Business owners and marketing managers are tasked with telling a story on social media to engage their following in hopes that eventually they will convert to clients/customers, and graphic design is the cornerstone of social media marketing – it’s the visual element that helps business owners communicate and promote their products, services, brand, and ideas. Our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, and visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared on social media. Without effective visual elements, brands lose opportunities to communicate a more impactful message to their audience.
While it may be more effective to outsource/delegate your social media management to a company like Green Apple Lane Design, many businesses have to spend years going it alone in the beginning. Luckily, it is possible to simply and easily create visually appealing images without having to purchase and learn a whole new set of professional software programs. These apps will help you jump right into making stunning images for your social media feeds, without a time-consuming learning curve.
Our Top Picks for DIY Photo Editing & Graphic Creation
Canva
Cost: Basic Free | Pro for a fee, billed monthly or annually
Canva is a graphic design platform that is available on the web or as a mobile app for Android and iOS devices. This platform provides thousands of free templates for everything from social media posts, annual reports, presentations, business cards, flyers, email templates, and more. One of the convenient functions of this platform is the ability to size your design to match optimal dimensions for different social media platforms. You can also find stock photos and icons directly in Canva. You can also add logos and company colors for quick access when creating designs to stick to brand guidelines.
Adobe Photoshop Mix
Cost: Basic Free | Pro $9.95 per month billed annually or $12.95 billed monthly
Photoshop Mix is a photo editing app that focuses on allowing the user to combine and merge several images into a single image. The technique of cutting and pasting images onto one another creates an interesting effect. You can merge multiple layers to create a unique and eye-catching image or edit a popular meme to be more relevant to your brand.
Adobe Spark
Cost: $9.99 billed monthly or $99.99 billed annually | Included in Adobe Creative Cloud Plan
Adobe Spark can be used to make graphics, short videos, and even web pages from thousands of templates. Create beautiful designs from your laptop or mobile device. The wide variety of typography makes it easy to choose multiple fonts that work well together in a single design. If you are already in the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem, integrating photos from your personal collection is as easy as dragging and dropping from Lightroom CC. If not, you can upload images from Dropbox, Google Photos, or choose from thousands of images generated from the web and populated into the app.
PicsArt Photo Studio
Cost: Basic Free | Gold Subscription $8 billed monthly or $47.88 billed annually
PicsArt allows users to edit photos or create collages with thousands of stickers, fonts, frames, and masks. PicsArt is available on iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices. This app is great for adding artistic effects to images like creating a stenciled effect or using brushes to draw on your photo.
Scheduling Apps
Social media never sleeps, but you do, so finding the right scheduler is critical to your brand’s success. Create and schedule content in advance to make sure your message reaches the right platform at the right time.
The number of internet users on social media rises every year. In 2018, an estimated 2.65 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost 3.1 billion in 2021. That means your audience and potential customers are browsing their timelines at all times of the day. These apps will help you schedule content, monitor timelines, view engagement, and more for multiple platforms.
Sendible
Cost: Ranges from $29/month (12 social profiles, 1 user) to $299/month (192 social profiles, 12 users)
This all-in-one social media management tool comes fully equipped with a wide array of features. You can choose to schedule posts individually, through queues or in bulk to Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google My Business, and Pinterest. You can also utilize the Instagram Reminders feature to receive scheduled emails with content to be posted manually. Customize content with the Smart Posts feature to tailor a single post on multiple platforms to display relevant captions, emojis, and hashtags. High performing and evergreen content can be reused with repeating schedules. Find and share content relevant to your audience with the RSS Auto Posting feature.
Hootsuite
Cost: Free for 3 social profiles, 1 user, max 30 scheduled posts | Plans range from $19/month (10 social profiles, 1 user) to $499/month (50 social profiles, 5 users)
With more than 16 million users worldwide, this platform allows integration with multiple social networks and popular sites. Some of the network integrations that this scheduler offers that others don't include Reddit, Tumblr, and Marketo. With Hootsuite, you can listen to what your customers are saying, monitor multiple social media streams, and schedule content easily. Extensive analytics reports can be created allowing you to pull data from 70 different metrics to track performance and make better data-based decisions. Unsure about the cost? Give Hootsuite a try with a free 30-day trial.
SocialBee
Cost: Ranges from $19/month (5 social profiles, 1 user) to $79/month (25 social profiles, 3 users)
This relatively new tool constantly rolls out new features alongside offering social media scheduling capabilities. This includes conducting competitor research. The main functionality of this tool is focused on category-based evergreen posting. Create a content calendar built on sharing a balanced mix of content with your audience. Once you identify your top-performing posts, flag them as evergreen and SocialBee handles the rest.
Later
Cost: Free for limited use | $9/month (single accounts) or $49/month (multiple user accounts)
Schedule and publish posts to Instagram automatically - no notifications required. Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are also integrated into Later. The visual design of this tool is intuitive making it easy and quick to use. Later is an Instagram Partner and uses the Instagram Graph API for publishing to Instagram, so your account is always safe. Find and repost quality user-generated content from Instagram with this tool. Grow your account by analyzing data generated in reports to create content that has proven to perform well.
Other Great Tools
Grammarly
Cost: Basic Free | Premium $29.95/month billed monthly, $19.98/month billed quarterly, or $11.66/month billed annually
Grammarly is like having a professional editor at all times. Don’t worry about typos in social media posts, emails, and reports. Grammarly automatically scans your writing for grammatical and spelling errors. This tool is available as a browser extension on desktop and a keyboard app for iOS and Android devices.
Mention
Cost: Free limited use with in-app purchases | Paid options range from $25/month to $600/month
Great for social listening, the Mention app allows you to know what the internet is saying about your brand. Mention monitors social media posts, news sites, and blog posts then generate reports on what is being said. You can customize the statistics to view data relevant to your business. Currently, more than 750,000 marketers use Mention to monitor the internet to build their brand and see what competitors are doing.
Thinking of trying these tools out? Share your final product on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram and be sure to tag @GreenAppleLaneDesign so we can see how you implemented some of these tools!
