Must-Have Instagram Creator Tools for Influencers
By Pritika Matkar
Once you have established your presence on Instagram, you cannot depend only on your post captions and the number of followers for your success. Sure, having a strong profile boosts your game, but to maintain your stance in this ever-changing and highly competitive game, it is imperative that you engage in and use different creator tools to manage and boost your profile.
“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking barriers, defying rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”- Mary Lou Cook
As a creator, you must not shy away from showing creativity with every post and story you put up on Instagram. If you are serious about your growth on Instagram, you need to invest some time and perhaps money in these creator tools.
Instagram creator tools are fairly easy to use and don’t require any rocket scientist to figure out how they work. Even if you are a novice in designing and art, you can effectively use these tools to your maximum benefits.
Why Do You Need These Tools?
It is a hard work to maintain your position as an Instagram influencer in this highly evolving and vastly competitive platform. You really need to step up the game to get the desired engagement from your audience rate. While consistency is the key, you cannot keep posting just one concept or format of content on your Instagram profile. Your audience would always be expecting something different from you.
No one likes to open their Instagram and look at the same type of posts every day on their feed. As a viewer, we need to know that the person we are following is different than the other creators in the same niche. The audience will always be expecting you to come up with quality content involving eye-catching imageries or video content.
“Almost all creativity requires a purposeful play.”- Abraham Maslow.
Whether you post a blog on your website, create a short video on a video-driven social media platform like Hobo.Video, or you are planning to put up an Instagram post, you should consider playing around with different concepts and discover what your audience would like the most.
You have to make decisions about the concept behind the post, how it should look and what caption or text should go along with it. As your platform grows, you encounter a wide range of audience, some of them have a unique taste that you need to gauge out with this content trial and error method. You also need to keep a check on what flew and what flopped. Keeping a tab on all these aspects individually can create quite a hassle. To save you from this statistical chaos, Instagram creator tools come super handy.
Best Content Creation Tools for Instagram-
There are tons of creator tools for Instagram available on the internet. Few of these tools also come as applications to make them more user-friendly and downloadable on mobile phones. Some of these apps are available for free and few require a minimal membership charge to use.
To help make Instagram account management easier for you, we at Hobo.Video have shortlisted some content creation and optimization tools that can help you save time and make more meaningful content. These tools can also help you increase your effectiveness and land you collaboration with brands of your dream.
· Top photo editing and design tools
One of the important aspects of being an influencer is creating visually appealing posts for your Instagram page. This can be achieved by using photo editing applications that would help you refine any photo that you take, or with some graphic design tools that will help you create stunning visuals to improve your brand image. Few of the top design and photo editing tools include-
1. Canva-
Canva is the easiest application that anyone could access. You don’t need to have any knowledge about editing and graphic designing to be able to use this tool. Canva provides many templates, images, backgrounds and effects to create a perfect design for your content. Whether it is for Instagram stories or posts, you can create amazing banners by superimposing images, texts and graphics on a template background to attract your audience’s attention.
Canva is a free tool for image design with premium $1 pay-per-use graphics. You can avail animation and transparent background services with a monthly $12 Canva Pro subscription.
2. Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Express
Adobe Photoshop is a powerful image editing tool that comes with a variety of features to enhance pictures or develop exciting visuals. Adobe has now launched Photoshop Express for mobile phones. Photoshop Express is a user-friendly mobile application that does not have all features as the desktop version of photoshop but contains handy tools like blemish remover, and a lot of preset filter options to enhance your photos.
3. VSCO
VSCO is essentially part social media platform and part photo editing application. It has an in-depth suite of high-quality photo filters that can take your mobile photo editing skills to a new level. The premium plan contains thousands of customized, high-quality filters for only $19.99 per annum subscription fee.
· Top video editing tools
You don’t have to be a professional videographer to create captivating video content on Instagram. There are many video creations and editing tools available on the internet that help you create entertaining video clips.
1. Boomerang by Instagram-
Boomerang is an app by Instagram that help you create GIF-like looped videos. You have an option of adding filters directly to your video while capturing. You can post these videos directly on the Instagram app or save it for later in your gallery.
2. Inshot-
Inshot lets you increase the quality of your video clips by giving you the liberty to edit your videos in any way you want. You can take advantage of its trimming and resizing tools, add sound effects from the Inshot sound tray, add a voiceover, and sync another video or sound clip with your story. This tool also allows you to rotate, crop, add filters or emojis to your videos.
3. CutStory for Instagram-
CutStory is a video editing application available on Apple devices that is specifically designed to edit videos and make them suitable for Instagram stories. This app splits long videos in to 15sec clips in a straightforward way which makes it easier for you to upload on stories without leaving out any part of the video.
· Top Ecommerce tools-
While posting your products on Instagram to sell is a great way of marketing, it becomes a hassle to every time give an external link to redirect customers to your store. To avoid this hassle there are few tools that enable you to share your Instagram post directly on eCommerce sites like Shopify so that customers can easily browse and spot the posts from your Instagram and make a purchase through your site.
1. Instagram Shoppable Feed for Shopify-
Using Instagram Shoppable Feed, you can easily add the Instagram photos to your store and tag the products that are featured in every image. If used on the store’s home page, this tool will help drive traffic to your page and grow your audience base in real-time. You can get access at just $4.99 per month.
