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How To Use Canva To Create Social Media Images
In the sea of social media profiles, it’s important to stand out from the crowd. The profiles that stand out and engage users get the most share of likes, follows and comments. The best way to stand out is by creating engaging visuals that grab the user’s attention. Creating these visuals can be very time consuming. In the past you’ve needed to have access to expensive software or the knowledge to design them. Thankfully there’s a solution in the form of an online software called Canva. In this short post I’ll go over the basics of how to use Canva.
Canva is an online tool that helps you create stunning graphics for the various social media accounts. It’s amazingly simple to use and the interface is intuitive. In this article I’ll show you how to easily create social media images for social media.
Create an account
To get started you’ll need to sign up for an account at https://canva.com. When you sign up you’ll need to confirm your account. Go ahead and look for the confirmation email in your inbox and click the confirmation link. You also have an option to login using your Google or Facebook account without creating an account.
Choose a design and template
First you’ll need to choose the type of design you want to make. Canva offers a number of pre-set options for you to choose from. For the purpose of this article, select Facebook Post design. You’ll be directed to a new page which displays interface controls that we’ll use to customize our design.
On the left side of the interface you’ll find a number of templates displayed in a grid format. These templates cover a number of different types of Facebook posts that you can create ranging from sales posts to birthday posts to event posts. Click on the Yard Sale template.
Customize text and images
When you click on the template, it gets loaded in the main interface section in the middle of the page. Next we’ll customize the text and or image. To change the text, double click on the text in the template and you’ll enable the controls to start editing. To edit the image on the template, double click on the image outside the text and you’ll be able to upload your own graphic.
Publish and share options
After you finish making changes to your template, you will then need to share or publish it. These options appear on the top right of your screen. Here’s some explanation on each:
Share: you get to share this graphic with other people and allow them to view and potentially edit it. This is a great option when working in a team
Download: this option allows you to download the graphic you created. Once downloaded you can upload to Facebook on your own.
Publish on Facebook: as the name suggests you’ll be able to publish this post to Facebook directly. Before you share on Facebook you’ll need to connect your account to Facebook. You can do this by logging into Facebook and authenticating your connection.
Premium options
Canva is a great social media tool and as you have seen because of all it offers you for free. For most people this is all they need. However, Canva offers some amazing features at the premium level and I’d like to mention a few here:
Brand kit: This feature allows you to produce graphics that are true to your brand in terms of color scheme, fonts and other visuals. Consistent branding will make your profile more memorable.
The one-click tool helps you publish your posts to a number of social media accounts at once and resize these posts to fit the respective profiles.
Animated designs: This brings your designs to life and wow your customers with amazing presentations.
How to Use Canva: Conclusion
If you want to stand out from the crown and grow your social media profiles you need to present engaging visuals. Canva makes it very easy to do just that in a few clicks. With Canva you can create custom visuals for all major social media accounts. Give it a try and let me know what your experience was below in the comments.
If you’re looking for a Canva alternative I’d highly recommend checking out Stencil. I have a Get Stencil Review if you’d like to learn more about it.
If you’ve tried both Canva and Stencil I’d love to hear which one you like more below.