How to Create Engaging Social Media Marketing Content | Liz Azyan | Skillshare
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How to Create Engaging Social Media Marketing Content

teacher avatar Liz Azyan, Digital Consultant

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:04

    • 2.

      Types of Content

      5:53

    • 3.

      Created By You

      7:49

    • 4.

      Shared by You

      5:54

    • 5.

      Created to Engage

      6:32

    • 6.

      Shining Example #1

      8:39

    • 7.

      Shining Example #2

      7:30

    • 8.

      Shining Example #3

      6:52

    • 9.

      Shining Example #4

      12:59

    • 10.

      Engaging Social Media Graphics

      16:12

    • 11.

      Canva's Engagement Templates

      15:55

    • 12.

      Saving Time

      4:06

    • 13.

      The Power of Storytelling

      6:28

    • 14.

      Call-to-Actions for Likes & Shares

      12:29

    • 15.

      Project & FREE Gift

      1:24

    • 16.

      Bonus: Getting Started with Canva

      5:03

    • 17.

      Bonus: Canva Tutorial Deep Dive

      24:48

    • 18.

      Bonus: Extra Social Media Tips

      7:05

    • 19.

      Bonus: Tools

      1:05

    • 20.

      More

      2:17

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About This Class

Do you ever feel stumped as to what to post on social media? Are you not getting enough engagement and interaction with your audience?

Come behind the scenes of an experienced social media and digital consultant, to learn how to create highly engaging social media content immediately. You’ll learn:

  • The 3 main types of social media content that you should use to get people wanting more.
  • Surefire social media content that will make you stand out in the increasingly noisy social media platforms. You don’t have to be an expert to do these!
  • How to save time on social media once and for all!
  • Bonus material to help you get started.

Students will be able to immediately try-out these new found techniques out in the real-world and start filling up their social media content calendar.

This class is perfect for business owners who are just starting to build their online presence to kick start their social media adventure to advanced marketers to get inspired and complement their current social media content arsenal.

