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Last week I wrote about beginner SEO techniques and the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. In that article, I mentioned the need to include different sized blog graphics for each network in your post. Here is how I created a Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest graphic in just a matter of minutes, using Canva at Work (the paid version of Canva).
Set Up Your Brand
Before beginning this particular project, I had previously uploaded my brand colours and logos to Canva. I’ve also been uploading generic photos there whenever I think to take new ones. It’s so much less time consuming to create graphics when you have your own photos to work with and don’t have to go searching for stock photos.
Choose a Photo or Layout
The first thing to do is choose the photo that will be the basis of your graphic. If you don’t have a photo, you can use a stock “layout” from Canva.
I like to start with the Facebook graphic and resize from there as I find it works better that way. So I picked a branded layout to begin with.
Notice everything is already in my brand colour! That’s a nice time saver. I opened up this Facebook Post layout, changed the text, dropped in my logo, and added a different photo. I thought this photo worked better on the other side, so I switched sides. I tweaked everything to be centered and boom. Done. Less than 10 minutes (not including how long it took me to find a photo.)
Tip: Change the name of each file and add the network it’s intended for at the end, i.e. FB for Facebook. This makes it much easier to find when you’re uploading several that look similar!
Resize Your Graphics for Other Networks
Now that you’ve designed the first one, you’ll need to resize it for Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram. If you’re doing this the old fashioned way, that could take some time. In Canva at Work you simply click on the File menu, choose Magic Resize and pick which new sizes you need. Click on the Abracadabra button and watch the magic.
Canva will now copy all of your elements into new size formats, in new windows, for you to work with. Most likely you will need to adjust things as the orientation of each network’s graphics is different. For Instagram, all I needed to do was increase the size of my clown picture a bit. For the Pinterest graphic, I had to crop the photo differently, move the headline to the top and center the photo top to bottom. Twitter was actually the quickest adjustment. I removed the subhead and increased the headline font, then centered the font and logo. All in, it took me less than another 10 minutes to resize all of the graphics. Here they are:
In under 20 minutes I’ve created all the graphics I need to promote that blog post on each of the networks. I’m really loving Canva at Work. It’s making me actually WANT to create the graphics for each network, which will only help to promote my blog better.
Have I convinced you to try Canva at Work yet? What’s holding you back? Let me know in the comments!
P.S. I still recommend you hire a graphic designer to do anything that needs to be printed, your original branding/logo, and anything else you can afford to hire them for. There’s a reason you do what you do and they do graphic design. Don’t let the ease of DIY make your brand look bad!
