Canva to Create Facebook Posts
In this video, I’m going to show you how to use Canva to design professional-looking Facebook posts that are going to help you increase engagement and grow your audience. Stay to the end of this video and I’m going to tell you how you can get a free copy of our ‘Create Amazing Content For Your Social Media Platforms’ guide.
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Hi this is Jeanne with Six Figure Business Coaching and it has been my pleasure for the last 15
years to be helping small business owners profitably market their products and services. This video is going to teach you how to use Canva to create designer-quality graphics and strategic content to grow your Facebook page. It may be hard to believe but no matter what your skill set is right now, by the end of this tutorial you’re going to know exactly how to build beautiful, creative imagery for your business.
So right now we’re in my Canva account.
Let me just tell you a little bit about what you’re looking at. On the left hand side is your navigation and you can see ‘Home’ is darkened because that’s where we are and then on the right hand side are some optional places that you can go. Right now we’re going to go ahead and click on ‘create a design’ and you can search for different types of designs and you can even see right here it says ‘Facebook post’ but let’s, for argument’s sake, we’re gonna say, let’s say it wasn’t listed there. We’re gonna go ahead and type in ‘Facebook post’ and then we’re going to go ahead and click on it and before I click on it you can see when I put my cursor over it it gives you the dimensions.It’s automatically going to put in the correct dimensions for a Facebook post image which is 940 by 788 which is really, really nice. You don’t even have to worry about if it’s the right size. I’m going to go ahead and click on that.
Canva such a wonderful intuitive, design software. On the left hand side, again, is your navigation, on the right hand side you can see this is our canvas, our blank canvas, so we are going to go ahead and…let’s do a motivational quote because that can really be used on any Facebook page, even in a Facebook group.
We all need motivation. I like to do those often on Monday mornings because people really need that Monday morning motivation, that excitement that, ‘let’s get going’ and sometimes they need it on Friday mornings, too to get themselves through the day, to make it through to the end of the day. What I normally do is just search for ‘motivational quotes’ and often times you’ll end up on a website called ‘brainy quote.’ It’s got loads and loads and loads of quotes.
This one’s just fine, ‘Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Til your good is better and your better is best.’ I will tell you something about using quotes, is that you should always provide the person’s name whose quote it is so it doesn’t look like you are claiming that this is your quote. This is St. Jerome’s. We are going to go ahead and copy this. I’m going to highlight it. I’m going to copy it. In thinking about the quote itself, ‘good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best .’ You want to think about how you want to visually represent that.
So, these are some cats. These are some sales. These are Halloween. There’s food. there’s birthday. Summer. Spring. Love. So, lots and lots of different options and the beautiful thing about these is that these already have backgrounds. They already have text that’s set up at a certain size, a bunch of different texts in different sizes, they have different text elements, they have different really cool little elements to them. You could just go ahead and use any of these and just change the text however you wanted to. For example, let’s just pick one, maybe we’ll pick this one.
Okay, so let’s go ahead and…we don’t want it about the slopes. We can see this guy is doing amazing things on the slopes so when I click on this I could see that there are dotted lines around it. That means that there are a couple different pieces that are grouped together and when I click on it, I can also see up here it says ‘Ungroup.’ If they were not grouped together it would say ‘Group.’ so I’m going to go ahead and ungroup those.
Now I can see I’ve got one, two, three text boxes and then a background box. I’m going to go ahead and click over here so it de-selects all of them and I’m going to get rid of this one that has the big text because of that huge quote is not going to fit in this big text. I’m going to click on it and I’m just gonna hit ‘delete.’ I’m also going to get rid of this one I think, and delete that. Then, I’m going to click on this one and I’m going to double click on the text so it selects all of the text. Then I’m going to go ahead and paste my text because the text that I copied from the motivational quote is still saved and so once I paste it, it’s there now. To me, that’s a little bit small, so I’m going to go ahead and double click on it again to highlight it and I can go up here and make the size bigger. I can even make it a little bit bigger than that and then I can grab the outside when it has the crosshairs and move it.
