Improving Your Social Media Presence

Ten words without a picture is tl;dr

Whether you’re a marketer or an entrepreneur (who is by default also a marketer) I don’t have to tell you, that images and videos are important in social media. You’ve probably noticed that on Facebook you can add interesting backgrounds to posts that you make without pictures. There’s a reason for that. People just don’t engage with text only posts. Unless it’s a family member updating on mom’s surgery, if there isn’t something to catch our eye, we don’t care and won’t read.

Ok, so you agree with me on this, but if you barely have enough time to blog, post and respond to posts, how are you going to add taking or searching for an image (that you may or may not have to pay for)? Ain’t got time for dat, right? Well there’s help out there!

I just finished reading an article from StrongSocial where they listed 7 tools that can help the time starved (and graphic arts challenged) that are free to use (with paid “Pro” versions available). I was intrigued. As a graphic artist with myriad image factory accounts, I thought I would check out the recommended tools (the free versions) and let you know what I think of them. I plan to write up a review of one at a time, I want to give myself time to play with the tools so I will report on one each week.  I will rate their ease of use, library of images, customization and value as a tool—and whether I recommend upgrading. They tools listed in this article are Canva, Pixlr, Piktochart, Infogram, Recite, Stencil, and Makeameme. The article offers a brief description and has links, which I’ll include  with my review, to their sites. As a professional graphic artist, I use graphic art software, so I’ll also be looking at these tools in comparison with what I know well, the Adobe Creative Cloud (ACC)—mostly to see how much easier they are to use. 

Check back here and read my review of Canva, which was StrongSocial’s top pick. One of my clients loves this tool, so I’m looking forward to playing around with it!

In the meantime, if you have any favorite online image tools that are not mentioned here, let me know!