How I Easily Create Social Media Images

When it comes to social media, I recommend text and video (rather than images) whenever possible -- because with text (example) and video (example), you’re reaching people who will resonate with your message, rather than just followers who like your pretty pictures and might not even be reading your messages.

However, this is different on Instagram and Twitter, where you can’t communicate a long message or video (except for IGTV), and therefore, images with a short message are the next best thing.

In this video I show you how I easily create such images using Canva:

There’s an even simpler tool called Pablo that you might try as well...

I get most of my images from Unsplash.

Other image sites worth searching:

Pixabay (similar to Unsplash)
Creative Commons Images (click “google images” there -- the largest image database by far, but you’ll need to sift through some irrelevant ones)

How to find just the right image? It takes practice searching for the right word. For example, try these categories, one word at a time:

Type of people, e.g. “middle-aged woman”, “group of kids”
Type of activity, e.g. “kayaking”, “talking”, “hugging”
Type of ideal, e.g. “community”, “courage”, “kindness”
Type of scenery, e.g. “cityspace”, “stars”, “crowd”
Thing of nature, e.g. “mountains”, “trees”, “beach”
Animals, e.g. “elephants”, “frogs”
Color, e.g. “blue”, “red”, “rainbow”

As you practice searching images, you’ll become savvier about what words and ideas to use, to find the kind of emotion you want to evoke. Practice!

At this point I’m rather casual about the image messages I make. From searching to creating the image, the whole process takes me about 10 minutes.

To see my image messages, go to my Instagram:
George Kao on Instagram

Mar 11, 2019

By George Kao

Under Authentic Content Creation

2 min read