Meet Your Teacher

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Liz Azyan

Digital Consultant

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Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Do you feel clueless when it comes to creating social media content? Do you want to read the rewards from your social media content, but not sure How do you feel like he's simply don't have time to create social media content and just find it tedious. Or you're always worried that you're not doing enough social media for your business. Will after eight years of helping people overcome their fear and overwhelm of creating engaging content on social media. I'm glad to tell you they are not alone. Social media can be a lot of work, and if you focus on the wrong things, it could be even worse. I've personally done this myself through experimentation of what works and what doesn't. So today we're gonna talk about how to create engaging content on social media. Let's get started. 2. Types of Content: I'm so happy that you decided to join me in this introduction section. I'm going to show you what type of contents you should be sharing on social media. Let's not waste any more time. Let's dive right into It is good to offer a variety of different types of content and sources of social media content. Broadly speaking, there are three types of categories of content that you should be implementing in your social media strategy. The 1st 1 is content that is created by you, and this can come in many different forms, including links to other content you've created, like block post articles or videos. It could be promotional offers. It could be ideas or spur of the moment thoughts that you have. It could also be image banners or even post that you're re posting from other social media sites. Say if you're sharing something on Twitter, you might want to share the same thing on Facebook. But why do every platform has a different flavor to it, and you might need to tweak that update a little bit. But the context off that update can remain the same, and you could cross post it across different social networks. The most engaging social media content that's created by you should be short and sweet. I mean your audiences scanning through their news feed and casually looking for something that catches their attention So they're likely to ignore a huge block of tax or long video unless they're really the big fans of you. If you're trying to convert, you know cold audiences into warmer audiences is short and sweet. Posts are really great, and you know there's there's shortened three and to the point, and that's what people love. Another thing you might want to do when creating content by yourself. You know that's by by you or your company is to use images and videos. When you post with images and videos, they're much more likely to grab the attention of the audience because you know it's very visual. People are very visual when or their on social media. Another thing is to use a variety of formats, so to share as much off a variety of contents possible. So get into a schedule where you can combine techs, photos, length and video to stimulate your audience. Another a tip I would like to give when creating your own content is too. Make sure to use direct links like you know, whenever you're sharing a link, make sure is the direct link to the content that you want to share. So, for example, when you add a link to your post on Facebook, it will create an image showing a preview of the website that is clickable. You can then add your own custom headline or comments to it, and your audience will click the link and go directly to the website. The second type of content is content that is shared by you so this can be found through natural search as well as automation. I'll talk a little bit more about this. In the lessons ahead. You will find content to share from others naturally by reading the feeds of other uses and thought leaders in your field. But the best. The most efficient way to find high quality content to share regularly is design up for new subscriptions of the websites that you want to share from. You can have the top news stories and other contents and live it directly to your email inbox, which takes some of the work out of the process for you. The third top of content is content created through efforts to engage with your audience. And this could include replies, likes, mentions, questions to your community and so on. We will cover this in depth in the lessons ahead. All content is intended to engage, but this their top content is more direct, like asking your audience for their opinion or in an idea or piece of short content. A good way to present a mix of these three types of content is to think in terms of 33% 33% and 33%. So is a good number of tops of content across all three types of content, and then you can adjust according to your tastes. You might before, for instance, to emphasize on your own content and give it more than 33%. On the other hand, you may feel the efforts to engage with questions and mentions get the most results, in which case you'd put more effort there. Once you start sharing content, monitored the results and see which of your audience response to most choose a ratio accordingly. Based on these results, also taken to account your own capabilities. For example, it might be difficult to produce a 40% of your own original content and say, If you don't have the resources to do that, then maybe you might consider doing mawr of sharing other people's content as well. And you could change this based on how many resources you have in the future as well. So, yes, don't feel pressure to create a lot of your own content. Ah, lot of successful social media strategies are actually mostly based around celebrating other people's work and celebrating other people's content. So if you don't have those resources, don't feel like you're under performing at any point. So should meat is a very social space. Therefore, it's best to mingle, as they say, and the best way to mingle is to celebrate other people's work 3. Created By You: they are so many types of content that you can share on social medium. I will show you 19 content ideas created by you that you can start implementing today. Be sure to jot down your favorite ideas while I go through them all. At the end of this course, you can slot those ideas down into the ideas generated project. Those who submit the project will get free access to my very own 100 plug and play social media conversation starters for free, so pay attention to the lessons for a chance to get this special gift. So without further ado, let's go straight into this lesson. This first type of content is my favorite. You composed the funny or inspirational message or image with your logo or website. You are out on it. What an easy way to get noticed, right? Just post a branded image like you see on here, and it's gonna be great content for your social media. You can also post product photos as part of your content. Just look at how Nordstrom has created an INSTAGRAM account showing all their products. It's really eye catching and can even drive people to buy your products directly. You can also take candid shots of yourself, your employees or snapshot of your office. A workplace. I love the idea of taking behind the scenes photos and videos like these ones by Zappos and Georgetown burglary. They're both fun and interesting to see. It helps hit to humanize the brands and look past the logo. You can also show behind the scenes of your products. This works best on size, like Pinterest or instagram. Think about how you can add unique angle to the shorts, for example, and employees actually using the product or a customer submits a photo. You can also ask for input on new products. Take, for example, this company fancy. They let their members curate the foods that show in each month's box. Customers not only get what they want, but they'll feel valued and they will feel part of the company. Your followers will love giving their thoughts on how to improve your products, but you don't always have to talk shop. Feel free to post something totally unrelated to your products and your business. Show your human side and show your personality. Take these examples. By Dennis DT and Amber McCue it has nothing to do with their business, but it's so much fun and has a sense of humor about it, and that's what really makes an engaging content. Do you have a block? Why not share a link to your most popular block posts, give a brief insurance to the post and explain Why is your most red and shared post? You can even pin them to the top of your news feed? Like what I've done here on Twitter, Have you recently been at an industry event? This is a perfect opportunity to create original content from photos and quotes taken from the event. For example, here's my tweet of a speaker and event I was attending. I posted it literally seconds after she said it. Don't forget to use the event hashtag for maximum exposure. Do you want to provide value for the audience? Why not share a link of a free download or offer on your social media posts? This could even be a plug in white paper, e book or anything else that would be useful for your audience. If you want even more attraction, invest some money into social media ads, too, such as Facebook ads to Twitter, instagram or Pinterest ads, they can really help drive more traffic to your offers. Sometimes it's really fun to take your audience down memory lane with you. If you haven't heard of Throwback Thursday or hashtag TBT, then you definitely need to look it up. Thes type of foe's air so much fun to see share photos of old logos or websites or even your very first product. Here's a little tip You can use the way back machine to take a snapshot of your old website . Imagine that. Have you ever noticed that you can create links for your newsletters? You can totally share those links on social media, recycle your newsletters and gain new subscribers at the same time. Sometimes is not worth looking for content to post in the dark. Take a quick look through your analytics to find out which topics generate the most interest from your audience. Clever right? Have you written a guest post before? Why not share that, too? And don't just do it once when it just got published, remember to repost it every now and again. This will increase traffic to your post and keep your host block happy, too. As a business, you want to be on the top of your game and be seen as an industry leader. Why not share random tips for your niche? Make it into an image and you'll stand out even more. Just look at these. For example. These are the type of things that you could share on your social media. Have you heard of a website called Kwara? It's a website where people always questions and other people answer them. Find a relevant question on Quora in your niche and answering on social media. It's a great idea to look for questions in your industry that people are looking on looking for answers for search the most popular question and create a social media post to answer it. And don't forget to hash tag the key word. You can also hold a giveaway or contest on social media. This can be as simple as asking your fans or followers to comment to answer. Take a look at this example. This increases interaction between you and your audience while rewarding them to do so. What a great way to capture their attention. Acknowledge your brand ambassadors and let them know there, Appreciate it. Did you know there are apse where you could find out who's your biggest fan on Facebook? Go to this link and install the app on your Facebook page. I'm sure your fans will be chuffed to be mentioned on your timeline. It's really great to put a face to the name. Show people that you're a real person. You can show people what you had for dinner, for instance, last night and share what you're doing this weekend. You can also use videos such as Facebook Live to really show yourself in the most authentic way. I'm sure you've been waiting for this one, right? There's a reason why this one is the last one on the list. There's a time and place for self promotional, social media, but first and foremost, use social media to build relationships, establish trust and build your reputation as an industry expert. When people do want to buy, who do you think they'll come to first? Try using the 80 20 rule, 20% promotion and 80% value. I really live by this rule. When it comes to social media, make sure you're providing as much value as you can, and on Lee, promoting once in a while to not annoy your followers. Did you manage to jot down your favorites? Be sure to drop them down so you could slot them into the ideas generator at the end of this course. Next, we're going to talk about content that is shared by you. 4. Shared by You: social media is not always about creating your own content. Most times is about sharing and celebrating other people's work, too. So in this lesson, we're going to talk about how to create content that is shared by you and potentially made by others. Remember to jot down your favorite ideas for the ideas generated project. At the end of this course, there's also a special gift of 100 plug and play conversation starters up for grabs. For those who submit their projects, you can use thes 100 conversations. Thoughts is immediately on your social media channels. Got it? Great. Let's get started. So the first type of content that shared by you that you could share with your audience is sure new, relevant industry statistics. These perform great in terms of retweets and shares. Data can really help you influence your audience to do business with you, especially if it's could trying to convince them that this is the right decision for thm. So remember to look out for reports and white papers that provide thes data so you can share them with your audience. Infographics are visually attractive things to share on social media finding Infographic, your followers would appreciate. You could check out the daily infographic for ideas, or, better yet, create your own or just head over to Pinterest and find an infographic that is related to your industry and share it with your audience. Have you heard of slide share before Sly shares the website where people post their presentation slides for others to see. So if you want to find one that's already proven itself to be popular, go to the trending and social media section at the bottom of the slide share homepage, so you could start sharing those with your audience. You can also share case studies. Case studies are great for delivering useful information in a way that's offer more palatable and actionable than a standard block post. You could find these different case study websites just by googling them se que study plus your niche So there's plenty of websites out there, and you can easily share those on your social media news feed as well. Have you ever heard of I f t T T. This is short for if this then that I have to. Titi is basically a website where it collects or and creates a bunch of recipes that can create a lot of business automation to help your business run more efficiently. So say, for instance, if you posted something on Facebook and you wanted to repost it on lengthen, you could potentially taken. I have TT recipe and then autumn eyes this process for you. So that will save you a ton of time because you don't have to visit both websites at the same time. So what you can do here is you goto ftt and share a link to a recipe with your followers that you feel that can be useful for them. I'm sure your fall was a fine and deeply useful that you have shared it with. Um, you can also share a tool, preferably a free one, or resource that you think that your fault was with fun, useful. Take a look at this tweet where somebody defend defenders shared with their followers a great new tool by another company, and they also mentioned the companies of the company will also know that they've shared their resource is with the followers. This is this type of relationship building as well, because people always appreciate it when somebody shares their resources with somebody else . So take a look at your business and see what tools you already using on. Recommend that to your followers. Have you ever been on Reddit? If you haven't, I highly recommend that you do is my favorite social media site. Visit Red. It's trending subreddit page to find popular and trending topics to post about. You could also use Twitter's trending content to find content that's popular and trending on Twitter and share it with people, say on Facebook or Pinterest or linked in. Just because it's a trending topic on Twitter doesn't mean you can't share it on other platforms to, So you should definitely stay on top of what's going on in your industry or niche by using Google alerts. If you haven't done this already, you should definitely go to this link and start creating a let's that are related to your industry. This is handy as you could be the first to let your audience know about breaking news in your industry and be seen as an industry leader. I want to be even more trendy, visit Google's top charts to find what people are currently searching for, and then give it your own spin on one of these topics and share it with your social media crowd. And last but not least, remember what I said about social media not always being about you and celebrating others. Why not share a link to a coupon or sale from a complementary business? Just make sure they're not your competition. Did you manage to jot down your favorite contents to share? If you have great the ideas generator project is waiting for you at the end of this course . Our next topic is content that is meant to engage in this lesson. I'll show you to create content that will definitely generate engagement with your followers. 