"Good Design Matters for your Business" - Zoe Adams-Jones Shows You How to Create Fabulous Social Media Posts Using CANVA.

We all want to do a better job with our social media activity. We know how important it is to increase our customer base and to connect with our current customers. However, producing engaging content and having content consistency is not quite so simple.

I am always looking for an easy solution and when it comes to design, Canva is simply perfect! Canva, for those of you who have not used it before, is a graphic-design tool website. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to more than a million photographs, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics. It offers a wide variety of content types that include Facebook and Instagram post templates, posters, brochures, and so much more!

Canva is free. However, you can upgrade for a nominal monthly fee to increase its functionality. Personally, I would start with the free version and then upgrade later if you feel you need the extra functions.

Zoe Adams-Jones

Recently, the wonderful Zoe Adams-Jones, CBA, of Jaz Trading in Queensland, Australia, made a live online tutorial - "Creating Easy Professional Graphics using Canva" - that she shared with the Australian ballooning community and to her followers on Facebook. Zoe has a background in digital marketing and has many years of experience in this field. She very kindly agreed that we could share her tutorial with the readers of the Very Best Balloon Blog.

I had previously "had a go" at using Canva, but because it did not work for me instantly, I gave up. As with anything new, you need to invest just a little bit of time to go through the steps. Zoe's tutorial will guide you through the simple steps of how to use Canva with ease, and within no time you will be producing fabulous marketing materials that you can use across all your social media channels.

I recommend that you open up Canva first (www.Canva.com) click on "Create a Design" and have a little play for a few minutes. Then watch Zoe's tutorial and everything will start to make sense!

I hope like me that you enjoyed Zoe's tutorial. I know that once I had watched it I was more than ready to have another go, and this time I found the software very easy to use. Dare I say that I am finding it a little bit addictive and will have a play whenever I have a few minutes spare! You can also download Canva as an app on to your phones and iPads! 

Here are a few designs that I have recently made using Canva for Instagram and Facebook. 

Using quotes on your Facebook page and Instagram posts can lead to good reactions from your audience. I added a quote over one of my balloon images and wished my followers a "Happy Monday," too!

Since social platforms are about being sociable, your followers desire content that is inspirational, informative, positive, hopeful, entertaining, or humorous. 

Here are a couple more designs that I created on Canva using two of my design images and added some text to promote my company and website. As you can see, I have been playing with backgrounds to see which looks better. I think that the second design looks more complete! 

Here is another example of with and without a background. Again I feel that the design with the background is more complete.

I still have much to learn, but I know that by using Canva I can transform an Instagram or Facebook post into something really exciting and eye-catching, and that is exactly what we are all trying to do.

A huge thank you to Zoe for her fabulous tutorial. I know that it really gave me the tools and information that I needed to get me started! I hope like me you are enjoying Canva. I would love to see some of your work! 

Happy Ballooning!

Sue

www.suebowler.com