Photo Apps…Free and Worth It?

iPhones, Andriods, Galaxy and everything else, we all have some kind of device we use for photos and videos.  Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Mumblr, Twitter and Bitter or any other social outlet you use, a good photo is hard to pass up. You’ve seen ’em, you’ve liked em, you’ve posted on em, so why not get all of your photos noticed? 

It starts with a few basic rules – composition, lighting, and focal points – but equipment plays a large role, as well. Here are some enhancers for your devices that can help shape your memories to be.

And btw, all of these apps are free...

Photo Editor:  This is a decent app – similar to another one called Aviary. Both apps mentioned have a text 

editing option, but with Photo editor you can upload photos to social media outlets 

through the app itself.  

Pixlromatic:   This one’s a good app. It’s very decent for the iPad, and good for the iPhone, as well. It’s

        has a wide selection of filters and effects, and you can mix some of them together. Great

results are what you get, in my opinion. You can upload your enhanced photos to a      

                        predetermined selection of social sites, but not every single one out there.

Camera 

Awesome: If you love to take pictures, this is definately worth having. It has focus options, composition 

options, and offers sharing onto many existing social and photo sites. One LARGE

drawback, however, is that it doesn’t use the new OS feature for the iPhone so the volume 

volume button doesn't work for the shutter. 

Instagram: I would use this app as a last consideration, and only for social media sharing reasons. 

It’s very useful in that you get cool effects-control options. Instagram has limited editing 

abilities, but is good for people who don’t know photo editing software so well. 

You need an account in order to upload your own photos or view other people’s.

They’re worth checking out, and most apps mentioned above have recently been on top 10 lists of free apps, so if you haven’t seen or heard of them by now, I recommend you check them out.There are paid apps out there worth considering, but get your feet wet with these first. You’ll find that most of the time, they can get the job done and you’ll have plenty of options to explore and play with.

Written by: Saul Angles

Facebook Page Insights - Use Them!

   When trying to measure just how well your Facebook campaign or daily posting efforts are doing, it can get really confusing listening to all the different acronyms and conflicting advice about what days and times to post are best, and what not to do or do. Who should you listen to? The answer is simple: Your online customer or page’s fan base.

   Yes, there are some great tips about Facebook and what works for businesses. Photo posts are king, while plain-jane html links, or long videos are usually shunned. But where’s the best place to get information as to what works? All you need to look at are your page’s own Insights. Everything you need to see about what’s really working on your page is available within your Admin tools. All the advice in the world is useless without actively checking to see your page’s “health.”

   On the basic screen shown below, you have a lot of information available to you. You’ll be able to see how everything is going on your page, with the only drawback being a two-day backlog with some of the data.

Facebook Insights Graph

 
   Here you can see just how many likes your page has, your potential reach of content, how many people are sharing or talking about your content, and even how many people actually saw content from your page. There are two ways you can get this information. Either use the basic view with the charts available (shown above), or you can download even more detailed information into an Excel spreadsheet so you can really drill into your page’s worth.

   There are a few things I like to look at. One of them is the information on each individual post, which is shown below the graph that is depicted in the screen above. This will show you the virality measurement along with the amount of people who talked about the post. This is really what is connecting your fanbase on a day to day basis. You may notice that photo posts work better than video posts or vice-versa. Did that funny quote you posted to your status really hit it off with your fans? Now you can actually see if it fell on deaf ears or not, and make adjustments to your plans for future posts.

Facebook Page Demographics

    Another good pair of insights to work with are your Demographics and your Reach pages. These insights will show you the age ranges and sex of your fans, as well as the geographical locations, browser types used, and a whole host of other information to use. That, my dear reader, is the whole point to all this information: USE IT! If you find that your page is mostly being viewed by males ages 18-25, it makes no sense to post something about tips for expectant mothers, unless that’s what your page is about. If it is, then you’ll be able to see that whatever you have been posting is attracting the wrong audience.

   The bottom line is, blindly posting random statuses and links, or constant spam about your business won’t win you a huge fan base. Facebook is about building a community for your page. You can’t do that if you aren’t speaking its language. What works for your page that goes against conventional wisdom? Please comment below if you’ve found some other information that has helped you hone in on your fanbase, and visit our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/VSBrooksAdvertising

 By: Stephen Kish - Social Media Coordinator/ VSBrooks Advertising