Are you looking for new ways to make your social media stand out? If you want your business to get noticed online in 2021, you need to add some eye-popping images and graphics. 

But what do you do if you have little or no design experience? If this sounds like you, don’t worry! There are plenty of tools available that are easy to use and can help you create free, professional-looking social media graphics in just a few clicks. 

Tips for making social media graphics

Before we show you our favorite design apps, let’s start with the basics. Here are some of the best tips out there for getting your audience’s attention on social media using images.

1. Always use graphics emphasize the most important points
2. Don’t overcomplicate things – keep your design simple and limit unnecessary information.
3. Pick a few colors and stick to them; otherwise, it can start to look messy! 
4. Make sure you understand how different colors evoke different emotions 
5. Pick fonts wisely – they should portray your brand message 
6. Try and choose evergreen content as much as possible to avoid losing value 

Our top 5 design apps for social media

Now we’ve shown you our top tips for social media design work, let’s dive in with some of the best apps out there for creating graphics for your social media accounts: 

1. Graphic design 

The first thing you will need to keep your accounts looking fresh is a good graphic design tool. Apps like Befunky or Desygner are amazing for this, as they are free and include loads of helpful features. 

For example, you can use these apps to add text, create custom graphics, and add details like shapes and icons. You can also use them to add digital effects to pictures like filters or colors. Plus, they are usable on-the-go on the mobile versions. 

2. Logo builders 

Having a recognizable business logo is vital. This should be displayed on your website and correspondence, and it should also be visible on all your social media accounts. It’s essential to be consistent and create a logo that represents your brand. 

If you don’t have a logo for your business, you can build one for free, and there are various apps available, such as www.logocreator.io, to help you do this. 

3. Video creators 

Video content is quickly overtaking other marketing strategies as a way to boost engagement and reach new customers. People are more distracted than ever, and it’s hard to compete for their attention. Videos can help you catch your audience’s attention much more quickly.

Free apps like Biteable and Animaker are awesome choices for beginners. They have lots of features to help you create customized videos using music, animation, background shots, text, images, and more, so your social media content stands out. 

4. Free photos 

Images and photos can be used on social media to brighten your text posts and make them more appealing. They are also helpful for blog posts, your website, email marketing campaigns, and social media cover photos. 

To save time, you can get plenty of free photos from tools like Pixabay and Pexels. These supply millions of free photos that can be used in your business. 

5. Picture editors 

Finally, using a high-quality picture editing app can help you add finishing touches to your images to make them more professional and unique using more complex design tools. 

Some examples of free apps are Pixlr and Fotor, which can add layers and effects and create collages. Or, you can try Pablo for adding quotes or text to your images.

As we know, 2019 has been an interesting year for SEO industry. Now, it is 2020. The New Year will bring a new set of changes in the way that businesses market their services and products. The marketers worldwide will try to improve their ranking on search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is basically the process of driving traffic, both from the sources of “organic” and “paid” to win the race of ranking on SERPs. If you are wondering what SEO trends will dominate 2020, then this article is for you. Here, we suggest the hottest SEO trends in 2020.

1. Video content is getting over written content

Nowadays, written content is reckoned as the “standard”, even by many people continuously insist that including various formats of content is a great idea.

Despite written content is a basic form of content for most brands, images, infographics, videos and other mediums still serve as peripheral additions.

2. Mobile optimization will become more crucial

If you website is mobile-friendly, then congratulate! Your audience is no longer in just a single place. People now use various sorts of devices, including tablets, laptops, smartphones to browse web. Bearing in mind this, many brands became mobile-friendly in 2019. It is anticipated that there will be more and more brands taking up this trend in 2020. Mobile optimization will turn into the norm, instead of an exception. It is reported that the number of searches on those mobile devices has increased about 43% year-over-year. Because there are more and more people use mobile devices to surf the Internet, so Google decides to make it much easier to find those mobile-friendly, relevant websites.

3. Local SEO will be highly focused

When it comes to SEO trends that will dominate 2020, local SEO is a noticeable trend. According to Entrepreneur.com, the role of local SEO is assessed higher in the coming days. As a marketer, you should let Google know where you are situated and what you are providing so that your opportunities of showing up on pages, particularly in front of relevant audiences will increase. It is very important to have your local pages including your business name and address, etc with Yahoo, Google and Bing.

