Instagram Posts Using Canva
(Create Beautiful Graphics in Minutes)
In this video, I’ll teach you how to create professional-looking Instagram posts to increase engagement and grow your followers.
Stay to the end of the video and I’m going to tell you how you can get a free copy of our new guide, Create Amazing Content for Your Social Media Platforms.
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Hi, I’m Jeanne Willson with Six Figure Business Coaching and we help small business owners with strategic marketing.
Strategic marketing results in strong relationships with clients and higher revenue for your business. Good strategic marketing will ultimately result in really strong relationships with your clients and also with higher revenue for your business.
Instagram is one of the hottest social media platforms for imagery and our clients have seen incredible growth once they started using Canva to create the right images for their business.
So today we’re going to talk about using Canva to create Instagram posts. Canva is such a fantastic design program and it’s free which is perfect! It obviously has an upgraded version that you can pay for but there’s lots and lots of fantastic things that you can do with the free version.
I’m going to show you what you can do with the free version to create a professional-looking image for your Instagram post.
GETTING STARTED IN CANVA
(In this section, I’m describing what seeing and I’m doing in Canva. Be sure to watch the video to see exactly what I’m describing.)
Set up a free Canva account. I’ve already done this, so this is mine. Up here on the left hand side, this is our navigation.
We’re going to go ahead and click ‘create a design’ and it automatically gives you some options but I’m gonna type in ‘Instagram” and it comes up with a ‘post’ or a ‘story’ but right now we’re gonna choose Instagram post. On the right-hand side is obviously your canvas, your empty space that we’re going to create it in and on the left hand side is your navigation again and they’ve got some pre-set up templates which is absolutely fantastic.
They’ve set up backgrounds and designs and lettering. You can go ahead and use any of these. They’re just showing you – They put them in categories here, like this ones the ‘Chinese New Year’ and these are just two of them and you can click on ‘see all’ and you can see all of them. If you wanted to use them just the way they are you are welcome to do so. Some of them you do have to pay for.
If you put your cursor over it you can see this one says ‘free’ in the corner but if you put your cursor over this one you can see it doesn’t say ‘free.’ Most of the imagery that you select that’s not free is typically $1 (US) for an image so it’s not expensive and you can set that up when you set up your account so you could pay for each individual image.
You would pay for that when you download the image. You can design it, and create it, and if you choose to use it ,then when you download it is when you would pay for it. Let’s say we’re going to go back to the templates over here and we are going to select – they’ve got different seasons, they’ve got birthdays, and I think I want to select this one.
I have decided that today we’re going to create a really fun Instagram post and it’s going to be something that we’re going to post – something that we’re going to do on a regular basis – it’s going to be a weekly pop quiz to try and get some traction and get some people excited to check back with us on Instagram (each week) and to get some some interaction going with our followers.
We’re going to take this design, which i think is kind of cool, and we’re going to use it every week. What we want to do here is, we obviously have to change some of the wording. I’m going to change some of the colors so that they’re more like my brand. When you click on different sections… okay, so I’ve clicked on this and you can see the dotted line.
You can see a solid color line but when I see a dotted line I know that means there are different pieces that are grouped together. Up here in the top you can see it says ‘ungroup’ now. If they weren’t grouped together it would just say ‘group.’ I’m going to go ahead and click ‘ungroup.’ Ahh, you can see all these little pieces are all grouped together.
The one I want to change is the pink one. I’m okay with the black and white one, so I’m going to click away so it’s de-selects everything, then I’m going to go ahead and click over here. Now I can see the color is up here in this square, so if I click on the color I’ve got all these options to select from now.
CHANGING COLORS
If I know what my brand color is I can go ahead and click up here, then go ahead and put the number selection in here. I’ve got that in here. I’m gonna go ahead and search for that.
There’s my logo colors – dark purple. I am going to go copy and then I’m going to paste that in here – there’s my color. It’s really nice because once you put that in, it will automatically save that now in document colors. I can see it changed one section but it didn’t change the other, so now I’m going to select that.
I can see it looks like that could be part of the pink but I can see in the top here that that’s actually the black, so let me select up here. Aha, that’s the other pink part. I’m going to select the color, I’m going to change it to purple. Yeah, that’s what I like. I like how that looks. Okay and then, I’m going to click here because I want to change the text.
