This last section is for those of us who live on the internet. There is absolutely no need for a social media scheduler if you’re just documenting your life, and I genuinely hope that we never enter a day where they become the norm! But for those who use social media for work, using a scheduler makes the process easier on a day-to-day basis.
Social media has become such a huge industry that the expectation for each post has really shot up. In order to grab someone’s attention, every image you produce has to give value , either by being (for instance) informative or exemplary. So, when you’re looking at the social media feeds of bloggers or brands that you follow, you’re likely seeing something that was scheduled weeks in advance. Using a social media scheduler helps social media managers wrangle multiple platforms and accounts at once, and make a big difference in helping you stick to the “big picture:” the story that you’re following for your feed.
I recommend dipping into a few basic social media schedulers to see if switching to a scheduler would help you spend more time focusing on the moment, if you tweet or ‘gram a lot. Buffer, Hootsuite, and Later are the current big 3 of the social media world right now, and they all offer something unique.
Stay grounded in the moment
Social media has become a huge part of daily life, but it doesn’t have to be. By streamlining your workflow with a great camera/smartphone and the right apps, you can cut down the amount of time you spend on social media while still reaping its rewards. Easy editing programs like Adobe Lightroom and VSCO for mobile will help you get your photos Insta-ready, which you can post when you get home or schedule to go up later in the month.
The better your process gets, the less time you’ll spend doing it—and the more time you’ll actually get to spend feeling as joyful as you look in those photos.
Explore smartphones and cameras online at Best Buy.
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This post contains images from theNotice and @thenotice, courtesy of the author.
For many of us, our lives are lived out on the internet—whether we like it or not. Social media is a place where we can connect with friends far from home, share photos of our best moments, and create an online brand that can make or break some job interviews. Taking a photo from camera (and there are many great cameras for capturing great photos) to social media can be a process that you need a little skill for, which is where this little reference sheet comes in.
When you’re sharing with friends and family, taking something from camera to social media is simple: just snap, caption, and
cacklepost. But for those of us who want their online presence to follow a certain brand, you’ll need to look at each image individually and as a whole. Following a coherent narrative lets viewers create a cohesive picture of you in their head, which can help you snag a role as a content creator. Or create a picture of your week-long vacation in Mexico that even your high school bully will be envious of.How to pick a social media-friendly camera
For high-quality snaps, I recommend using a social media-friendly camera to take your photos. Smartphones are great, and their quality can be fantastic, but having a camera can give your feed an extra edge.
DSLR-quality photos will give you a crisper picture, with more detail and less pixelation. You’ll also see better depth of field; that is, the parts of the photo that aren’t in focus will look blurrier, helping to really showcase your subject. Most DSLRs will also do a better job of representing true-to-life colours, and they’ll have a more even exposure balance across the frame. Best Buy has a great DSLR buying guide that you can reference if you’re looking for a new camera, but the point that I want to make here is actually pretty simple.
To pick a camera that’s good for social media posting, all you have to do is make sure that said camera has Wi-Fi capabilities. It’s a feature that’s available in pretty much all cameras on the market right now, but photographers using an older camera might want to update for the social media age. Even if your old camera still takes beautiful photos (which it probably does; great cameras don’t “age out” the way an old laptop or smartphone does), having the ability to send an image from your camera right to your smartphone is unbeatable. Travel cameras even offer durability and a compact size, which is often helpful for social media posts.
Wi-Fi image transfer and remote shutter apps help you create a mobile photo studio while on the go. They’ll let you snap a high-quality shot and take it from camera to social media within minutes, which an older camera body just can’t pull off!
When to use your smartphone
I prefer to shoot with my camera whenever possible, but I do leave it at home on a regular basis. If I’m going to be out for the whole day and I don’t want to lug my camera body around, or if I’m going somewhere that I really don’t want to be disruptive at, then a great smartphone camera is the perfect compromise.
Smartphones are a great way to take a snap of your date night dinner without startling everyone in the restaurant, and with their image quality always increasing, many social media users run their social media feeds solely off of smartphone content. My suggestion? If you’re managing a professional social media feed, you should be shooting from behind a DSLR. But if you use social media to connect with family and friends, then a smartphone is the better (and easier!) choice.
Smartphones are also a great option for impermanent posts, like the ones that you’ll see in Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and Facebook Live. Using a smartphone doesn’t always translate into a lower-quality image, either—the example used here shows a smartphone in low light settings and a mirrorless camera with a flash, taken within minutes of each other.
Batch processing your images on a desktop
My favourite part about taking an image from camera to social media is looking at the before and after in a great image-editing app. There’s something deeply satisfying about taking your shot to the next level, whether it was shot on a smartphone or a Wi-Fi enabled camera.
Social media platforms are designed to prefer high-resolution images, but many platforms will have a limit on image size. It might not even be obvious; your image may be discreetly downsized during file transfer or during upload to the platform. I recommend aiming for 1080px x 1080px images, which is Instagram’s current optimal resolution at time of publication. Twitter and Facebook have similar optimizations, as images that are too small will appear grainy and images that are too large will take longer to load the full-sized image.
For image editing, I find that using the right software for the job cuts down on the time you spend editing, even if that means switching programs partway through. Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop are the industry standards when it comes to desktop editing. I use Lightroom to filter images in batches, and Photoshop to make specific tweaks to each one. Casual users may prefer something like GIMP, which is is a free, online service that works like a slightly clunkier version of Photoshop. I’m sticking with Adobe, though: I don’t like that they switched to a subscription-based model, but their software really is the best.
Great photo apps to take your shot from camera to social media
I tend to edit images in large batches on my computer because I run a blog and schedule multiple posts at a time, but I find that most people prefer editing their images on their phone. (Honestly, so do I!) My favourite filtering app is VSCO, which allows you to control photo basics like temperature, exposure, and contrast alongside adding varying degrees of filters.
After snapping an image on my smartphone or transferring one over from my camera, I’ll open up an image in VSCO, tweak it for a bit (I have three “favourited” filters that I use for all of my work content so that it all looks vaguely the same), and save it to my phone. I’ll then upload it to my Twitter, Instagram, or Instagram Stores, and occasionally brighten it a little bit more in Instagram. Their Lux function is really handy—it adds contrast and clarity at the same time, which really helps make smartphone images look like they were taken on a DSLR.
If you’re not sure where to begin with image editing, I honestly recommend just starting out in Instagram. Their basic photo editing tools are pretty solid! Begin with exposure and white balance, and then let your creativity take you away.
Social media schedulers