4. High Google ranks will no long mean more organic clicks

If you are still assuming that the top 1 Google ranking will warrant you the most of organic clicks, then you have to think again. The bad news is while the click-through rate is still correlated with positions, many other factors could impact your own organic clicks in the major SERP – Google in this year.

Local packs, paid ads, carousel results, rich snippets, and knowledge graphs are some of attention-grabbing SERP factors draining away organic clicks from your high ranking website.

5. Rich answers are increasing – that is both an opportunity and a threat

Another SEO trend that will dominate 2020 is rich answers. Oftentimes, rich answers are established based on public data. Hence, if your current SEO strategy was established on public domain data, then you should change direction because obtaining the search traffic from Google will just get harder for you. If you could get your page featured in the rich answer, you will achieve a massive traffic boost. The best thing is, getting featured in the rich answers is definitely possible even when the authority of your website is not very high yet.

When crafting killer articles for your site or blog, there should be two main considerations: first, the contents must be able to engage entertain and efficiently drive conversions; and second, contents must be able to reach a broad scope of audience.

Technically, as most web traffic comes from search engines, weaving materials that are optimized for better search visibility is paramount to get your place on the internet.

Although these goals – high-quality content and efficient search visibility – may seem to be not correlative with each other, both are essential in obtaining marketing success. Thus, they must be part of your primary goals.

It is important for your contents to be well-written, entertaining and filled with relevant information for the users; however, none of that would matter if they remain unseen inside your website.

A good SEO ranking can help pull your contents in its hiding place and bring it in front to many readerships.

As a marketer, you should learn on how to become a great storyteller— conveying your brand’s story through different mediums to a wide number of audiences. Here are ideal practices in weaving efficient and captivating articles:

Use Examples

Giving concrete examples could make your article stronger and more relatable. Stay away from purely theoretical contents when sharing anything about your products or services or your brand in general. Consider finding excellent points that relate to news or pop culture to better give your audience a better frame of reference. These relatable stories can be remembered longer than by presenting confusing statistics or numbers.

Show Your Voice

One of an ideal thing you can do for your brand is to provide it with a unique voice. Don’t hesitate to get a little bit quirky or funny (if you are).

It is helpful to read the piece aloud to identify if it sounds just like you. Your real voice can become your best asset.

While it is through that you have to adhere to the standard of your industry but the reality is that the more you sound like a human being, the more people will get attracted to engage with you.

Get To Know Your Audience

Be aware that your blog is not your journal. Make sure to know your audience well to allow you choose suitable languages for whomever you are trying to address your articles. If you are writing for broad readers, forget about the jargons. Keep paragraphs on point and short and refrain from incorporating difficult-to-understand materials.

Finally, become a critic of your work. Go on for some revisions if you think it’s necessary.

Major Considerations In Writing Articles For SEO

See? Creating great articles isn’t as hard as others would think. Now, we must address the next necessary factor: optimizing your contents to be seen.

Along with social media posting, being able to optimize your contents for the search engines is a proven method in bringing in your articles to a better number of audience. Mainly, by trying to optimize your contents to appear more often in search engine recommendations, you can have a great chance of increasing not just the visibility of your articles but the trustworthiness of your brand as well.

The following are primary methods you can use in creating SEO-friendly contents:

Stay Organic

Putting in friendly and highly visible keywords within your piece is the best way to exemplify your campaign. These keywords must be incorporated in a way that they will look organic with the subject matter. Know that most of the readers today especially those that spend an ample time in the digital world are capable of noticing if you just stuffed your work with keywords that you hope will maximize visibility.

Incorporate Effective Keywords

Make sure to optimize your articles by including keywords in your titles or even in your subtitles. Create a keyword hierarchy and utilize the most search generating efficiently. Further, remember to use the most relevant keyword in the article’s title.

Be Clever About Image

Make sure to include images with alt texts to make your page show up even in image searches. Images are also necessary for breaking up texts in a creative manner. Further, high-quality images will make your piece even more attractive and engaging.

