Video has always been a popular content format, but in the last few years, it has simply exploded on social media. These days people are constantly live-streaming, capturing the moment, creating both short and long-form videos and posting them online. In fact, it’s estimated that by the end of this year, up to 80% of all Internet traffic will come from video (up from 74% in 2017). 

Quite clearly, video is all the rage right no - so how can you latch onto this trend and create beautiful social media videos quickly and easily? 

In this post, I’m going to highlight some simple, effective tools and tips to help you create amazing social media videos.

Are you ready to start developing your own video marketing strategy? 

Useful tools for creating social media videos

Creating social media video content is easier than ever - all you really need is to know where to look. In fact, you don’t even necessarily need to film anything yourself – these days, many video creation tools offer huge libraries of stock footage that you can utilize, along with images and music that you can add to your videos. 

Here are some useful tools for creating your own social video content. 

Wave

Wave is a super-easy to use video creator, which comes with a huge library of over 200 million stock video clips (although you can also upload and use your own visual content). 

One of the really cool parts of using Wave is that you can very easily create the same video for any format, at once - landscape, square, mobile, Instagram Story, Facebook cover and much more.

There are 30+ different formats to choose from - this is important, as you can’t share the same video on just any platform without optimizing first. It won’t look its best if you’re not using the right format for each channel. 

As for the actual video creator and editor, the tool is very easy to use - there are 5 main steps to the creation process:

• First, search for videos and images in their library and choose those you want to use (you can combine them as you wish)
• Then, start editing your video - add text (most people have the sound off when playing a video on social media platforms, so it’s important to add subtitles to your video if you want them to get your message), zoom in and out, trim your video clips, change the lighting and much more 
• Once you’ve finished editing the actual video, add a watermark to protect yourself and help promote your brand
• Although most people might not listen to the videos they play on social media, some still do – at this stage, you can also add some music background from their audio clip library
• And finally, your video is ready to publish wherever you want online – or, you can always download it for later use 

Adobe Spark

The Adobe Spark free graphic design app is an easy to use tool which enables you to create three different types of content:

• Social media images 
• Web pages with beautiful graphics
• And video stories - which of course I’ll focus on here 

To create a video story with Adobe Spark, you have a few different options to choose from - pick one of their story templates or create your own from scratch: 

The tool is designed to make the process as easy as possible - once you pick a template, the app tells you exactly what you should convey in your video story.

It seems quite basic, but the results can be stunning – you just need to right images and videos to use in your video. You can also change the theme of your video with a click (there are a few different themes, and you can play around with the colors for each one), as well as change the layout of a screen (fullscreen, split screen, title and text, caption) and resize either to widescreen or square. 

To actually create the video Story, click on the + sign on each slide to add video, text, photos or icons. They don’t have a video clip library, but you can search for free images in-app. 

If you want to record yourself speaking over the video, you can do so by clicking on the microphone icon that you’ll see on each slide. Alternatively, you can also add music to your video - either your own or one of the audio clips available in the Adobe Spark library. 

Biteable

Biteable is another great option for creating social media videos, as well as ads or explainer videos. 

As with the other tools, you can start from a scratch, however there are a lot of themes and templates that you can use as a starting point. 

To filter your search, choose what you want to promote, explain, present or share:

Once you choose a template, it’s very easy to customize it - you can change the text from each “scene”, the font and the timing.

Once you’ve added and edited all of your scenes, the next step is to change the colors - you can choose from a variety of color palettes or you can add your own custom colors to keep your branding. And finally, the last step before previewing and publishing your video, is to add music (if you want to, of course) from their audio library. 

Animoto 

Animoto is a video creator that can be used for creating slideshow videos of photos, as well as marketing videos for business.

Again, you can start from scratch or use one of the available templates - filter through the templates based on your objective: attracting an audience, sharing a product or service, telling people about your business.:

Once you’ve chosen your template, you can add more blocks to your video, as well as upload your own visual content (photos and videos), search for images through Getty Images and easily customize each video screen: 

You can easily edit the existing screens and the text, as well as add voiceover. Following your video editing, you can watermark your video with your own logo and change the style of your video, and the ratio to either landscape or square.

You can also apply filters to your videos to change the look (just like you would on Snapchat or Instagram), as well as add music.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter if you’re not a talented graphic designer or editor - if you want to create social media videos, there is now a plethora of tools available which enable you to easily create and edit video content, even with no previous experience. Anyone can become a video marketer. If a lack of experience is what's holding you back, all you really need to do is get a tool to help.

Take that first step and start creating.