Did you know Social posts with images get 3x more engagement? They get more views and more shares than other content.

According to Twitter, Tweets with photos receive an average 35% boost in Retweets.

Social Media Strategist Jeff Bullas reports that Facebook posts with photos receive an average 37% increase in engagement.

And Buzzsumo found that posts with images receive 2.3 times more engagement than those without.

That means if you don’t have a visual content creation strategy, you’re losing your audience.

But contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to be a graphic design wiz to create engaging and attractive visual content for your social media.

There are many free and/ or low-cost, easy-to-use tools you can use to make social media posts, banners, infographics, and so much more. In this article, I’d like to share with you my top, 6 favorite tools:

Canva:

Canva is a free tool, that in many ways has all the functionality of many paid design tools. Canva takes the guesswork out by giving you pre-defined templates to create social media posts for all the major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn,…

Canva not only helps you with what size each of your social media images should be, but it helps you take an image you’ve created for one platform and resize it for another platform.

The best part? Canva has a (forever) basic free version that gives you all the necessary functionality to create engaging and visually appealing social images.

Quozio

One of the best ways to show your authority is to come up with your own quotes. Whether you want to share your own or someone else’s, Quozio can help you do that fast.  You can create eye-catching image quotes in seconds.

Quozio makes the entire process extremely simple:
Enter your quote,
Enter the author’s name,
Choose your template.

That’s it! You’re done 🙂

Promo
if a picture is worth a thousand words then a video is worth a million 🙂

It’s true! Video content gets 20% more attention and reaches 3 times the amount of people than a standard post.

Using the right tool, like Promo makes all the difference when it comes to making high-performing videos. Promo has ready-to-use templates and it fits all types of content.

With Promo, not only you can create social media videos, but you can also create compelling video ads, product videos, explainer videos, YouTube videos, Instagram Videos, and so much more.

Piktochart

Infographics can be a fantastic way to display complex information in an eye-catching, easily sharable way. Piktochart makes it easy to create infographics by simply plugging in your data, customizing the layout, and sharing on social media.

It comes with more than 600 templates, that are easily customizable by just dragging and dropping elements.

 

Colormind

My biggest challenge is knowing what color scheme to use with a specific image. If you’re like me, and graphic design doesn’t come easy to you, Colors allow you to create professional-looking graphics.

Colormind takes all the guesswork out of the color selection process. Simply upload the image you want to use, and it will show you the exact color scheme of your photo. It will also suggest additional color palettes you can use in hex color format!

 

Pexels

Using complementary images to convey the right message in your social post is very important.

My go-to Stock photo site for all my images, including my online courses, is Pexels. You have access to millions of high-quality free stock photography. What makes this site stand out is its high-quality images of people, which are few and far between on the best stock photography sites.

In addition, you’ll have access to stock videos. You can use them inside your social video post and I use them all the time inside my online courses.

Before I let you go…

It goes without saying, regardless of which tools or platforms you use, to be effective at Social Media you have to first think about your strategy.

As business owners,  you have limited time and resources. As such you have to be very strategic about where you spend your time and resources.

My recommendation is, don’t try to be on all platforms all the time. If you do that, you’ll be spread too thin to be effective — and you’ll burn yourself out.

Start with one platform based on the following criteria:

    1. Where can you shine most?
      Each social media platform complements different sets of skills and requires different resources to execute.Find out what types of resources and skills are needed to be successful on a particular social channel. Then evaluate your current resources, and skillset to see if you have everything you need to be successful at it.

    2. Where does your audience hang out most?
      This is an obvious one… you want to show up where your audience is most likely going to be.
      Do a bit of research to find out on which platforms your audience is spending most of their time.One way to do this is by looking into which platforms your competitors are successfully engaging with your target audience.

    3. Which platform supports your market & industry best?
      Evaluate the type of content you’re going to post on social media and the audience who’s going to consume that content. Then do some research to see which platform allows you to showcase your content the best, so it’s easily consumable and digestible by your target audience.

Once you identify one platform based on the above criteria, spend some time to get the hang of that platform first, for at least 3-6 months, before venturing into any others.