Final Thoughts

The above-mentioned ideas can help you get your way to the top of your marketing battles. Not just these will help elevate your brand, but these ideas will also aid in enhancing your reputation as a quality content provider.

Snapchat is a mobile application that makes most of us wonder if it’s simply something the young generations are doing these days, or it could be a valuable alternative when it comes to marketing.

Snapchat has experienced tremendous growth since it was launched a couple of years ago. Today, there is already an average of 9,000 snaps per second and a staggering 8 billion or more video views on the platform each day.

While Snapchat stars are now shifting their allegiance to Instagram, many are still thinking that this social network (which has not been thoroughly explored) could be a significant part of their marketing arsenal too.

Before getting any far, you may need to acknowledge that Snapchat is distinct from other social platforms. Your posts won’t get archived, and the sponsor ads won’t stay there for more than 10 seconds. With those things in consideration, here are some effective ways to use Snapchat in marketing your brand.

Offer Giveaways

Snapchat’s time limit is a great podium for giveaways as it may help encourage urgency in engaging with your audience. Aside from giving giveaways on other social platform to gain a new set of followers, you can exhaust Snapchat to ask your audience directly to participate by providing their in entries, and then reply to them instantly – this then creates one-on-one interaction.

Perhaps, you can create a series of snaps or some sponsored stories as this can surely help in building anticipation for your giveaways. This may organically spread the word about your brand. You may ask your follower to get involved by asking them to submit their name and contact info or even by encouraging them to invite  their friends or family members to follow you on Snapchat.

Make Partnerships With Influencers

Major brands collaborate with influential individuals in expanding their reach for their products and services. Most of these personalities include YouTubers, Twitter Stars, and many others. On Snapchat, you can find users with a huge number of followers that relate to your industry and partner with them in promoting your brand to your target demographic in a natural means.

Take Audience To Your Behind-The-Scenes

Just like on other platforms, you would want to add some human element to your posts; otherwise, your content will be perceived in the bad light. Your audience must see you as a friend who tells important details to them.

One great way to nail this is by showing some behind-the-scenes footage. Your audience will be more likely to find it appealing because these contents are not planned in advanced or polished in contrast to most contents in a usual campaign.

You can have photos of staffs having fun, videos of employee working for a product launch or simply by being your user’s tour guide for a particular event.

Use Q&A For Further Interactions

Snapchat is a very interactive platform. You can practically start a question and answer session for you to engage with your followers. With the contents’ “quick-disappearing” nature, it encourages speedy responses while providing you with a distinct way to interact with your audience.

You can ask users about some interesting topics like their weekend plans or some random questions like “if you are allowed to do teleportation at this very moment, where would you go and why?” Sure, it’s good to keep things casual and fun most of the time. Engaging and educating the audience while having some touch of fun with it is always an ideal marketing approach.

Final Thoughts

Snapchat’s features and developments mentioned above are providing businesses and ideal opportunity to engage better with their target audience. Though it is still a young platform especially when it comes to content distribution, marketers are just getting started. Meaning, there is an ideal platform for you to attract and build a community of followers without needing to face stiff competitions.

Are you aware how Instagram can bring success to your business?

Do you know how to get a huge number of followers and likes for your Instagram account?

No doubt, Instagram is an excellent way to connect socially and engage with consumers. With more than 400 million active monthly users and 3.5 billion Instagram Likes every day, it is a useful tool for creating brand awareness. You can gain instant success by using Instagram in the right way, but the wrong way can be a loss of time and energy.

Instagram Tools To Gain Success

1) Collecto

Formerly, Collecto was known as Followgram. With this Instagram tool, you can increase your Instagram account’s functionality. This tool has an elegant web interface to manage your Instagram presence. It also has a statistical section that synchronizes data and gives you an overview of your account’s activity.

2) BLACK

Instagram had an amazing black-and-white filter called Gotham. And this was perfect for developing noir-style photos. But Gotham was ditched for no good reason and got replaced with Inkwell. Nowadays, many online businesses use BLACK, which is an iOS-related application. This is a robust tool to emulate black and white photos using filters.

