Capture, filter and caption social media images with these cool apps.

Hello, welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for anybody that's got value locked up in their business and just a little bit frustrated that not enough people know about it. And today I'm going to share some tools and tips on what you can do using your mobile phone, because we've all got now the devices in our hands that are extremely powerful for content creation and distribution. Now, personally, I use an Apple phone, but all of these apps also exist in the Android store as well. So let's just look at what you can post. And I'm going to look today at pictures because we've all got a spare 5 minutes when we're waiting for the kettle to boil or the bus to arrive or the kids to get out of school. So there's really no shortage now of time spaces where we can create content and post it from the phone. Now, if you're wondering just how much you should be posting, there are some guidelines that are given, and that is that Twitter, we're supposed to look at about 5 posts per day. Pinterest, if you do that, 15 pins per day. An Instagram post, 1 per day. LinkedIn, 1 per workday. And YouTube, 1 per week. Those are a guide that are given out by people like HubSpot, but there's no reason not to post more. And one view is that you can post as many tweets as you like because they last about 18 minutes. Each Facebook post only lasts for about 90 minutes, so the content that we create disappears very quickly. But it's also the opportunity to create content for our newsletters and for our websites, for example. So I think that there's a great opportunity within the phone to build brands and build our own authority. So let's look at how we can do that. Now, first of all, just look at the sort of content that we can, we can create around topics. Personally, I like to think of 3 different areas. One is my personal life, the second is my professional life, and my third is the social life. So the personal things that I do, you know, if I'm working out or taking Binky the beagle for a walk, things that I'm finding interesting for myself that I think may be of use to other people, for example, nutrition or working out. The second can be professional. So if something happens in my professional life with work, with the team, with the client, with the customer, then I like to share that under personal. And social is, uh, the domain where things are happening with more than one person. It's sort of semi-business, semi-personal, where I might want to share something and especially repost content from other people. So what I'd like to think about now with my camera when I have it with me is what are opportunities to get a piece of content that's within this personal, professional, or social domain that I can take and share either directly with a member of the team, sharing directly to people on my WhatsApp, for example, to a client, for example, like, I love to do the pictures when I've taken something that I think would be of interest to them specifically. Take a picture and maybe mark that up, for example. And I'm going to talk about how I do that. And then also the professional way you see something take place that you think would be a useful learning for other people, which you could then share on Twitter, Facebook, or a video, for example, or a training course. So one of the key things to do is to get the camera and the camera shooting position right. Now we had Marcus Ahmad, who's a photographer from Bristol. Give us a bit of training. And one of the tips that he gave was to always have the grid lines on, which I hadn't thought about before. But the grid lines are just a setting, especially on the iPhone. I know in the settings you could choose effectively a tic-tac-toe. The tic-tac-toe, or the, the, the lines that go across the screen, make a very nice 9 square. And in that 9 square, what we do is we line up what we want to shoot in the top left or the top right where the lines intersect. So this is one of the first things that I learned that I was doing wrong, was that I was putting the subject matter kind of in the middle square. And in fact, we need to be putting it on the lines and where the first line in from the top and the first line in from the left intersect. Intersect, or where the second line from the, from the right and the top line intersect. So that's where the eye goes to. So to get that, shoot right first. Now, if we're doing social media, then we need to shoot in portrait, of course, because pretty much everything that we post is going to be in portrait. And we can edit the size of the picture And either do a freeform. I personally often just shoot using the, the photo, uh, in the standard size that it comes in. And of course you can do a crop using the cropping tool, and either a 9 by 16, 8 by 10, 5 by 7, or 3 by 4. I personally often just go for the 5 by 7 which is sort of a nice rectangle and a good size for the screen. If I'm going to shoot something for a presentation, for a PowerPoint, then I shoot it in landscape because otherwise the portrait doesn't give me the full width. So just thinking through for a second what you're going to use it for. And of course, if it's Instagram, it needs to be a square. It's a slightly different size for Instagram. And so then you'd have to be making sure that you're shooting into the square. The next thing, of course, is to think about the, uh, the resolution. I tend to try and shoot in the high resolution, uh, on the grounds that I can always reduce the resolution. And especially if I've got Wi-Fi, I've got the bandwidth. But if I shoot in low resolution, uh, it's easy to share But of course I can't expand the size of it very well. Now the iPhone has got the portrait mode, as I believe the Samsung and most phones do now, and that's really good for getting people, um, that I want to have people or myself in front of a background but without showing the background. Could be useful, for example, for a construction site if you want to show that you're on site somewhere, or or if you're in a venue but you don't want to show too much of the venue but show that you were there. Using the portrait mode gives an opportunity to just mix up the picture a little bit. It puts the focus on the person, and on the newer iPhones, I think you can even use the portrait mode on a product, not necessarily just on a person. I used the portrait mode effect when I was taking shots of the Wake drinks in China. I put Binky my dog. He was smelling the can, and I had horses in the background, so I blurred out the horses and had Binky there in the foreground. I also sometimes use the filters on the phone just because often we're shooting things that are a little bit mundane, and the