12 Influencer Apps You Need for Your Personal Brand
As an influencer, you spend a substantial amount of time creating, producing and posting content on your phone. Since all of the major social media applications are mobile focused, the average amount of screen time we experience and utilize for work related projects far exceeds that of the generations before us.
When working as an influencer on social media, the importance of your business not only relies on creating good content, but includes managing all aspects that pertain to building and maintaining a personal brand.
In order to help you keep your process of content creation, production and growth strategy streamlined and effective, there is an overwhelming database of mobile applications targeted to help social media users and influencers. With categories such as scheduling, strategy, editing, design and analytics, there have never been more applications for us to choose from.
To help you decide which applications are worth the storage space on your device, we have sifted through some of the most effective influencer apps that you can download today.
While the majority of these applications are free, some do come with added paid features or a monthly cost to access the entire program. Depending on your interest in financially investing in mobile applications, you can choose which programs best suit your social needs and budget.
Here are 12 influencer apps that you need to have:
Scheduling Your Content
As an influencer, you are most likely posting content at least one time per day or even more to your various social networking platforms. In some situations, the need to be constantly pushing out content can become overwhelming and difficult to maintain in the everyday busyness of life.
In order to help you plan your content for your social channels, there are several influencer apps that can schedule your content and help you design the ideas for your future posts.
Later allows you to schedule up to 30 posts per month for free with their mobile application or web browser. It is only designed for scheduling for Instagram and it lets you store your images through the application. You can preview your images before posting. If you want to schedule and manage more posts across multiple accounts and schedule videos, they have premium plans beginning at $9/month.
Planoly is the first visual planner for Instagram. With their free account, you can upload 30 images per month to plan out on the application’s feed before posting them to your Instagram. If you are interested in more in-depth features, solo premium accounts begin at $7/month and team accounts are $159/month with the ability to run 10 accounts. Planoly also offers the ability to auto post your content to Instagram, but only if you have a business Instagram profile.
UNUM is a mobile application that acts as a design platform for visual storytelling. The application allows you to visually plan your feed, gives you data-driven insights on your social profiles and publishes your digital content. With the free plan, you are given 18 grids to plan your content layout, three tags to store, reuse notes and hashtags, ten photos for your album feature and 500 uploads per month of videos and photography. If you want to increase your grid number and usage, premium plans begin at $4.99/month.
Hashtag Strategy
In the growth stage of any influencer’s career, there will be a time where using hashtags is a targeted and effective way to have your content noticed.
Growth takes time and with new additions to social media platforms such as software configurations and algorithms, your content may not always have a strong visual presence.
In order to help new accounts view and discover your account, many influencers employ the use of hashtags to their posts. Hashtags are key phrases that can be used to describe the niche, industry and description of your image.
All Hashtag is a simple hashtag-generator tool. With the application you get the hashtag generator which generates top, random or live hashtags to show you the best hashtags you need. Hashtag creator which allows you to create your own hashtags. And the hashtag analytics tool where you can analyze the hashtag and its performance to integrate with your social media strategy. This application is completely free to use.
Photo Editing
When creating content on-the-go, you need photo editing applications that are effective and align with your visual aesthetic.
While there are more photo editing apps than we could possibly count, only a handful of them offer editing that is comparable to professional photography software systems.
VSCO is a photo editing application that is free for mobile users and available on desktop for a one time purchase fee. On mobile, VSCO is a film photography driven program which means that the filters available are made to replicate the beauty of film stocks. On VSCO, the application will come with a set of included presets, while the remainder of the packs are available for purchase. In addition to being a photo editing software, VSCO also has a journal capability which allows you to share your images with a large network of creatives.
Snapseed is another photo editing application that is perfect for fine tuning your content. With tools such as the healing brush, color curves and perspective shift – Snapseed is a professional application that closely aligns with desktop editing software. On the app, you can edit both RAW and JPEG files as well as create and save presets of your edits for later use. The application also comes with built in filters that you can change and adjust to match your personal style.
Instagram Stories
The introduction of Instagram Stories changed the social application forever. Now, users are not only focused on uploading individual posts. A huge part of being an influencer depends on your activeness and the frequency of sharing you engage in via your stories.
Followers want a behind-the-scenes look and sneak peek into the everyday movements of an influencer’s life. Even more so, influencers now have to find ways to make their story’s content stand out from the crowd.
InShot is a mobile application that can help you create unique Instagram Stories. With multiple capabilities it allows you to edit video by trimming, cutting or deleting the middle part of the video, merging them together and adjusting the speed. For Instagram, it allows you to blur the borders of your photos, create a square canvas for posting and add colored borders. You can also add music to videos, voice-overs, text to your video and photos and add any filter that is available with the app. It is easy to use and allows a seamless integration for sharing to apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Whatsapp.
CutStory is an application that is used to shorten long videos to meet the time requirement of Instagram stores. You begin by importing your long video and CutStory will cut it up and save it in increments of 15 seconds. The clips are exported in chronological order so you know what order to post them in. You can add music to your videos, create a slideshow, pick a unique background and add any type of stickers or text to your videos. Each video will be saved with the CutStory watermark. To remove this, you can purchase this feature within the app for $0.99.
Moonlight is another application geared toward creating videos. With the application you can create and edit videos on your phone. There are professional film inspired filters and touch up adjustments such as exposure, brightness and contrast. You can trim any unwanted footage, add music to your video from your iTunes library and then quickly share your creation to your messages, Instagram, Facebook and email. Your videos are outputted in high resolution and look great when shared on your Instagram Stories.
The final application to create unique Instagram story content is 8mm. This is another application for creating videos that replicate the process of 8mm movies. This app is highly popular with creatives who want to create content with the 8mm feel without having to break the bank on the vintage equipment and film processing. The app comes with 10 retro colored film stocks, 7 different lenses and a jitter button which allows the frame to shake. The application can be purchased for $1.99.
Checking Your Analytics
As an influencer, your engagement, reach and follower count is what defines your position within the social spaces.
These key components are what allows a brand or company to offer you sponsorships and campaigns over another creator. Having a strong engagement and steady follower base is what can help an influencer grow in their personal brand.
To make sure that you are staying on top of your social statistics, you will need influencer apps dedicated to checking and analyzing your analytics.
The Followers Track for Instagram was created to give you accurate analytics for your Instagram followers. You can track unfollowers, blockers, deleted likes, which followers give you the most interaction and engagement, which followers are ghosts or inactive and see where your followers are located. This is a good application for people who have many followers and need to see if they are real people or spam, bot accounts. Since engagement is a huge factor of your influencer success, you will want to make sure you have the most authentic followers to create true interest and interaction. The app is free, but some more advanced features may need to be purchased.
Our final influencer app is the social media manager, Crowdfire. The application allows you to manage all of your social accounts in one place and works with Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WordPress, Etsy, Shopify, Medium, 500px, Vimeo and more. The app can help you compose your posts and schedule them for later. Additionally, Crowdfire will recommend articles and images that relate to your audience, so that you can share them on your social profiles. Analytics wise, the application allows you to track your social growth, post performance and followers details. It gives you detailed performance metrics and additional tips to increase your growth rate. The program is free, but there are limits for free users. If you choose to use the premium features the pricing begins at $9.99 per month.
These are our 12 influencer app recommendations for any creator looking to draft, produce and share content straight from their mobile device. From planning your content strategy to creating unique images and videos and monitoring your analytics and performance, having the proper tools can make a definitive difference in the process of growing your personal brand.