3) Iconosquare

One of the most user-friendly interfaces to manage Instagram accounts is Iconosquare. It was previously known as Statigram. Using this Instagram tool you can include various add-ons to Instagram accounts. The best part of using Iconosquare is its analytics feature. You also get different tips on optimizing your Instagram account and making the most of your engagements.

4) Perfect365 And Facetune

If you are a selfie junkie, then Facetune is a highly recommended application to airbrush your skin and even whiten your teeth. Perfect365 (which is available free on Android and iOS) is one of the best feature-rich applications to tweak your best selfies. According to US Weekly Magazine, Kim Kardashian and her sisters often use this Instagram tool to edit their selfies just before posting them to Instagram.

5) Totem Analytics

Previously, known as Nitrogram, this Instagram tool is one of the best analytic platforms created to boost and focus your business’s Instagram presence. This tool uses two platforms Totem Connect and Totem Analytics to enhance your Instagram presence.

Totem Analytics tool assists you in getting real-time metrics for your posts and even lets you monitor the growth of your competitors. Totem Connect helps in reaching and interacting with your targeted Instagram audience.

6) Hyperlapse And Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile

One of the best apps for creating time lapses, Hyperlapse allows you to speed up and slow down the video from 1x to 12x the normal rate. It uses software image stabilization, which is quite a standout feature. You end up getting cinematic videos that look like they’ve been captured on expensive camera gear. Android users can go for an alternative like Microsoft Hyperlapse Mobile.

7) INK361

The INK361 is one of the best and most commonly used free web interfaces which allows you to view your Instagram feed on your desktop. Here the images displayed will be much bigger compared to the mobile. Furthermore, you can design custom albums and share them even with non-Instagram users.

8) Boomerang And Phhhoto

Among the tons of apps which can you use to develop short animations and videos that loop, Phhhoto is one of the best. Unlike other applications, it creates low-fi moving pictures by design. To get higher resolution looping videos, you can use Boomerang.

9) PicStitch And Layout

Many people get irritated when they open their Instagram feed and see dozens of snaps in a few minutes. With the Layout app, you can create various photo layouts. Similarly, PicStitch contains 245 different layouts, and it also has a built-in photo editor.

10) Enlight And Giphy Cam

Some people feel that Instagram is filled with too many symmetrical buildings, sunsets, and selfies. Well, this is not the case. You can also post fun or silly snaps. As per Lance Ulanoff, the chief correspondent of Mashable, Giphy Cam is an incubator of all your best and worst GIF nightmares.

It is the perfect app to organize goofy video posts. Similarly, Enlight is a feature-packed photo editing application. It has Painting, Mixer, Effects and Sketch tools which assist in converting your outstanding photos to creative art pieces.

11) Curalate

This is an excellent analyzing Instagram tool, suitable for visual website content and can be used for measuring and monitoring the performance of brands on Instagram. Using Curalate, you can introduce the story of your business through videos and images, to increase the engagement of your audience and create a brand reputation.

12) Snapseed

One of the best photo-editing applications suitable for Android and iOS is Snapseed. Snapseed has a large number of editing tools which are stronger than the built-in ones of Instagram and its filters.

13) Piqora

This is a paid Instagram tool suitable for social media engagement. This tool analyzes your Instagram account and informs when you need to post based on your analytics. Piqora also helps with managing your account and contest tracking.

14) SnapPen And Typic

Some people don’t like to ruin their Instagram pics with doodles and text, still, these express emotions in a photo. Typic is a free app that helps in adding stamps and text while SnapPen used for adding doodles. Both these Instagram tools are straightforward and simple to use.

15) SimplyMeasured

This is a free Instagram tool to produce detailed reports about your Instagram campaigns. You can either export it to PowerPoint or download the Excel analytics. SimplyMeasured informs you which images are bringing Instagram campaigns and which day or time is best for posting images.

16) Websta

Formerly known as Webstagram, this Instagram tool assists in organizing Instagram posts, sending messages and also provides statistical information about your account. Also, you can browse famous users, hashtags, and images.

Conclusion: There is no doubt that Instagram is a great platform for your business. But you do have a lot of options regarding the Instagram tools to gain Instagram success. Choose the right tools and you can increase your Instagram marketing productivity exponentially.