5. Created to Engage: So now you have got a good idea on what content to create and share. But what about creating content that is meant to engage? Remember to jot down your favorite engagement content. Ideas for the ideas generated project. At the end of this course, there's also special gift of 100 plug and play conversation starters. Remember that, and that's available to anybody who's finishes the projects and submits it. Are you ready? Let's go. The first type of content that can create great engagement are quotes because quotes are very relatable, no matter what people do for a living or what type of person they are, therefore they do tend to get quite a lot of engagement. It doesn't necessarily have to be an image. Ah, plain text quote will do. Just remember to tag the person you're quoting. If you can fill in the blank posts are so much fun. Just take a look at this one. It generated a huge amount of replies, retweets and likes is important to make it easy to fill in. Those don't go asking a difficult maths problem to solve. You can also run polls to pre engagement both Facebook and Twitter have their own in built poll, but you can also create polls on an external website and link it to your social media post . Take a look at this example. This business is taking a poll toe. Ask for feedback on the potential service they're looking to offer. What a great idea eliciting reviews from fans and followers is one of the best ways to get testimonials you can use as social proof on your website. Take a look at this example, asking for a review on iTunes as I tune sense to rank their podcasts by reviews. It's a great opportunity to boost your ranking on iTunes, too, and engage with their followers at the same time. Want your fans to love you? Show them your love. A simple thank you can go a long way to building connections with their fans. Love this example by sky dancers from Timber Creek High School. Twitter account thanking their fans. What a lovely way to do it. Sure, the love By recommending a business you've worked with successfully in the past, everybody loves a lover. Another great way to create engagement is to pose a hypothetical question and asking followers what they would do in this situation. Spread the love, share a link to someone else's social media profile and encourage your fans to like or follow them. You can also post a photo and ask fans to come up with the creative or funny captions. I always have fun taking part in these ones. These are my favorites. Isn't predicting the future fund? Why not post your prediction on social media and ask your fans and followers what they think? Just make sure it's not too political or religious. That can lead to a lot of trouble. Don't say I have a warn do Ever heard of this? Hashtag or hashtag I am A. This means you're allowing your fans and followers to ask you anything for a specific amount of time, dedicate and announce a slot of time of about an hour or so to answer all the questions so people will know Quick tip major that you are known thought leader or expert in your field before attempting to do this or that you have a lot of followers that really do engage with the all the time because if you're not in that position, you might not get as much engagement as you're not an authority in your field, and you might be disappointed. So just the Cavett on this specific method you can also tag or mention an industry grew in a post. So starting conversations with industry leader is a great way to gain really good quality followings on also, you know, just create some building relationships with people that really have an influence in your industry. But don't expect them to reply all the time. As you know, they're quite busy people, so be clever about how you approach them. Here's a great example of someone tagging me and other thought leaders in this post. It's a legitimate question and is really designed to engage in conversations. And as you can see, you know, the conversation actually went on a lot longer. But this is what I could grab on the screen shot. Um, never be sleazy or be disrespectful of other people's time. Never demand an answer, you know, always leave it open ended because people don't like to be pushed into a conversation that , you know, they didn't ask to be apart off, so you'd just be aware of that. So Do you have a particularly helpful or controversial comment on your block? You might want to post a link to the comment and get your fans and followers to way into is a great way to engage on content that is going to drive people to your website. So just make sure that you link them right back to the post. That's that you want them to comment on. Do you have a question that you get asked a lot like every day or every week or every other month, again and again? So instead of answering it on Lee for one person, why not answer it on social media? Even more people will benefit from the from the answers that you provide and could potentially save you a ton of time to from repeating yourself, answering the question over and over again. You can even link it to the portion oven of the ethic you on your website to drive more traffic there, too. So that concludes the ideas for creating content that is meant to engage. Did you drop down your favorites? Make sure that you do, because then you can slotted into the ideas generator project at the end of this course. Next topic is all about saving time on social media. If you find yourself spending way too much time on social media, a recommend that you pay full attention to this next lesson. 6. Shining Example #1: So here I'm going to show you a really creative Twitter account run by at how Reynolds, which is Helen Reynolds, somebody that I know who's a cams professional. She used to work in the public sector, but now she has started her own agency. And she now delivers social media training to the public sector. So her account is superimposed, inspirational. And I really wanted to show you because I'm hoping that I will inspire you and show you that content doesn't have to be hard. Content doesn't have to be all flashy and designed by a professional graphic artists. Oh, you know, it doesn't have to be all these showy things that we are led to believe. And helen does a fantastic job at this. She is a creative professional that really does inspire other creative professionals to do better. So just to give you an example, this is one of her tweets, really engaging to eat, got lots of interaction here. And it's just literally her writing this cartoon and drawing this cartoon has her name here to make sure people know that is created by Her. But it's just a funny little cartoon that pokes fun at her date day job. Like what she used to do. The sort of things that the challenges she had to go through. I thought this was really great. It was really relatable. People who work in that job will know what she's talking about. I might not be funny to some people, but I find extremely funny because I've been in that same situation where somebody just said, oh, I want this to go viral. And as you, and I know, not everything goes viral as you intended to. Sometimes it's a hit or miss. And it's not. Some, especially stuff that has to do with government is not easy to make viral because there are serious things that they talk about. You don't just create some content and then expect something serious to go viral because that's not how social media works. It has to be fun, has been engaging as we relatable. And that's the only way usually a serious type of content or message can get through and then go viral. So it's really, you know, it's quite funny this cartoon and you can see a lot of people agree with it because they'd like to have interacted with this content. And this is the type of content that you can create without needing to have super mad skills in drawing. Or, you know, you just have to dig deep into your experiences and then kinda share it with the world. Because Helen deliver social media training to CMS professionals within the public sector. So by her sharing her experiences shows to the people who probably kinda be her clients that she knows what they're going through, she knows what challenges that they're going through and she knows how to get to overcome them. Because she's been there and her content or content is simple piece of content like this, demonstrates that they can see how powerful that is being relatable to your audience and showing them that, hey, I know what you're going through. I can I can relate. So, you know, I'm the best person for you to get help from because I I've been there. I know I know a way. It's like another thing that she does is things like this. This is really simple, right? You don't even have to draw, is literally just you writing down a Helen just wrote this down on a piece paper, took a picture of that probably with their phone and then upload. It is so simple and probably takes like five minutes, right? But look how engaging is a 189 likes 46 retweets, 15 people commented on it. And this is a really great engagement. She gets this type of engagement all of the time. People like me, like I tend to I don't even like wait for her stuff to come on the field. On the social feed, I just go to her, her account and the CEO, what content is Helen put out recently because I really loved her content, so I will go to her. So you don't have to be at the mercy of the algorithm gods to hope to show your content to your followers. You just become like a source of inspiration for a lot of people, people you want to talk to and they come looking for your content as long as like producing the Monica says consistent basis than people know that you'll have new content that that they can engage with. And this is, to me, is a very evergreen topics content. She could have posted this ages ago. People would still like it today. Another piece of content that's really great hour, this is another one. I think this is quite funny as well. This is like a unicorn. And she's just poking fun at the fact that people expect a lot of coms professionals to do a lot of things that sometimes are not actually realistic. So that's why she calls it the columns unicorn. Again, as you can see here, it's the head loss of engagement interaction. And people's loved the source stuff. She even sold T-Shirts based on this piece of cartoon and I think it's sold. I think it's whole quite well. I mean, who knows? But I think that's just just shows that sometimes your content can really inspire people and just really relate to people on a very personal level. And you'll be able to stay top of mind. This is what they say when you create content that is engaging and relatable, you become top of mind whenever somebody thinks of, say, a social media expert, teach them in within the public sector. So she is the person that they relate to and built. They'll think about when they need some home. Another one is this one I love this one. This isn't the F heart tonight there. This is just like a, a bit like a flow chart, but in the same style where she teaches, draws it. And this is the concept approval process and it shows the flow of how some comms professional would have the project starts. You know, she creates a lovely bit of content in draft mode. But by bn after it goes through several layers of bureaucracy and too many cooks. And what comes out at the end is a big, obeys the crap. And oh my gosh, look at how engaged people are with this piece of content, especially in government. I have experience working with them and there's a lot of bureaucracy. There's layers of approval. And sometimes the content you put n looks nothing like that comes out at the end, looks nothing like what you put in the beginning. It totally is changed beyond belief. And this is something that I think Helen encapsulated by experience really well. Just through this one tweet with this one sort of flowcharts. And again, it's ahead, the content is ahead. And this is how you create content that stands out. This is how you make your brand a place, a destination, instead of just a fleeting, the content that sometimes someone season happens to like once in a while. But when you create content like this, people come to you. They don't wait for the feed to show PP In your content. They will go to you to find it again and again because they enjoy it. So, and they, they, they would share it with their friends because people love to share things that make people smile. And the whole, the whole recipe of success for social media is you share content that makes people feel good or evokes a very strong feeling or strong reaction. It can be something that makes people smile, makes people cry, makes people angry. These are all very strong emotions. And if he can get to engage people on that level with their content, that means you're doing a great job. So I hope that this inspired in, and I have another piece of content created by Hamlin. And in the next lesson that I think you'll find really, really creative and inspiring as well. 7. Shining Example #2: So here's an example by at Tel Reynolds on Twitter. And she is a communication expert and who has a communications agency that serves socialmedia training for the public sector. And she had launched this course for social media managers. And she, I think I wanted to share this video because she did such a fantastic job at launching this campaign in a way I've never seen before, by the way, that I've never seen anyone do it quite like this. I've seen a lot. But this was special and really stood out in my mind and I'm not surprised helen does a great job every time. She really thinks outside the box. So this tweet that you see here is it's an announcement to launch her social media managers online course. So she says, I have 3-bit brilliant things. I won't just talk to colleagues in social media people about today. She says, number one, a big fat juicy news. Number two, the launch has something very special, about three and a nice message from someone you know and love. As ready. I'll start with the message first and see even there, she's just tease three blunt even that has gone low engagement. So this was the surprise. She says everyone working in columns, Leslie and I wanted to do something bombastic to make you smile. Your amazing thank you. And if you play the message, you'll see what it says. Enter yourself. This is shorter. Yeah, I gotta give a big shout out to a CMS creatives in the UK. All communication people big up yourself. You guys are doing an amazing job lately, even throughout this pandemic and throughout you guys allow you people have been at home. You got to go home and kids and everything and went all around you guys. You've just been on top of it and just been doing an amazing job. And, you know, what can I say? Hell, Reynolds is as big in you guys up and not begin you guys. Because you guys have been doing just an amazing time for us to grow. Wanted fantastic, say yeah, oh yeah, yeah. So as you can see there, that's shaggy. If you don't know him, he's a very popular singer a few years ago when he had that huge Psalm bombastic. And it, you can actually hire him on a website called cameo to do shoutouts for you. So that's what Helen, wow, that was something I did not see come in IC. I've seen a lot of online courses launches and I've never seen anyone do it quite like this. And I thought, wow, what a, what a great piece of content ME allowed people with. I know these are the rates here. You can see the different rates and you can choose, I mean, to someone that my cheaper, they place their reality TV stars depending on our popular there. But you have to choose one and I guess that would, your audience would know for it to work. And she probably spent a lot of money because shaggy is very popular. And I think if you could spend hundreds of pounds on ads, then why not use this? This develops organic traffic. And look at the engagement she got here. People really, really love their people that even I was like, whoa, that's not so cool. I know that she bought the shadow. I thought what a cool way to get your posts to go viral using shaggy. And then saying, you know, those lines are bombast in all. Then his voice is very, you know, kind of like going down memory lane in some sense. And it was just called to see her tomorrow with something so creative and really engaging. So like after, say C After she went viral on the same Twitter thread. And you can see here there's several, several threads in the same tweet. She then announces her social media corps, CDC who I happen there. She got herself viral. And then she announces the course. And even that as well gets a ton of engagement. And then she goes on to talk a little bit more. And then just the CNO. She, she, she knows people are on that thread and people are getting notifications. She then sense yet another cameo here. Let's listen to this. You know, I need a calm in my life. The course is called social media expert and helps boost social media. So good luck. And I hope you boost your social media with the elements from the hoffman. If you watch Bay Watch he know he's a very popular actor. And he asked her that was one where it actually says the name of the course itself. And I think that was so cool for her to also throw one more in to get, you know, keep the fire going, keep it up, keep people interests that keep people talking, get that post viral and gay organic traffic. And, you know, I think it was a huge success. Just look at the engagement. I wouldn't have seen that if it didn't go so viral like this, you know, because sometimes you just miss things. But because he, when you're launching is very time sensitive. And you want people to grab people's attention right there during that lunchtime. So it's important to think, live outside the balls, get creative. And really kind of just make people laugh and smile and engage with like a strong emotion like this lemma, people see a shaggy, some people might be firms. It's just cool to see somebody. Content being used in an unexpected way is very surprising. You don't expect something as serious as an online course launch to use this sort of method to grab people's attention because that's what you want, right when you're launching, of course, want more eyeballs on the content on the landing page, on the sales page. So how do you do that? You create a piece of social media content that is likely to go viral. So in this case, hats off to hell and she was successful, hands down. So when you're creating any type of launch campaign, think about certain ways that you can go viral of with your content. So then you'd raise awareness about your course. You have to think a little bit out of the box and you might have to spend a bit of money, but I mean, wouldn't you agree it's worth it? I think it's worth in this case, obviously, you'd have to step out of your comfort zone and really think outside the box because this is not something that you see every day when somebody's launching a course. So don't just look at the influences in your space and see, oh, how did they do it? That's their gate, you know, don't worry about them. You're different, you are, you. So think about how you appeal to your audience and use that as the same mechanism as it's humorous is making people smile. If it's inspiring other people as if it's being a surprising, unexpected, creative, then continue on that path. Don't do what other people are doing. Don't worry about them. Just do you and create content that you feel will connect with your audience. So I hope this has inspired you and let me know in the comments what you thought about this. 8. Shining Example #3: So this is the count by Julian ship hero and he is the CEO of demand curve, which is a company that helps startups with their growth. And he has, he runs really, really engaging Twitter account, which I also personally follow consistently. I check his tweets every day because every single tweet, he tweets. There's always something to learn and there's always something that I find fascinating and engaging about it because I'm interested in growth tactics myself. So in that sense, he's very successful with his content because I've come to expect excellence from him when it comes to his content. So let's just look at one of his pieces of content now one is show you as an example. So as you can see how to use the tweets as the image is below. Share a growth tactic. You know, he's a growth experts, so that's why he's gonna share. They state the implication of a product's benefit. And the benefit being, as an example, clear your inbox and the implication being so you can go home early. So the benefit, as you can see here in all the examples are highlighted in green, whereas the implication, what is highlighted in purple. So he's giving examples to educate his audience who's could be a startup looking for an expert to help them with their growth. So think about it this way. Usually start-ups, they might not start off being ready to hire a growth expert, but they do follow tips and advice from other people. But when they hit that time, when they are ready to hire someone to help them out, guess who they're gonna go to. After. If after all this time they've been following Julian, they'll definitely go to his agency to get advice because of all the great education that he's given out for free in the public domain that has proven to have worked for them. So in this case, this have a look here. So you can see is clearly labeled the green one and the purple one. And he gives four examples here. And that is a fantastic way to show someone your expertise, but not so many words and even the way she writes the tree, I think that's very important as well. How you craft the tree, the space between the lines, and how people can visually see immediately what you're trying to tell them or what you're trying to teach them without having them reading scratched up paragraph where you kinda feel your eyes not drawn to anything. The benefit of that paragraph is not highlighted just because of the way structured. So that's the other thing I've learned from his content is not just the content, but how it looks, how he presents it to the world. And I think that there's a lot that we can learn here. And so there's two things. Specifically. First, of course, the content, the way he presents it, and how he's taken the extra effort highlighted. So we can see just with a glance, what is the what he's trying to teach. And also just how simple He's conveyed the idea that he wants people to absorb. Pointing out this a benefit, this is implication. And then he highlights it in green and purple to make it even more obvious than then he gives them a little call to action in the end I call it this is the call to action that getting people to take action upon his advice and look how engaging this is. 1000100 lives. 