2. Covet.pics for Shopify-
This tool not only helps you share your Instagram feed on platforms like Shopify but also allows your customers to share the images of their products purchased from you, on your profile. It also provides detailed insights on how every post is performing with metrics like engagements and orders. It is a free tool for one gallery and product tag per photo but requires $14.99 per month for a basic plan that includes two galleries.
· Top Marketing tools for Instagram-
Instagram relies on hashtags and it is essential to add relevant tags to your posts if you want a wide range of audience to engage with your posts. To drive more traffic to your profile and increase your engagement, you need to use the best Instagram marketing tools available in the market.
1. Keyhole-
You get the holy grail of your religious hashtag postings only when you are able to create and trend your original hashtag on Instagram. To get the suggestions about relevant hashtags and know the real time demographics about how this tag is performing, the keynote is the best tool that can come in use. With this application, you can also find relevant hashtags that are trending and add to your post to get yours in the hotlist.
2. Repost for Instagram-
Sometimes, you don’t need to get behind the lens and go through the pain of clicking and editing a perfect picture, you can repost other’s content on Instagram with proper curation and giving all the due credits to the owner of that image. Repost is a free app that lets you copy the post and share it on your profile within seconds. It is available to use for free across all platforms.
3. Display Purposes-
A web-based tool that helps you get more control over hashtags that you can use to trend your post. It utilizes keywords to generate suggestions for relevant and trending hashtags that you can use to reach to a wider audience. You can manually adjust the number of hashtags that appear at every search.
· Top Management tools-
Maintaining consistency with your posts can be a difficult task when you have an extensively busy schedule. In such cases, it is important that you take help of post management tools that help you schedule each post according to your frequency. There are many good tools available for different social media platforms-
1. Sked-
Sked is a post scheduling tool with a variety of features including web-browser based scheduling to upload posts. It also comes with an exclusive photo editing feature to remove tweaks and fine-tune your images. Sked also allows mass uploading. It comes at the minimal cost of $25 per month for a freelancer plan.
2. Hootsuite-
It is one of the most popular social media management platforms that widely handles streamlined platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Its Instagram hand is also gaining equal popularity with features such as mass uploading, scheduling and posting for your Instagram business accounts. This app comes at a monthly subscription of $29.
3. Onlypult-
It is one of the popular post schedulers that comes with a facility of storing your used hashtags in a tag section and making it easy for you to reuse the tags often. You can directly upload and schedule pictures and videos for posting via your PC. It offers a wide range of plans starting at $10 per month.
· Top analytics tools-
As an influencer, it is of utmost importance to know whether your Instagram posts are creating an impact or not. You need to be aware of your Instagram engagements and post demographics. The right analytics tool will help you measure this engagement and the results of your Instagram marketing activity in a simple way so as to get an insight into what type of post is working for your niche.
1. SquareLovin-
SquareLovin gives you a detailed analysis of your posts to help you understand what strategies are working in the market. It does not just give pretty graphs and infographics, it provides you access to insights on your recent posts, monthly engagement rates and a history of your post engagement with month, days and hour wise breakdown of audience’s views and interactions with the posts.
2. Iconosquare and Sprout Social-
These are the two efficient growth analyser apps available for all the influencers and business owners to use and determine their audience engagement rates for every post. Iconosquare also provides users with a chance to compare themselves with competitors and see where they stand in the market. You can avail a monthly subscription for Sprout Social at $99 per user/month, and Iconosquare at $49/month.
· Other effective tools-
There are many other tools that can be used to improve your follower demographics on Instagram. You can use tools to host contests or optimize your profile for a better spotlight in the platform. Few other must-have tools include-
1. Linktr.ee-
With the only exception of some Instagram stories, the only place you can mention a link on your Instagram is in your bio. This limits the efficiency of your marketing strategies and thus, it is a wise choice to make use of your bio as effectively as possible. With Linktr.ee, you can combine all these links on a unique screen and post the URL to this screen in your bio. You can add links to multiple platforms on this screen by just pasting in the new URLs as and when you need them. It also allows you to check the number of times these links were clicked by your audience.
2. Gleam Competitions
What better way to engage your audience than by hosting a contest or a giveaway? Gleam.io provides you with a platform where you can run such competitions embedded in a webpage. These competitions are designed to increase audience engagement with your profile. Gleam verifies entries and reduces the number of steps required for anyone to enter the contest. You can add the link to your contest to your Instagram bio and host several giveaways from time to time.
Bring Out Your Creativity and Boost Your Engagements
As an influencer, you need to be consistent with your posts and make them catchy for your audience base to engage actively. You can take help of all different tools that are available on the internet to create such engaging posts. Audience these days are driven more towards video-based content and it is necessary for you, as an influencer to identify the need to switch to such content often to maintain a growing curve on your engagement graph. One such video-driven social marketing platform is Hobo.Video. We give special guidance and platform to nano and micro influencers to thrive in follower growth and substantial earning.
“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”- Maya Angelou
You can never run out of creativity, even when you feel like you don’t have a creative streak, explore some templates and create something awesome!
