We are fortunate to cover some AWESOME events via social media and we’ve learned from years of experience, that planning ahead is the best strategy to covering events.

“Plans are nothing planning is everything” -Dwight D Eisenhower

The more we plan, the less stress for us. Here are some tips to apply when getting ready to cover your next exciting event via social media!

Make sure you sign in to all of your client’s social media accounts. Log out of your accounts if you have to. The client/event comes first.

Follow. Follow. Follow. Follow the event speakers and sponsors on all social media platforms prior to the start of the event.

Plan social media in advance. Have pre-written social media posts and schedule them in advance. This keeps you one step ahead and keep stress at bay!

Hashtags are your BFF. If your event has a hashtag, follow the hashtag on Instagram. Use hashtags on Twitter and Instagram. I suggest you google hashtag ideas if you feel stuck on what hashtags to use.

Edit photos before posting. Edit the lighting of the image before you post. We edit photos using the photo editor that came installed in our iPhone, but there are tons of fancy apps you can use. Make sure all your images have a similar editing style. Don’t edit one photo extremely light and another photo extremely dark. Make your photos look consistent.

Keep up with technology. Buy a new phone if your cell phone is outdated. An iPhone 5 won’t cut it!

Use a social media scheduling tool. We love Hootsuite and Buffer the best.

Invest in a portable charger. You don’t want to run out of battery life during a major social-media-worthy activity. Trust us on this one.

Have a cute phone case! Because, c’mon, style is everything.

Get a mani. Yes, you heard me. If you are going to be covering an event all day (or for us, sometimes multi-day events), you are staring at your phone and screen, cute nails boost your mojo!

Engage. Comment, like, reply! The more engaged you are, the more others will be engaged.

Here are some of the most used apps that we use while covering social media events:

Square Fit: https://apple.co/2G4C24J
Square Fit allows you to post full-size images and videos to Instagram without having to crop anything out! See an example here. You can rotate, move, scale and flip your posts with ease, and the app even comes with filters, borders, frames, and stickers that you can add to your content. This also allows you to create posts without even needing an image to begin with! You can create a post on your own with the background colors, text, patterns, and border styles that the app provides.

Canva: https://www.canva.com/app/
Canva is a free design program that is perfect for people who don’t have professional design software or expertise to use! The program uses a drag-and-drop feature and has a variety of templates ready for use, making it easy to create graphics for social media and blog posts. Canva provides millions of images, photo filters, icons and shapes, and hundreds of font options for you to create anything you can imagine.

Hootsuite: https://bit.ly/1OgDxq9
Hootsuite is an absolute dream for people and businesses who run multiple social media accounts on all of the different platforms we have now. It provides a single space for all of your social accounts to be managed from, making it easier for you to find, schedule, manage, and report on all of your social media content. The Hootsuite apps allows you to schedule, publish, and monitor your content from anywhere, keeping you in control and in the loop wherever you go.

Boomerang: https://apple.co/1Mxxpx6
Boomerang has made a way for you to share your everyday moments in a fun and creative way. You can create short videos that loop back and forth to share with your friends with ease! Simply find something that’s moving or create a moving selfie, tap the button once, and Boomerang will shoot a burst of 10 images to stitch together to create a mini video. The video loops back and forth, and you can instantly share it to Instagram or Facebook right from the app.

Repost: https://apple.co/19Fdw4n
The Repost app is the easiest and best way to repost your favorite Instagram posts to your own feed while still giving credit to the original Instagrammer. When you come across an Instagram post that you’d like to share on your own feed, simply copy the link from the original post, open the app and paste the link in Repost, then position the attribution mark for your own post. You can then share the post with all original credits intact.