Now, again when I click here it says ‘ungroup’ at the top and I could see that dotted line again, so I’m going to click ‘ungroup’ because I want to use do different things to different sections. When I ‘ungroup’ this I can see that there are three different text squares; this one is a text square, that one, and that one. I want to deal with these individually.
EDITING FONT
That one I’m going to get rid of all together, so I’m just going to hit ‘delete.’ This one I want to move it up. I want to go ahead and change this to say ‘Weekly Trivia’ and I actually – if I double-click on this whole thing (oops, it didn’t do it – it should select it all) but if not I can hold down my cursor and select it all because I think I want to change that text to my brand color.
If you also have some different brand fonts that you want to use when you select the font, you could see up here it tells you what the font is, so you could select the down arrow and you can type in your font to see if it’s here. Some of the fonts – it allows you to use.
Some of the fonts, with the crown on them, they are fonts that you need to purchase Canva Pro in order to have access to those, and I believe if you purchase Canva Pro you can also upload your own font, so if you did have a brand font that you didn’t see listed you can upgrade to Canva Pro and you can go ahead and upload your own font. I’m okay with keeping this one for now.
You also have some options up here at the top. You have, like I said, here’s your fonts. This is the size, here’s the color, you can bold it, italicize, underline, these are some things that you’ve probably seen before. Here you’ve got different options.
This is transparency, so if you put a color here and you had a picture behind it maybe you want to make that the color a little transparent so you see the picture behind it You can also use this if you wanted to link this to something, maybe you have – you put a link here, an address an HTTP address at www address to something you can do that and you can lock things in place so they don’t get bumped around.
Position is moving things forward and back. All these parts and pieces here you need to think of as being layered they’re kind of layered on top of each other because as you can see, if you remember, this square is black and it’s tilted to the side but we only see this little bit of black down at the bottom on the right because the purple is on top of it.
By all means, get in here and play around a little bit. You can always – if you do something that you didn’t mean to do – you can always go up here this little twisted arrow and that’s your undo. If you’ve done something you didn’t mean to do just stop, don’t panic, just hit the ‘undo’ button and it will undo the last thing that you’ve done.
What I want to do is, I’m going to type something in here that says ‘guess the right answer for a chance to win a prize’ …and maybe we’ll say, ‘put your answer…’ and we probably don’t even need to put this, but you could say, ‘put your answer in the comments’ but I think that’s feeling like that’s a little bit obvious.
I’m going to change this color from pink since we’re not using pink anymore to black. Now, I’ve got to put the answers down here.
I’ve got four – well I got to put the question and I’ve got to put the answers in so I’ll move this all a little bit because I need some room here… Maybe I’ll put that down man. What I can do here is, if I like this font and the way it’s set up and I want to use it in a different place, I can go up here and hit ‘duplicate’ and it automatically duplicates that font and the box so now I can put my question up here.
SETTING UP THE Q&A POST
I have a question that I set up – I thought this was kind of fun. if you are a fan of Seinfeld, like I am, I thought this is a fun question: Every episode of Seinfeld contains an image or reference to what superhero? I’m going to let you think about that one while I put this together and then when we’re done and ready to download this I’m going to tell you what the answer is.
What I think I’m going to do is I’m going to go over here to ‘elements’ and I’m going to just pick out – now, again, go through this because there’s tons and tons of different things that you can use – there’s – these are just featured, different pictures, there’s grids, there’s shapes, there’s frames, there’s stickers, and sometimes they move (which is really fun), there’s gradients, lines – there’s all different kinds of stuff, but we’re going to make this simple and we’re just going to use a circle and I think I’m going to make them like big going to make them like big bullet points.
I might do that. I’m not sure how big I can make them…now, I don’t want it gray so again gray is up here. We could go up here and I’m going to make them purple so that they look nice and I’m just tapping the arrow on my keyboard to move it over just ever so slightly so it lines up with the the text.
Now I’m going to go here and I’m going to duplicate that text because I want to use that text again because I don’t like to use more than, say, two different types of fonts in any kind of design because then you get – it starts looking a little messy.
I’m going to put – I think I want… I don’t want that all caps…so it should, should be able to do that – open oh it’s all caps on my computer. There we go. Spiderman. Then, I’m going to align that left so I can make this a little smaller.
