15 Best Social Media Tools for Content Creators: From CapCut to Adobe Lightroom

While creating social media content may seem easy to outsiders, content creators know that a lot goes into posting the perfect picture or video. In today’s social media landscape, making an excellent first impression is increasingly essential. Users who interact with brands on social media might be trying to establish if they want to purchase products or services. Therefore, social media marketers and creators must create high-quality content – and use the right social media tools – to put their best foot forward. 

On the other hand, there’s no doubt that creating content can be pretty time-consuming – between editing, planning, scheduling, writing a caption, posting, resharing, and measuring results, it can quickly become a full-time job! Thankfully, a wide variety of tools for social media are available to make creating social media content much quicker, easier, and – quite frankly – more fun! 

Social media tools are apps, platforms, and programs that help to streamline your social media content. The different types of social media tools include content creation, planning, and brainstorming, social media management, listening, publishing, scheduling, monitoring, tracking, and competitive analysis. They’re designed to improve specific segments of your social strategy and, used together, they can help you boost your social media presence and achieve your business goals.

The benefits of social media management tools can not be underestimated in an increasingly online world. We talked to some of the top social media experts in the business – including Envato’s very own social media specialist, Hannah Copeland – to find out which social media tools they can’t live without. The different types of social media tools they recommend include tools for content creation, social media management, planning, scheduling, reporting, and everything in between.

Behance is Adobe’s online platform for showcasing and discovering creative work. The platform is built around an innovative online community that shares their artwork, designs, and creative processes, which makes it a great place to research design trends or source inspiration. According to Hannah, Envato’s Senior Social Media Specialist, Behance is a go-to resource for content ideas and aesthetic references. 

“There is limited digital real estate, and audience consideration on social media feeds,” says Hannah. “To earn attention, you must contribute value to the scrolling experience, which comes from researching and producing original creative content. When coming up with content ideas or writing design briefs for social media assets, it’s important to use strong aesthetic references. I like using Behance as a search engine for creative inspiration.” 

While social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn are helpful for sharing, connecting, and engaging, they can also be great places for researching trends, coming up with content ideas, and learning what will generate the best results.

You can even go one step further and follow product managers and client partners of these platforms to be the first to hear about updates and new features.

“Social media apps are often great research tools/resources,” explains Hannah. “You can ask TikTok how to bring an idea to life that will garner success on the platform using the Search bar. Simply type in your product messaging idea – for example, ‘best PowerPoint templates‘ – into the Search bar. Then filter the results by ‘date posted’ and ‘most liked.’ The video results will offer editing inspiration that is trending now and getting the best engagement. You can echo your messaging in a similar format. I follow many product managers and client partners at TikTok and Instagram on LinkedIn that regularly post about new features for their professional network.” 

There are also many automation tools for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other top social networks that help with research and other social media marketing-related tasks.

Miro is a digital whiteboarding platform great for brainstorming and visualizing ideas. It facilitates seamless collaboration between users, allowing them to represent their ideas creatively. It also streamlines all collaborative tasks, including workshopping, strategy mapping, product development, and process visualization. As a social media tool, it’s perfect for creating a collaborative and interactive mood board to share across teams, channels, or stakeholders to ensure everyone is on the same page – literally!

“I use Miro for creating a visual mood board with ideas and hyperlinks,” says Hannah. “Miro is a great tool for grouping and connecting ideas – which comes in handy when planning for multiple social media channels that each need a slightly different TOV, format, or creative direction.” 

Adobe Lightroom is a popular photo editing perfect for creating aesthetic social media content. Accessible to everyone from professional photographers to photography enthusiasts, Lightroom is much more than a photo editor or image editing software. It also allows users to import, organize, manage, and find their images, combining photo management and photo editing into a single tool.

