Create Professional Social Media Graphics Quickly & Easily with Canva

In this post, I’ll show you how you can create beautiful, professional-looking social media graphics quickly and for free using Canva.

One thing I hear from a lot of the people I work with is how difficult it is to maintain their social media accounts. They already know that content with an image gets way more shares on social media. So, in addition to thinking up or finding interesting content to post, they then have to scour the internet for a copyright-free, eye-catching image to go with it. If that doesn’t work, they even end up paying someone for a stock image.

You might think you need to hire someone just to manage gathering materials for your social media posts so you can get back to focusing on your business. But it doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming, and you really can do it yourself easily.

Let’s dive into creating social media graphics in under 10 minutes with Canva.

Create Social Media Graphics in Canva

1. First, sign up for a free Canva account. Go to Canva.com and fill out the form to create your account.
2. At the “Create a design” screen, choose Social Media.
3. Scroll through the layouts to find one that catches your eye. Don’t worry if the colors don’t match your branding or the images don’t mesh with your content. You can always change them.
4. After you choose a layout, fill in your text. Do this before you start customizing anything else. Your text will tell you whether the layout you chose is going to work for your project, so you can switch to a new layout before you overcommit.
5. Start customizing with the Elements menu. Choose an appropriate background image, add in your branding colors, and adjust fonts until you have a design you love. If you need to, you can even upload your own materials from the Uploads menu on the left.
6. Download your image so you can use it on all of your social media platforms.

Pro Tips

• Experiment with the transparency setting. It can help your text stand out on a colorful image. You want to make sure contrast between your text and the background is high so your image is readable even when it’s small.
• Create repetition. If you have a line across the top of the image, consider adding one along the bottom. If you use blue text, see if you can find a background image with a similar shade of blue.
• Consider alignment. In general, use a single alignment for the whole image – center, left, or right aligned. Left and right alignments are stronger looking and have more of an impact, but that doesn’t mean you can’t ever use a center align. If you center your text, make sure it’s echoed through the other elements in the design.

Canva is an awesome, simple graphic design tool. But it’s also really deep and feature-rich. Do you have any pro-tips for using Canva? Post them in the comments. And if you need help with Canva, get in touch with me!