Now, I kind of like that but, you know, I quite like this background color and just so you know, if I wanted to change the size of this, I just grab the corner to make the whole thing a different size. I can grab the sides and make it wider if I wanted to. You can stretch it across, but I’m thinking I might want to even – well I want to change the color first. I feel like that’s not a great color.
So, up here is the corresponding color to the box that I’ve selected. So I’m going to click there and change this color to yellow or an orange, or darker orange, or pinky-orange. Okay, I kind of like that. So, now I want to move – I want to see more of the skier. I’m going to move the box and the quote together. I’m going to select…. The quote is already selected. I’m going to hold down my shift key and I’m going to select the box.
Now I’ve got both of them selected and I’m going to hit ‘Group’ so now it’s got both of them grouped together so I can move them together. I think that’s a pretty darn cool picture. Look what he’s doing. You can’t see it behind the picture or behind the block. Now, I can click up here and ‘Ungroup’ because maybe I’m thinking…hmm, what if I made that text – I can click up here and change the alignment. What if I aligned it to the right? I think that looks a little bit better and maybe, what if I brought it in a little bit so it kind of squeezed together a little bit more and then maybe what if I pulled this down and pulled that over to kind of connect it to the side? I think that looks pretty cool.Again, now you can see a guy who’s jumping, doing this snowboarding in the background and it’s such a cool picture. The reason that the picture in the back is water marked and has lines on it is because this is a picture that you have to pay for. Canva does have photographs and imagery on here that you can buy which is fantastic because it’s not very expensive.
Right here you can see it’s a Premium image and it’s $1 so you could buy this image, you could download this image and pay $1 and you would have a really nice social media image. Now, we could also say, I don’t want to pay for that image. I’m going to find my own image. We can click on the image and delete it and this is like a default background image. I’m going to delete that one as well and we can go over here to ‘Uploads.’ Actually, I could go over here to photos and they do have photos here and on some of them you can see there’s a dollar sign on them. Those you have to pay for. You can see some have a crown on them and these are available with Canva Pro or you can pay for them if you don’t pay for the Pro version but they do have others that are free. Let’s see if we can find something. inspirational. ‘woman celebrating’ okay I think these are all going to be paid images. I wonder if we just put in ‘free images.’ How about that? There’s a nice one right there.
So I did that really quick, I don’t know if you saw it. I clicked on the image and then it automatically shows up on the right. Again, you can resize it and if you want to resize it with the correct dimensions you just grab the corner because if I grab this, it’s gonna – it spreads it out but doesn’t spread it out quite right. I would do that and then it automatically went to the background as well so you could use that or you could say h’mmm, not sure about that one, I might like this one,’ and now you can see where it placed it here and it’s on top of the orange rectangle. What you can do is click on ‘Position’ and say I want it to go ‘backward’ so that’s how you do it.
You have to think of the each of these elements as a layer. The picture is a layer. The rectangle is a layer. The text is a layer. That’s what you use ‘Position’ for is to layer the different pieces. I’m
going to say, I quite like that one but now I want her to be up there. I can try making the picture a little bit bigger to get her up there further. That’s pretty good. Yeah, so I think I like that. If this
were it and you were done with this, now you can see over here you can publish it direct to Facebook but I would caution you on doing that because it does render a little oddly. It says it’s from Canva and it doesn’t look quite as nice as you might think it would so all you have to do is go over here and download it.
Download it as a PNG which is a really nice file size. It’s really small but it’s quality – it’s a high enough quality that it’s just perfect for what you would need for Facebook. If you wanted to have something that had a transparent background which is not something that we have here, we have a full background, you would have to have the upgraded version but right here all we have to hit is ‘Download.’ Preparing your design… and it says ‘where do you want to put it?’ Then we tell it where we want it to go and we give it a name and we save it.
Now my image is saved and the name that it gives it is actually up here so don’t forget to name your images which is something that I tend to forget to do. So make sure that you name this. You might leave it as ‘Good, better, best.’