100 retweets, a bunch of people responding to him. So I hope you've taken inspiration from this. And if you're an agency or somebody who is educating people to do something better within your industry, then why not try to point out that certain something in a more effective way, the way Julian has done here, let's take a look at his other content. And there's a bunch of his that I love that I'm going to show you another one that's really, really popular here. This again, you can see another example of him teaching something using the same sort of technique. See he uses it over again. Again. That's very popular as well. And then let's look some more. Oh, here it is. This is actually pinned to the top because it's the most, the most one village he has. So basically this is something he wrote and this is what he wrote on his website, if I'm not mistaken, and each is basically he screenshotted the whole blog hosts. And then he just put a tiny introduction to it. And it's just amazes soup. You have to read it to appreciate it. But this just goes to show that people are willing to read a long piece of content. If they know that the person that wrote it has taken a lot of time to think through that piece of content. So they know is valuable is not just something that we're tapped in five minutes. He probably took a whole week to write this blog post. But then he didn't put a link as most people do. He actually just sent a screenshot so people don't have to click the link and go somewhere else. He keeps people on the platform itself, which is I think really clever. And he is just engaging the way he presents that content without having people to work really hard, does you can see people really gravitate towards his content. I do know for sure that it's the content itself that's really valuable and people appreciate, but sometimes it's also the delivery. So when you're writing a piece of a tweet or, you know, writing a post on Facebook or Instagram, just think about how you're delivering that content. Because different delivery might actually attract more eyeballs to your content and January more conversation around it. So I hope that's inspired you and I encourage you to go to Julian's Twitter account to see how else he uses his content. Take inspiration from the Anika told the copy the technique. I mean, you're not going to copy the content obviously, but the technique, you can see what works and what doesn't, and you can start practicing applying the same techniques to your content. 9. Shining Example #4: So in this lesson, I want to talk about Gretel rose van real, and she is the founder of five different e-commerce stores that are making multi-million dollar a year. And she's also named Forbes 30 Under 30. So she started when she was young, I think she started her first company when she was 21 or something in her very early twenties. And she's from Australia. And these are the five different brands as she has at the moment, as go hey influencer, assumptive, official drop bottle might moral and the fifth y, I have her as one of my examples is because she is the shining example of how somebody uses social media content to drive and launch their brands. And she does it so well. And the she might be she might also be doing it in a way that you didn't think was even a thing like you wouldn't have thought, wow, I didn't even know this was a strategy that you can use. So I really wanted to point this out to you. So as you can see here, all the tabs open are pretty much in Scrum and and you can immediately tell that most of her brands are on Instagram. So I'm going to open the first one here called SMT official, which stands for skinny me t. That's what the SMT is four. And this is the website. And so basically they're selling detox teas. And that's the brand chooses Shopify for this brand. And basically that's what this thing cells and just got 245 thousand followers. And you think that's a lot, and it is a lot. But what I want to share with you about the success of her brand is I'm not going to show you what's on this page here. I'm not going to talk about anything on this page because the success of this brand really actually is from this account, this account called detox tips. And I think it was created PVAN before skinny meaty was created, if I'm not mistaken, is run by Gerta. You can see that. And basically she created this account to build an engaged community before she launched her brand. So this is where she basically post everything that she's passionate about in terms of detox teeth. And then she generates a lot of following and generates a lot of passionate people who are interested in this topic. And you can see here there's no branding. There's means, there's different, different types of there's nice pictures, different types of content. And you know, there's no real strategy here, if you ask me, is just sharing what she thinks this community will like or this community cares about. As you can see, this one has got 652 thousand followers. So what she's done here is she's generated content that has nothing to do with the brand. It just has to do with what people care about. And then when you talk about things that people care about, people are gonna gravity towards you. And this is a big, big challenge for brands and companies when they set up social media account, people rarely are interested in brands, you know, people feel is sometimes sleazy that smart me always doing promotional stuff, always has an angle and they just feel like I'm not interested in that. But if it's about tips, you know, it's God, it doesn't. You can't see them selling anything in their posts. Says no branded posts is is literally an account that you follow because you're interested in detox steps. That sort of community can grow and people can get really passionate about it. And people will like, can engage without feeling like they're being sold too. And I love that. I love this strategy because I will only offer me I'd, I'd hesitate to follow a brand, but I'd readily follow an account that gives out tips all day long. So she created this, and then once she launched her brand, she used it to drive traffic to her brand. So if you think about it, a lot of brands tend to pay influences to promote their brands. What she did was so clever, she didn't have to hire any influencers. She had for 652 forwards, 652 thousand eyeballs and audiences captivated and engaged with her content already here. She didn't have to pay someone else to get eyeballs on her account or on SMT official or to her website because they're there. And she had put in the time and put in the effort to build this community from scratch. And from there I think she learned that that really, really helped and that really helped to increase sales quickly for her, the brand that just launched. So she decided to create another account called detail swatter. And from here she created the account and she built engaged phone is almost a million followers here. And what happened was, now that she has an engaged following, she decided it's time to launch another brand. And that's when she came up with drop bottle. Since you can see here chop Bordeaux, that's this brand right here. And this brand is basically selling this bottle right here. And this bottle is like a water infused with fruit type of bottle. So either, so, yeah, you can see picture there. You put all sorts of fruits, vegetables, and end in get that infused bottle. And that's what she's selling. So what she did was she created this account and you can see like she only post the actual bottle only a few times in between these other beautiful photos. So you can tell that this is a very interesting based account where people don't have to be worried about being sold to every, in every single post is one, every animal to three to four posts once, even sometimes I could see a lot of posts before they post it again. So it's an amazing like to use content that people are passionate about in there under the umbrella of a different account, your brand. And then send all that love to the brand that you're, that you're launching or you have lunch that you are promoting. And that's a far better strategy than trying to drive people to brand accounts. So because people are more likely to like them. So the other thing is, as she created this accounts called detox food, and that's the same thing you can see here. She's selling the drop model link here. She has the link here, and she touches the drop bottle account here. And again, it's not a branded account is just pictures. And once in a while, I think she will post the drop bottle. But people will come here. People will look at the account and then they'll, they'll be curious, you know, because we're human, we're curious, we're going to click that link. And if it entices them, they, they will buy the bottle. So that's another account that she's created, detox food, detox water, and then detox tips for the skinny meeting. Isn't that clever to create several social media accounts that are intraspace. And then once you have an engaged following, you could then launch your products to it without having to hire an influencer to promote your brand for you. And you can see here, I think another thing I wanted to show you is how she's actually diversified the skinny me tea brand as well. She has this account called skinny me underscore t, which is still hurricane 24.610100 follows, which is still a lot. But this specific account is more meaning-based for her community. And I think that's kind of clever because sometimes when you're on your official brand account, you don't want all those means in the kinda looks out of place. And there's a little bit more serious, right? But with having this kind of diversified account, you can be a little bit more fun. Knee could be more relaxed. You could use means, you know, other people's content and it's a lot more fun and relaxed, so it's caught them vibe. So you can't treat different people's attention with diversifying your town's. Another one she has, which is really clever, I thought was the skinny meaty results. So this account is just for showing the before and after photos, which I think is her perfect because they get these photos being sent to them and then they post them here. And as you know, sometimes, you know, people who put their testimonial images up, they're not professional photos, so they might not look aesthetically pleasing for the brand page because it doesn't fit the kind of branding you have for your Instagram page. So that's why creating this alternate account where people can actually even support each other and this account, right? So in the, on this page, they're really creating a community of hardcore followers by having people share their results. And that one's got 52.110100 follows, which is nothing to sneeze at. Considering, you know, it's just an eCommerce brand is not like a physical store or anything. Another account they have is this one here, skinny Me Tea Talks. That's like a combo of skinny mean TEDTalks and skinny t. So skinny, skinny meaty detox thing, that's how you say it. So this one here. It's a little bit also a bit of a mix of different content. This is got a little bit more of the tea, but I think this one's got just a slightly different five from the amperes. So as you can see here, this was got 73.3 thousand followers. So just goes to show you, I mean, people will stumble across your content and different ways. I think this is the, what she's using is basically the Starbucks strategy is like or that I would call the Starbucks or McDonald's strategies. Like you could go to any story, right? But you will always find a Starbucks or a McDonald's there because they're everywhere. And that's what she's doing. The DOB is Kant's. She's like, you know, you don't have to know who I am, but I'm going to find you. I'm gonna attract you, and I'm going to build a community that you're attracted to. So then I could sell you what I feel, but you will find useful to you. And that's just an amazing, amazing strategy and it's worked really well for her. She has five different brands that really successful and she's under 30 years old, so she's one millennial that really knows how to use social media content and profit from it. So take a look at all her accounts and see what you can learn from it. But most of all, I think if you took anything from this lesson, is thinking about creating interest-based accounts. Because if you're struggling with your brand account, that means people maybe have a slight block to the brand itself or they just don't like to like brands they are, they're more interesting communities. And the only way to build a community is through interest-based accounts like this. And it doesn't have to be in scram. It could be YouTube, it could be, you know, tick talk. It could be Facebook, it can be Twitter. It could be anywhere. So think outside the box, you know, think about doing differently. Don't think about, oh, it's just one account and you have to do everything on that account. No, you could totally create multiple social media accounts as long as you have the resources to do it, obviously. But you can create multiple social media accounts. And with these, in this case, you don't even have to do it yourself. You can delegate. You can hire people to just run the account because you don't have to keep such a close eye on it because, you know, it's not brand counsel, you're not you won't be you won't have to worry too much about your brand reputation. But at the same time, I would say if it's your first startup is if it, or if it's your first brand. I suggest you craving that interest-based account yourself because there's so much to learn from your community when you're building it. And what you learn from your community can be injected into your product and help create a better products as well. So I hope that was helpful. And if you have any questions or if you want to share another brand that does the same thing that you know, please do share in the comments. 