filters make it a little bit different. And that's partly what we're looking for as well, is a little bit of stylistic work. So now if we've got the photographs taken and we've zoomed in close enough and the lighting of course is good enough to be able to see the subject. The next little app that I've got on my phone is for editing, and I've got a few that I just wanted to mention. There are lots, most of them available for free on the App Store with either a paid upgrade or funded by advertising. One of my faves is one called PhotoFunia. That's photo and then F-U-N-I-A. And I think it may be from Holland because it's got Dutch scenes written in it. Now, with Photophonia, you can embed a photograph into other pictures. In fact, so you could take a picture of somebody or something and then put that picture of that person or that logo, for example, on the side of a building in Manhattan or an artist's painting on the side of the street, as I did with the child's birthday party invitation. There are 618 effects in all, and then you can export those pictures to PDF or PNG so you can then use them, for example, in social media posts. I really like that, and I've used that on a few occasions, including taking, for example, a photograph of a couple of people speaking and putting them on the front cover of a Newspaper because it also enables you to edit the headline on the newspaper. And that's a really nice one— a couple of guys sitting on a park bench reading newspaper with your photograph embedded on the front page with your headline. Another one I like to use is Snapseed because it allows me to change the image itself by adjusting the filters. There are some 33 tools so I can adjust my often bad photographs. It allows repairs on the photograph, some little retouching I can make them look vintage, but I can also add text and frames, which I like a lot. It's useful and it's free. You can upgrade if you like to, but I found even the free app gives me enough to export images to my social media, either one by one, or I can export to an aggregator like Buffer or to Zoho Social or HubSpot, or send it one-on-one, for example, to my WhatsApp or my WeChat. So I like Snapseed, and often I'm amazed at how much we can do just on a small phone screen. One that I like for making a montage is Instamag. And Instamag is good for just cropping pictures and dropping them in, for example, to have 2 or 4 or 6 or 8 pictures together in random picture frames and adding text with them. You don't do a lot in terms of the photo filters, but you can crop. So if you've got a, for example, a number of different aspects of a building that you want to show, or I used to use it with Morgan, I'd take a number of different elements of the Morgan car and embed them to make a montage and then share that and then put a headline over the top of that montage, and that makes it a really nice piece for then sharing out. Another fun app which I like is called Instatoon, and that's Instatoon, and it renders photographs in line art with filters including original. So what it does, it takes a normal picture which you can either take into the app or open up your photos, and it will then do a line drawing of that photograph, and you can change the granularity of it And you can then change the filters. So it has some standard ones like Venice, Paris, Tokyo, which changes basically the hue of the— what effectively becomes a cartoon, makes it with different colors. You can also upgrade for just £4.99, and then you can add cities like Beijing and Berlin. Why those are part of the Pro and not the standard, I don't know, but I guess they had to make some the pro version. Now with these, you can also adjust the canvas, so you can make it more or less granular, make it look like it's on a sort of a satin finish or more of a rough finish. So Instatoon can export images, it can export a video, it can also make a live photo, as in when you press it, makes it move with the Apple Live with— that's with the Pro. And also you can export GIFs, so moving pictures. So that's beginning to make almost a movie. So that's good for marketing and making something fun out of something mundane. I'll use that if I've got a relatively standard image, maybe a standard picture of a person or a product, but make it stand out. And also what I can do, of course, is I can export an image that I've made in Instatoon into Photofunia, or I can import it to Snapseed or to Instagram to add text over the top to make it into something a little bit different. So photographs are a really quick and free way of capturing a moment. As we know, a photograph is worth a thousand words. So sharing with you that on your phone you have the opportunity to create really quite amazing quality pictures very quickly, slice of life that you could use either to share with a client, just, I was thinking of you, here's something I saw that you might find useful, with a member of staff, kind of a thank you note maybe, or with your followers on social media. And I sometimes use these pictures for media pitches as well. I won't talk too much about the distribution platforms because I think that warrants another, another, um, podcast in itself. But as we look at the Speak PR program, which we talk about— storify, personalize, engage, amplify— and no, engaging content is a central part of the Speak PR program. Central part of any social public relations program, whether it's through your owned media or your earned media channels. So I encourage you to take photographs. The great thing about it is that they're free, and it's not as though we used to have to process the pictures on 24 or 36 on a roll. Take pictures, crop, have fun, and get some excitement going, because pictures flowing freely through your social media channels will increase the frequency and also show that you've got a sense of humor, that you're involved, you're engaged, and people could well share your images if they're cool, and that helps to amplify your content. And don't forget, of course, you can take other people's images and you can repost those as well. So have fun with pictures. It's a great way to get involved in marketing and building your brand. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. And if you like this, please do subscribe or come to our website at eastwestpr.com to subscribe for our weekly newsletter. And if you'd like to work with me on your own needs, we have a mastermind at speakpr.co, or you can reach out to me at jim@eastwestpr.com. So until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, that you have a profitable and successful business, and that you enjoy taking some photographs using these great devices that really help us to build the brand just using the power of what's in our hand.