Boost Your Social Content With These Apps & Accessories

We’ve spoken before on the blog about the importance of Social media contentin any company’s marketing strategy, and some of the ways in which you can maximise your content’s appeal online. But today we wanted to take a look at a few different tools that’ll turn that beautiful piece of metal and glass in your pocket into lean, mean, filmmaking machine. We’ve picked out a few apps and accessories that we either use ourselves or just like the look of, that’ll help to boost your social video content and keep you ahead of the pack.

Get Ready to Gimbal

Gimbals are just one of the more high-tech gadgets that have been adapted for the smaller screen. There are more and more companies offering smartphone gimbal devices, from established brands like DJI down to newer startups popping up on the radar — like Flowmotion, who caught our attention earlier this year with their iPhone gimbal, the Flowmotion One.

Beginning as a kickstarter campaign, it’s finally found its way to public release — and we got our hands on one. And truth be told, it’s pretty impressive! We’ll be going into much more detail on it on the blog later this week, but it has a few brilliant features that make filming on the iPhone so much slicker. It acts as a stabiliser first and foremost, but with tracking and motion time-lapse functionalities built in as well; just clip your phone into the holder, sync it up and your ready to capture a tonne of dynamic shots. It’s Particularly great at shooting content with a lot of motion or action in it, like sports, but also handy for keeping shots steady on the go.

Lens Me Your Eyes

Aside from gimbals, tripods and whatever other accessories exist to control your shots, one of the other factors worth considering is the look of your shots. That’s where lens attachments come into the picture (or film…pun intended).

Again theres a whole host of companies offering lenses at different prices and qualities — so it’s worth looking around for what works on your budget and scale (although heres a handy run down) — but lenses are a brilliant way of creating versatile video content. Fish eyes will warp the frame, macros allow impressive close ups for mobile shooting, wide angles will fit more in your frame; with a full arsenal theres almost no limits to what content you can get right out of your phone. It’s as simple as clipping a lens over your phone’s existing camera, and shooting to your hearts content!

Finding The Spark

Your video content is looking a step above the rest with the help of external accessories, but putting together the footage afterwards is just as important. So what tools are out there for editing on the go and getting your content live as quick as possible? One great option is Spark Camera. It essentially does the shooting and editing in one place, making it easier than ever to build quick video content for social.

Naturally you can use it to edit video for any platform, but it works especially well when creating Instagram Story content — where short, quick, portrait video goes along way. Spark allows you to get a little more playful with the format, stitching together a narrative or collection of shots, which can put your Story content ahead of the pack. It’s a really simple and intuitive app too — just press to record, and use the coloured circle ‘timelines’ to cut down and stitch shots, add a little music from your library and thats it! You’ll be surprised how a bit of editing can make the most basic video content pop a little more!

Desktop In Your Pocket

Apps like Spark may shine in the point n’ shoot content creation for social channels, but there are also options available for when need of a little more horsepower when editing on the fly. In comes LumaFusion, A new app from LumaTouch, which essentially has a lot of the same video editing capabilities that you’d expect from a desktop application — just on mobile. Granted, it’s not really at the point of replacing video editing on the desktop just yet, but as an option for editing on the go, its seriously impressive. Opening up the options of other more limited editing apps like Apple’s free iMovie iOS offering. LumaFusion comes with a price tag — but it’s absolutely packed with features we just wouldn’t have expected to see on a mobile platform before.

We won’t go into all of those here, but some of the more notable ones are it’s ability to import footage from cloud services, key-framing on a mobile device (yes we did just say that), and a host of colour settings and transitions. We’ve been using it on the iPad which has it’s obvious benefits, but it is also available on iPhone too; so it works great as a way of quickly adapting existing content for social platforms while out and about.

Those are just four tool’s we’ve picked to help create better video content straight from your mobile device — but there are loads more out there! We’d always recommend digging around yourself to see what would work for your brand — if you need advice or want to learn more about how we can help with your social media content, get in touch through any of our social channels or give us a ring!

~ This article was originally posted on the Blueprint Film Blog ~