10. Engaging Social Media Graphics: So in this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can create stunning graphics for your social media using a simple tool called Canva. You might already know about this tool. But if you don't just know that this is a tool that you can use to design all your social media graphics without having any design skills. And you're gonna see why I say that in a minute, just to let you know Canada is totally free to use and you have the option to upgrade, of course, for the paid service. And which means you get a few more pro, features attached to it. But I myself, I use the free account for years and in fact, I've only just upgraded last year. So that's how long I've been doing this job professionally and I've been able to get by with just the free version. So be confident to know that you don't have to spend any money on this. It's totally free and it's totally easy to use. So give you an example. I'm gonna show you how you can just take a simple photo that you have in your library and then make it into a really attractive social media graphic with I need design skills without having to hire somebody to do it for you. So this is canvas website. So if you go to canva.com, this is what you see and I'm just going to log into my account. Alright, so when you login, you hit, as you can see, there's a lot of templates here. There's like Instagram posts, logos, Facebook post posters. You get the idea. It's got everything you could ever need to create graphics for your business. So I'm just going to show you a few examples here. These are all templates. By the way, I did not design this. I just pre-selected at before I recorded this lesson because I want to show you how you can take a simple photo that you have in might be of you your office or it could be something you're working on. And then put it into a social media graphics that makes a lot more attractive to look at. So let's take this one to begin with. So this is one of the templates, a premade template. And if you wanted to use this, or you have to do is replace this photo with yours and then change the colors to match your brand. So I'm just gonna see what photos that I want to use. So in this case I might want to upload my own photos. So say, let's see what's in here. So say I want to take this photo here and then I'll position there. So instead of say posting just a photo of myself, like I'm going to show you here. So say, usually if we don't have any design skills, what we'll do is we'll just make this photo fill up the whole sheet. And then you just put some writing over it and then maybe add a filter to. And that's, that's the social media posts. But over here, as you can see, this has so many layers and textures. And it makes it a lot more interesting to look at and say if these colors weren't your brand colors, all you have to do is click on the element itself and then select the color. Here is the color. Kinda control here. And you could change the colors based on say, your brand color, or you can also change the color based on the colors in this photo. So here, if you can see here, see that that's the photo their Canvas has picked up all the main colors from that photo. So you can choose, say, that color. And therefore that when you choose that polar, and as you can see, the king C, How about the whole background now kinda matches the photo. It looks really professional because it has chosen the colors from that photo. So for the background, I'm gonna choose this light color here. Can you see how beautiful that is and how easy it was to just quickly make it brand double or to suit your colors and see if you wanted to create this from scratch. I'm Superman, add a blank page there. And then we're going to select this and then see what's the information here. This particular element is called pink block. So this is in case like you are creating from scratch, but you wanted to copy something like this where you didn't didn't know why it's called. So if there's a way of learning what these elements are called, so this one was called Pink blob. So if you go here and the elements, you can search pink blobs, and you can find that element c here. There's a few of them. But they all, you know, we could use any one of them and say if it's this one, I could open up. And then I turn it around. I could change the color to match again. You know, we're trying to recreate this, right? So okay, so that looks pretty much similar. Now we're gonna look at this and see what is this called. So remember what we did before we clicked it and then we looked at info. So this is called, called square polysaccharide. So let's have a look here. And sometimes you might even want to save the once you know what templates you like. So say for this, for instance, you know, you like that. You can add it to your likes to save it so you could access it easier next time. Or you can add two folder and you can create all sorts of folders to save this particular element into folder so it is easily accessible next time. So now, so let's see. Okay, we've come with all these different squared polar rides. And you can see as, oh, do you want to use that one? Or do you want to use that one? So let's continue to look and see which one is which even choose to if you wanted to. I think it's this one, might be this one. Let's change the color. White. So as you can see, this is slightly different. This one looks kinda like a paper. So it's not that one. So let's continue looking and see where it is. So I think it might be this one. Yeah. He might be less opener. It sorts of similar brace, not so much as you can see. You know, you don't necessarily have to go with the same one. You just wanted the same look that pretty much achieves it. And then let's add that photo again. And to move it, you just double-click and you can move that picture. And then let's see what this, what's the name of this is called red blob. Okay, so let's have a look and find. Red blob is quite funny. Name isn't a rep lobe. Ok, so I can immediately see that's the one. Let's try get down here. Okay, so for this one, as you can see, now is overlapping the picture. I won that because that's not how it looks like here. So to, to move it to behind the picture, each has right-click and then click send to back. So in immediately goes to the back of that picture. And you can change the color just like before flight. And then go to the Color control and then change the color. And then there's one more element here, so we don't know what this is called. Let's find out. So this is called purple shape, vibrant doodle. Okay, so let's look for that. For Paul. Do though, something. Ok, so there's all sorts of different doodles here. I'm guessing it's dot one, dot one. So we change the color to whites, or we can change to that kinda silent grayish color. And that one's already on the back, so that's fine. And then you can see there's two of them. So let's create two duplicate, just right-click it and then copy, and then click Paste. And they will be duplicated. And as you can see, it was kind of like a different angle, just change. As you can see, this one is on top of the picture. So let's send it to the back. And this one as well as slightly to the front. So descendants of bag. So that was easy, right? The last thing to do is put this Hello there. And so just to see what this font is called, you click it, and then you look up over here in the font control. So this is called Moon time. So what you wanna do is over here, go to the tax element here. Click either whichever size you want. Let us click the biggest size there, and then drag it to the place you want to drag it to. And then we just typed hello there. Today have an exclamation mark. Yes it is. Next, find the font control and change it to yes moon time. And as you can see, is quite small so you wanna make it bigger. It just click the plus button here. Or alternatively, another way to make it bigger. You select it and then you just drag the arrow there. And you can make as big as you want to make sure it's centered. I just kind of these things here. And then I just make sure that it's set to center. Right? And the other, another ways to kinda center it, if you're in case you're curious, is to follow these pink lines here. When it kinda tells you, it tells you when it's centered. So that's kinda like an indication of when you've hit the center. And that's dead center is like that line is a complete straight line. So that means that you're good to go. So that's censored. Alright, so I'm not bad. Yeah, that's one example. Here's another example I want to show you. So this is like another creative example. This is an element, this is the picture, and this is another element. So again, if you want to know what this is called, Just click it and then click the information button. This is called nine for some reason, not very good. Tidal. And this one is called rips paper. That makes sense. So let's search for red paper. There you go. So as you can see, there's a lot of options here. And you could choose with 21. And say, for instance, if the same piece of paper, write, this piece of paper is a lot bigger than what we need. You can actually just crop the picture really easily by, if you see this little white line here in all the corners, that is to show that you can crop it. So if you just drag it immediately crop that picture or in that piece of paper. And also like safe, I wanted to put in there and say I wanted to I wanted ripped apart to be on this side, right? All I have to do is flip it. Go here to flip, flip horizontally. And there you go. Oops. Let's go back. Minimal state there. Alright, and then now it's like overlapping the picture right? Now what I wanted to make sure that it doesn't overlap. So I'm just gonna set the hierarchy to go to the back. There you go. Let's get rid of that one and use that one instead. And then let's find somebody else does not use this. Let's use a different torn paper and see which one looks good. This one might look good like that. The color matches this branding here. So let's get rid of that. So sometimes you can replace the main image by just hovering over it and replacing a sequence a0 there. But we don't want to, you don't want to replace it. We just wanna kinda have an overlapping slightly. Don't worry if it continues to do that, just pull it back. If it does, then it will just release itself. When you're doing this, it will, sometimes that will happen. Don't panic. Sometimes when the mouse takes over E to just use your keyboard, then move it into position so it doesn't take over that picture like before, right? And this is like, isn't this like a really creative way to show an image with spin, boring and putting the image and using up the whole space. This way you're adding texture, you're adding layers are adding text and captions and making it more interesting to look at them just had, say, having this picture there, right? And C, you could change it. And this is, well, maybe you can move around this fantastic idea and this is really easy to do as well. So and this, I just found that through the templates here. So just sometimes if you want to look for, say, Instagram templates, you just type in Instagram. And while I look, there's so many options here for you to choose from. And you could just, here's another one that's fantastic, using just a photo and then adding a few of those blobs there. Adding some texts are making that really pop. And it's really engaging to the eye as well. So this is something you want to use. Just click the template. Just replaced this photo, changed the colors to match your brand, changed the text to match what you want to say. And voila, you'll have a really attractive social media impose graphic that you can use and display proudly on your social media accounts. So if you create one with Canada today, please do post in the project area. I'd love to see what you come up with. If you don't have a Canvas account, feel free to click the link in the notes section and you'll be able to create a free account there. I hope this was useful. 11. Canva's Engagement Templates: In this video, I'm going to show you how you can use Canvas to create really engaging social media post. So this is the type of posts where you want to encourage people to interact with you and engage with their posts. So what I love about Canvas is not only provides you the design templates, but it also provides you with the content idea for each of those visual design. So take this for instance, right? This, by the way, all the examples I'm going to show you actually templates within Canvas. I didn't create a single one of these in any single way. I haven't changed the photos, haven't changed tags. So that's what I love about it is, it gives, also gives you ideas about what to write or what suppose. And this is the first example I want to show you. So this is the type of posts where you ask a question and they ask people to say what their answer is in, in the comments. And they could say a, B, C, or D, right? And they might even elaborate on that, on that, but that's just kinda make their giving them like a value. Abcd is just make it easier for people to respond without needing to have a lot of, a lot to say, Right? So that's really great for engagement and you could change this like you could change the question. And he changed the answers. You can change the background. And let me just show you an example here. Say they want the background to be that you can change to that, or you wanted to change it to that. You want to change the color of this box. You just change it to that. And you could change literally everything. But what's great is you have the concept to work from and could keep this as a template if you're on a Pro plan, you can keep this as a template and save in a folder. And you can just go here and then click here template like that and then select folder. And you can, then, once you've selected Egypt could publish template and that will be available as a template to you to use for future posts so you can reuse the concept and put it in your template file. So be easy to access in the future. Here's another example, the yes or no question, right? Which do you prefer? Give them two examples. Coffee or tea. And she could change, you could change this up. It could be, do you prefer black or white or orange or pink? Or you could change it to whatever and then you can change the background if it was orange or pink ICA for one side is orange and one side is pink. Or do you prefer hills or flats? And you get, have a picture of a heel here and then pair of flats here. So you could change this up. But also again, if you'd like to use this every now again, you can save as a template. Here's another one that's really popular is the secret to success is, and then leave blank and then leave, it says there, leave your answer in the comments. So this is to encourage engagement on asking them to leave their answer in the comments. And here's another 110 mistakes. Almost every person makes. You sure inviting message goes here. So that means, you know, you're supposed change message and then you ask a question here. So this is probably like a blog post, but then it's a blog post that is intended to also engage and ask, asking people for their inputs at the same time. So that's really great. I think it's not just about promoting the post, but also about starting a conversation. And here's one where I actually marked this as change. The question of the week. And I said change this to comment on the week so you could actually engage your audience, especially if you have a, you know, an audience that is like your fans. They are always, they always show up. You can show appreciation by highlighting the comments of the week. And you can say, here's the two, you could put two comments to people's comments and then put their handle name up here instead and put their, their comment that you wanted to highlight. So that's a way to engage your fans, I would say. And this is a great idea to use what was question of the wheat to begin with, you know, taking a template and then changing up and making it into a different type of post. Here's another one. Why do you think it will make sense first, start working together. This is very clever. So this one is, instead of asking, asking engagement in the post is asking to send a DEM. So that's also an interesting call to action and a way to engage with your followers. Oh, this one, I love this one. Do you like what you see and then share your thoughts in the comments section. What I like about this poses this for asking every type of engagement possible, like comment and share, and then save here as well. So I love that. It's reminding people that they can engage in different ways. Here's a really fun one is kind of like a work from home bingo type of card. This is a beauty care beauty care addition. It obviously changed this to something that suits your content. But I like the idea is very engaging and we'll get it. We'll catch people's eyes and hopefully gain some interaction from your followers. Here's another one. Are you confident in your social media marketing strategy? Yes or no helps. So this lightly to attract those who need help, right? They'll be like no help, I need help and they might even get a client even. That's one way to engage and have more fun on your social media graphics. Here's another one. It's time for truth or lie. Have you ever left your best lip balm in your car and came back to a multi-part, it'll say yet so they would answer yes, no or what likes her. So this is a little bit of humor in it. So obviously you don't have to stick to this question. You change it to whatever you want that suit your audience. But it's the whole, it's time for truth or lie concept, right? And it's got simple answers made to engage. Here's the straightforward question, what five things can you live without? And you could put your logo up here and then you URL down here. You can change the colors, change background. And it gives you the idea of what questions to ask and how you can frame it within the visual. And that's what I find is released for with Canva. It gives you that idea of how to lay, lay things out, what fonts to use, and how to position your branding elements. This one, this one is a little different. Would you like to inspire others? Obviously, you could change all the text, all the questions, and then says, come share your story. So that's really that site. Either they would comments in, they would tell their story in the comments, or, you know, you can say, come share your story in the comments, or in this case I think is actually saying, go to the website to share your story. So you could potentially change that to say, come share your story in the comments. Then that will be an engagement posts, right? It's because you're asking for interaction. So you see, as you can see here, this was a post, was more of a call to action, I think. And you just changed it into an engagement posts by just adding a few words. So that's really cool too. You could add your own spin to things and not use the posts as it's been templated. And then next you have things like this. You can say, which color do you wear on a daily basis, common below. That's another form of interaction that you can create. Here's another one as well, really pretty, I love it. What books give you inspiration is the a, B, C, D sort of thing. Again, comment down below. Here's another one. What inspires you and makes you smile. And then set type something that Mr. comments and put it in the comments. Here's another question is a different way, right? That's what I like about Canvas gives you ideas on different ways to ask the question, what will you leave behind in 2020 and what's something you want to start in 2021? So this one is a double-barreled double-barreled question. So says, share one answer for each question. Here's another question, but a different kind of format to the one before. And here's another interesting one. This is actually, I would say, maybe an e-commerce product. And then it's asking, what would you choose. So it's kinda clever because it's asking people to choose. Mn is giving information about the product you're selling. And it says More info in the bio, but it's still asking for that interaction, right? So this is a kind of clever in traction, but also promotional. And I wouldn't have thought about if I didn't look at this example template. And so that will give you an idea. And if it's something you like, then you can save as a template and use it over and over again in your content plan. Here's another one. It says, which style do you prefer? So do you know these two Aesthetic trends? So here's a picture of one trend, here's another one. Obviously this is meant to engage with people. Here's another one. Why do you think it will make sense for us to start working together? This is very clever. So this one is, instead of asking, asking engagement in the post is asking to send a DEM. So that's also an interesting call to action and a way to engage with your followers. Here's another one is asking me a question on Instagram. And there's a really popular one that ABCD one, but it's got like a different look and feel to it. So that's