You know what? I’m having a hard time grabbing this circle because it’s so small. What I can do over here is, I can zoom in a little bit, here we go, so now I can grab this. I’m going to go… okay, so now I’m going to link I’m gonna – I selected Spiderman, okay so I’m going to select the circle, then I’m going to hold down the shift key and select Spiderman.
Now I have both those things selected. Then, I’m going to hit ‘group’ so now those things have become grouped together because what I want to do is, I want to copy it so that each of the other options has exactly the same size circle the same size text and the two are spaced exactly the same. What I’m going to do is hit ‘duplicate’ and I’m going to go ahead and move that down a little bit.
Now Spiderman… change this to Superman and then I’m going to select that and I’m going to hit duplicate again. Actually I could make this even easier and click on this, and hold down my shift and select this and then ‘duplicate’ both of those so now they are exactly the same height vertically.
Then I’m going to change this to Captain America. I might have to change that a little bit and then this last one was… Okay, so I don’t like how that worked out, so I am going to first ‘ungroup’ this so I can select just the text portion and make it longer. I can do that now.
I’m going to go ahead and re connect those – I should say ‘regroup’ those because I want to move all four of these now down a little bit because there’s too much space – so I’m going to hit ‘shift,’
select ‘shift,’ select, now I could ‘group’ all this so it all moves together.
I’m going to move this up a little bit. Move this down a little bit. Move this down a little bit. Okay, now I’m gonna just – I know I can hit ‘fit’ and this is gonna fit it so that I can see everything. Yeah. I think I’m happy with that. If I wanted to I could add – this adds a frame to it – to the square and I could change the frame to my purple color, click out of that. Hmm, yeah I think I like that.
So, it kind of looks like a invitation, if you will. So yeah, so that’s how we can create that now when we hit… Now, in order to get it from Canva to Instagram, we’re going to download it. Ahh, it does say that we used a ‘premium image.’ Let’s see… haha! So, again, we could download this and go ahead and pay $1 (USD) for the premium image and I know it’s a premium image because when I click on it it says ‘remove watermarks’ or I could just choose to remove that image.
Let’s see if we can find another element or we could look and see what kind of backgrounds they have that maybe we could use to replace it.
Most of these backgrounds, if not all of these backgrounds, are free so that’s kind of cool. So…that doesn’t look too bad. It’s got a little bit – it’s got the white that I was looking for and then it’s got just a little bit of texture on it. Let’s see if we can find something else that… is closer.
No, I don’t like that one as much so I’m going to ‘undo’ and I think I’m going to leave that one – I’m gonna leave that one there. I like that.
DOWNLOADING THE FINAL VERSION
Now, let’s go over here to ‘download’ and now I can see it’s not going to charge me for the download anymore. The type of file we want to download is – we want to leave this as a PNG.
It does have other options but a PNG is a nice high quality image. It’s going to look good on your Instagram feed. It’s going to be a fairly small image which is nice – so we’re going to go ahead and click ‘download’ and then it’s going to ask you where you want to put that file… and then we’re going to save it.
So, this is the weekly trivia question and I’m going to tell you the answer when we’re ready to download this finished image but you can go ahead and guess now in the comments below! You can see that there’s just an infinite number of ways that you can be and get creative.
I would caution you, though, that you do want to stay ‘on brand’ because you can just get crazy, carried away with all of this beautiful, wonderful imagery. Like I said… This is all – in the – these are just these are in the background section!
You do have the option to, which is really nice, and that is to upload your own imagery into Canva (even in the free version). You can take images of you, images of your products, images that you use for your services, images that you’ve got on your website and you can upload any of those images and keep them stored here so you can use them as you’re creating your Instagram posts, your Instagram stories, and really whatever that you’re creating here on Canva.
One thing you might want to think about doing, too is to think about what you want to create and then coming in here and trying to find it versus coming in here and finding an image and then trying to create the post to go along with it – just a thought there. I hope that you enjoyed this and found this valuable.
We believe in social media marketing and we’ve seen how powerful it can be to help businesses grow and that’s why we created the ‘Amazing Content for Your Social Media Platforms‘ guide and you can get a copy of it RIGHT HERE, and I did promise you that I would answer this trivia question – so every episode of Seinfeld contains an image or reference to what superhero?… and the answer is ‘Superman!’ I hope that you all got that right!
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