By Debbie Gregory.

LinkedIN Debbie Gregory VAMBOA VAMBOA Facebook VAMBOA Twitter

 

Millions of social media images are posted daily.   Unfortunately, very few of the images are interesting enough to make people to stop and notice them. Most of them go completely unnoticed often because the images are low-quality, unappealing, not worth sharing, too sales-pushy, or just plain boring.

 

As a business you need to stand out and grab people’s attention. If your posts aren’t captivating your customers, it is time to change what you are sharing. We have compiled a list of some of the most popular free or inexpensive online tools to help you build a library of quality images, gifs, videos, templates, and more to boost your business’ social game.

 

Adobe Stock

Adobe Stock is a huge marketplace for stock imagery. They currently have a collection of over 90 million high-quality assets that you can choose from including photos, illustrations, videos, and templates. They offer a free pack of items when you sign up, however, there are fees to use the Adobe collection.

 

BeFunky

BeFunky offers a lot of graphics tools, layouts, and templates for just about any need. You can get 125 effects for free or sign up and pay for access to their entire library of high-resolution image effects and templates.

 

Canva

Canva is pretty versatile and offers preset image sizes and ready-made layouts for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest which adhere to their specific size guidelines. You can also use it for larger projects as well. They offer both a free limited version and a subscription version that provides you many more features.

 

Creative Market

Creative Market offers fully finished and ready to post graphics, fonts, website themes, photos, mockups, and a lot more. Everything has been assembled from tens-of-thousands of independent creators that submit new designs on a regular basis. They do offer some of their creations for free, six new free items every week, but most of their downloads cost money.

 

Easel.ly

Easel.ly is a source for infographics and reports; including charts, maps, graphics, and dashboards. They offer a much different set of visuals than either Infogram or Piktochart (both discussed below). You can start for free or choose their paid option.

 

Giphy

Giphy is a giant, growing collection of free animated gifs that are great for adding some movement to enhance your social posts. Motion makes things more memorable and posts with video or gifs are more likely to be shared.

 

Hootsuite Composer

Hootsuite Composer is a social media image editor and library that helps you create and prepare images that are appropriate to post across different social networks. Composer is a feature within Hootsuite that provides you access to a large library of images to enhance your posts with all of the usual functions including resize, crop, rotate, transform, filters, and more. You can even add your own logo. It comes with whichever Hootsuite package you’ve signed up for.

 

Infogram

Infogram is a great source for infographics and reports; including charts, maps, graphics, and dashboards. You can start for free which allows you to create a limited number of items or choose one of their paid packages.

 

The second part of this article will provide you eight more free or inexpensive tools you should consider using to create better social images.