Want more views, clickthroughs, shares, and overall engagement on your social media posts? You’re not alone. According to the 2014 State of Inbound Marketing, 84% of marketers cited organic, top-of-the-funnel sources like social media, blogs, and search engines as rising in importance in 2014.
Posting visual content is one of the most important things you can do to improve your social media strategy. A successful social strategy will often include photos, videos, and screenshots of infographics or other graphs.
But posting visual content for the sake of posting visual content isn’t the best way to optimize your presence on social media. It’s important that your visual content be compelling, relevant, and correctly formatted. Here are some tips to create visual content:

1. Have an established palette or theme.

Stick to similar visual styles across all platforms so your brand carries on a consistent appearance.

2. Use Canva.

Canva enables you to create content, like quote photos, infographics, social media header artwork and photo collages. A particularly handy feature of Canva is that you can size your artwork based on which social media platform you need it for. Canva offers a collection of images, colors and fonts to help you with your creations.

3. Create a hit list.

Having a Hit List can be a great way to source inspiration in order to create your own images. Now, don’t get too excited. Nobody is ending up in the trunk of a car. It’s simply a list of pages or profiles to follow in order to get ideas for what to share and what to create. Share the content you find on a hit list and share your own original content consistently too. Other people are out there looking for great sources of content so if you can end up on their Hit List, even better! This is not about copying. It’s about inspiring you to create your own visuals and putting your own spin on it.

4. Have a brand or style that will inspire you.

Finding a source of inspiration can really help you jumpstart your visual marketing career. It’s not about mimicking a style, but rather adapting elements from different areas and making them part of your own style.

5. Use The Stocks.

The Stocks is a compilation of several of the best royalty-free stock photo websites in one place, in addition to a few paid stock photo sites. You can use the photos for both editorial and commercial purposes, and alter them any way you choose. No more worrying about paying a couple hundred dollars for credits on a stock photo site that isn’t all that great anyway. Pexels and Pixabay are my favorite of the stock photo websites that can be found via The Stocks.This site also has video, audio, icons, fonts and colors that you can download.

Things move fast in Visual Content Creation world. Remember, some of these tips and tools will suit you, some won’t but you can treat it as a “pick and mix”.  Jump in and take what works and use them to create visual content for social media in new, more efficient ways!