but definitely not the least important tool that I use to help me manage all of my social media and all of the workplace that I have is my project management tools. And it’s important I think to have a tool to help you manage all of these because it’s chaotic.

Social media is chaotic, you’ve got so many different moving parts, you’re creating content, you’re scheduling content and you really need some way to visually see everything that’s happening and to control it. And so it’s really about how do you organise yourself.

And the tool that I use and I’ve used so many different tools and the one that I think I’ve landed with because I find it, I guess, does the job for free and this is a great option for most people and that’s Asana. And now you may be thinking, ‘Oh Asana’ but hear me out.

I really like Asana because there’s free and there’s also paid options as well. Trello is fine. I like Trello but I prefer Asana because you can use the free option pretty much for a big team.

I think you get 15 seats with Asana, and that’s a pretty big team, and it really does everything that you need. And if you have a look inside Asana, you can either set things up in a board style or Kanban board style and then you can move your tasks across the workflow, like physically move.

So this is my video creation workflow. I have a list of everything that I want to create. Once I started, I move it to the start column just by dragging and dropping it.

And then I just go across the workflow until I’m done. And this lets me know where I’m actually at with all of the different video or content ideas. And I also use it to help me manage my video team.

So outsource teams. So you don’t have to rely just on email because email can get chaotic. You don’t know where things are. With email threads when you’re going back and forth with people.

With my video team, I have the workflow here so when there’s a video job ready to do, we’ll pull it into ready to start and then we’ll move it across the different boards depending on what stage the project is actually at.

And the beauty of the Asana, and I guess most of these project management tools is that everyone has access to all of the information in one place. You can have the conversations here, you can upload all of your files and it’s all in one place.

People get notifications in their inbox when things, when they’re tagged and when things get moved across. So I really love it. I like the improvements that they’re constantly making with the Asana.

So you get to see like your images if you upload them, so it’s not completely boring. You can add a bit of colour if you upload images and things like that as well.

But it’s definitely a very, very handy tool to help you manage the chaos, to help you manage your workflows and to manage all of your social media content and your calendar of when things need to go out.

So there you have it. A breakdown of some of my top social media apps and tools to help me create content and manage my social media with ease. If you found this video useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel.

And if you’re looking for more ways to grow your business using social media, make sure you grab a copy of my Social Media Checklist. It’s a super simple guide to get you up and running on the major social media networks so you can start leveraging the power of social to get more clients and make more sales with ease.

To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description box below. And thanks for watching.

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