Businesses know that to remain competitive, they must consistently generate interesting social media content. But not every business owner is a talented content writer, videographer, and photographer. They could pay for professionals to help with this content, but top-quality service providers often come at a premium price. For budget-challenged small businesses like myself and my online invoicing startup, that cost simply isn’t an option.
Thankfully, there are several tech tools available that can help make social media content creation affordable. These tools will allow even the most inexperienced content creator produce professional-quality videos, infographics, and blog posts to reach customers.
Infogr.am
You’ve probably noticed that infographics have exploded in popularity in recent years. Many professionals assume to get top-quality infographics, they have to hire a graphic designer and pay thousands of dollars per assignment. But with Infogr.am, you can create basic infographics at no cost whatsoever.
To use Infogr.am, simply choose from the many templates provided and customize it to meet your data. You can add charts, videos, images, and text to give your infographic exactly the look you want. Once you’re finished, you can add your new infographic to your blog or website with one click.
Posting content from other sites is a great way to fill your blog. Linking interesting content is a great way to provide interesting content to your followers without having to create it yourself. But the content curation process can be time-consuming, requiring you to subscribe to multiple services to get the content that matches your readership.
Reddit’s community members vote content up or down to create a website that catalogs some of the most interesting website on the Internet. By browsing the content posted on Reddit, you’ll be able to find articles, news items, photos, and videos that might fit in with your content efforts.
InstaQuote
Designed to provide visually appealing quotes for Instagram, InstaQuote is a great way to get inspirational quotes for your various social media accounts. You can type the quotes up and post them as text or use the photo-based quotes provided.
One benefit of providing inspirational quotes is that they’re likely to be shared with others. Each time one of your followers retweets or shares your post, your brand is seen by all of that person’s followers, increasing your exposure.
Canva
If you’re maintaining a blog on your site, you likely feel challenged to find affordable photos to include with your content. You should even use photos when you promote your blog posts on your social media accounts, since they’ll stand out in users’ newsfeeds and increase click-through rates. Canva provides an affordable alternative to stock photo sites, letting you pay a small flat rate for photos you need for your content. They even have an easy editor to add custom graphics and lettering to each photo.
Canva offers photos at $1 per image. You have access to countless photos.
SurveyMonkey
One way to boost your content without spending a fortune is to hold surveys. SurveyMonkey provides templates that make it easy to survey your customers. Choose from more than 15 different question types as you create your surveys and add your own custom logos and branding to connect with customers. Once you’ve created your survey, you can send it out by mobile, web, and social media.
Once you’ve collected your answers, you can use them to create content like whitepapers, blog posts, and infographics. Each survey can provide multiple content types to provide unique material for multiple days.
The Takeaway
These tech tools prove that you don’t have to spend a fortune to create interesting content for your different platforms. With a small time investment on your part, you can use these tools to connect with customers and increase social media shares.