As a photo editor, Adobe Lightroom includes a subset of Adobe Photoshop’s features more tailored to the contemporary photographer. Offering a wide range of photo editing features – from colorization to photo manipulation tools – in one easy-to-use app, it’s easy to see why Lightroom is a go-to tool for many social media creators. Lightroom Presets are especially popular among content creators, helping them to create and maintain a consistent look and feel across their feeds. 

“Creating a curated, brand-cohesive feed in Instagram is a bit like making a good-looking CV for potential followers,” Hannah explains. “Using resources like Lightroom Presets helps to unify content and establish a distinct style.”

Later is a social media management platform and link-in bio tool that helps you plan, analyze, and publish social content in advance. Helping brands and creators save both time and money, it’s a tool with various helpful functionalities and features, including a dedicated content calendar, auto-publishing, a content generator, a link-in-bio tool, built-in analytics, and more. 

In addition to being a one-stop shop for posting social media content, Later has its finger on the pulse of social media news, making it a go-to resource for staying up to date with all the latest platform updates and algorithm changes. 

“Social media moves at the speed of light, so it’s key to keep up with new features, algorithm changes, and platform updates,” says Hannah. “I regularly read Later.com’s blog, which monitors platform and algorithm changes.” 

Initially made by TikTok for TikTok, CapCut is a free, easy-to-use video editing app. It offers a range of basic, easy-to-use video editing tools and advanced features such as keyframe animation, auto-captions, text-to-speech, motion tracking, background removal, smooth slow-motion, chroma key, and stabilization. CapCut is a go-to tool for capturing, editing and posting high-quality short-form social media video content for any platform – such as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or Facebook Reels. 

“My video editing tool of choice is CapCut, which has both a desktop and mobile version,” says Hannah. “A free tool made by TikTok, CapCut is brilliant for creating all short-form social media videos.” 

To leverage the power of video on social media, brands and creators need to be able to repurpose video content. If you’re looking for a way to transform your long-form videos into shorter, more digestible content, then Descript is a super helpful tool. 

Descript is easy-to-use video editing software that enables your to edit your videos like a text document and repurpose longer videos into snackable social media content.  

“Descript transcribes your videos so that you can identify and remove fillers, um’s, and other unnecessary words. You can also quickly add in text blocks and other fun additions while you edit, making it even faster to turn your long-form content into short-form goodness,” says Darryl Praill, Chief Marketing Officer at Agorapulse.

Talkwalker is a tool that monitors every single mention of your brand or keywords across the internet. The platform tracks mentions on news platforms, blogs, forums, websites, and Twitter, so you can stay on top of engagement opportunities. Every new mention of your keyword is consolidated and sent directly to your inbox, making it impossible for you to miss a chance to engage with your audience, community, or potential customers. 

“You must know what others are saying about you online,” says Parul Thakur, Social Media Marketer at SocialPilot. “Talkwalker Mention sends you an email when you have been mentioned anywhere on social media. It’s super handy for keeping up with any engagement opportunities.” 

Bitly is a link management platform that allows you to shorten and customize your social media links. Ideal for social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter, where captions and posts must be kept brief, Bitly makes the link-sharing process more manageable, consistent, and visually pleasing. 

Bitly also allows you to track and analyze link performance to monitor traffic and clicks. This tool offers several subscription plans, from Free to Enterprise, including features such as customizing links and analyzing clicks, automation, integration, and bulk link management. 

“Original links can often be tedious, long, and messy, so we prefer to shorten them,” says Parul. “We use Bitly for our Podcast campaigns to track the link clicks, traffic medium, and other location insights.” 

Google Analytics is the go-to web analytics service for tracking website performance and collecting visitor insights. It provides statistics and basic analytical tools for analyzing digital marketing performance and search engine optimization (SEO). Google Analytics is part of the Google Marketing Platform and is accessible to anyone with a Google account.

Google Analytics can be used to:

Using Google Analytics is an essential tool for tracking and analyzing the performance of your social media content or campaigns, helping to inform future content ideas, improve marketing campaigns, drive website traffic, and better understand your audience. 

