Take Your Social Media Game to the Next Level

There are a bunch of creative apps to help your tweets and posts stand out (Prisma is one of my recent favorites).  Here’s a collection of some of the best, written by the Product Hunt team.

Whether you’re responsible for managing your company’s social media accounts or you just want to share cool stuff on your personal profiles with friends and family, the list below is filled with tools that will help. Now you can create GIFs out of stills and videos, turn your photos into artwork, and resize your social media images perfectly and efficiently. Read on for seven great apps that will make everyone envy your social media feed.

Motion Stills by Google

Turn live photos into cinematic, beautiful GIFs.

Motion Stills is a neat pilot project created by the Google team. Now, you can bring your Apple Live photos back to life with advanced stabilization and rendering. You can turn your images into GIFs, or edit them together to create longer animated clips. You can also create cool movies by combining your Motion Stills together in just one swipe. It’s a great tool that allows you to string together a bunch of images to create an unforgettable video or GIF.

(Note: this is only currently available for iOS)

Prisma

AI that turns your photos into artwork in seconds.

Holy happiness. If you haven’t heard about it already, Prisma is basically Instagram filters—but 1000x better. We’re serious. Just take or upload a photo, choose one of many different art styles based on your favorite painting, and voila! Out comes a super cool, highly artistic photo of one of your favorite memories. Our advice? Combine Snapchat filters and the Prisma AI—and you’ll immediately get a photo in a brand new style that truly looks like a piece of artwork. This has got to be one of the best photo apps of 2016—highly recommended.

Linkmoji

The emoji URL shortener.

Say goodbye to boring URL shorteners! Now you can paste a link in, and out pops a shortened URL made completely out of emojis. You might confuse the crap out of everyone, but they’ll figure it out eventually. ;-)

Try the link in this tweet. ??

Giphy Capture

Turn anything on your screen into a GIF.

Giphy Capture allows you to turn anything on your screen into a GIF. First, enter the link of any video URL or upload a personal video file. Then you have the option to add captions, subtitles, or animated text to your GIFs (or stills). You can also add animated stickers and filters to them, as well (#winning). Set the speed for stills, and choose how you want your GIFs to loop (e.g. normal, reverse, ping pong). This is also a great tool for creating GIFs out of LIVE videos because you can edit after you’ve recorded. What we’re trying to say is…you will never look at a YouTube video the same way again. :-)

CloudApp 3.0

Your clipboard in the cloud.

CloudApp does something similar to Giphy Capture—but the functionality is a bit different. This menu bar app can capture GIFs like you would screenshots. You can record a webcam video or take a screen recording, add comments and annotations, and then share what you create seamlessly. It really is like your ideal clipboard in the cloud. While this is a useful tool for social media pros, it’s also great for anyone who is frequently sharing screenshots, videos, and designs.

GIF Toaster for iOS

The most advanced GIF converter app for videos and photos

GIF Toaster allows you to convert photo, video, bursts, and live photos into animated GIFs. Select a photo or video you want to convert. Then, set your encoding options (e.g. playback speed, frames per second, range, size, etc.) and covert it with one tap. This GIF creator is perfect if you want to capture something on your iPhone. Creating funny posts for Instagram and Twitter directly from your phone has never been easier. This is one of the most powerful GIF apps out there.

Landscape by Sprout Social

An interactive tool for social media image resizing.

Landscape by Sprout Social will help you resize images so they fit correctly on Twitter and Facebook (along with other social platforms). If you’ve ever tried to do this the janky way (ahem—posting sample tweets to see where the image will get cut off), you’ll really appreciate the ease of this automatic resizing tool. Now you can quickly produce multiple image sizes of the same post— optimized for different social media profiles, messages, and campaigns—so you can actually focus on the most important work: building your audience through social.

These are just some of the tools we use at Product Hunt to increase engagement (and have fun) with content on our social media accounts. For more, check out the full collection by Niv Dror on Product Hunt.

BONUS: The TNW Social Media Toolkit

The Next Web’s Social Media Director Matt Navarra put together a collection of tools he uses to manage TNW’s social media accounts. The collection is regularly updated and you can follow it here on Product Hunt.

Notable Highlights:

• Compressor, which optimizes and compresses your images by up to 90%
• Smart Moderation stops inappropriate posts on Facebook & Instagram
• Twitter’s two new apps: Engage and Twitter Dashboard
• Google GIFs (a must-install) Chrome Extension that lets you view animated GIFs in Google Image Search

  (ProTip: just add the word GIF when doing a search going forward) ??