Top 10 Apps for DIY Social Media Video (Android edition)

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Are you one of the 87% of online marketers who is already using video as part of your social media marketing strategy? If not, it’s time to get on the bandwagon…and make a social media video about it! There are so many amazing apps and programs out there to help you on this journey, you’re sure to find at least one to help you create your video content. Here are a few programs I’ve found to be fairly user friendly for those who are new to social media video production.

Phone Apps for Video (Android)

Ripl – Animated text over photos. FREE, $12.99/mnth to upgrade

Ripl is a great phone app for turning photos into slide shows. The paid version includes tons of templates to choose from. The free version is great if you don’t mind the small Ripl logo watermark on your videos.

3 free templates suggested each day (includes Ripl logo)
Customizeable colours and fonts
Add photos from your gallery, online storage
Suggests hashtags
Basic analytics
Save to phone (Ripl Pro, Free version won’t save to phone)
Free music available (upload your own with Ripl Pro)
Schedule posts for later (Ripl Pro)
Add your own logo (Ripl Pro)

Legend—Animated text over photos

Legend is another great phone app, but unlike Ripl, it’s completely free and no logo watermark. Legend is perfect for adding animated text on a plain background, or over a photo. You can upload your own photos, or search free Flickr galleries right in the app. Legend videos also make great “intros” and text blocks to build into other, longer social media video projects you’re making.

No background music abilities.
Add photos from gallery, storage, or Flickr.
Orientations: Square and landscape
Sizes: 512p, 720p, 1080p
.gif and .mp4
Save to phone or share to network
Share via Messenger or text message
Templates and colour combos cannot be edited.
Text cannot be moved around, it only follows the templates.

Loopsie FREE

Make parts of a video remain still to create a cinemagraph effect. This one takes some artistic creativity. You have to remember that you’re freezing a recorded video…you cannot “animate” a photo. Use the app to take a video and freeze part of the scene to create your own cinemagraph effect.

Using finger swipe over parts to freeze
If you freeze too much, animate and fix
Switch from landscape/portrait to square.

Hyperlapse–FREE

This app is made for one purpose only. It speeds up a long video to make it shorter. Think of those DIY or cooking videos where they speed up the long, boring parts. The only problem is you can’t speed up or slow down a small section of the video, it’s all or nothing. Good news is you can record in the app or import a video you took in your camera.

Video Editing Programs for Laptops

Animoto $26/month to upgrade and remove logo

Animoto is a cloud-based editing program with tons of templates to make you look like a pro. There is a mobile app version as well. The one difference I’ve seen between the laptop and mobile version is the watermark. If you make your video on laptop the Animoto watermark is two sashes across opposite corners of the video. On the mobile app there is a logo card inserted at the end of the video. I prefer the logo card at the end, but I also prefer editing on a laptop. There are some interesting weird glitches with Animoto where some Chrome users will have difficulty using it and older computers with a specific graphics card cannot use the Marketing side of the program. If it works for you, it’s great. If you’re one of the ones for whom it won’t work, keep scrolling!

Landscape & Square
Storyboard templates
Add clips from various videos
Customizeable logo, fonts and colours
Background music available
Voiceover capable

Wave—$59/month to upgrade

Wave is a great program if you have the budget for it. Because of the price I haven’t played around much with it. I include it here because it has a library of stock video clips you can incorporate into your video.

Landscape & Square (plus many other ratios)
FREE version 2 mins, low quality video
Stock video clips available
Add clips from various videos
Customizeable logo, fonts and colours
Background music available

Adobe Spark— $10/month to upgrade

I often compare Adobe Spark to Animoto. It’s also a cloud-based editor. However, I find it to be less stable than Animoto. I personally get a lot of error messages and crashes when using it, but others don’t. On wifi where Animoto works quite well, my classes often find Spark won’t. However, some people prefer the Spark interface and templates. The templates are quite limiting.

Landscape & Square
Storyboard templates
Add clips from various videos
Customizeable logo, fonts and colours (Pro)
Background music available
Voiceover capable

Animotica—Windows 10 download, $12 to upgrade

Animotica is a downloadable product, not cloud-based. It’s my favourite program I’ve found so far. There’s only one problem. Here in Canada I don’t seem to be able to buy the upgrade through the Microsoft Store. This program does everything a beginner needs to do and the logo watermark on the free version is not obtrusive, so I don’t mind it. Animotica works in layers, so you can layer text and audio, move it around, add colour blocks, and even keep a persistent voice from a clip and insert photos. It really does a lot for the money.

Landscape & Square
Cropping and offset editing
Colour correction and filters
Add clips from various videos
Customizeable logo, fonts and colours
Background music available with fade in and fade out settings
Voiceover capable
Free version is limited to five layers

Lumen 5 — $49 or $99 a month to upgrade

Uses your blog post or article to create a video. If you’ve ever thought “I could make a great video based on that blog post, Lumen 5 is the product for you. Paste in the link to your post, or paste in the entire text, then simply click on each sentence you’d like to add to a slide in the video. Lumen 5 automatically creates the slide and suggests an image. There are video clips available too in the Premiere version. You can turn a blog post into a video in 10 minutes or less.

Screencast-o-matic–$15 a year

If you want to show people how to do things on the computer, Screencast-o-matic (Aff) is a great, easy-to-use program to capture the video while you explain what’s going on. For examples of how I use this one, check out this blog post about locking down your social media privacy settings on each of the networks.

Whether you’re looking for templates you only need to insert your photos into and update text, or you’re looking for a more robust editing program, there’s something here for everyone. I’m still checking out other programs, so if you’ve got a favourite that’s not listed here, let me know in the comments!