Design Tools for Social Media is a collection of templates and tools to help anyone create professional-quality images and design for their business or organization. This bundle includes 3 Photoshop templates, 9 custom brush sets, 20+ themed photo overlays for your pictures, 15 patterned backgrounds for your images, 1 video overlay video background, and many more quality resources.
Design tools for Social Media helps social media marketing professionals build more effective visual content by providing a comprehensive set of do-it-yourself services and resources. Social media is a powerful tool that has grown in ubiquity over the last few years. It has become a necessity in contemporary business, with an average ROI of 3,000%. However, social media’s effectiveness is affected by the public’s perception of a business brand, starting with its logo. This book delivers basic design principles and concepts that are crucial to visual design, specifically geared towards social media marketing professionals who want to create effective visual content.
Tailwind Create
Tailwind Create is the tool you need when you’re short on time… and design skills!
If you’ve ever stared at your screen for hours trying to think of new post ideas, or been stressed out by starting all your social media designs from scratch – let alone scheduling all of them to your platforms – Tailwind Create is here to help you breathe easy.
You can start from almost done with breath-taking designs created for you by our smart designer. All you need are your photos! Tailwind Create instantly transforms your photos into hundreds of optimized designs for Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest with one click. Just choose from any of the “almost done” designs tailored specifically to your niche or industry!
The best part is, your brand styles (think: color palettes and fonts) are automatically applied to every post to keep your content seamlessly on-brand and matching the look and feel of your brand or business.
easelly
Pricing: Free Plan available | Student $2/month | Individual $4/month | Enterprise $5/month |
Platforms: Web
If your target is to create high-quality infographics for your social media audience, easelly should be your go-to design tool. The best part about this tool is that it’s completely free to use to start with — you don’t even need to create an account to start using it. However, you do have the option to go for its paid plans if you want more features.
All you’ve got to do is choose from one of the numerous infographic templates on its website and start customizing it to suit your requirements. And the best part is that easelly has a huge library of icons, illustrations, and charts that you can drag and drop onto the infographic design to further customize it.
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.
Canva
Canva is one of the most versatile free tools you can use for almost any digital project. It provides templates for perfect image sizing on all the major social sites (and many others). There are also sample layouts of text and imagery to give you an inspirational boost when you need one.
You can access a library of free graphics for your image, along with a wide variety of text editing tools. You can use Canva’s free images, pay a small fee for others, or upload your own.
We like Canva so much that we wrote an article about using it.
Skitch
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.
Pixlr
Pricing: Free Plan available | Premium: $4.90/month| Creative Pack: $14.99/month |
Platforms: Web, Android, macOS, Windows, iOS
Pixlr is yet another popular photo editor that doubles up as a social media design tool as well. Using this tool, you can seamlessly edit your photos to make them more attractive for your audience.
Whether its collages or removing backgrounds and adding layers, this tool can do pretty much what every professional photo editing tool does.
It’s also got numerous design templates that you can edit using its drag and drop editor. While this editor may be slightly more complex than that of the other tools, it does offer a wide variety of features so once you’re used to the UI, creating designs will be a breeze.
Snappa
Pricing: Free Plan available | Pro: $10/month| Team: $20/ month |
Platforms: Web
No list of social media design tools is complete without the mention of Snappa. This all-in-one design tool helps you create eye-catching graphics for your social media accounts.
Snappa removes the guesswork for dimensions by providing you with the right dimensions for all your social media designs.
All you’ve got to do is start with one of their templates and choose from over 5 million stock photos. You can then add text, effects, and graphics using its drag and drop editor to make your design more attractive.
One feature that’s particularly helpful here is its ability to remove backgrounds. Other tools offer similar features too but with Snappa, you can do it with a single click.
However, Snappa doesn’t allow you to edit videos.
Fotor
Fotor is primarily a collage-maker, but it does provide tools to create social media graphics. There are templates for social site cover art that use the proper dimensions for sharing in your posts.
Fotor will also create thumbnails for YouTube videos. After selecting a template (or uploading your own image), you have access to other graphics and text options.
When your image is complete, you can click a share button to send the graphic to your favorite social site.
Conclusion
From the globally popular Facebook and Twitter to newer, niche networks like Instagram and Tumblr, design tools for social media abound. Designing for social media is not just about choosing an image or type of content, it is about integrating these elements into an active, dynamic environment.