Animate your social media posts
Every day millions of social media posts are being done. To make your posts stand out from the mass and increase engagement you need to come up with some creativity. According to Twitter in 2014, posts that include an image result in a 35% boost in retweets. This means your post is seen by a vastly bigger audience compared to a non image post. In this blogpost you will learn how to quickly create branded quality images, videos and GIF’s to include in your posts.
Branded images in social media posts
Images containing your brand colors can quickly be made with Canva. The free plan offers more than enough functionality to quickly generate some good quality content. Images can be bought from Canva for $1 a piece. Can’t find what you’re looking for? Pexels is a great place to find free images that can be uploaded to Canva for use in your designs.
By pressing the duplicate button in you can quickly create lots of similar images in the blink of an eye. Drag a new image into the design, change the text and your next post is ready to go. This way you can quickly generate content for a whole week of posts that can now be scheduled with Canva as well. Try it 30 days for free, I’m convinced you’re sold :)! They’ll warn you half way and before the trial period ends so no danger in trying all the features for free.
Animated images in social media posts
Make your posts really stand out by using animated images. As users are bombarded with information on their timelines it is your task to have as much people sticking with your posts as possible. The more attention, the better and how can this be done better than with animations like the one you see below! This might look like something that requires a decent amount of work but you’ll be surprised as to how quickly this can be made.
For these animations a subscribtion is required but this will only cost you a few $ per month and will bring you a ton of value! The free plan requires you to buy every image you use for $1 a piece, so that’s often more expensive than a pro subscription. The pro plan gives you access to a huge database of free stock images, unlocks video content, animiation tools and now even includes a content scheduler for all your social media channels!
The animation below is created with Canva pro and follows the same workflow as if it were a normal image. The ‘animate’ button lets you chose between 10 different animations like ‘bounce’ or ‘slide’ that are applied automatically to the elements in the image. Quickly create multiple animations by cloning the page and drag other elements into it or just change the animation type! Piece of cake!
Branded videos in social media posts
Lift your social media posts to an even higher level by using video backgrounds in your animated posts. For this you’ll also need a Canva pro subscription. I will explain to you my way of creating these short videos. Because Canva lacks a feature to remove the colors of their stock videos I turned to Pexels for free stockvideos. After downloading the video content that suits my planned post, I edit the video in a video editor on my desktop to remove the color by decreasing the saturation. The now black and white video is uploaded to Canva and dropped as background for the post! That’s it!