also an idea to use this template. So here's an interesting one. So this will probably work for e-commerce companies. So if you're planning a giveaway, you wanna make a bit more interactive. You can ask people to put in the comments what's on their wish-list. This will not only give more exposure for the giveaway, will also give you a good idea of what is one of the popular products in your store. So what's interesting about this is I think in, is asking them to tell their friends, which I think implies that the more they share, the higher the chances they get to get the giveaway and what's on their wish-list. So here's another one. To increase engagement. This is you put one option on one side and then another option on the other, and then ask them to choose your team. Which one is your ready to go makeup? So that's an idea as well. Here's another one. Yes, no question. Do you wash your makeup precious enough? And so I will probably no one for yes, as you can see like look, there was a 26 examples of how you can create engagement posts, visual engagement pose. So there's a lot of examples here, and none of them were created by me. They were all templates within Canvas. And all I did was sometimes I would just search for, I will go to over here, I would say ask questions. And then all these options come up on the left-hand side here. And you can just choose which one you want. And if you like, you can save as a template. I could sometimes put quiz. And that's how I found those templates and then I put engagement. So that's how I also found some of the other one that filled, fill the blanks of templates. So with Canada is matter of knowing how to use your search as well. The better you know how to use it, the easier it is to find what you're looking for. So here's some top tips on how to use the advanced search in and Canva, which can really up your game. I think he coherently upskill yourself by just knowing these advanced search ninja tips. So the first thing is say if you're looking for an apple, a normal person would say, go to the photo section and then type apple, right? And you get all these variation types of apples and save. You want just ran apples. So what you should be typing is Apple not, not, in this case, not green because you want just red apples. So as he saw, there is very important that when you put in the advanced search, the not has to be capitalize. If you don't capitalize it, it won't see it as a ninja action. Won't. Just. Another way to get the same effect that we want to just now is red apples. Is she just put Apple? Apple and then put the plus sign read. And that also gives you the same types of results, probably slightly different. As you can see, it was a bit of a variety there. So it's worth doing both because they, they produce different results. So that's fascinating to see. So this, you get this type of result. And if you put it like this plus Red, I think it's focusing more on the read in terms of background as well. And see slight got a lot of red backgrounds for this search results. So it's worth, if you're looking for something, try different methods of advanced search. So the first one is the knots function. And then next use the combining the keywords function. The nice thing is if you want one or the other. So for example, you wanted an apple or banana. And remember the ore has to be capitalized for it to be recognized as a function. And there you go, you get apples or bananas. So say if you wanted like pictures of an apple that has no background, so it's got a transparent background. So you just put Apple and then put cut out. True. And there is, you can see you have lots of options for apples that have no background. This is always useful when you want to have, you have a blank background or a colored background. And then you just want to have an object sitting on top of the design. You know, remember when we did that, heals or flats, engagement posts, you can search for heals. Right. And so you could put in the posts on the top corner, c like that. And then you want flats. And then each could just put that in the other corner on the side, right? And then the middle, you have the engagement persuaded. It says, do you prefer heels of flats? I need to just place those two options there. And then you can make the background something like that. Or, you know, I mean, leakages, choose background. So it's not so bland. Right? It's as simple as that guys. So those were the advanced search tips. I hope that you paid attention and try to use them and see if it helps you better. Social media graphics. 12. Saving Time: social media platforms are free and easy to use, But many businesses have trouble finding the time and managing their schedules effectively . For social media, it takes a great deal of regular work, So here are some tips to help you manage your time effectively. The first thing is to monitor your time. When you get started, monitor your time that you spend on social media and try to keep a detailed record on exactly how you use your time. For example, how much time on each platform on how long it takes. After a few weeks, look at your records and you'll get a good idea of the time investment involved. You can also find some places where you can scale back or make changes to save time. Another tip is to schedule your social media time. Decide exactly when during the day you're going to spend time on social media, create time slots according to your audience Peak times, for example. You could spend 10 minutes first thing in the morning reading and sharing content on Facebook because, you know, usually that's when people use their Facebook. When there are, you know, traveling toe work or or in Q. At a coffee shop, so you know that's the optimum time to reach your audience. Another tip is to write posts in bulk. I do this as well, and it's really, really effective. Save time great posts beforehand and then post them according to your schedule. So sit down for an afternoon and create a stock of posts for each social media channel. You'll have to have a social media tool that can manage this, obviously, so you could scheduled amount some of the platforms that Facebook has a scheduling tool, so you don't need an extra tool for that. But you do need to go into the publishing tool section or feature within the Facebook pages to do this. Ah, and then during the social media time slots, you could just copy and paste the messages that you've probably already written and say something like a cell. She that's what I use. I put everything in an Excel sheet and then paste them over to the scheduling tool that I'm using. You can supplement these pre written posts by spontaneously writing more timely content as well. So say, if you're in the middle of doing the prove written posts, something comes up. You can also respond to people during that time. Therefore, you kind of like, you know, killing two birds with one stone your being there, your your scheduling future posts. But you're also there to engage. If there's a message coming in full, you so created time in your schedule on a regular basis for social media content creation. When you get an idea or see something that you like to create something similar to save it into an ideas file, this is very, very useful. I haven't ideas file myself because I often see interesting post by other people, and I'm inspired by them. But I don't necessarily have the time to do it just yet. So it's important to have an idea file, which is, you know, like Excel sheet that you could just refer to when it's time to create content so you don't have suffer from writer's block. And that's also another thing about creating social media content. People often sit there and stared at this blank screen, and they don't have any ideas. But if you've already gotten ideas while you just at a time you want to, do you create your content and you start working, and that's going to save you a ton of time. A good place for your idea file is probably a place like Google dogs or ever known, which will allow you to store like gifts, images, embed codes, tweets, videos and hashtag, so keep it nice and simple so you can access it in the future. 13. The Power of Storytelling: Recently, I attended the Instagram pop-up shop in London, and I interviewed good re, Instagram's had a grant development and Austin, how do brands become successful on Instagram? So being successful on Instagram is almost the same as being successful and other places, and it comes to brand name brands. I have got a unique story. I don't real authentic story. Do very well on the platform when they share elements of that story through images and video on Instagram. And they're able to also connect with the community of followers and explain more. This concept is storage. Images and video, whether it's, for my observations as a marketer and researcher, I find that storytelling does play a big part in Instagram success on top of being visually appealing, of course, brands that really want to make their mark needs to be great at two things. That's telling their own story and the other is telling the story of their audience and target market. Today I'm gonna show you two brands that do a great job at telling their story and the other telling the stories of their customers. First, let's meet Joe. Joe is the creator of scamper dude. I think as a MOOC to Joe's brand is a dream to work with because of the background story of how the brand came about, scanf and duties. Brand's story also helps them to reach out and facilitate more conversations in their community. I was lucky enough to hear Joe, sorry, at the Instagram pop-up shop in London. Then now you can too. I had lunch, you know, my writing and had her baby surgery. And it was obviously that's quite a life-changing, terrifying event. And I didn't know if I'd be OK. So when I was facing the surgery on kind of this to what people say about the Golden Gate. She look, you go back and you look and you go, have I done enough good in my life? I have a helped enough people and I thought I have enough. I've worked in the offering, had a printing a fun time, but apart from attended kay, run, struggle, clip, but I made 2 thousand pounds. Gatsby says it's everything I could come up with. I've really done that was good. I haven't. So I felt like if I make it through my surgery, I'm going to do something that really helps other people. And I had teachers but I still have to children. They were heading 13 and the thought of leaving that out, mom was just awful. So I went into the surgery and luckily I came out with I and I it was when I was in hospital. I had ten days. Why couldn't see much 11 because decided my head was shaved and I had a 20 staples down my head. It was a grandchildren conceding I that so I had to be a powerful move the days, ten days, which was really hard and that's when I first saw what do I wish you'd get around to help my children to make them feel better whatever apart. And I thought I was happy to think that I'm assuming here to watch out for them. I gave up the idea of what now is my superhero sleep buddies. And they are shaped kinda Christian computers. Once dinosaur bones have Roberto and I thought, I guess hacking into one of those I superior to watch over them. And on the back I could have had a pulpit and I think that my picture in it and I could have said why me still here, you don't worry it that's why that first came from, the first idea kind of came around. So I can imagine hospital Sagittarius and the January 2.5 years ago, I came into the hospital and I thought, I can't do this. I'm gonna make them because if we make them, make them, I could donate one of revenue or a solid to a child who has lost a parent because that's what I was worried about. Child who's really AL and we still haven't really need a superhero to have their back. And then I can thought that's gonna be my slide again. Superhero has my back and we're going to tell it, which would mean that someone's watching over them even if they can't see you. So then I decided I wanted to do a play thing too, because kiss gets equational anxiety whether you go to school, don't ask me and I wanted to make all children know that a superior has their back. So I started designing them a clothing line. I've registered the company names gamble dude in the march. And then you have the most amazing fire in your belly. You, if you're given a second chance at life, really managed to then launch the planet block that should pretty into liberty in the November when after the year after my surgery. Which why do these timing is very important because I love that story. Joe's journey has definitely made scanf and dude one of the most memorable brands that I've come across on Instagram. Now what if you don't have a story like this? How can you use the power of storytelling on Instagram as a marketer when faced with this type of situation, I always turn to the community. I tried to find their stories and try to tell their story from a brand's point of view. Try it. The results can be quite remarkable. A brand that does this well is 2pi. I first came across, should be when I was looking for a special ring. Once I found chickpeas Instagram page, I was hurt. I waited for a post from them every single day. I was mesmerized not by their pretty images, but by their incredible stories. Check it out. If you want to do things they don't read. The lesion. Is having a where we're heading toward. You meditate. Tammy sway. 14. Call-to-Actions for Likes & Shares: So in this section of the class, I'm gonna talk all about call to actions, so-called her actions are all about getting people to take action and posting a good call to action will boost your conversion rates. So whenever you want people on social media to take action, you need to tell them exactly what you want them to do next. So in this lesson, I'm going to show you exactly that. If you want people to take action when on social media, you need to create compelling call to actions to tell your audience what you want them to do next. So in this lesson, I'm going to share with you a few ideas that might inspire you to create your own call to actions for likes, shares, and comments. So the first idea is to request a like and share. So in this example I showed you. So for instance, you could share this picture of some floppy disks. And you can say something like, like if you know what this is and share a few own one. So you see, without many words, you're asking people to interact with the content of the picture. And it's pretty easy, pretty snappy, and it doesn't require a lot of effort. Like people don't need a comment on it. They just need to either like or share it to express their opinion. So that's a great idea, right? Why don't you try it and let me know if it works for you. Now see if you're sharing some sort of information, article or link. You could also just directly requests to share. So you can see something like if you found this useful, please do share with your friends. Or if you know anyone who might find this helpful, please do share it with them. Sharing is caring, and then have a look smiley face. And that's always a good idea. So request shares, that's always a great way to get people to take action. You could also try and get people to share something to make them feel good. So you can say is it's something around fundraising or just something that, you know, is going to help another person, then you can say, you know, you can help someone today by spreading the word near and far by sharing this video now, so this is, for instance, if it's a video, you could say that Orpheus like an image you can see to share this photo now, or if it's a document or flyer, you know, just like in the real world, if you want people to help someone else, then you just say, please help to spread the word by sharing it or telling your friends. So it's kind of like the same sort of feeling that you want to convey on social media. You want people to inspire them to feel good by sharing. So that's another idea. You could also offer a guest to motivate people to share, so give them an incentive. So for instance, you can say, if there's a video that you're sharing, sharing this video right now to unlock the rest of this video for free, click the link to get started. So basically you're saying share it so you could then get something for it. There's an exchange there for them sharing your content. So that's a great idea if you want, if you're kind of information or content is a like a two parts, right? So you separate it into two parts and they need to give a really good value in one pot. Enough to, you know, but not everything enough to entice them, tell them that they can get more, more value if they share with their friends. So that's also a great idea to get people to take action. Another idea is to ask for tips and ideas from your followers. So you can say something like, you know, what is your favorite app to schedule your social media posts, comments below to share your tips. So you're drawing upon their experience for them to share with you and your communities. So that's always a great thing. So it's not just about you, right? You're asking them about their perspective or you, their suggestions. And therefore getting them to engage with you. A call to action such as comment below with and to share your tips. So that's also great way to connect with your followers in getting them to take that some sort of action to communicate back with you. Another thing that you can do is you can request a like or favorite for your content. So in this case, this example, click the like or favorite button. So in this case, I am not saying that you should write both. You should choose one or the other. So click the like button or click the Favorite button. Now, if you found this useful, if enough people like it, then I'll reveal my top secret sauce in part two of this odd school next week. So this is kind of really clever because you're asking them to vote on whether or not they would like more information above us. So this is like a great way to experiment on, say, a blog posts that you're planning to write for next week, you want to see if it's worth actually writing it, right? So because writing a blog post can take some time and you wanna make sure that it's something that will be consumed once it's done. So using social media call to action or posts like this can not only help with your engagement, but can also help give you an inkling on whether or not an idea you have brewing in your heads about say, a blog post or another piece of content, or maybe even a video right, is even worth doing. So here's an example of exactly what I just said. Say this guy called Greg Eisenberg, leafy, don't follow him on Twitter. I highly recommend that you do because it's really great accounts to follow. Said, I wish there was a step-by-step guide to unbundling Reddit. There are literally thousands of ways of making 1 million to 10 million per year businesses on top of credit. If 