by: Caroline Eaton
Welcome back to your personalized lesson in social media! We’ve been talking about Facebook so far, and one thing I keep coming back to is that you have to have great, sharable graphics to boost the activity on your Facebook page.
Today we’ll discuss how to create those graphics! Good news: you don’t have to be a trained graphic designer to figure this out and be successful.
If you do have a designer on hand who loves working with Photoshop, go ahead and utilize him/her. Our Media Coordinator makes all of the images shared on the DOE Facebook page in Photoshop.
However, if you don’t have a designer, previous design experience, or don’t want to spend the money on Photoshop, there are free tools on the web that allow you to make high-quality graphics. They’re pretty easy too!
Before you start using the tools, you must first have high-quality images with which to make your graphics. There are websites that allow you to download these images for free and use them however you want. A quick Google search will pull up numerous sites, but I recommend starting with Unsplash.com and Deathtothestockphoto.com.
Unsplash.com // deathtothestockphoto.com
Once you download the images you can add text, crop the images, and make many other edits to suit your purpose.
Now that you have the images, head to Canva.com to make them into high-quality graphics. On Canva, you can size your images, add text, create an overlay, use backgrounds, etc.
Once you make a free account with Canva, they will walk you through a quick tutorial so you can get used to their system.
Then you’re ready to start! Play around until you find a style you like, and try to keep the styles of your graphics consistent to each other. For example, pick 2-3 styles of fonts to use for all graphics, and design them so that they complement each other and have similar elements.
Quick tip: One of our favorite things about Canva is that you can choose the size of your image based upon what you’re creating the graphic for, such as, Facebook cover photos, Twitter Post, Pinterest, Twitter header, etc.
Are you wondering what exactly you can use these graphics for? Check out the DOE Facebook page for ideas, or simply Google search ministry graphics and see what other organizations are doing. You can use them for announcements, verses of the day, sharing links to your website, etc. The possibilities are endless, and adding these graphics to your Facebook page will definitely make it more interesting and draw more people.
Any questions? Feel free to send them our way.
BONUS:
We’ve created ideas and themes for a Facebook Series that shares a collaboration of verses focusing on one topic.
What does this mean? Each week, we begin a series that ranges between 7 and 14 verses; one verse will be posted per day on Facebook to comfort, soothe, and relate to our audience. We’re offering these to you as a FREE downloadable ZIP file. As we release these on our Facebook Page, you’ll be able to access them on our blog.
Download the first series here.
