Graphics are one of the most important things on social media. Unless you’re a graphic designer, creating graphics is not your strong suit. You can get an Adobe Cloud subscription to Photoshop and create your own. If you’re anything like me, what you see in your head rarely comes out that way in Photoshop. I don’t have the necessary skills with Photoshop to create amazing graphics. Luckily, there are services out there that can help you create great graphics.

Canva

I think Canva is one of the best graphics services on the market. The best part is most of what they offer can be free. This is especially true if you upload your own images. If you do pay, they have some of the most reasonable rates for pictures on the web. They are just $1. Other services charge any where from $10 to a few hundred for images. Here is what Canva offers:

Templates for most social media networks. Including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and more

Free and paid images for posts are available

Available on the Web and on iOS (iPad and new iPhone app – Android app coming soon)

Saves your images for later editing – Including a duplicate feature to reedit

Adobe Spark Post

Adobe Spark is very similar to Canva. It’s Adobe’s new service for small business. It can create images for all social media as well. They have templates that you can use and “remix.” The down side to the service, to me is, that the color schemes are fixed. Sometimes they work and other times they not. The big bonus is it automatically resizes images for different sites and can create short movies out of images.

Templates for most social media sites. Including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more.

Free service from Adobe but must create an account at the Spark page

Available on the web and on iOS apps (iPad & iPhone – No word on Android apps)

Save your images in your library

Automatically resizes images automatically for different sites

No fees for using pictures

PicMonkey

The simplest of the bunch is PicMonkey. It has a few preset sizes for images or you can create your own. It doesn’t have the text tools the other services offer. It’s more of an editor than a design. One thing that it does incredibly well is to create film strips for Pinterest. Film strips are the vertical collages with 3-5 pictures. They work really well on Pinterest

Has some presets for social media or you can create your own size

Free service more about editing pictures than creating graphics

Can’t save you images without a paid account

Has a collage creation tool

These are a few different things you can use. Each one has preview of images created in each service. Some other apps that deserve a mention are: WordSwag, Typorama and Retype. These services and apps are one of my big passions. As more come out I will over them. However, these three have been around for a while and are stable. They are the ones I recommend most.

I didn’t touch on creating film graphics but I will do a post using iMovie and Canva after this series is done. Once you have it set you can create short videos in a flash for Facebook and Twitter.