If you are looking through all your Canva stuff and you labeled everything FB post_ you could see all the ones that were Facebook posts and then you can also see right over here it says ‘All changes saved’ so you want to make sure that all the changes are saved before you move on to
do something else. That’s really all there is to creating a quote image.
Now I’m going to talk to you about a few other things that you may want to consider. You may want to use a font that is one of the texts that you use for your brand. If you already have a defined brand and you know that you use a few different type of texts and we we normally recommend that your branding includes one serif font and one sans serif font. There’s lots and lots of really good reasons for those but and sometimes we do also use one like fancy font so those are some considerations. What you can do is when you get into Canva, you can go over here. If you wanted to change the font you can look up whatever your font name is and you can
see if it’s listed. Sometimes your font will not be listed and you have a couple of options.
One is, you use a font that they already have that’s something similar, or you can pay for the upgraded version and you are allowed to upload your own fonts to Canva which is a really nice option. The other thing is that this color that we use back here, this pinky-orange color, you may want to always make that your brand color so you would just need to have the hex numbers for your colors which are those six digits that represents the number of your color. If we go up here and click on that, you could click here on ‘new color’ and you could put the number in right here.
Again, you want to use the colors that you use in your brand and we normally recommend no more than two, maybe one more accent color. You don’t want to get too crazy because you want people to recognize it’s your brand. You want people to recognize when they see it on different platforms and in different places they go, “Ah, I know who that is. I recognize those colors.” or “I
recognize how that’s used together.”
So think about that when you’re creating your designs.
Another thing that you could consider doing is the ‘upload’ section – is imagery that you can upload so these are images that we use that we can upload – that we’ve already uploaded, I should say. You can click here, upload an image or video and go to all of your stuff and upload any of the images that you want to upload and they will be stored here in Canva which is a really nice feature and and that’s on the free version. One thing you could do is – we have this this little tiny version of our logo that we could put in the corner of all of our images…or you could put your your business name at the bottom maybe in white just light or you could put your website address. Those are some nice ways to bring in your brand and to make the images custom to you. I just realized one thing that we didn’t do which I said we should and that is to give credit to St. Jerome.
So, let me go back and let’s add some some smaller text here. Again, if it’s too small you can make it a little bit bigger. It’s the wrong color, maybe we’ll make it white. I’ll bring it down here.What made me think of it was that if people saw our logo on it they might think oh well that’s something that we came up with but it’s not. We designed the imagery. We designed – we put the image together with the box, with the text, with the quote in the different colors and put our logo on it, so we’ve created something unique here, however the quote itself is not something that we came up with so we’ve got to give credit to St. Jerome. Thank you. This is the way that you would go ahead and create a quote and we just call them ‘quote cards.’
A really great way to also come up with the content for quote cards is actually from your own content. If you write blog posts, if you have videos that you’ve done, if you have lives that you’ve done, go back through those. If you’ve done any teaching whether that’s in front of a group live or online live, or done a workshop, or a webinar, I have no doubt that there are some really valuable points, tips, or quotes that you can pull out of those and create your own quote cards and then put your name on them because they are your quotes. Don’t forget that you have lots and lots of quotable (I’m sure) information and teaching out there that you can use for your own social media.
Now, do you feel like creating a quote card is going to be easy for you? if you do comment EASY below! There’s one more thing that I want to show you that I think is really really cool and really unique and that is the animated social media because you know how much people love animation and video and motion, I want to show you how you can do that in Canva. It’s fantastic. I just jumped forward, so I just jumped back so I could show you how we got here. You can click on this button ‘Create a Design and ‘Animated Social Media’ comes up right here, the first one,or you can go over here where it says ‘Create a Design.’ I just clicked on ‘Animated Social Media.’ We’re going to come up with a blank palette on the right hand side and then on the left hand side are all the different types of animations and when you put your cursor over them you can see them move and the even better part is that you don’t have to use them the way that they are. You can customize them as well. I kind of like this one.
