Tag Archives: facebook

Breathe New Life Into Your Social Media Profile: GIFs As Storytelling Art Form

Posted on by

Visual micro content (VMC) is driving forces of engagement these days. Clips and GIFs in the social web are as popular as never before. And I am not talking about the creation of memes.

More and more brands are discovering GIFs, clips and cinemagraphs as fine art and a new way of storytelling. Movable imagery recently became a popular marketing format, which is easy to digest and really stands out in social media feeds.

“Yay” for being a photographer or visual engineer with tons of material on hand. Shame on you if you aren’t involved on social networks yet. Visual content marketing is the way to advertise your photo business, create leads and drive sales in 2016. Why? Gen Y! On a global scale, 64% of the web traffic are videos.

For the young audience, VMC is the digital answer to TV spots; small bites of information and entertainment. Instead of producing a 30 seconds spot try creating 30 spots lasting a few seconds to appeal to a number of buyer personas in your target market.

But beware of producing VMC just because you read it’s trendy and Facebook, Twitter or Google provide the technology. Each cinemagraph, clip or GIF needs to fit into your overall social media strategy: What is your communication goal? Whom do you want to reach? What can they learn from you?

Once you have the answers to all these questions, start planning VMC in your content calendar and make sure you optimize your visual material for each social network. Facebook’s algorithm will reward you with reach if you upload a video there instead of posting it as (YouTube) link. Twitter content has an ideal size of 506x253px.

For details, check out this always up-to-date social media image sizes cheat sheet (Google spreadsheet).

 

Useful resources — DIY:

Useful resources — Libraries:

Useful resources — Inspiration:

I gave it a try myself with GifMaker and a series of photos I took in Auckland a few years ago. You might want to go through your archive too to see if you can leverage some old photo series today.

auckland_harbour_gif

If you like this post you might also like Adobe Post: Create Beautiful Free Social Media Images In Minutes…

Adobe Post: Create Beautiful Free Social Media Images In Minutes

Posted on by

free_social_media_images

I think I might have just stumbled upon one of the easiest to use photo apps since a long time to create eye-catching photography event invites, Pinterest album covers, newsletter graphics, text posters, Twitter cover images, Facebook ads…you name it.

With Adobe Post (currently available for iPhone) you are only a few taps away from professional looking designs with your own photos or photos from a huge library of creative commons pics. Within seconds, the mobile app allows you to change sizes, layouts, colour palettes, fonts and photo filters.

To give you an idea of what I am talking about, I took some of my favourite inspirational travel quotes to create a new edition of this old post within 50 minutes (including the research for creative commons images and playing around with my customization options = 10 minutes per image).

The easiest way to get started with Adobe Post is to make use of one of the suggested templates, which you can personalize to your liking.

adobe_post_templates

Once you get hooked, you will probably go ahead and see what Adobe Post can do with your own photos. You can upload them from your camera roll, Lightroom, the cloud or take a new shot with your mobile device’s camera.

After finishing your edit — and this is the cool marketer’s stuff — you can easily change the (social media) format of your creation and switch with one tap between Facebook cover image size, Twitter post size, YouTube thumbnail size, LinkedIn cover size, Instagram square format etc. Most of the time the app works really neat and crops your image or relocates your texts and shapes in a way that won’t require further adjustments.

adobe_post_social_media_marketing

Here are a few tips of app features I discovered by chance (no tutorial):

  • zoom in and out of an image with the pinch-to-zoom move
  • rotate an image with the two-finger-rotate move
  • the last item you create will be the foreground layer; previous items move in the background (creating with that in mind will save you time if you want to overlap text and shape layers)
  • tap several times on a single colour palette icon to try all its different looks
  • tap several times on the “text spacing” to resize shapes you may use
  • tap on “text align” to switch between all caps and big/small letters
  • you only need to share the app once on social media to unlock exclusive fonts and shapes
  • you only need to email the app once to a friend to remove the #AdobePost hashtag

I hope you find the app helpful for all your coming social media endeavours!

If you like this post you might also like RollWorld: Spin It, Warp It, Scroll It, Zoom It — Create Tiny Planets And Abstract Art On Your Mobile Device…