If you own digital signage screens or come across them often, you’ll know one thing – most of them stay empty. It doesn’t matter if they are in offices, cafés, or schools; most digital signage screens are either blank or recycle the same content for weeks and months.

Understanding how digital signage works is simple, but the problem comes with keeping the screens fresh with content. You have to:

Design or find the content from its source

Repeat over and over again to keep things fresh

What we’ve come to realize, is that whether you work in Marketing, or IT or are the owner of a small business, we all could use some help getting intelligent, beautiful content onto the screens that surround us. This leads up to the power of apps for creating awesome digital signage displays. 

Apps make it easy to use the digital signage software you have without jumping through hoops or worse, leaving the screens blank altogether. 

In the next few sections, we’ve outlined some of the best apps for your digital signage. They range from tools that can make content generation easier, to those that allow you to effortlessly use your digital signage for productivity and collaboration.

But first, let’s make sure your digital signage is all set up to use these apps properly.

Digital signage apps are fast replacing traditional media player hardware, as a way of getting screens hooked up to content. With an app like our ScreenCloud player, you can take a smart Android TV, or a regular TV along with a device like the Amazon Fire Stick 4K or Chromecast with Google TV and easily connect the two, to get videos, images, PDFs and HTML content up onto your screens.

However, it's important to understand that these consumer-grade media players are built for in-home use and are not designed for digital signage and because of this can be prone to performance interruptions and security risks. 

If you would like a more business-ready device that can withstand prolonged use up to 24 hours 7 days a week, and is purpose-built to minimize risk and maintain device performance, then we recommend a media player such as our Station P1 Pro device, and MeLE Overclock3C or an Asus Chromebox 5.

Let’s dive into the apps, starting with possibly the most helpful – apps that help you access continuous content.

This really does what it says on the tin. An RSS feed (otherwise known as a ‘Really Simple Syndication’) is a way of delivering regularly changing web content. These are useful for delivering news or headlines to screens in high-footfall areas such as offices, receptions, and break rooms. However, RSS feeds can also be used to deliver a feed of your blog posts, pull in the latest tech or start-up news, or read from your favorite sites. 

The benefit of an RSS feed in digital signage is that you don’t need to have your own feed to share content. Once you have the URL, simply drop it into the ScreenCloud RSS app and you’re ready to begin syndicating your digital displays with the latest industry news and blog posts. 

RSS Feeds are available on all ScreenCloud plans.

Our YouTube Live integration is another great way to access news content for your screens. This is perfect for your organization if you prefer video content to text – who doesn't?

With the app, you can easily enter a YouTube livestream or playlist URL and let your screens do the rest. If you’re planning content ahead of time, you can also schedule lifestreams for specific times. 

YouTube live is included in all ScreenCloud plans

Other amazing apps can help your employees and customers stay ahead of current news and events throughout the world. Some of these include:

The Live News app is available on all ScreenCloud plans.

In the high-flying world of finance and professional trading, you need access to up to the minute data about prices of the biggest commodities. Whether that's gold, oil, global currencies, FTSE 500 companies or crypto - our Stocks and Exchanges app has it all.

Allowing you to keep your finger on the financial pulse so your trading team never misses an important update.

You can easily update and customize your financial stream, with the trading pairs that matter.

Access the Stocks and Exchanges App on any ScreenCloud plan.

Our social media apps allow you to pull in Twitter feeds, YouTube channels, and social media dashboards, opening you up to a world of new possibilities. For many businesses, social media integration with digital signage means you can:

Showcase employee achievements and recognition

Aren’t convinced yet? Well, consider that social media has become an integral part of in-store experiences, offices, and restaurants as a way to increase reach, garner social proof, and connect audiences. At an event or exhibition, a social wall is a quick way to build hype, with visitors endeavoring to tweet or share an Instagram image in the moment.

When you sign up to ScreenCloud’s digital signage solution, here are some of the social media app options you’ll gain access to:

We have two Instagram apps that help you pull slightly different kinds of content from the platform.

