Tried and Tested: The most useful online resources for student communicators
The internet is amazing. If you have an idea for a great piece of content, the chances are there’s a tool online you can use to make it happen. Even better — many of them are free!
In our team, we’ve been using a whole bunch of online resources to help us create, and distribute, great content for students. Here’s a list of our bomb-proof recommendations, tried and tested by us. I’d love to know about any you can’t live without:
Infographics
Infogram
Infographics and infograms are everywhere right now. In an age of growing mobile traffic, readers want quick, easy to digest information, and visuals are one way to do that.
Infogram makes creating infographics a breeze. Using your own data, even from an excel spreadsheet, Infogram gives you a range of different chart types, themes, and colours, so you can make your data come to life.
Price: Free to create and publish online. Upgrade to access more themes, download charts as PDF, and use custom branding.
Design
Canva
Let’s face it, we’re not all designers. But quite often you might find you need to design a poster, or create a banner image for your social media profile.
Canva lets you access thousands of professionally designed layouts, images, icons — really everything you need for design — and helps you slot them together to create good looking content that you can then download and keep.
There’s no substitute for a great designer working on your project, but this can help with the small things.
Price: Free, although some of the stock images have a cost attached.
Images
Free Stock Images
We would always recommend using up-to-date, high-quality images shot on campus, but sometimes you need to use stock.
Getting hold of images to use in your channels can be a minefield of permissions and licenses, and lots of free image resources tend to be free for a reason. (Hint: they’re rubbish.)
However, we’ve found a couple of free sites that produce consistently good results:
- Stock Photos That Don’t Suck is a post by Medium user @Dustin that brings together some of the best places to find free — and good! — stock
- search.creativecommons.org lets you search for Creative Commons licensed images on Google, Flickr, and many other places, all from one search bar. You’ll often need to attribute images, but it’s free.
Price: Free, but some images require attribution
Pic Resize
If you often have to resize images to fit on a certain website, you’ll know it can be a fiddly experience.
Pic Resize takes all of the hassle out of it by letting you simple typing the dimensions you need, choosing a filetype, and clicking save. You can even set a final file size if you need to, useful for those who use the T4 CMS.
Price: Free
Pixlr
If you need something a little more powerful than simply resizing, but you still want to do it online, Pixlr is a great option.
Like a mini-Photoshop, you can add layers of other images or text, recolour, add filters, and resize — all in your browser window. Just remember to save before closing the browser!
Price: Free
Recitethis
With some reports suggesting that posts on social media with an image receive 150% more engagement, sometimes any image is better than no image.
Recitethis turns a short piece of text — a pull quote or call to action — into an attractive image, with lots of options to choose from, and spits it out as a downloadable image file. Perfect for when you’re short on time but need an image.
Price: Free, but the image will be stamped with an attribution.
More usually found in the social media category, Instagram is also a great way to take and use lovely looking photos for your content.
Using the app on any mobile device or tablet, you can take a shot or short video and then use one of the built-in filters to create any style you like. Once you’ve published the image it’ll be available in your photo stream for use anywhere you like. It won’t work for publications or your corporate site, but for social media it’s a really handy way to fill your timeline with current, relevant images.
Price: Free
Social Media
Sprout Social
There are many social media scheduling and planning tools out there, but the one we’ve been using — and loving — is Sprout Social. One click posting to all of your accounts, on all of your channels, is amazing, but the best part is scheduling your updates. Write a month’s worth of content, and let Sprout do the rest.
You can also set up searches on both hashtags and standard text, to see who’s saying what about your services on social media, and you’ll get powerful analytics on all of your social media activity.
Price: Free for 30 days, then from £37 per month
Buffer
An alternative to a full-power social media tool like Sprout Social, a free Buffer account lets you schedule or queue status updates on one account per channel. If you have just one Twitter feed, and one Facebook page, then this could be a good solution for you.
Posts made through Buffer also have full analytics on them, so you can keep track of your engagement.
Price: Free
Mail Chimp
If you’re sending a weekly newsletter — or even something less regular — and want to see who’s opening your emails, and who’s clicking your links, Mail Chimp offers a high-quality email service for free.
Setting up a campaign is simple — choose from a template, or use a drag-and-drop editor to create your own — upload your recipient list from a .csv or Excel file, preview and launch! Mail Chimp will also give you a web version of your email, which you can Tweet or post on your other channels to save you having to duplicate your content.
You’re limited on the number of recipients, and Mail Chimp adds a logo to every free email you send. If you’re sending to more recipients, or want logo free templates, then speak to us about the University’s preferred email marketing suppliers.
Price: Free with recipient limits and Mail Chimp logo.
Litmus
Ever wondered what your emails will look like on the dizzying array of devices and email readers? Litmus lets you see everyone’s email inbox, all in one place. It also gives you powerful analysis on how long people spend reading your emails, and what platform they’re using — including mobile devices.
Price: From $79 per month
Analysis
bit.ly
URL shorteners are easy to find — any time you paste a link on social media you’ll get one. But Bitly take it a step further and lets you track every click of your link, wherever it’s posted.
We use it to measure the power of campaigns. Stick unique Bitly links on a poster, a screensaver, and an email, and you’ll build up a picture of where your audience is engaging with your content the most. Or you can just use it to save space in a Tweet!
Price: Free
Google Analytics
There is nothing like Google Analytics. We’ve lost whole days getting sucked into the endless audience, demographics, and behaviour data it gives you. So long as your webpages have Google Analytics turned on (speak to your web team if you’re not sure) you can get all of this for free.
Some of the most useful information available is about which of your pages is most popular which different audience groups, and where your traffic is coming from — such as how many users are on mobile.
Price: Free
Collaboration
Google Drive
If you often collaborate with others on content production or planning, keeping track of your Word and Excel documents just becomes painful. The collaboration tools in Drive make it a breeze to co-edit documents in real-time, with updates appearing instantly on each others’ screens.
You can also create simple, secure forms for collecting data from your audiences — think snap surveys or application forms — that can be embedded anywhere, and which store all of the data securely as a spreadsheet in Drive.
Price: Free
That’s our list, but there are hundreds — if not thousands — more resources out there. What tools can you not live without?
Originally published at studentcomms.wordpress.com on October 31, 2014.
