How to Make a Social Media Post for Your Small Business

Do you wonder how some businesses create appealing content on their social media accounts? Well, you no longer have to dread figuring out if your content has too much information, non-appealing information, or not enough information because I'm here to help! Appealing images or content pulls in possible consumers that can build loyalty and engagement within your audience.

Let's assume we're making content for a school musical.

For this lesson, you will need the following items:

• A laptop

• A phone/ device with access to your social media accounts

• A Canva.com account (Step Three)

• Something to write on and something to write with

Step One: Organize Important Information

Grab something you can write on and jot down important information you think your audience will need to know, e.g., date, time, location, and name of the musical. These are all the necessary information for your audience to understand how and where to attend your school musical. We need to make it easy and convenient for your readers.

Although we don't necessarily like to admit it, we humans are lazy and often skip over wordy content. If there are any other important announcements that you need to let them know, e.g., "outside food and drinks are not allowed, concessions are available." the flyer should state it.

Step Two: Gather Pictures

Visuals are easier to understand than wordy content. Choose a few photos that relate to your subject. You don't want to put in an image of a basketball player (unless your musical consists of a basketball character, of course) because you want to make sure the picture informs what they will be experiencing in their participation. An appropriate image would be someone singing or someone dancing because musicals consist of both dancing and singing.

Step Three: Make an Account on Canva.com

After gathering all of your important information and pictures, you need to create a free account on Canva.com. Canva is a website where you can create a variety of social media content. They have tons of templates to choose from, or you can start from scratch. If you are a beginner, I would recommend you use a template. If you know what to do or have worked with Canva, you can start from scratch.

Canva is free, but the availability of images and elements is limited. Right now, I have the "Pro" (paid) version, but you don't need to worry about this part because for about two years, I used the free version of Canva, and I still was able to get the job done while making it look great!

Step Four: Choosing a Template

Once you get the hang of it, Canva is very easy to use. The site gives you the option to resize your design to whatever is compatible with your use.

Considering the platform you are posting on, e.g., Instagram, you want to choose the template that works best for that.

You can type " Instagram " in the search bar, and many template options will pop up, just like the image below.

Choose your desired template.

For the school musical, we're going to post on Instagram's Story.

Step Five: Set the Mood

Once you have picked out the perfect template for your design, you want to set the mood. I'm not talking about a candlelit dinner; I'm talking about the style of your design. Are you going to include a gif? Incorporate a PNG? Have a theme of colors? Or maybe have an idea of a specific title font? As you brainstorm, jot your thoughts down.

For our school musical, I came up with the following list of what I would like to include:

• Music Notes

• A Staff

• Rusty, boxed font

• Frame for my Image

• Important event details in a sticky note

• Red and black as theme colors

Step Six: Put Together Your Design

When putting together your design, you don't want to cram everything. You need to keep in mind that if you can't fit everything you want, you simply can't fit everything you want. You can delete any non-important images or the non-important PNGs. Your main idea is to get the information, about the event, to your audience.

Font sizing. I don't typically use the pre-sized fonts; I usually eyeball on what I think looks good.

In the Text tab (red arrow), text-related tools become accessible. On the left, in the dark gray scrollable menu, you will see the top three default heading options with different types of fonts premade for any occasion. You can choose any of these text templates, look for a specific font style in the search engine, or take a look at the Font Style drop-down menu (pink arrow). The orange arrow points to the Font Size adjuster. The rest of the ribbon shows more tools for writing like text layout, bullet points, or letter and word spacing (green oval).

But when creating a digital flyer, the title is usually the most extensive wording on the design. In this case, "All Shook Up" is plastered the biggest, and then the date, time, and location, the second biggest like so:

To set the background color, click on the background and click on the colorful square on the top left corner of the ribbon (red arrow).

To find default colors, scroll down in the opened color panel.

To create your own color or enter a specific color code, click the rainbow-outline with the "+" symbol (orange arrow).

You can see that the date, time, and location are all in a white sticky note graphic. To find those types of PNGs, you can select "Elements" (yellow arrow). In the Elements tab, you can find five category tabs (purple arrow):

• All

• Photos

• Graphics

• Videos

• Audio

In the search engine, you can search for any graphic images that relate to your theme. For the school musical, I searched up "music note." As you can see, there is a variety of options to use for your design.

When you are adding images, you don't have to add more than three. Usually, one image should do the work unless you are trying to express a list of things, e.g., let's say you're creating a flyer for a school fair; you can put a picture for each activity that's going to be there. But in this case, one image for a school musical should do the work.

To insert an image onto your design, you want to click on the Uploads tab (red arrow), the Upload Media button (orange arrow), and select your image to open. All uploaded images would appear in the dark gray scrollable menu (green arrow).

Canva has a cool feature where you can insert an image into a frame. Click on the Elements tab and type in "frames" in the search engine. A frame forms the image into a different shape, e.g., a heart, oval, or square. Click on the heart icon with a landscape image in the middle (below picture).

You can choose any frame to insert your picture in (try your best to choose something that complements the theme of your flyer design). For the musical, I decided on something that looks like a paint scribble. Then drag the uploaded image right into the frame, and it automatically adjusts the picture to that shape.

When you put everything together, your design should come out something like this:

Step Seven: Saving Your Design

To save your design, click on the download icon in the top right corner.

A download menu opens up. Under file type, you would choose either JPG, PNG, GIF, or whatever file format is appropriate for your design. Once your file downloads into your computer, send that file through airdrop or email (depending on your device).

Open up that file on your device and upload that image on Instagram, Facebook, or whatever platform with a fabulous caption to go with!

Index

(PNG) Portable Network Graphics: a file format with a transparent background; used for logos, small graphics, and word images.

(JPG/JPEG) Joint Photographic Experts Group: a popular image file format for photographic images

(GIF) Graphics Interchange Format: a file format that includes little animations or a small video footage