The Gallery for Instagram lets you create a live scrolling wall of your Instagram content or zero in on specific posts. You can also choose from different layout options to maximize the visibility of specific content. 

Oh, and you don’t need to worry about that blank screen we were talking about; once the feed reaches the end of the stream, it immediately starts back from the top.

You can also use the Gallery for Instagram Business to showcase whole posts, not just the pictures. This is great for boosting engagement with customers and teams by displaying posts about updates in your company. 

Everything from social gatherings to recent events is on the table; as long as you’ve posted it to Instagram, your screen viewers can see and engage with it. 

Get Gallery for Instagram on the ScreenCloud app store.

This is a fun app that allows you to create bold and impactful social media dashboards that are incredibly easy to set up and which look seriously impressive.

Walls.io allows you to connect a Facebook page, Twitter account, Youtube playlist, or Instagram hashtag, moderate which content you like, design it to your branding preferences, and display it on your digital signage screen with a single URL!

The result is a beautiful social media display, which works in real time and pulls all of your social channels into one dashboard. Walls is ideal for the following businesses and scenarios:

Walls.io is available in the ScreenCloud app store.

Other options to highlight your social media messaging with ScreenCloud include Strea.ma and Taggbox Display.

Similar to the YouTube Live app, this YouTube app allows you to easily stream videos to your screen. You can show playlists, channels, and individual videos; or provide a search phrase that will pull through relevant videos.

It’s a great idea if you are set on specific videos, as opposed to live broadcasts. We highly recommend the YouTube app if you’re trying to stream your own channel or just finding videos to entertain and engage your audience.

YouTube Live and YouTube are included on all ScreenCloud plans.

Creation and productivity digital signage apps

You know that incredible presentation you did last month? Wouldn’t it look great repurposed and added to your screens? Often, we have lots of content that we can use to create awesome digital signage content, we just don’t know it. 

With Google Slides, you can easily create a presentation or add an existing one to your screens. Our Google Slides app can also be used to frame your latest sales figures, and graphs and even to create a series of customer testimonials that will bring serious kudos to your organization.

All you need to do is create your slides, publish them online then copy the URL into our Google Slides app in the ScreenCloud App Store. You can set the duration per slide in milliseconds and the total duration.

Google Slides is included in all ScreenCloud plans.

Our ScreenCloud CMS has amazing design templates that can make it remarkably easy to create digital signage content. But there’s no reason why you can’t use Canva and share your designs directly on your digital signage screens. The Canva app lets you do just that.

Use Canva’s embed code to instantly display your designs with no lag. Need to change colors? Don’t worry; the changes will appear on your screens as soon as you tweak your Canva design. Besides this seamless integration and real-time updates, our Canva app also has multi-slide support so you can effortlessly cue multiple slides.

The Canva app is included in all ScreenCloud plans.

Social media content and news aren’t the only things these apps are good for. You can also create a digital notice for any of your screens. Whether that’s for updating employees, informing customers of changes to your services and offerings, or simply keeping some messages top of mind.

Don’t worry; you’ll have tons of creative flexibility, from custom backgrounds and fonts to dynamic design scaling.

Learn more about our Noticeboard 2.0 app here.

As you might have guessed, the Dropbox Gallery app lets you connect your Dropbox account with ScreenCloud's digital signage software. All you need to do is choose which image folders you want to show and customize preferences like timing and background.

The integration is so seamless that you can update the image folder and automatically see the new images on your digital screens. No need to worry about resyncing each time and you certainly won’t need to upload each image manually.

Learn more about our Dropbox Gallery app here.

The ScreenCloud app store features a suite of useful, free and paid apps to create quality professional displays. From internal communications apps like Google Calendar, Slack, and Microsoft Teams to business intelligence tools like GeckoBoard, Microsoft Power Bi, and so much more. 

Getting started with digital signage content couldn't be easier.

If you’d like to learn about other ways ScreenCloud can boost your business’ digital signage ,book a demo here.

How can you create eye-catching digital displays for digital signage? By using ready to use apps and templates. Discover the best apps for your displays.

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How to create great displays with digital signage apps

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