If you’re like me, you can’t be confined to desk and run social media for your church. You need mobile tools that allow you to quickly capture what’s happening and feed it to your social media channels. Here’s a quick list of tools that I use to get the job done:
Hootsuite Mobile App
Yes, you can use the official Twitter and Facebook Pages app to handle multiple accounts, but the Hootsuite’s mobile app is the tool of choice. Here’s a quick rundown of its features:
- Multiple account management (Facebook, Twitter, etc…)
- Scheduling of posts in advance
- Geolocation search for nearby social media activity (read more that here)
- Check-in with Foursquare
- Manage your Hootsuite streams
Sorry there’s no third pary app to replace Instagram. Due to their API restrictions, if you want to use Instagram and all of its features, you need to stick with its official app.
VSCOcam
VSCOcam is the best photo editor on the iPhone. Not only does it come with built-in filters, it also lets you have fine grain control over editing your photos.
Horizon
Horizon is a video camera app with one goal; to rid the world of those horrible vertical iPhone videos. You know the ones I’m talking about. The kind that makes you think you’re looking through some sort of rectangular peephole. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Just ask any video professional, and then watch them start to tear up.
IFTTT
I like things that are automatic. IFTTT (If This Then That) let’s me automate a lot of my life. You can automate photo backups, your Buffer account, notifications and more. Recently, they released an iPhone app which let’s you automate actions on your phone. For example, let’s say you added a reminder in Siri but you also want email to yourself that reminder, IFTTT for the iPhone can do that. The possibilities are endless.
Feedly
There’s no way to keep up with every social media news site, but there is a way to put all those updates in one place. Using Feedly you can create a dashboard for all your news sources. You can also connect to other services like Pocket to save articles for later reading. (Bonus feature: you can hook up Feedly to Buffer with IFTTT to automatically tweet articles you save.)
Over
Over for me is the best way way to lay text over your photos. While there are other choices, Over provides the best selection of fonts and tools for creating art on the go for your church social media channels.
Of course this list is just a start, however for me these are the essential apps that I use on a day to day basis. Got an app that you think should’ve made the list? Hit me up on Twitter (@dgirardier) and let me know.