1K per 1000 people like or retweet this, I'll write it and posted on my sub stack this week for free, Follow me and I'll tweet the link this week. So obviously he reached his goal here has got to 0.1 thousand likes. So obviously he was successful here you've got to 0.110100 likes. And then as you can see, let me just try and find it. So here he actually has pinned tweet here. There it is. That is the article that he was talking about of writing. And he did it based on that tweet, you know, based on just kinda serving his followers to see if that's what they wanted. And I bet he gained a bunch of followers as well on top of getting a bunch of likes. So it's a double success here for him based on that one tree. So great, great example. I know lot of people who've done this and have had great success. So if you do try it and you do get great feedback, please do share it with me in the comments. And another idea is to find out where you stand on a topic. So this could be anything funny or serious. So I'm just going to give an example here. Danny Hawkins, Xia, some things she said random thought but something to think about this morning. When you brush your teeth, do you put water on the toothbrush? Toothbrush first. Then add the toothpaste later or do you put the toothpaste on first, then run an underwater and she did it in a poll and need considers, she got so many eight votes, which is pretty surprising. Considering the topic is kind of like really generic. But I think this is a great way to engage and get people to interact with you. So this is a great idea if you want people to take action on your social media posts. And also you could even ask things like gum, something more serious. I mean, if you wanted to know where your community or your fall, we stand on the whole mask thing, right? You want to know what people think, should they wear masks, shouldn't there? Where mosque, I mean, there's a little bit more controversial and you might want, or might not want to ask that question. But it's things like that. But you know, we'll get engagement and we'll get people talking will get people to take action on your social media posts. I mean, I personally wouldn't do something like that. But, you know, if your somebody within the medical space or some work has something to do is relevant to your work, to understand that you might be a researcher even then? Yes. I would say go for it because that's relevant to the line of work you're doing. But if it's not, then it's up to you that, you know, sometimes I can be a bit of a tricky place to be and if it's not, if it's just a random question. So yeah, just a little caveat there. A word of warning. Okay, that's one idea that you could do. Find out where your followers Stan, on a topic. Another thing is to ask your followers to share their stories so you can see something like, have you ever heard of stories of people making six figures from a single launch? So if you've had that sort of moment, share your story below. So this is about asking people of their experiences and whether or not they have had the experience that you just described. So think about the things that your community is kind of probably obsessed about or like is really important to them. And then try to see who in your community has had that experience. So this is a good way to not just get people to take action on your social media posts, but also to pick out who are these people amongst the people that follow you fall under this category and then you can kind of take it further right, of in terms of content creation. Once you know who these people are, they share their story. You might want to extend like a private message to them. Say, hey, maybe I can interview you because you have this experience. So, you know, I mean, like this piece of content is not just for the sake of engagement, but you can also extend that to create even more content that's intriguing or interesting to your community. So that's a little bit of a creative way of doing it without our rightly asking, can I interview someone for the specific story, a specific case study? You don't have to do that. You just have to 0 out this question and then let them come to you and let them show you who they are. And then we can broach the question of asking to do an interview. So you won't have this awkward conversations, conversation with people you don't know to get an interview with them. In this case, they've already interacted with the, so it makes the opening of that conversation a lot easier to have. Another thing you could do is you could request advice from followers. So just now we had requested story, no, you request a vice from followers. You could say something like this. So I am creating some landing pages and was thinking of using lead pages and click funnels to create them. What do you think? What do you use to create your landing pages? So here you can see your telling people what you're doing and then asking them what they think of n, also asking them what tools they use. So this is also a normal way how people have conversations in the real world. You're creating that same conversation on social media. And usually people who are mostly observers, you know, sometimes you have followers that are kind of more observers. They're quiet, they don't engage. But when they see a question like this, and they, you know, they know they have the answer. Most times these will get those people who are like silent followers that will get them talking. Because this stuff relates to them if they use these tools in the lead pages, in the click funnel tool, and they, if they've used it, they probably have an opinion on it. So that's how this can work. And you should think about the things that are relevant in your industry that might get people talking as well. 15. Project & FREE Gift: Congratulations, you're almost near the end of this course. So as you have now listened to all the ideas for the three categories of social media content. It's time to put it to the test. Start your ideas, generate a worksheet in Google Docs, Evernote, or a platform of your choice, or use the idea generator spreadsheet provided generates some ideas for your content that you can create and post in the next few weeks based on the different types of engaging content and the topic areas that will help your audience the most. As you review your social media Results moving forward, you can add ideas to your document, saving you time in future, postponing. And as promised, anybody who submits the project can get the 100 pug and plague instant social media conversation starters for me by emailing me at support at Digital dash match box.com and put in the subject skill share 100 gift. And I will email you your free 100 plug and play social media conversation starters immediately. 16. Bonus: Getting Started with Canva: In this video, you'll see a cool way to make sure you get the most out of Canvas swinging sign up. You'll also discover why getting started on the right foot is really important. And I'll show you how you can navigate Canvas homepage easily and how it can inspire you to create visually relevant and stunning designs to share with your audience without feeling embarrassed about your design skills. Because with canvas, you'll never need to worry about that. Trust me on that. Let's not waste any time. Let's get started to sign up to Canvas. You just have to go to canva.com slash signup. Once you're here, you'll see that you can use Canva for free forever. If you wanted to. You can create, selling designs and documents in minutes. And you don't have to worry about having any design experience. The tool is set up so you can start using it from the get-go. As you can see, you have three options to sign up. You can sign up using Google, Facebook, or email. I'm gonna go ahead and sign up huge via my Google account. So once you've signed up, you'll be asked what you will use Canva for. This step of the process is really important to set up, right? Because Kansas has different quick starting points for different professions. If you choose the most relevant choice for you, Canva will be able to recommend designs and templates, especially for you. Say for instance, you are a teacher and you select the teacher profession, right? When you set up, Canva will be able to recommend designs and templates suitable for creating visuals for your classroom lessons. And if you're a small business owner, Canva will be able to recommend designs and templates to help brand your business. For the purpose of this demo, I'll choose the Small Business option. Once you've selected your option, you'll be offered a free trial of Canvas pro version for 30 days. For this tutorial, we're just going to skip this option for now and go into depth on how you can use the free version. So now as you can see, because I identified myself as a small business owner in the beginning at the sign-up, Canada has given me the relevant shortcuts to designs and templates to help them get started to see what other designs and templates are available. Simply click the search box and scroll down to the suggested designs. You'll find there's so many more options to choose from. And you can even select a design with custom dimensions. This could be for designs that are not already defined by Canvas. If you go to Canvas homepage when you're signed in, you will find the navigation sidebar on your left. Here you'll find all your designs, templates, photos, app's, brand kit, where you can add in your brand colors for free. I really love this feature because as it helps to create my design based on my brand colors so quickly, you can also add your logo and brand fonts, but that's if you upgrade to the canvas pro version. So we'll leave that aside for now. You'll also find Canvas design school resource here on the left side bar, where you have a lot of video tutorials to help you create better designs and improve your designing skills. You also have the ability to add team members, create folders, and access all the designs you have deleted in the last 30 days. I personally loved the template section as canva is always growing, is design library and Neil see new designs come up all the time. Kanban will also showcase their latest and most relevant designs right now in the featured collections. Say for instance, right now we're going through the lockdown period due to the coronavirus. So you'll see Canvas featuring the remote working templates. And as you click through, you'll find some inspiration and content that you could be creating to engage with their audience. They also have presentation templates and coronavirus themed templates complete with the text, clip art, all ready to go for you to use on your social media and other media outlets. Some of you might even be interested in using the zoom templates for your meetings or webinars that you will be holding. So as you can see, Canada can help you not only create stunning graphics, but it can also help you to spark some content ideas that you might not even have thought of doing or think you might not have the design skills to create. 17. Bonus: Canva Tutorial Deep Dive: In this video, I'll show you how to create a design using Canva in three simple steps. First, I'll show you how to choose your design types. Next, I'll show you how to choose and customize the template. And lastly, I'll show you how to publish and download your designs. If you stick around to the end, I'll show you how to share and manage your designs as well. So let's jump into my screen and get down to business. So the first step is to choose your design type. There are two types of designs that you can generally choose from in Canva. The first one is using one of the camphor templates, which you can find in the template library or by conducting a search. Another option is to create a design from scratch. For this tutorial, let's go ahead and choose a template that's usually where I start. I'm going to choose a blog thumbnail template. So there are three ways I can go about finding a template for my blog thumbnail. I could browse the template page and look for the category blog banner. Or I can just type in blog banner in the search bar on the top of the page. Or if you want to create from scratch, you can go to the top left sidebar and do a search there for blog and see what suggestions come up. As you can see, there are two options here for blog, blog banner and blog graphic. I'm going to create a blog thumbnail. So I will go ahead and select the blog banner. Next, I'm going to show you how to choose and customize a template. For this tutorial. I'm going to choose this Templates customize. I'm going to change the colors and added an image to match my brand. When you first use canvas, you'll be guided through the process of customizing your template. The first tip is to click on an element to edit it. You will see the editing toolbar appear above as you're editing the template. You can also upload your own photos by either clicking the Upload button or dragging and dropping your files onto the canvas from the desktop. Lastly, the guide shows you where you can publish your designs Once you finished. To make this blog banner match my brand, I'm gonna change the colors of this blog banner to my brand colors. As I've added my brand colors earlier in my brand kit, I should be able to easily select it from the editing toolbar. In this case, I want to change the pink background to my bronze brand color. So I'll just click the background. And as I'm doing that, the editing toolbar will appear on the top. And I can just click the pink color in the editing toolbar and select the bronze brand color from my primary pallet. So easy, right? No need to go through the hassle and find my brand HTML color-code. Now I'd like to change the text on this blog banners. So what I'll do is I'll just double-click in the area of texts that I want to change. And then if I want to just delete everything and just highlight the whole thing. And then delete and then just enter the text that you want to add. So in this case I'm adding my name. But as you can see, this actually covers the text below here. So we could do a few things here. We can either move this down so it doesn't overlap. Or I think in this case, because of how the zed and Y is quite long at the bottom, I'm going to put the word bliss and asean on the same line like that. Let's, you can see whenever I tried to create a space, it goes down. So you could do two things here. Either you make the space bigger and then try and add the space again like that. Or you can select it all and then change the font size. So in this case I'll go to 48, Make it a little bit smaller. So it gets, it decides that it wants to fit into. And then I see that I need to probably pivot a bit. So there's this rotation tool here. You could turn it around slightly. I might even move it slightly to the left by just clicking on it and then pressing down and then moving it wherever I want. As you can see, there's, well, there's an alignment tool. So you could say, you could tell whether or not your text or your elements. It could be an image or text, whether it's centered or not. So that's pretty cool thing. So now that that is moved up, I can move this back up again. And if I want to change this as well, I could just double-click deleted and then add my own text. Alright, so that's all done. So you could also change the fonts in itself. You could change the colors. You can see all the options here. To change the colors I get changes to pink or gray, or I think I'll stick to the whites. I can change the actual text. I could change the actual font, family. See what fits. And you can see here that the ones with the crowns on the side, those are premium fonts. So you'll have to use the Pro account to access those. And you can see when you try to do that, this pop-up comes up. So if you want to continue to use the free version, just choose this fonts that are, that don't have the crown on the side. So I'm gonna go with the original. I think that was quite nice. Okay, so now what I wanna do is change this image. So as you remember earlier, I had uploaded an image of myself here. And now I'm just going to swap the image that is currently there in the template with my image. So sometimes that happens, you just have to make sure that you see. You just hover over it until you get it to the right spot. And now too, as I can see here, there's a lot of head space here, so I'm just going, when you double-click it, this is what will happen. You can move the image. Within the frame there. And then you could even, and if you want it to be clear, you can make the image bigger and resize as you see fit. Once you're done, you just click outside the box and it's done. Pretty good. A. So another option is if you want to use filters, you can also do that here. You just click on the image and then click Filter here. And you can choose the different filters that you want to use on your image. So sometimes it's nice to use that on Instagram where you use the same filter over all your images. So I can see is you've got a theme going on, is like this. You could use this epic filter and then you could just go up and down and adjust the intensity. And you could just take note of what you use like say epic 29. Just take note of that if that's the kinda filter you like. And then when there's a different image, you apply the same setting so you get the same kind of look and feel every time for your images. You can also adjust the image here in terms of brightness as say, if your photos are a little bit Doc, you could adjust the brightness of it to ingest the contrast of it. You could add some tint. You could blur out if you want to. If you just wanted to blow it up slightly. And that's possible. You could add process x process here. You could just really play around really with the settings here and see how you like it if you made a mistake, don't worry, just click Reset and you're back to normal. You can also crop the photo, which in this case we won't do because it's kind of already in a frame. And you can flip the photo. You could flip horizontally or vertically. You could do all that here. And if you've made a mistake, don't worry, just click Undo up here until you find the image that you want. Again, the way that you wanted it. I also wanted to show you another function that you can use on the elements. So when I say elements, it could be videos or photos or text or images, anything, you can basically adjust the transparency as we'll also see in this case, I've just lead to the picture and I'm adjusting the transparency. You can also do it here. Say for instance, may be this background to the texts there. I could change the transparency of that as well. And I could change the text transparencies Well. So sometimes you want some images to be less prominent than others. You could change the brightness of it with its transparency. And you can also duplicate items. So say if you want more hearts on it, you duplicate