Get Shift Done: Tips and Tricks
Social media has turned advertising on its head. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular social networks have become the most pervasive, powerful and — if you do it right — the potentially most effective channels for sharing your brand and message with an enormous and growing market.
The key phrase is if you do it right. Your graphics have to be impactful and memorable to capture the imagination of the millions on social media. What’s more, today’s cost and time budgets — and social media’s short attention span — require that you move quickly, without getting bogged down in production.
A great new online tools for creating cool attention-grabbing graphics for social media is Adobe Spark Post — and it’s free to use. Here’s how it works — and how easy it is to create a graphic suitable for sharing on social media.
Sign up or log in with your Adobe, Facebook, or Twitter ID.
Click on the Plus icon in the My Projects page that opens up. (Or tap, since Spark is touch-friendly.)
Select Post from the main menu. (The other Spark programs are Page and Video.)
On the next screen, in the space under, “What do you want to say?” type your meme (the text you plan to share). Click on Continue.
After a few moments, Spark Post generates a workspace with your meme inserted into a graphic.
In the upper-right menu, click on Themes to open a scrollable selection of designs. Try out a couple by clicking on them to apply the text effects of those designs. (Note: This applies the look of the text in each of these designs and not the background picture.)
In the upper-right menu, click on Background to display a tabbed scrollable sidebar. The first tab relates to the current background photo.
You can alter the background photo by clicking and dragging your mouse on the sliders for Scale and/or Rotate, or by choosing one of the Photo Filters. Here is the original photo scaled larger and rotated counterclockwise, with the Magnolia filter applied.
If you wish to replace the background photo, click on Replace Photo. Then select the source of the photo from the displayed options:
- Upload a photo from your computer.
- Search the Web for photos tagged as Creative Commons (i.e. they have free licenses “for commercial use with modification”).
- Upload images from your account at Creative Cloud, Lightroom, Dropbox, or Google Photos.
When you have finished designing your graphic, click on Resize in the upper right menu.
The sidebar displayed has options to automatically resize your graphic for all significant social networks. Click and drag on the sidebar’s scrollbar (to the right) to view the three categories:
- Social post: for a graphic you’ll include in a post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or a blog
- Social profile: a graphic sized appropriately for a Facebook profile or page cover, Twitter header, LinkedIn cover, YouTube thumbnail, or Etsy cover.
- Standard: Change the shape of your graphic into a square, landscape, widescreen, tall, banner, etc.
Click on any of the sidebar’s icons to have your graphic automatically resized for your specific social media purposes.
For each social network graphic you create, click on Share in the middle of the top of the screen.
In the Publish window that opens:
A. Give your graphic a title.
B. If you wish to have a person or your company listed as the author, type the name in the Author field. Click on the radio button to the right of it, to turn on that feature.
C. To remove Adobe’s branding from your graphic, be sure to click the second radio button to on. (Available only to those with a paid Creative Cloud subscription)
D. If you wish to make the graphic as popular as possible — i.e. have it appear in search engine results and possibly featured on the Adobe Spark website — look in the Get Noticed section, and click on the third radio button there to turn it on. If you wish your graphic to remain private, be sure it’s off.
E. Click on Pick a category. In the menu that opens, select the appropriate one for your graphic.
F. At the bottom of the window, click on Create public link.
In the Share window that opens:
G. Click on Copy to save the public link to your graphic to your computer’s clipboard. Then you can paste the newly-created image wherever you want to use it, such as your blog, your website, or social networks.
H. Click on Download under your graphic to save the picture to your computer.
I. Click on the Facebook or Twitter icon to post the picture to your account on either site. If you’re not signed into your account, you are prompted to do so. Once you are signed in (or if you are already), Spark Post displays a very familiar window for posting the graphic to Facebook or Twitter. Simply type a message and Click on Post.
J. Also in the Share window, click on the Email icon to automatically paste the link to your graphic into an email memo. Address it, fill in a subject, write a note, and send it.
Your Adobe Spark Post graphic is automatically saved as you work, and you can return to edit it or reshare it at any time.
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