According to research from Wyzowl, 83 percent of business owners surveyed think that video gives them a good ROI. If you can get over the growing pains of incorporating video into your marketing strategy, you’ll be one of those businesses that knows it’s well worth it and sees the rewards. While some video, especially on YouTube, can be a bit longer, videos created for your social media channels like Instagram perform best when kept short and sweet. To help with creating quick videos, there are now a variety of social video tools and apps created for business owners like you. Here are four options to consider.
1. Shakr
Built especially for Facebook and Instagram, Shakr allows you to easily create social video content with no video or design qualifications needed. The tool offers more than 2,000 video templates to choose from depending on the focus of your video and the style and brand of your business. You can just drag and drop your own video and images into the templates and you’ll have a professional looking video in no time. Shakr also comes with an extensive media library with stock images, videos and music so you can include media without worrying about licensing issues. Shakr’s basic plan starts at $49/month, which is pretty restricted — you can only download one un-watermarked video a month. The $99 standard plan offers unlimited use.
2. Animoto
Animoto is a Cloud-based video creation service that lets you choose from a pre-built storyboard template (or create from scratch), add your images or video clips and finally adjust colors, fonts and other design aspects until you have the video you need. You can also adjust the aspect ratio of the video to size it properly for Instagram, Facebook or YouTube. For added brand recognition, you can add your logo as a watermark in the corner. An easy-to-use voice over tool allows you to quickly add voiceover to your video. Like Shakr, Animoto also comes with a stock image and video library and commercially licensed music. For professional use, plans start at $33/month.
3. Magisto
Magisto is an online video editor that works on desktop and in a mobile app version for easy video editing. Setting Magisto apart from others in the industry is the fact that it is powered by artificial intelligence that takes care of the editing process for you. The site will create an edited video based on your inputs of images and video, editing style and music, and then you can make edits as you please. One of the more affordable video editing options out there, Magisto’s professional plan costs $9.99/month. The business plan, which comes with features like video analytics and customized brand colors and fonts, costs $34.99/month.
4. Splice
For video editing on the go, Splice lets you create videos from your iPhone or tablet. It offers a range of editing capabilities including cropping images, trimming video, adding effects and animations along with title slides and text overlays. There’s also a library of sound effects and music. Splice might have less built-in templates than some of the tools above, but it offers intuitive video editing — and it’s totally free.
How do you plan to make social video a bigger part of your marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments!
Photo: Unsplash user Marten Bjork
