Top 10 Free Resources for PR Pros
If you’re anything like me, you’re always looking for the best free resources to use for anything and everything. As PR professionals, we have to be nimble, thrifty and creative when it comes to doing our job, and that sometimes means using the free resources around us. Read on to learn more about my favorite apps, add-ons and websites with free tools that can make life easier whether you’re a communicator, marketer, creator or writer.
Grammarly – Because we all need a little grammar support. Grammarly’s digital writing assistant supports clean, mistake-free writing while offering suggestions that go way beyond grammar. Think of it as spell check on steroids. Improve and strengthen your everyday writing with a free account or step up your writing game even more with a Premium account.
Canva – An easy design tool, Canva provides online design and publishing capabilities for the beginner creative or professional designer. From presentations and text animations to photo effects and team collaboration, create complex designs with Canva’s easy-to-use suite of features.
Hootsuite – For monitoring and organizing your social accounts. Hootsuite uses social media’s incredibly powerful platforms to build relationships, uncover consumer insights and create seamless customer experiences across channels. Save time by scheduling posts across all your social networks in just a few clicks. Take your social marketing, sales and service to new levels with Hootsuite.
HARO – Reporters looking for story sources. HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, connects journalists seeking expertise to include in their content with sources who have that knowledge. Its straight-forward pitching process allows sources to find topics related to their expertise, industry or experience, while allowing journalists and bloggers to spend more time writing and less time sourcing.
ClipGrab – To pull and download videos from the web. ClipGrab officially supports the download from a handful of video websites, including YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and Facebook. It has been praised for having a clean and easy user interface and can convert downloaded files to other formats such as MPC, MPEG4, OGG Theora or WMV.
Clipchamp – Easy video editing. Create videos in no time with this popular free video editor. Whether you need to save time on uploads, save money on storage or create an entire video from scratch, if it’s anything to do with video, Clipchamp is a great place to start.
Bit.ly – URL shortener. Bit.ly helps you create, share and monitor secure links by working faster and more intelligently with features like branded links and the ability to redirect any link. You can even create custom links with your chosen domain name, making your links consistently recognizable across channels.
Adobe Spark – For social media graphics, web and video. Adobe Spark makes it easy to create social graphics, web pages and short videos. The application even allows you to add your brand to all your designs to make anything you create uniquely yours.
Google Alerts – For media monitoring. Google Alerts is a content notification service that sends emails directly to your inbox when it finds new results in web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, etc., that match the search terms you set up. Keep track of clients, projects and more with this easy, helpful tool.
Google Trends – Track Interest in a topic over time. Google Trends shows how often a term is searched in Google’s search engine and analyzes the popularity of top searches across regions and languages. This tool can help marketers better understand their audience and interests in real-time with eye-catching graphs and charts.
Over the years I’ve tried so many of the free resources on the market, but these are the ones that I’ve stuck with that really make my days so much easier. Most tools work across platforms and devices and can be used through their websites, web browser add-ons, desktop applications and smartphone apps. What are your favorite free resources? Let me know if I left any out!