I’m sure I’m not the first to admit that everything I post on Facebook is a photo or, at the very least, accompanied by a photo. And when I log onto Facebook, my feed is almost entirely images as I scroll past albums of friends’ recent abroad trips or link previews for Buzzfeed articles (amongst others).
Visual content has come to dominate most social platforms and there must be a good reason for it! According to SocialMediaToday, “Tweets with images or photos can generate as much as 150 percent more retweets than posts without images…When it comes to Facebook, posts with photos generated the most action, an impressive 87 percent of total interactions.” Need I say more?
Unfortunately, unless you have Photoshop it may be difficult to produce high quality, engaging images up to par with the clean and beautiful graphics floating about the Web. However, in the wake of the increasing demand for visual content on social, various sites and apps have risen that seek to make design and editing simple and easy for non-professionals and professionals alike.
These FIVE tools aim to help you produce stunning visual content that can be used on all of your brand’s social media platforms:
Packing the basic elements of graphic design into one neatly formatted and user friendly website, Canva is the go to for many when creating visual content without Photoshop.
Our fave features on the design platform are the design layouts catered to social media posts! These layouts include the perfect dimensions for Twitter posts, Pinterest graphics, Instagram photos, Facebook posts for desktop and mobile, as well as header and cover photo sizes for the relevant sites. Once you choose a layout, you are free to edit it however you want using any of the sites features from their fun and modern fonts to their wide selection of vibrant images!
Pablo is a more simplified version of Canva as it only offers one image size (a ratio of 2:1), which is catered most to Facebook and Twitter. This site allows you to write text over beautiful, highly contrasted images. Just like Canva, you can upload your own images to use and even add your own logo to the design!
Over offers the same elements as Canva and Pablo, but all packed into a mobile app! Unlike those two sites, however, Over is not free but since it is more catered towards enhancing your own images with its many features, I’d say it’s worth its $3.99 pricetag.
Over allows you to add exclusive fonts and art to your images to make them more eye-catching and creative. This is a great on-the-go tool for social media posting!
Now that we have moved into mobile apps, VSCO CAM is a free widely used tool for mobile photography and editing. The app offers 11 different filters and variety of photo enhancing tools including brightness, contrast, straighten, sharpen, temperature, and saturation amongst many others.
VSCO CAM is ideal for turning an average photograph into something more artsy or professional. Though it may take some time to master its many elements to find the perfect edit, it will be worth it once you see the great feedback after you upload your photo to social!
Afterlight is an image-editing app that carries a lot tools to upgrade any image. It is $.99 but it carries much more filters and tools than VSCO CAM. The app boasts 15 adjustment tools, 74 filters, 78 textures, and 128 different frames.
A fun aspect of this app is that it lets you play around with natural textures that mimic 35mm film light leaks to make for very cool, vintage-y photographs (if that suits your brand, of course). Afterlight is definitely a great alternative, when it comes to Photoshop, for stunning edits!
Each of these tools is designed to make your visual content look just as great as any professional’s would and they should definitely be taken advantage of! Which one are you going to try out first?