So let’s click on New Year, but I don’t like the background because I feel like it’s really really dark and the background is also watermarked. You can see at the bottom it says ‘remove watermarks’ which means that we would have to pay for it, so why don’t we try and use a different picture in the back. Let’s go ahead and delete the background image. Whoops…okay this is good, we deleted the animation which is bad, however, it gives me a chance to show you there’s an ‘undo’ button at the top, so if we click on that, there it is again.
Now I know when I put my cursor over here, this box represents the animation. What I want to do is, I’m going to grab it and drag it down to kind of pull it out of my way so I can grab the background image. Now I’ve selected it and delete. Oh, and there’s another background image. I’m going to delete that as well so now you don’t see anything because everything else on there was white and that’s fine. Let’s go to photos and, again, if you had your own branding imagery you could go ahead and upload that but we’re going to go ahead and use some of the things that they’ve already got.
Now you have to keep in mind that since all the animation is white that’s probably why the background image was dark so we do need something that’s kind of a little bit on the darker side.
Let’s use the city and see how that works. It’s a nicer image. I got that to fit but I don’t see the imagery or the animation so I’m thinking it’s not in the right place. Let’s go to ‘position’ and send it to the back. There we go. See now we got stuff moving around. Let’s grab the animation and move that back up again.
Okay, so we know that animation is moving around the text in the middle. You probably want to keep whatever text we want in the middle, so let’s make up some new text. When I click on the text you can see, like I said, the dotted lines, like I said before. Now we know that’s a bunch of pieces grouped together. I’m going to go up here and click on ungroup and now I can see there’s a text box at the top, a text box in the middle, and a text box at the bottom. I’m going to click off the picture.
Now they’re unselected and then I’m going to select the top one and we’re gonna make this – so this one’s just gonna say ‘Have an amazing weekend,’ so we’re going to wish everyone a wonderful weekend in the city. Maybe we’ll use this and let’s say something like ‘It’s the weekend’ and we’ll spread that out a little bit. I think that’s still a little too big so I’m going to go up here make it a little smaller and then down here… We can, maybe we’ll say ‘enjoy the nightlife’ so that kind of goes along with the image. I’m not too excited about these three lines here so I’m going to take those off. I’m literally just clicking on them and then once I can see the square around them, I’m just hitting delete so they go away, and maybe we don’t want to say ‘enjoy the nightlife’ maybe just ‘enjoy’ and maybe we want to make ‘enjoy’ a fun font.’ Let’s go up
here and see what we have. I’m going to scroll through. They have a lot of fonts on here which is great but it could also mean that you go through a lot of fonts. Now it says ‘enjoy’ and I’m going to make it bigger. Let’s make it 21. Let’s make it bigger than that, 28 and now it’s still all capitals and I want it to be capitals and small letters so I’m going to see if it’s all uppercase because of this. Now I’m going to type in here… okay let’s try that again. There we go…a couple clicks there and joy!
Okay, so I think that’s really fun and will be something that’s noticed because that’s another thing that you want to make sure that when you’re thinking about posting on your social media it’s something that’s going to get noticed especially because people are scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and so imagery and movement are a couple things that are really important and can get you noticed before they notice somebody else’s posts. This is awesome. Now we’re going to go ahead and download the video.
We can download this as an mp4 or an animated gif – either way. We’re going to download this as an animated gif just because if you download it as a video (an mp4 is a video file) and when you do that Facebook is going to ask you a lot more questions. It’s going to say, ‘What’s the title of this video? Do you want to put closed captioning on this video?’ You can see at the top here where it says ‘play’ it’s only six seconds. You’re not going to want to go through all of that for six seconds of video. If you’ve got a long video on Facebook, by all means, that you’re gonna upload to Facebook, by all means, upload it to Facebook and do the closed captioning put a title, description, tags, you know all of that good stuff, but if you’ve just got a short little animated image like this then just download it as a gif and you can upload it to Facebook.
Now you have the tools that you need to do at least two fantastic, amazing images that are going to get you noticed on Facebook! We truly believe in social media marketing and we know how powerful the results can be so we put together a guide for you that you can get free and there’s a link in the comments below it’s called ‘Create Amazing Content For Your Social Media Platforms.’
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