Video, baby! If you haven’t integrated it into your marketing plan, it’s time.

I often talk to my clients about video and how important it is, so today let’s talk about two free video apps to make your life easier.

The first one I want to talk about is called Magisto. It’s available for iPhone and Android. It allows you to create polished-looking videos from chunks of other stuff.

So what does that mean?

It’s a really simple process of three steps. First, pick your style based on the story you’re trying to tell. They have several templates to choose from. Step two is to upload pictures or other videos. Thirdly, pick your background music and it creates the video for you. You can even add text.

What does this mean for you? In the course of your business, you can create short, 10-second videos and take pictures – things that, separately, might be just an incoherent mess – then load these elements into Magisto and have one comprehensive, polished video. It’s so cool and looks very professional. I love it; it’s just a neat little tool. 

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The second tool I want to talk about is called Hyperlapse, which is iPhone-only. It takes a long video and condenses down into something short. Say you’re a realtor and you want to have a walk-up to the house you’re showing. It’s super boring if you are only filming a walk up for a whole minute. People are not going to watch that. But, with Hyperlapse, you can take a minute’s worth of video and compress it into 10 seconds. I find editing very challenging, when I have to cut something at exactly this second and pick it back up at exactly another second. This tool gets rid of that. 

The other benefit of Hyperlapse: smaller videos fit in Instagram stories better. Hyperlapse was built on the Instagram platform, so it’s really integrated with both Facebook and Instagram.

There are so many really good video apps, but these are two that make your videos more simple and polished. I’ll be the first person to admit I’m not great at shooting video, but I always want it to look professional. These apps help me to do that. There are professional versions of  both apps, but I suggest starting with the free versions first to see if those work for you.