“Google Analytics is key for tracking and reporting. It makes it easy to track website-oriented social campaigns – the whole team at SocialPilot loves this tool,” says Parul. 

Jasper AI helps brands, creators, and writers break through writer’s block to create succinct, high-converting content. An AI writing bot invented to create engaging marketing and social media content, Jasper can write blog articles, social media captions, Facebook ads, marketing emails, and website copy. 

Jasper can help you put words to almost anything, conjuring concise, engaging copy for even the most niche industries and products. This tool is particularly handy for writing copy when you’re working to a strict deadline, have a fast project turnaround, or need to repurpose copy across multiple channels. Many companies trust it, and you can be confident you’ll get authentic recommendations since it includes a plagiarism checker.

“Another top tool recommendation we’ll throw in is Jasper, an AI tool that can help you create all of the reams of content you’re going to need when you’re asked to promote three blog posts, a webinar, two new product releases, and a new hire – tomorrow,” says Darryl. 

Trello is one of the most popular project management tools on the market. Used by everyone from designers and web developers to brands, businesses, and content creators, Trello is a collaborative tool to track team projects and tasks, visualize workflows, and provide an organized project overview from start to finish.

Trello uses boards that contain parameters such as lists and cards. Each card features a broad range of task information, including a description, due dates, checklists, file attachments, automation, comments, and more, and can be moved from list to list as a project progresses. Trello is super useful for keeping tasks organized and is often used by teams to assign tasks, visualize projects, and track work progress in real-time. 

“I use Trello for planning and scheduling content. However, I love Trello’s Calendar Power Up the most,” says Hannah. “Having a shared, live, month-view calendar of content is invaluable. I use it as my source of truth regarding what’s coming up, with each day’s content having a final copy and assets attached and labeled with channel allocation.” 

Monday.com is a customizable social media management platform designed to streamline efficiency by tracking projects and workflows, visualizing data, and team collaboration. It includes automation capabilities, is supported by both a mobile app and desktop, and integrates easily with other apps.

Monday.com is a super helpful tool for all social media tasks – including building campaigns, organizing content production, prioritizing tasks, and monitoring performance.

“I love Monday.com as it can house copy, assets, and workflow updates in one place – which is great for communicating with freelance clients in seeking feedback and gaining approvals,” Hannah.

Falcon.io is a comprehensive social media marketing platform and a cohesive customer experience management tool. The platform offers features for listening, engaging, sharing, monitoring, and managing customer data on social media. 

Falcon.io helps you to stay organized, save time, and easily manage all your social media with scheduling, publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools.

“Falcon.io is great for scheduling content across different platforms and accounts, and it has functionality that helps streamline repurposing content between channels,” says Hannah. 

Envato Elements is an unlimited creative subscription offering everything you need to create incredible social media content. With just one subscription, you get unlimited downloads of millions of premium quality creative assets, so you can download whatever you want, whenever you want, as many times as you wish. 

High-quality creative assets such as templates and photos are critical to the success of any social media campaign – but finding them can take a lot of time and effort. The Elements library gives you a constant supply of fresh designs that will wow your audience time and time again. An annual or monthly subscription includes unlimited downloads, commercial licensing, and a vast library of customizable assets, including fonts, illustrations, video templates, stock photos, and audio tracks.

“Envato Elements is the perfect one-stop shop to get everything I need for a post, from graphics to templates, to mock-ups, to a massive stock library,” says Hannah. “Only needing to visit one website is a game-changer for creating content. I also love the ability to build a collection of items and refer back to them or send them to someone I might be collaborating with.

“Every item also comes with broad commercial rights so that I can use any download confidently on business accounts and in advertising. This is important as social media accounts will get flagged, and their quality rating will be affected if there’s any copyright infringement on assets posted. Also, Elements offers unlimited downloads in every creative category. Swoon!” 

Ready to start creating stunning social media content? Head to Envato Elements, get your subscription, and start creating today!