Creating Visual Content: These Are Your 3 New Favorite Tools

[jrineakter]

Have you ever noticed that online articles or social media updates from B2B companies contain little visual content? And if there is an image, I often see the most commonly used stock photos. You know them: the puzzle pieces that fit together, the whiteboard with beautiful diagrams or the handshaking of two people.


In this article I will explain why you need good visual content – ​​whether you work for a B2B or B2C company – and how I put this into practice myself without you having to hire designers. So that your content is even better read and shared.

The why of visual content
Most blog posts are between 750 and 2,000 words. Would you read a post like this if it didn’t have images? Most people just won’t read a big block of text.

You can increase the readability of your articles by using subheadings and lists. But if you add images, you increase the readability enormously. Articles with relevant images are viewed 94% more than articles without images.

94 percent

And it’s no different with social media: Facebook posts with an image get 53 percent more likes than posts without an image. And on Twitter, posts with an image get 35 percent more retweets .

Ultimately, you want your articles austria telegram number list or social media updates to be read and shared, so visual content is key.

How to create visual content
So visual content is important, but you probably think that you need a designer for the best result. Or that it takes a lot of time to create images yourself. That is why many people pay little attention to it.

The good news: That may have been true years ago, but it’s definitely not anymore. You don’t have to be a Photoshop expert to add beautiful images to your content. There are plenty of online tools that can help you with this.

Finding images online
It starts with finding good images. Do you have a limited budget or no budget at all for expensive (stock) photos? Then you can get started with the following free high-quality stock photo websites:

Pixabay.com
Stocksnap.io
Startupstockphotos.com
Freepik.com
Morguefile.com
My personal favorites on this list are Startupstockphotos.com and Stocksnap.io.

stock snap

For royalty-free images, I have tested many search engines. My favorite at the moment is Librestock , which allows you to search over 40 stock photo websites.

Always pay attention to the license terms, once you have found an image. The sites above generally only have creative commons images. Always check the license terms yourself, because they can differ per image. Attribution is most common with the creative commons licenses: a link to the original image in your own article.

3 DIY tools
Once you have found an image, you can edit it. You may want to use a crop. You can also add text to make the image more unique or in line with your branding. Here are three simple online tools that you can use to do this:

1. Pablo
Sometimes it's hard to find a good image. That's when I use Pablo . This online tool to create (social media) images was created by the popular social media management tool Buffer.

pablo

The process is simple: you choose a nice image, a font, type your text and then you can download the image.

2. Canva
With Canva you can create a design based on a huge amount of different templates. Whether it is a simple image or a large infographic: you can create it yourself with Canva. You no longer need Photoshop this way!

Another tip: some design elements are available for a small fee, so be careful which template or design element you choose.

3. Designfeed.io
With Designfeed.io you can create similar images as with Pablo. The big difference is that this tool itself searches for the visuals for you and presents them based on the text you enter. Below you can see the suggestions based on the text I entered. This really only took five seconds:

design feed

My advice is to write the text in English first, to get the best suggestions, then choose a creation and change the text to Dutch to use yourself.

By the way, the tool is still in beta and can only be used by invitation. Fortunately, you can request an invitation on the site and then you will quickly have beta access to try the tool yourself .

The right size of your image for social media updates
All social networks have their own specific sizes for the images that you can use in status updates or your personal profile. In the past I searched for the right size via Google, precisely because the sizes also change sometimes.

Luckily, there are online tools for this. My favorite tool at the moment is Landscape from the social media management tool Sprout Social.