it. And then there's the copy, and then you can move it here or wherever you would like. Yeah. So that's an option. Another option is to duplicate this whole slide. So this whole banner, you could duplicate the whole thing. And this, in this case the blob banner, you probably wouldn't do that. But probably if this was a slide for a presentation, you might want to use the same layout. You just click to duplicate, and then you get another copy. And if you're working with a team member, you could add notes here. Say, how does this law do you prove? And then you can click save. And so there's so many things that you can do in terms of editing your customizing your template, and these are just a few options for you. The other great thing about Canvas is the ability to access stock photos so you don't have to go rummaging around and, you know, subscribing to photo stocks, websites just to get access to images that you'd like to use for your business or you know, for whatever purpose that you want to use it for. In Canvas, you can access a photo library that is immediately accessible, as you can see here, I just put some photos and all I have to do is search what I'm looking for. So say I'm looking for a bicycle, for instance. So I just type them by school. And then as you can see here, if you see the crown, that means that is something that you need to pay for and it's not free. So in order to use images, you don't necessarily have to have a Pro account. You could choose to just use one image and pay per image so you can stay on the free account, but pay per image. But if you upgrade to pro, you, if you use a lot of stock images, you might be saving a lot of money because then you'll just be paying for a bulk of images instead of just an image at a time. And that this might suit people who use a lot of images. Or if they're an agency that uses a lot of images for their clients and so on. So in this case, I'm going to try and use this free image by just dragging it and putting it there. So as you can see just now, it was possible to also add this image in the background so I could just hover over and that could be the background. And sometimes if you notice, if you use a photo background, sometimes it's a little bit too too bright. And then four in order for the text to show like this white text here, you need to make it a little bit darker so you could either use effects. These are just a lot of different apps that you could use to create effects. Or you can use a filter. Change the color or you change his transparency. See how that just changed the whole background. And then in May, the white texts kind of pop up a bit. You could also use elements to add a layer over the image. Like say for instance, if I wanted to have sort of like a dark black overlay. So I could just make the texts become more visible. So you can see here now when I selected that shape over the image. And so you don't want that, you want the image to go above the picture, but below all the other elements on this design. So I'm gonna do is I'm going to click the position button and I'm going to click backwards. So as it couldn't backwards, you can see that it's kind of like moving down in terms of where the Layer is. And you can see when you should stop. So I think there, if you make it a little bit bigger, you can see. Okay, so now it's gone where you want it to be. So I'm just going to pull it so it covers the whole area. And then what I wanted to deal with are going to add a layer of darkness. And so a layer of black color, a transparent black color over it. So the image itself isn't too bright. And so I'll be able to read all the texts on, on the image. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to turn down the transparency on that DC. What happened there? So what I did was I put a layer of black and then I turned it down over the image. And as you can see here, is much more readable. All these texts, all these kind of why elements much more readable. In this case, I might want to change up the black, so it's now a color that is more visible. I might change it to yellow. So all the blacks here, I'll just change it to yellow. So see, in a few seconds I would say, I would say okay a minute. At most. I have just changed this whole image from that to that completely how it looks. And it's changed. The whole theming of This is all but bicycles now. So I could change this and say bicycle mania. I could change the text. Maybe I'll change the font to that and then I'll make it a little bit smaller to small thing again. But I'll see, remember what we did before. When it kinda gets a little bit too big, you just make the area bigger. And then you could change this to a different font. Let's choose a free one that doesn't set. That doesn't set. Maybe I like the original. Maybe change this one to something else. Yeah, I kinda like to beg. Change it. Change it to be a bit smaller. Scale it back. So it's centered. Alright, that looks better. But do you think? So? Do you think you can do this too? I mean, you could even go crazy and at ASU could parts of bicycles. So over here, just now I was searching for bicycle photos. Now I could add Vice cool clip art. So see you have the pro and free versions. I'm gonna add a provision just so you see how it looks like. So when you add a pro image or pro element is going to have this kind of grid like image to it. So that means that's a paid for element. And when you try to download this whole design with an image that has a paid element to it. It will show you here that you need to pay that PE and download, and then the watermark will be removed. So if you wanna see it without the width, the watermark ticket, just download a free watermark giraffe, but you will still see the watermark. But if not, you pay for us and then you can download it and you won't see the watermark anymore. So that's how you use the premium images while not needing to upgrade to pro the pay as you go. When it comes to text, you can also change the emphasis of certain texts you know, with, you can either make a bold, you can make it italic, underline it. You can change the transform it to be capitalized with uppercase. And you could also change the spacing between all the letters so you could create more space between the letters or you can reduce it even just the line height. So this is, say, if It's like this and you want the line height change, you won't maybe wanna make it closer or further away. And you can make it change with the anchor is. So there's many things you could do in terms of changing how the text appears. So another thing you can do, well, in this case, we probably wouldn't do it, but you could create bullet points as well. So say if that's one bullet point, that some of the bullet point, it's totally possible to do that. Course, you can change the color. To change all of that. You could change half of it. So you can have two colors on one line. And that's really cool thing to do because you might want to emphasize just one word and have that stand out on. You might even go as far as bolding it. So it stands out even more than that one. So the next thing you wanna do is publish it. Once you're done with the design, you want to publish it, you wanna download it, you want to share it, and you really want to manage it. So the first thing I would say before publishing is to click on here file and click Save makes sure that the latest version and the version that you're happy with is always saved. Another option is you can save it to a folder. So currently we haven't set up any folders in this account. So let's try to set one up. So let's say blog, banner. And then it's saved to that folder. So if you create any other block banners, you could say that to the file and you could easily review it in a folder, which makes it a lot more organized for you to find in the future. So once you've saved it and organized it, either click here to download or you could care to publish. So depending on what you want to do, I would say first usually what people would do is they would just downloaded. In this case, remember I created two, I duplicated this design solve. Now we have three pages in this whole design. So, but I just want to use this one. I just want to download the first one. So what I can do here, I click the down button and just click on page one and click down and then click Download. And then prepares you design. It only takes a few seconds. And then you, you choose to download it onto your machine. That's one way to do it. Another way to do to publish is you could publish as a link. So maybe you want to show it to someone. And then they could just grab the link. You grab the link em that it used, share it with somebody. Just like that and that's what they'll see. And they can open their own Canvas account and then they can edit it. Or they could, they could share it, or they could see it in a thumbnail view. So once you share it, remember you're sharing the whole thing. You're not just sharing that one page. So you could also publish it directly to your social media. So UCAS publishes Facebook, Twitter, and email Facebook group. You could download it as an animation. Now this is cool, but it's only a pro version. So I won't show it today. But you can also upload it ascended to your Google Drive Dropbox. Because depending on what your system is, you might want to send it straight to your cloud storage so your team member can access it and then share it on social media or you can even share it to your mail chimp. So say if you're creating an email header, then that will be awesome to just send it straight to male chimp. You could also send it slack and you can print it if you wanted to. So there are so many options for you to publish it, but the easiest one and the one that people are going to use, the moles are obviously just download it. And you have all these options on how you can download it. For social media. Png, JPEG is totally fine, whichever you prefer. I prefer PNG because it seems to work better on most platforms. And that's how you publish your design. Next, I want to show you how to share your sign. Now this is very cool as well because you want, might want to share it with their teams, invite somebody to edit it. So this is where you go to share it. So you could have, you could have accessed this here just now with shared Lake is basically the same thing. But over here you can also have the option to add in somebody's email address or share it with your team member if you've already added them to your account. 18. Bonus: Extra Social Media Tips: As you've been such great students, I want to give you some bonus content. This bonus content will help you further in your social media content journey. So let's get started. So when considering content created by you, there are a few questions you should ask yourself. The first one is to start where you are. So ask yourself, do you already have blog posts, guest posts, and images already published? If they do, you should repurpose the content that you already have. You don't need to start from scratch, just reuse the stuff that you have already in your online marketing assets and repackaged them to be used as social media content. This will save you a ton of time and resources. The second question to ask yourself is, what resources do you currently have to create more visual contents? So look out for on-demand services like design pickle, or flock C, or tools like Canvas and digital much balls pro to streamline your content creation and management. The third question to ask yourself is, how much time are you currently dedicating to creating content? If you don't know, start monitoring how much time you spend on social media and lend some time to specifically creating content. This will help you overcome writer's block and definitely save you a lot more time for the content that is shared by you. You should definitely ask yourself, are you already consuming online content? Because if you aren't, it will be very difficult. Start sharing things that you have no idea what it's about. So sharing starts with what you consume. So if you don't consume anything, I suggest you start consuming, you know, one or two content pieces of content or websites that you would read. Ligo two, and start from there, share content that you're genuinely interested in yourself. The worst thing to do is start sharing things that you know nothing about. I really, really would recommend you not to do that. Make sure you know what you're sharing so you can be of value to your community. If not, it's unlikely to work the way you want it to work. So just make sure that you are aware of the content that you're consuming and sharing. So the second question to ask yourself is, do you have a list of go-to resources? So if you haven't started consuming content, and therefore you won't have a go-to lists. Like for me, I probably have for Social Media, Social Media Examiner, sweater, the top sites in my industry or the buffer blog. Those are also the my go-to resources for knowledge. And how about go to tools, making sure that you have a list of things that you know that you are a fan of and start subscribing to their newsletters. So you could keep on top of what there, of what content they're crazy. So then you could share it with your community. The third question to ask yourself is, do you consume the same content as your target audience? This is a really important question to ask because if you're consuming content that is not relevant to your audience, then you might want to start doing so because in order to trap them, you've got to be in like within their wavelength. You've got to start thinking and liking the same thing that your audience does. Because like attracts, like, therefore, you will have a better chance of engaging with them once you are into the things that they're into, but don't force yourself to like something just for the sake of liking it. Because someone else like to make sure that you are genuinely interested in it yourself. So the last bonus tip is for the content that is meant to engage the questions you need to ask yourself is, could you improve your tone and voice? So the only way to know this is to reveal your recent posts. Beat shoots your company voice and culture. If you've noticed how you post a written, are they really speaking in the tone and voice that you really want to be seen, you know, associated with, is in the same tone of voice as how you speak. If not, maybe is a good idea to change it too much your tone. So that will make you stand out more because you're being, you, you being yourself, you're being, you're being true to the culture of your company. So if your culture, brand culture doesn't like to where or doesn't like the color pink, then you shouldn't use the color pink and you shouldn't swear. So that's a good tip to get started in just to assess what you currently sharing and make sure that it matches the identity, the brand identity that you want to convey to your audience. Second question you should ask yourself is, if you outsource your social media, is there a consistent voice and tone across the various platforms? So if you don't have one already, you should start a brand Guideline document for your social media to ensure your employees and contractors apply your tone of voice. So this is to make sure that there's consistency across, say, all your social media channels and all your online marketing. The third question to ask yourself is, how much actual dialogue is happening in terms of length of your comments back and forth. Because, say if you're engaged, you're engaging with your audience is limited to like answers of yes and no and there's no elaboration of your point of view, then you might want to consider reviewing your engagement strategy because social media is no different than real life. Deep, meaningful relationships are built on trust and actual dialogue. So don't wait for people to speak to you, get interested in others, and others will be interested in you. So I haven't no surprise for you is another bonus. So I call this bonus times two because I think this particular reasons really helped me, especially if you're serious about creating content that is going to stand out and engage with their audience. 19. Bonus: Tools: So let's unviable the bonus times two. Here it is. Download the exclusive list of 55 tools for creating visual, say you can use to tweet outstanding visual content. I don't know if you've noticed that by love creating digital content. Therefore, I've curated the top 55 tools that you can use to Chris standing and exciting visual content. And it's all free. You can download it on this link right now, straight to your computer. So don't wait any longer, go to that link and get your free visual content creation tools list today. Thank you so much for taking this course and staying with me to the end. I hope you download the free digital content creation tools this, and submit the project that the ideas generated projects. So I can review and then send you your 100 social media conversation starters. 20. More: Thank you so much for taking this class. If you've enjoyed this class, I'd like to introduce you to my other classes here on skill ship. As you can see, I teach a lot of different areas of digital marketing. And the links to the classes are in the notes below. Just click the pin in the bottom right of the video and you can view all the notes to see them. When you click it, you can then bookmark the other classes for you to watch when you have the time. So I'm just gonna go through the different classes and what they're about briefly. So you know what you can look forward to. Do. You want to create a Facebook ads campaign, but not sure how to start. In this course, I show you how to create high converting sales funnel for your Facebook ads campaign. Now this course is all about getting your brand to stand out. You'll learn everything you need to know about visual marketing and get ready to take your brand from math to amazing. If you're interested in video marketing, This course is a no-nonsense approach to video marketing is designed to help you hit the ground running with your video marketing, you'll get plenty of templates and a powerful contact counter to get you started on the right foot. Interested in branding. This class will walk you through the basics of building an unforgettable brand. You will learn how to build your brand from scratch and understand what decisions to make when it comes to your brand color, logo, topography, and imagery, and trusted to learn on how to build a website that converts. This class will walk you through the basics of planning and building or redesigning a website. You will learn how to create a multifunctional website that's not just predict to look at, but also constantly serving a purpose your business, even while you sleep. Lastly, if you have enjoyed this class, I'd love for you to leave a review and let me know what you think. I hope to see you in the next class.