HOW TO CREATE STUNNING IMAGES FOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

Including beautiful pin-worthy images in social media posts will do more than just make your posts look good. Beautiful images will bring more readers to your blog and will actually keep them there for awhile.

It has been proven that Twitter posts which have images in them are clicked on many more times than those that don’t have images.

But sometimes creating all those images can be overwhelming. I hope that this post can help to simplify the process.

First of all, to create gorgeous images, you have to either take the photo yourself and edit it to fit your social media, or you have to find an image online to use. There are several websites that offer free stock photos, and many of these photos are actually very good. Check out: Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash.

There are a number of great sites with free images. Just Google to find more.

Make sure that any site you get images from will allow you to use them for free before you upload to your social media platforms.

My favorite photo-editing tool is PicMonkey, so this post will show exactly how I use this site to create social media images. 

When I sit down to create images for a post, I create blog post images and social media images all at the same time. The only difference in the images that I create is the size.

I use similar colors and fonts in every image and I try to use a similar style in all my images. This is part of our “branding.”

To create images for your social media using Picmonkey, follow these steps:

1. Open PicMonkey.

First of all, open PicMonkey and choose “design” and “custom size.”

2. Choosing the appropriate size:

The sizes I are use are:

  Blog post – whatever size your theme recommends

  Pinterest – All my pins are tall skinny rectangles, some taller than others. For the regular     size rectangles, I size them at 768×1104 and for the long ones, 768×1304.

  Twitter – 400×400 or 220×440

  Link Parties – 400×400

  Instagram – square image: 1080×1080

                   landscape image: 1080×566

Facebook – shared image: 1200×630

                   link image: 1230×627

3. Background color:

After creating a canvas of the appropriate size, choose the background color for your canvas. If a photo is going to be your background, you can skip this step, but if you choose to put text on top of a colored background, this is where you choose the background color.

Click on the “basic edits” on the left, choose your color and click “apply.” Your entire canvas should change to the color you selected.

If you are using a photo click “overlay” which is the butterfly icon and choose a photo to import. Resize the photo to fit your canvas. Click “apply.”

4. Add text to your image

Next, click on “Text” which will open a text box on your photo. Move the box to the appropriate place. In the small box that pops up, choose centered, aligned left or aligned right and choose a font. Type whatever you want your image to say and click out of the text box.

5. Compress image and save

When the image looks the way you want it to look, go to the bar on the bottom and click the icon that looks like a stack of papers which will compress your image. Click save and choose a place on your computer to save the image.

At this point you should rename the image to something relevant. Use keywords that your audience might be googling so that your photo has good search engine optimization. Use hyphens between your words and leave out slug words such as “a” “and” and “the.”

6. Create images for all social media

Repeat the above steps using the size that is appropriate for the platform you are creating the image for.

7. Add alt text 

If you are using WordPress, when you upload the image to your blog, in the uploader window you will see a place to add alt text to your image:

 

Remember that alt text should be descriptive and should tell exactly what is on the image. The alt tag is typically used by screen readers which are browsers used by visually impaired people.

 Adding alt text is important because this is what helps your image be discovered by Google. And we all know that being discovered by Google can be a pretty good thing.

8. Repeat the process for all your social media platforms!

Use this same method to create an image for each social media platform. Click below to download eight beautiful Pinterest templates to use with PicMonkey. These templates are transparent and can be used as overlays with the images of your choice. Full instructions are included.

Don’t forget to pin this post on Pinterest!