Ripl App Review: Content Creation Made Easy
- Paul Mauceri
- Sep 18, 2017
- 4 min read
As PR professionals, one of our many tasks includes creating and distributing great looking content for our clients. The mobile app Ripl enables us to do this with considerable ease through professional-looking eye-grabbing animated posts. Whether you’re promoting a business, an event, a training or class, or just want to spice up your own personal social media pages, the Ripl app is a great option to make your posts stand out and enhance your social media marketing.
Setup and Installation
The Ripl app is available for download on iOS mobile devices and tablets that run iOS 8 and also for Android devices that run 6.0 or higher. It is not available for desktop use. According to Ripl’s FAQ page, the vision behind the app was it would be for “small business owners [who] are in constant motion.”
The app was easy to download from Apple’s App Store and you can set up your account through Google, which makes it quick and painless if you have a Google account and choose this option.
Basic Features
Once you have set up your Ripl account you can easily connect it with your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts by going to “Account Settings.” Ripl will automatically locate any of these accounts and allow you to choose which ones you want to connect to the app. Ripl will only allow you to connect to one personal Facebook account but you can share posts to any others you administer or to which you have publishing rights. You can connect Ripl to more than one Twitter and Instagram account but, since Instagram does not allow auto-posting, you will be prompted to launch it when you are ready to share a post on their site.
Once you’re up and running, it’s pretty intuitive, as well as fun! There is a “+” sign at the bottom of the screen that brings up the next “Create a Post” screen where you can select up to 8 photos from your phone’s photo library and add primary and secondary text for whatever announcements you want to go along with your post.
I really like that your post can include multiple images that dissolve into one another, unlike on Instagram where you can have multiple photos in a post but one has to manually scroll through each one.
Then, you get to customize the post with a variety of features, including select fonts, text and image layouts, as well as a soundtrack. The ability to make animated posts is Ripl’s key feature but you also have the option of it being a still photo.
The next and last step is writing a caption and sharing your post and Ripl gives you the option to share it with any social media account to which it is connected. Another cool feature is Ripl suggests hashtags based on the content of your post, which you can choose not to use and/or add additional ones.
Another great feature Ripl provides is tracking engagement on each of your posts with the three social media sites with which it connects, including Likes, Comments, Clicks, and Re-Tweets. This is a great PR tool in that it lets you see the results of your social media marketing within the app itself. You would need to go to the actual social media site itself in order to engage with other users.
Free vs. Pro Version
As with any app of this nature, there is always the option of upgrading to a premium version which comes with a host of additional features that, depending on your needs, may or may not be worth it. It costs $9.99 per month and the additional features and tools that come with Ripl Pro include access to many more design options, such as hundreds of fonts (the free version only offers a handful from which to choose), a much greater music selection as well as the option of using your own personal music for audio branding, uploading your own logo to each post (in the free version Ripl automatically add its logo to each post you upload through it), and the ability to schedule your posts, similar to other social media scheduling platforms like Hootsuite and SocialPilot. Whether the $9.99 per month price tag to upgrade to Ripl Pro is worth it clearly depends on how integral it is to your business. For just getting started, I feel there is a decent amount offered through the free version to get some great looking posts out to your social media sites. They do offer a free Ripl Pro 7-day trial.
Drawbacks
For the most part, what you get for the free version of Ripl is impressive. It would obviously be great if some of the features from the Pro version were available for the free version as well, such as the music and scheduling options. It would also be nice if it could connect with additional social media sites, for example LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Snapchat. A few other nice additions would be the ability to save some common settings as a default template, rather than having to approximate them each time you create a new post, to ensure consistency in your messaging and branding, the ability to use videos in addition to photos, and having a desktop version, even though this goes against the creators’ original vision. When working with photographs, having a bigger screen can often help with editing some of the finer details.
Wish App
Anyone working in PR knows the ability to do their job on the go is crucial and inevitable in today’s mobile device dominated world. Creating content for a client, whether it be for a business or any other type of entity, is also often a collaborative process. For me, a dream app would have many of the features included with Ripl, especially its Pro version, coupled with a sharing option, like those featured on note taking apps like Evernote. This way a team can participate in the creation process and contribute more ideas to make the content be the best it can be and true and consistent to the brand’s image.
But for what it has to offer, including the ease to get set up and start using it right away to make some pretty impressive looking content, Ripl is a nice app to have handy in the content creation space and provides an easy effective way to contribute to your overall PR and social media marketing efforts.
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