Any social media manager with experience knows that images can boost likes, shares and click-throughs – some experiments have shown that posts with images receive as much as 2.3X engagement as posts without images. The process of creating images may be effort-intensive, but using images in social media posts is clearly worth that effort.
As a small business owner, you probably can’t afford the expense of purchasing images or hiring professional graphic designers. The great news is that you can create amazing images for little to nothing, using resources available on the internet.
In this post, we’ll look at six lesser-known resources that are great for creating visual content.
1. Bannersnack
According to a study conducted by G2 Crowd in March 2017, small business users are crowding Facebook and other social networks for marketing. If you’re one of them, you’ve probably experimented with Facebook ads.
Running ads on Facebook is easy enough, but creating content for the ads can be tricky. Designed as it is, Facebook’s ad platform requires advertisers to provide high-quality visuals for ads. Bannersnack is a neat tool that can assist with that requirement.
Using Bannersnack, you can create and test versions of banner ads, and optimize them for maximum clicks.
Here’s how it works: First, create a banner using the tool. Next, copy the source code of the banner and paste it on your blog. Next, check Bannersnack for click-data to assess the performance of your ad.
Based on the performance, you can decide whether or not to use the banner in your social media ads.
2. DrumUp
If you manage multiple social accounts and publish several posts a week, you probably create various images to go with those posts. You could save a ton of time creating those images by using a social media management app with an in-app image editor. An in-app editor will save you the pain of navigating to a separate dashboard, uploading your background image, downloading your finished image and uploading it yet again on your social media management tool every single time.
DrumUp is a social media management tool with an in-app image editor that lets you create simple images. With text, object and background options, you can quickly create images to go along with your social media posts while scheduling them for publishing.
3. Color Contrast Analyzer
Social media marketing is all about getting noticed by your target audience, and sharp images are an important tool in accomplishing this outcome.
Have you ever wasted killer copy on less-than-impressive images? Of course you have. Most social media managers – myself included – are not experienced graphic designers. That’s where handy tools like Color Contrast Analyzer come in.
Color Contrast Analyzer is a Chrome extension which analyzes the color contrast on web pages and reports the readability of text on contrasting backgrounds.
To use the tool, upload your social media images on your blog and revise the images based on contrast readings until they’re ready for use.
4. Skitch
Screenshots make for beautiful blog and social media visuals – there’s so much that you can express by capturing words, graphs or pieces of web pages on screenshots. And while you can use any traditional tool to capture screenshots, you benefit more from using one that allows for annotation.
Skitch is a screen capture and annotation tool that can be activated on any screen using a keyboard shortcut. Once activated, the tool captures the portion of the screen that you frame with the pointer and opens into a window where you can annotate your screenshot.
5. VAS
The prominence of the internet and social media has led to the decline of our attention span. With people’s attention span swindling, it’s become more important now than ever before to understand audience behavior, and to create content that attracts attention. That’s where VAS comes in.
VAS, or Visual Attention Software, is an app that processes images and predicts which elements will draw the most attention. The app’s also capable of predicting which path your audience’s eyes are likely to travel when viewing the image.
Using this app, along with a banner image editor like Bannersnack, you can optimize social media ad images for maximum engagement.
6. Recite
If there’s one type of image that you can create in seconds, effortlessly, it’s quote covers – and quote covers are very popular on social media.
If you want to increase social media engagement, you should consider publishing quotes relevant to your industry from time to time. It’s very easy to turn quotes into social media posts- all you have to do is place them on simple backdrops.
Recite is a quote cover creation tool that lets you turn quotes into usable social posts in seconds. You simply choose from a selection of backdrops, add text and share the cover on social media.
I’ve paid special attention to graphic design over the years, in an attempt to increase engagement on my personal and professional social accounts. Image tools have made the task much easier and more enjoyable. Hopefully these tools will help optimize your process, and simplify your creation workflow.