“Community manager wanted:
Smart, witty copywriter, with skills in video editing, photography and photo
editing, light coding, client and media relations experience, ability to stay
up on the latest trends, data analysis expertise and a good online reputation.”
The role of a community manager is changing by the day. It’s
tough for a person to be an expert at everything listed in the above job
description, but guess what… It’s time to step your game up. If you don’t know
how to do all of the above, someone else does.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools out there to help you be a
jack-of-all-trades as a community manager for a brand and for yourself. Stay on your toes with five tools that are on my radar:
Studio
I read about Studio
last week on Mashable,
and have been addicted ever since. Dani Fankhauser
described it as a tool “that allow users to create beautiful layered design,”
and that pretty much captures it.
Don’t know how to use Photoshop or just scared of it in
general? This app is for you, but watch out… I spent $10 on icon packs for
layering in a matter of minutes, but I can now create visual assets for
business and pleasure, no matter where I am (see below for my wife’s pistachio
and white chocolate chip cookies).
VSCO
VSCO landed on my radar last
year, after hearing about their
partnership with 100Cameras.org, an
organization that “teaches children how to tell their story through photography.”
This simple to use, photo retouching, editing and filtering
app will change the way you edit your mobile photos, and will give them a look
that comes as close to film as you will get. Ellis
Hamburger captured it well in a recent Verge piece on the app: “VSCO hopes
to make them (photos) look real — which is arguably the next step for mobile
photography now that phone cameras are sharp enough. No longer must we
overcompensate for poor low-light performance and noisy post-processing.”
Don’t miss this app. Trust me.
WordPress
You may be thinking that WordPress
is old school, but from my experience, building a website is an art and a
science… neither of which I was good at in grade school. WordPress has been a “disruptive
force in online publishing for more than a decade,” and they aren’t going
anywhere anytime soon.
A stellar CMS, wonderful layouts, and a community of
millions of users willing to help each other makes WordPress a go-to tool for
me. Check out these 35
great examples of WordPress websites via Creative Bloq. It’s not just the
blogging platform from back in the day… it’s so much more.
Topsy
On Wednesday, Topsy launched
an update to their platform that’s a game changer. You
can now use the platform to search every tweet ever posted. Care to go back
and take a look at a brands tweet history since 2006 easily? Tap into your
inner data geek and check out Topsy.
Topsy takes Twitter search, or “search.twitter.com,” as us
old schoolers call it (tweet me some love if you remember Summize!),
to a new level. Check out the below example from TechCrunch’s search for a
comparison on tweets per day about Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Starbucks.
Instagram Video
If your brand has an Instagram account, start using it for
video if you haven’t already. 15-second videos with filters are stellar,
especially with the lack of good mobile video editing apps, but what’s even
better is that you don’t need to recreate the wheel by launching your brand on
a new social network. Chances are, your brand is on Instagram. Also, you can
now upload video from your camera roll vs. only taking video in the app,
which means you can professionally edit videos and then put them up on
Instagram.
Lulu Lemon is a great example of a brand that’s using
Instagram’s video features for 15-second bits of original content as well as
high quality advertising style content.
Need some inspiration? Check out August’s best Instagram
videos, according to Simply Measured, here.
