One of the big takeaways from Social Media Marketing World 2015 was
the importance of visual content. As Donna Moritz notes, “My session on
Thursday morning was all about visual content… There was an underlying
message that I wanted to get across: Visual content drives traffic and
sales.” Click here to read her full article.
Hearing that visual content is essential shouldn’t come as any great
surprise to anyone. Our frequent use of social media has trained us to
be a scrolling society. Think about the time you spend on Facebook or
Instagram: you scroll until something catches your eye – something
visual typically.
While Twitter may have begun as a microblogging site with its 140
character updates, the Twitter you experience today is rich and
immersive, full of images and videos.
But how do you create amazing visual content that works and drives more clicks to your website
from Twitter?
Here are 5 Tools To Make Awesome Images For Twitter:
The days of needing to know Photoshop are behind us! Canva has
templates created in the best size for each social network (for Twitter,
it’s 1024 x 512) and also allows for custom sizes. From the menu,
choose your layout, search for images, purchase stock images, add
effects, and customize typography and colors to match your own branding.
The drag and drop environment makes it easy to use and your designs
save automatically, allowing you to easily go back and make changes
later.
PicMonkey is another great start-to-finish tool. Crop images and add
overlays and text or create your own unique design from scratch using
custom dimensions. The free version of PicMonkey provides a wide variety
of frames, special effects and font types to choose from.
WordSwag
WordSwag is one of the best options for creating great images on the
go. This easy-to-use mobile app allows you to choose from a variety of
quotes or type your own custom text, search for stock images, add
filters, and change the text and design, all at the touch of a button.
Create beautiful images in minutes that you can post directly to
Twitter. The only downside of using WordSwag for Twitter is that the
images are all cropped square, which means some of the text may not be
readable until clicked. Nonetheless, most Twitter users are still not
taking advantage of the visual nature of Twitter, so merely having a
brightly colored image will drive clicks.
Rhonna Designs
Rhonna Designs is another mobile app tool that will allow you to
create beautiful images. This app takes a little more time to get used
to, but it also allows you to do a lot more custom design work than
WordSwag. Choose from hundreds of small components or templates, enhance
text with shadows, add banners, borders, or choose from the selection
of captions, catch phrases or inspirational words. While it’s definitely
more complicated than WordSwag, it’s worth playing with, as it’s loaded
with options and the typography and icons are beautiful. They currently
don’t offer the exact size for Twitter, however, the 16:9 image ratio
comes pretty close.
If you’re looking for something more similar to Photoshop, try
Paint.NET. This tool is free for PC users and has many of the same
features that are available in Photoshop. It supports layers and offers a
number of special photo effects. You can draw shapes, add text and
recolor you image. You can even cut out your images and remove the
backgrounds.
Final Thoughts on Creating Clickable Images
Whether you need a desktop tool or something that lets you create
images on the go, there are a lot of free or low cost options available
today that allow you to easily create eye-catching, clickable images.
And if that isn’t motivation enough, keep in mind that engagement can be
as much as 200 percent higher
for tweets that contain images, as opposed to text only updates. So
while you may not necessarily need to make EVERY tweet an image, it’s
definitely worth the extra effort to turn some of your tweets into
images.
What’s your favorite tool for creating click-worthy images for social media?
Sources: http://www.socialquant.net/images-for-twitter/
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