We’ve all seen images either on our personal Facebook pages, or business pages that weren’t quite up to snuff. Sure, the picture looks GREAT as a thumbnail, but now it’s been blown up and is unrecognizable! It’s oversights like this that can drive down engagement and interaction with your fans . Here are a few great tips and tricks that can help you avoid instances like this, and make sure that you’re consistently churning out quality content!
Integrate a program like Canva or Pablo into your marketing mix.
Both of these tools are free, easy to use, and can help you make sure that the content you create has the quality your fans want and deserve. If you’re a whiz at Photoshop, go ahead and use that! Photoshop has a seemingly endless roster of tools and customization options but can be a difficult platform to learn. Don’t have or know photoshop? Pixlr has a comparable level of customization and user interface as Photoshop, but is a free online tool. Photoshop and Pixlr are going to be for a more advanced photo editing skill level, while Canva and Pablo are much more user friendly.
Add custom watermarks, hashtags, filters and effects to your photos. Always wondered how to add that “WOW” factor to your photos? Photo customization is the answer! If you sell handbags, it’s great to put up a high quality image of one of your bags, but adding a watermark or hashtag onto the photo itself will considerably up the ante by customizing the image to your brand.
By showing your clients on social media that this image was made SPECIFICALLY for your location or store, you’re adding another level of customization, personal branding and fan respect. If you are a franchisee of a national company you want your guests to know that this wasn’t just thrown on your page by corporate. By adding unique identifiers, you’re telling your followers that these images and promotions were designed especially for them! A program like Canva makes this quick, and easy! Tools like Canva makes it simple to add filters, borders, and make collages to take your photos to the next level.
Make sure that you’re starting with the highest quality image available. Trying to trick out a sub par image is the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. No matter how much “lipstick” you slap on a low quality content, it will never be able to compete with a high quality image. You may find at times that social media scheduling apps, or other programs can’t handle larger images. As you can assume, the higher resolution of the photo, the larger the file. Usually when you start getting into the 5 MB range, you might run into problems! Use programs like Pixlr or TinyPNG to reduce the file size. This way you’re not compromising the integrity of the image, but can ensure that the file size is compatible with whatever social media platform you’re using.
It may seem simple, but that’s the beauty! By taking a little extra time to add effects, filters, hashtags, watermarks, etc. you can dramatically improve the quality of your photo content with little effort!
