My Favorite Tools To Create Visual Content via @RachelintheOC

Rachel Thompson

Author • Poet • Advocate

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My Favorite Tools to Create Visual Content

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You may have noticed that Pinterest and Instagram have gained more popularity. If you haven’t noticed, you need to! According to Social Media Today, photos on Facebook generate 53 percent more likes than the average post, (HubSpot survey).

If you’ve stored VHS tapes appropriately, they may still have a few more years on them. But if not, it may be about time to convert your VHS tapes to MP4 format before it’s too late. Thankfully, there are companies that offer analog to digital video conversion services, just look at these guys if you need one!

I am the first to admit that I am NOT a graphic artist, but when I noticed authors sharing excerpts in a visual format, I wanted to know more. One thing I discovered is the game changer that is clipping path service. So I asked my followers (thank you social media) and here are the two options I ended up using:

1) QUOZIO

From their website:

What is Quozio? Quozio turns meaningful words into beautiful images in seconds. Then share ’em on Facebook, Pinterest, email and more!

Quozio is pretty basic. You just type in a quote and it gives you a bunch of options for backgrounds. Here are a few I’ve created from both Broken Pieces and my WIP, Broken Places:

How-easily-we-forget Pain-isnt-always

 

These are just two examples. If you’d like to see more, go to Pinterest and follow my Poetry board. Once you create your visuals, you have the option to share to pretty much every site: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. It’s totally free and they keep all the picture quotes you create in an account for you which you can access at any time (I also recommend saving each one to your hard drive or cloud, just in case).

Once saved, it’s easy to upload to Instagram or any other site.

2) PINSTAMATIC 

If you’re not using Pinterest yet, you should be! It’s easy and fun. I spend a few minutes each day creating and sharing pins, and it’s also a wonderful search engine — someone, somewhere, has pinned something you are looking for.

Pinstamatic is designed to allow you to create similar pins above, but with more options (share a Twitter profile, FB, a photo, create a photo with a meme, etc). Click on the toolbar at the top to see all the options. I use the second from the left, the quotations marks, to create well, a quote. Here’s an example:

example of pinstamatic

I hope these options are helpful for you. I know their are lots of other applications, but these are the ones I personally use and find to be the most user-friendly. It’s an easy and effective way to share your work without being super ‘hard sell BUY MY BOOK!’ pushy.

If you want to make the most of your social presence then you need to make sure that you’re setting yourself up for success from the very start. One way to do that is to make sure that you create a good social media content and that you’re using the right tools, from Twitter dashboards to social media aggregators.

Luckily, there’s plenty of research out there on what makes a successful social networking update. For example, one analysis of twenty different studies found that updates get the most clicks if they’re posted between 1-4 PM. The best time to post is on a Wednesday at 3 PM, although that will vary from business to business.

Video has been touted as one of the major trends in social media marketing every year for the past ten years or so, and the reason for that is pretty simple. Social networking sites are increasingly prioritising video in their news feeds because they tend to pick up more engagement, and you can tap into that trend to bring in more eyeballs, of course if you don’t want to get any kind of restrictions or limitations from trending sites like youtube it will be vital to avoid using copyrighted music or visuals, check out your best options at these top music licensing sites. Consider adding subtitles so that when your video autoplays on Facebook with the volume muted, people can easily see what’s happening.

Comments

  3. Those are pretty sweet apps, but I’m a control freak so I use GIMP and Inkscape to make stuff for Catherine. Besides having control over everything, you’re not limited to just making quotes pics. They are more complicated to use, but are also free. I’ve been playing with GIMP for a while now, so I can do a lot of things, even if I’m no expert. And I’m getting better at Inkscape all the time.

    Here’s a quote pic I made for Catherine. http://www.writingwinters.com/fleeing-thoughts/

    Reply

    • looks great, thanks for sharing, Catherine. I go for easy, mostly because I’m so busy with my biz and writing and family and… ya know. But I’m thrilled at so many options and you’re doing a great job with it!

      Reply

    • Ha, I get that, Janie. It’s important to have at least one visual channel to share pictures or graphics — if Twitter or Facebook are your safe zone, share there.

      I find some amazing stuff on Pinterest and I enjoy using it as a search engine also — kind of mind-boggling how it’s grown.

      Thanks, as always, for weighing in Janie!

      Reply

    • quite welcome — I wondered too so I asked around and did some research. There are many more options, but I find these two to be the easiest, most user-friendly — for me, anyway. any questions, let me know.

      Reply

      • Do you know of one where you can insert your own photo? Also, my photo options are limited, so I would need one that allows resizing of the photo within the quote frame, with an option to let the text run off the photo (as in not over someone’s face)?

        Reply

  7. Hi Rachel, I will have to check these out. I’m not a graphic artist either but often create visual content for my articles.

    My favorite tool is PicMonkey. It’s easy and free to use with dozens of features to create or edit images.

    Reply

  10. Thanks for sharing this….Iv’e been wondering how to add my own words to images (Now I know) or at least I will do once Iv’e visited the sites you suggest 🙂 I don’t suppose you know how I would add text to photo’s of my own do you rather than suggested images?

    Thanks again for the info above, much appreciated!

    Kimmie x

    Reply

  12. These are brilliant. I hadn’t heard of QUOZIO. They offer a ton of background options and super easy to share on pinterest. I use piklr alot and colorcap on my iphone as you can lay text over your own images however the fonts are restrictive and quotes need to be shortish . Thank you Rachel 🙂

    Reply

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