Boost Your Social Media Engagement with These Tech Essentials Let these products do the production work for you.
By Mario Armstrong Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the September 2023 issue of BIZ Experiences. Subscribe »
As the leaves start to turn and the air gets crisper, there's no better time to snuggle up and create some content — whether it's that podcast you've been thinking about doing forever, or a video you've been meaning to edit, or something entirely new that will take your social media engagement to the next level. Here, we've put together a list of the tech products that will make you look like a pro, even when you're wearing sweatpants in your living room.
1. The circle of light.
Content creators know a ring light is essential to look good on camera. The 10-inch-wide Sandmarc Ring Light Wireless Edition [From $100; sandmarc .com] keeps up with your cord-free, content-capturing life with a battery pack that provides more than four hours of light at max brightness. The base holds a phone steady within the ring as it sits on a tabletop, or mount it to a tripod. Simple controls adjust the Kelvins from 3,200 to 6,500, balancing out the color. At just over one pound, this light is easy to travel with and recharges through USB-C.
2. Deskside deliciousness.
Few things crush your spirit like a sad desk lunch, yet deadlines (or travel) can make stepping away for a better option hard. The Steambox [$279; steam-box.com] puts a hot lunch within easy reach as you type away. The shoebox-sized, 4.4-pound rectangle uses a rechargeable-battery-powered heating element to turn water that you add into steam, which warms a stainless-steel tray loaded with your lunch. The Steambox holds about three cups of cooked or frozen food, which is enough to revive Chinese food leftovers in about 20 minutes and works without stinking up your office.
Related: How Content Creators Can Turn Their Creativity Into a Career
3. Two lenses are better than one.
Video doorbells have a problem: Most are aimed at faces (good!), but that means they can't look down at packages (bad!). The Eufy Video Doorbell S330 [From $199; us.eufy.com] solves that with one lens to see visitors and a second pointed toward the ground, to put your entire doormat area in clear focus — so you'll never wonder if a package arrived (or catch whoever took it). The hybrid doorbell works with your home's wiring, or use its rechargeable battery — and the 2K footage it captures lives on local storage without a subscription fee.
4. Small camera, big adventures.
This action camera is about the size of a wireless earbud case — but it can get even smaller. The camera inside the Insta360 Go 3 [$380; insta360.com] pops out, and at 35 grams — or about the weight of 14 pennies — it will hang off your hat, shirt, or selfie stick without much fuss. Click the pod back in and the full-size camera's touch screen flips up so you can watch yourself in selfie mode, even underwater. Choose between three aspect ratios to dial in the fit for social feeds or websites, and then start rolling with voice commands.
5. The mighty mixer.
Working with new tech can be challenging, unless the learning curve is based on something you've already mastered — like a smartphone! That's the insight driving the Mackie DLZ Creator [$800; mackie.com], a mixer that's versatile enough for newbie podcast producers to use yet sophisticated enough for the customization pros — and whose interface is a lot like a familiar smartphone operating system. Automix up to four microphone inputs while recording or streaming to a computer through a USB-C connection. No laptop around? Record directly onto the DLZ's SD card to edit the podcast later.
