One of the best things about creating your own posts is that you can tailor your message to each social media website. For example, if you’re creating posts for both Facebook and Twitter, there are different vocabulary words that grab an audience’s attention, depending on their social network of choice. Below are examples of words that are more effective when posting to Twitter versus Facebook. If you’ve purchased The Branding Bible or The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing , these examples will look very familiar!
Our free social media apps help you quickly and easily publish to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. With the free Social Media Marketing app you can: – Share directly from your Desktop to any of your networks – Schedule messages in advance – Save templates for quick creation
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.
Pablo by Buffer (Web)
Pablo is a minimalist tool for placing text over the top of images from the team behind the social media scheduling app Buffer. It couldn’t be simpler to use or in its design. To us, that’s a feature—but if you need something with more options, check out one of the other great apps on this list.
Seriously, Pablo is barebones. Open the website and you’re straight into the app. There’s no need to create an account—because there are no accounts. In the center of the screen, there’s a preview of your image. On the left, you can search for an image through Unsplash or click Upload Image to add your own. At the top of the screen, click Templates to choose from one of the six defaults. On the right, you can choose the size and shape of the canvas, add a filter, position the text, and insert your logo or another graphic. Click on the text to change its formatting, double-click on it to edit it directly. Oh, and click Reposition to change the position and crop of the background image. That’s literally it.
Once you’re happy with your post pic (and it won’t take long for you to be), click Share & Download to save your image or post it directly to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram (or queue it up with Buffer). If you do queue it up with Buffer, you can also connect it to any of the other apps you use with Zapier.
For all the lack of options, Pablo is still on this list. It makes it beyond simple to create basic-but-good-looking social media images. Honestly, by stripping most features, it just makes it impossible to create ugly graphics.
Pablo Price: Free
Snappa (Web)
Of all the apps on this list, Snappa is the only one whose free plan has access to the exact same templates, graphics, images, and other design resources as the paid plan. The catch is that, instead of having to carefully check what template you’re using, you can only download three designs a month.
If you only occasionally need to create images for your social media channels—or just want to create a one-off banner for your Twitter account or Facebook page—it’s really nice to not constantly be running into upgrade notifications. As good as Canva and Spark are, the free plans do make you very aware that there’s a paid plan they’d love you to be on. Snappa is a lot less pushy—but no less useful.
The other mild difference with Snappa is that its templates—while excellent—aren’t as thoroughly themed as some of the other options. (Right now, just before Christmas, there are only three generic holiday-season Instagram post templates.) You need to look at the defaults as a base you can customize and build from, rather than something ready-built that you’re just adding a photo and changing the words with.
If you want to make a birthday post, for example, you should look at the templates and pick one that has a layout you like. Then, open it and add your own picture with the Bkgrnd tool in the sidebar—either by uploading one or finding one of the included royalty-free stock images that works for you. You can customize it further by clicking on Effects and adding a color overlay, blur, or other adjustment—most of which serve to make any text on top of the image more legible.
Of course, you then need to add balloons. Because every birthday post has balloons. To do that, click the Graphics tool and then Icons. Use the search to find a balloon you like, and click to add it. To make sure everything lines up nicely, you can click the Toggle Grid option in the top toolbar and use it to position things perfectly.
When you’re happy with how things look, click Download to save your image or Share to push it directly to your social media accounts—so long as you haven’t maxed out your free posts. If you have, you’ll need to upgrade or click Save to keep the file until the monthly limit resets.
Snappa Price: Free for 3 downloads or shares per month; from $15/month for unlimited downloads, shares, and integration with Buffer and your social media accounts.
Tips to create perfect social media posts & tools that help you get your work done in no time
Tailor your social media posts for each network
Each social network offers different options for presenting your content. Social platforms not only differ in the number of characters, image formats and sizes they provide for your posts. Also, communities engage differently with content and post formats. The better you know your audience and know the way they are engaging on each social platform, the better you can address them.Tailor the message for your posts to fit each social media platform and audience:
- Adapt your comment to the number of characters allowed on each platform. Take a look at the number of characters displayed in the preview to make your meaning come through.
- Make sure your images correspond to the images sizes the networks provide. Consider adapting your images to create specific images for Pinterest and Instagram to make sure your message will be presented in the best way to fit these platforms.
- Share your posts to your social media profiles and pages with different comments for your message that will hit the language use of the respective community and focusses on their topics and interests.
- Share your posts on different days and at different times of the days. Networks and communities have specific rush hours for traffic and engagement.
- You can also share your post in relevant groups and communities on Facebook and LinkedIn but share them on different days and times and use different messages tailored to each group and audience. Make sure to follow the community rules of each group and only share content that will benefit the audience of the respective group.
Create multiple visuals for your content
Visual content is more likely to get shares, likes, and comments than pure text messages. Content with relevant images gets 94 % more views than content without relevant images. Visuals will increase click-through-rates (CTR) about 47 %. Infographics grow 12 % more traffic, and 200% more shares than posts without images.
Create multiple visuals for your content, such as photos, images, infographics, gifs, and videos. Capitalize on all your visuals to share, reshare and repurpose your content. For instance, if you share content that contains more than one image, share all your images – one at a time – to repurpose your content. This will extend the lifetime of your content and allows you to reshare your content without repeating yourself.
Tools to help to create visuals for your social media posts:
- Canva helps you to create visuals and infographics super fast and easy. Canva offers a huge variety of templates, layouts, photos and icons you can use to create professional-looking images.
- Pixabay, Pexels or Unsplash offer a huge collection of stock photos you can even upload to your Canva designs.
- Movely and iSpring Free Cam enable you to create animated videos and professional-looking screencasts.
- With the Internet Marketing Ninjas Tool you can resize your images for each social network quite easily.
Harness the power of emojis for your social media posts
There are currently 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard. In fact, emoji-based marketing messages have increased by 775% year-over-year. Emojis not only work for private conversation but can also be used for corporate communication to connect with your audiences. Emojis provide a global storytelling language and the can support brand building if applied correctly. Emojis in a Facebook post can lead to 57% more likes, 33% more comments, and 33% more shares.
- Make sure your emojis make sense to complement your message. Don’t jump on the emojis bandwagon just to have them.
- There are so many emojis around and some of them can be easily misinterpreted. Only use emojis that will be understood by your followers. Always make sure the meaning is clear.
- Stick with your brand messaging. Don’t blow kisses to your audience for promoting a serious business service.
Free Tools to Schedule Posts on Social Media
Buffer
Social Oomph
Social Pilot
Everypost
Latergram
TweetDeck
Conclusion
You can write great content but still fail to attract followers. To maximize your audience, you need to get the word out using social media. Each platform has its own best practices for getting the most out of it. For example, Facebook users like text. That’s why they don’t like videos or GIFs (graphical interface formats).