Here is a collection of free apps for creating social media posts. As you’ll see, these are apps that do far more than simply allow you to post to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. They offer a wide range of services such as providing free templates for creating tweets, social media post designs–and much more.
These social media post design templates will help you create engaging posts that stand out from the crowd. Whether your goal is to get more Facebook fans, increase engagement, or boost your Twitter followers, there are free apps available on desktop and mobile devices to help you with each of these tasks.
Canva (Web, iOS, Android, macOS, Windows)
Canva is a powerful, but still simple to use, template-based graphics design app. There are hundreds of thousands of templates, graphics, and photos you can use as part of the free plan (that goes up to millions of assets with a Canva Pro subscription).
When you open Canva, you’re presented with dozens of possible templates for everything from posters to Instagram Posts. It’s a lot to navigate, but there’s great search built in. Just click the search bar in the top right of the screen and look for something like “birthday instagram stories” to see more specific options. (I got 160 suggested templates just for that.)
Once you’ve found a template to work from, the drag-and-drop editor makes it simple to add your own resources. Just click Uploads then Upload Media in the left sidebar, add any images or brand elements, and you can drop them straight into the editor. One tip: right-click on any element and click Send Back or Send Forward if you want to move it behind things like the text (which you can double-click on to edit) or the image frame.
Like Google Docs, Canva enables you to share and collaborate with others, so if you want a second set of eyes on your design, click the Share button in the toolbar and then add an email address.
When you’re done, click Download to save your post for, well, posting. If you’ve accidentally included any premium assets, you’ll have the option to pay to remove their watermarks (normally at about $1 per asset). It’s a handy option if you only occasionally use Canva. If this happens a lot, you can subscribe to Canva Pro for $12.95/month (or at least check out the 30-day free trial). Pro has heaps of extra designs, and some nice features, like automatic resizing, a social media scheduler, and the ability to upload your “brand kit,” so you can easily add your logo, brand colors, and font to your designs.
Canva Price: Free for 250,000+ templates and 5GB storage; from $12.95/month for Canva Pro, which offers unlimited storage, millions of assets, and more.
Adobe Spark (Web, iOS, Android)
Adobe is the biggest name in graphic design, so it’s no surprise they have an app designed for making social media and web graphics. Adobe Spark (or Adobe Spark Post on mobile for the tools you want) isn’t as well known as Photoshop or Illustrator, but it’s better for most people. And it’s free to get started.
As I write this, Spark claims to have more than 34,000 templates for you to work from. A good chunk of them are Premium templates, only available to subscribers, but there are still thousands available for free. (To me, it looks like it’s a roughly 50/50 split between free and Premium).
Search isn’t as good with Spark as it is with Canva. The simplest way to get started is to select the kind of post you want to make from the home screen, then use the Templates search in the left sidebar to find the one you want, rather than to just search everything from the home screen. You can also create your own design using the Icons, Design Assets, and Backgrounds tabs in the sidebar, and, of course, adding your own photos (or pulling them from Pixabay) and text with the appropriate tools.
One great feature of Spark is how easy it is to resize and reformat your posts for different social media platforms. In the right sidebar, click Resize, and then select the different post style or design. Spark will then make a best guess at reformatting everything to fit. It normally does a pretty good job, and it should only take you a few seconds with the admittedly lovely-to-work-with editor to fix any quirks.
Spark is an excellent standalone editor, but it’s hard to overlook its integration with the rest of Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you plan to scale your business to the point where you need to use (and pay for) Adobe’s more powerful tools, Spark is the way to go. You can create libraries (in the Libraries tab of the sidebar) that are available across all your Adobe apps, pull in photos from Lightroom, and use Adobe Stock images.
Beyond the Post (graphic) design type, Spark also provides two other project types: Pages and Videos (available as separate apps on iOS). With Pages, you can build a simple, sleek web page that you can then share via a direct link. Videos is just what it sounds like: a basic video editing app that works as smoothly as Spark’s graphic design tool. You can even start with a template that will help guide you through ideal video structures for presentations, ads, and more.
The main downside of Spark’s free plan is that Adobe adds a logo to the bottom corner of your design. If you click on this logo, it will say Remove Once, but, after lots of testing, the logo appears to be removable in all designs—you’ll just have to deal with that upgrade pop-up each time.
Adobe Spark Price: Free for basic features; from $9.99/mo for premium features, such as logo upload and placement, branded templates and tools. (These premium features also come with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, starting with the $19.99/mo plan.)
Pablo
Developed by the social sharing app Buffer, Pablo gives marketers the tools necessary to engage an audience. Create images to share immediately, or schedule them to post any time.
The tool boasts a wide selection of royalty-free images, and you can also upload your own. A text editor lets you overlay your messages or company logo.
With layouts optimized for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Pablo can start working for you right now.
Skitch – Screen capture and annotation
Our go-to screenshot tool, Skitch pops up with a quick keyboard shortcut (Cmd+Shift+5 on Macs), then you can click and drag over the area you want to snip. We keep coming back to this tool because of the awesome and easy annotation features. You can circle things, point to things, blur things, and add text with just a couple of quick clicks. A product of Evernote, Skitch lets you save and store all screengrabs into an Evernote folder of your choosing.
Tip: Use the blur feature anytime you’re sharing an image with your email address or personal details.
Conclusion
Ready to create social media posts but don’t know which tools are best? These Facebook post templates, free apps, and design tips make it easy to create engaging posts that keep fans coming back.