Best social media graphics tools to use
Social media graphics is one of the most surefire ways to make your social media presence known. Depending on your company or organization’s aesthetic, your graphics should align with your product or service. In marketing, this is called your branding.
Once you establish it, everything else should follow, including your brand’s visual designs, aesthetics, and graphics.
A good number of times, while scrolling through your social media accounts, you will find a photo, video, or GIF that will catch your eye. These graphics did not come out of thin air, whether it’s a funky photo of a trending celebrity, a funny meme, or a long wall of text with color schemes. Some social media graphics can help you create them, and you can read up on some below.
Social Media Graphics
When doing social media marketing, the number one rule is to catch your followers’ attention. Uploading a text with a basic background image might not always cut it. At the same time, you don’t want your social media templates to look too extravagant, so much so that they already appear tacky and trying too hard to look cool and trendy.
Sometimes less is more, so long as they fit your branding. Amazing social media graphics don’t always have to be all visual; sometimes, the audience wants something they can easily read or repost to share. With that said, social media graphics are also about knowing your audience. Knowing what designs and fonts to use depending on your target audience.
5 Best Tools for Social Media Graphic Designs
Handling social media images and graphics isn’t always a piece of cake, even with the help of various editing apps. Luckily, you can take your pick from dozens of different images, videos, and other assets editing apps.
Some of them are completely free, but others require a membership fee or a one-time app purchase. Depending on what you need, below are some of the best tools for social media graphics.
Canva
Canva has over a million stock images, graphics, fonts, and illustrations to make templates and customize designs. While working online, your work is automatically saved, and you can also collaborate in real-time with your team members.
When you’re ready to save your work, you can save them in different formats, including JPG, PNG, or PDF. Canva Pro also offers a “brand kit” you can customize with your logo and brand colors.
GIPHY
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Visual content doesn’t always have to be good old photos. Nowadays, graphics interchange format or GIFs are all the rage online. Essentially, they are moving pictures that play on a loop, and they are compressed enough that they don’t take up too much space as a video would.
GIFs are a good way to bring attention to your social media graphics. It can be animated images or animated texts, so long as it fits with your branding.
Adobe Spark
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Adobe is the biggest name in graphic design. With Adobe Spark, you can create thousands of templates or customize your own. You can easily resize and reformat your design to fit any social media platform.
It is much more user-friendly than Illustrator or Photoshop. The app and its mobile counterpart have a free and premium membership, while the latter gives you the full works.
Prezi Video
Almost everyone will tell you that they don’t want to stare at a dozen slideshows of long texts when doing a presentation. Prezi makes your graphics so much more interesting. The app can help you edit videos clips and even make one of your own from scratch.
Prezi offers courses of how-to videos to learn all the ropes of navigating and using the app. You can learn how to make animated content and turn your presentations into videos in different formats.
Infogram
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Many organizations use infographics to spread data and information. No one wants to look at raw data full of numbers and symbols that make no sense if you’re not an expert without the help of some visual aids.
Infogram has an extensive library of templates where you can enter your data, and it will generate your chosen design or your customized brand templates. There is a basic plan with all the basic features and a premium one for larger brands.
What makes a great social media photo app?
The good news is that you don’t need to start from scratch when making your social media graphics. There are so many apps that can help with this, and many of them for free.
With thousands of templates, perfect image sizes, backgrounds, color palettes, and themes to choose from, you can save time and resources by investing in these apps. Below are also some things to consider when using a graphics and image app.
Beginner-Friendly for Designers
Design tools can be a bit complicated if you don’t have enough experience with them. If you have enough resources to hire a graphic artist, they will most likely have no problem using apps for pros like Photoshop.
However, for startup companies who have one-person operations, you should find a graphics app that is easy enough to learn and navigate for amateurs.
Some apps have great features but are not well-suited for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Sometimes you have assets that you want to go well in an Instagram post perfectly but can’t resize the image.
Other times, you just want to share your design from one app to another directly. Looking for apps that can do this will save you a lot of time.
User-friendly and smooth to use
Any graphic designer will tell you that your software is only as good as how smooth it can run. Some apps can handle heavy-duty editing without a hitch, but most, not so much.
If you’re looking to make some heavy graphics, like videos or multiple GIF sets, look for apps that can do this without too much lag and can preferably save your work in real-time on the cloud.
Wide selection of professional design templates
So many apps offer thousands of templates. As a professional business, you can’t just use any template. Try looking for assets and palettes that match your organization’s branding.
If the graphics can represent your brand well, then the app is an ideal one to use. Some apps let you customize your templates.
Multi-purpose
Graphic design tools are more popularly used for editing photos and posters. However, if you can do more than that in just one app, that’s a win.
For example, you will save so much more time and money if the app has templates for creating email banners, blog images, GIFs from video clips, flyers, and a hundred other things.
Do you need to be a professional to use a graphics app?
Many eye-catching graphics online are professionally done. Brilliant graphic design artists put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve to get proper compensation.
For many startup businesses, however, they cannot afford to hire one or at least one that can work full-time. This is why social media graphics apps need to be user-friendly, even for beginners.
You don’t need a degree in design to use these apps, though that would make things easier for you. If you are a first-time user, navigating and learning which tools may take a while, but patience goes a long way. Much like traditional art like drawing or painting, digital art can also be mastered through practice and experience.
Related Articles
Summary
Social media graphics play a huge part in a brand’s marketing strategy. If you can produce content that piques the interest of your target audience, you are more likely to bring in revenue for your company or organization.
Hiring a professional graphic artist is a sure way to do this. However, if you don’t have the means, photo and video editing tools can help you. With some online tutorial classes, some creative ideas, and lots of practice, you can make your graphics using these tools anytime.
If you are interested in content marketing, please email [email protected]
