Running a social media page for your business can seem like a real challenge at times. With social media becoming ever more sophisticated it can sometimes feel like if you don’t have advanced degrees in graphic design, English and marketing you’re already behind the game. This blog post will be a two part series that will highlight some easy and free tools that can help you create social media content like a pro.

InfographicCanva – Canva is probably my favorite tool on this list hence the reason it’s first. This is a free website that allows you to select from thousands of different templates for flyers, social media graphics, email headers, business cards and so much more. I think one of the best and most applicable services Canva can provide is helping create info graphics, which is quickly becoming the latest trend in social media marketing. For those who may not be as up to date on their social media terms an info graphic is just a visual representation of what is typically the drier information about a topic like statistics. Here is an example of an info graphic I made for a class that is about my school, The University of Akron. This graphic only took me about 20 minute to create yet it looks professional and has a lot of good information. The best part is most things on Canva are either free of you have to pay one dollar for an image or illustration which can really be worth it. If you’re interested in using Canva for your next social media post you can create an account here **.

Fotor – Fotor is a tool I just recently discovered. It’s similar to Canva in the sense that you can create a lot of the same kinds of graphics on this website, but I think where Fotor really shines is in its photo editing capabilities. You can crop photos, adjust the exposure, add vignettes, resize photos and so much more. This can be a really valuable tool if you don’t have Photoshop (or have no clue how to use it) because photos can often need small edits to look their best online. Fotor also allows for you to create photo collages that can look really impressive with relatively little effort. If you’d like to try your hand at some basic photo editing you can create a Fotor account here.

This concludes part one of this two part social media content blog post. Hopefully, you have learned from this post that you do not necessarily need to know how to use more “heavy duty” graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop and Adobe InDesign, and it is my hope that you will use these tools to create some awesome content for your next post on social. Next week I will be highlighting tools that help with social media content management.

**Trouble shooting note: Make sure you try the Canva link in a browser other than Internet Explorer as Canva does not support Internet Explorer.