On a daily basis I need to accomplish many tasks with a minimum of effort and time. I maintain many websites and social media accounts along with formatting newsletters and ezines.

The 4 tools I’m listing I use on a daily basis for formatting and social media maintenance.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a program that I have been using for quite some time. It allows me to manage all my client’s social media accounts. There are free and upgraded service plans. In a previous blog post, I discussed the difference between Hootsuite and Sprout Social. Hootsuite is a social media management platform, created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.

Canva
I use Canva daily to create social media graphics for all of my client’s social media marketing. I use the free account. You can see some of my graphics here.
Canva is a graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics.

Pexels
I use Pexels all the time. I find the most beautiful images there. I find images for my client’s ezines and other social media imagery.
Pexels provides high quality and completely free stock photos licensed under the Pexels license. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and also easy to discover through our discover pages.

Remove Background
This is a new app that I just started using. I’ve been playing around with it to test its usage. What I have found is that it needs to be about to identify a “real” person in it. I’ve tried with cartoon figures and it does not work. Remove.bg is a free service to remove the background of any photo. It works 100% automatically: You don’t have to manually select the background/foreground layers to separate them – just select your image and instantly download the result image with the background removed!

These are just a few tools that I use for creativity and social media marketing. There are many more and of course, new ones are popping up almost daily. What tools do you use or would you recommend? Leave a comment below for your recommendations.

Need help with your social media marketing? Contact me at chris@serenityva.com for a free consultation.