Photography has always been an integral part of design. Unfortunately, we’ve grown accustomed to seeing cheesy stock images of people in suits shaking hands. Not only are a lot of these stock photos tacky, but they cost a lot of money.

Thankfully, there’s been a growing number of websites with beautiful stock photography popping up all over the web. Best of all, they’re free!

In this post, we’ve curated a list of awesome websites for free stock photos. [continue reading…]

Most resources that you find online detailing how to use social media for marketing are all geared exclusively towards B2C for-profit businesses who are actively looking to sell to their target audience. 

While some of those best practices and general principles pretty much apply to across the board, plenty of workers already know first hand that marketing to a potential paying customer is completely different from running social campaigns for nonprofit organizations.

The basic goals of social media marketing are the same for nonprofits and other types of organization: Increased exposure, improved brand awareness, and relationship building with your target audience. That being said, there are crucial differences that you’ll want to consider and a few tips you should use for maximum results that are exclusive to nonprofits. 

Ready to get the most out of your marketing efforts? Let’s take a close look at social media for nonprofits.

If you put 100 social media marketers into a room and asked them about the hardest parts of the job, the vast majority would agree that the difficulty of coming up with the sheer amount of content needed to stay relevant was at least in their top 5. 

Quantity does matter, after all; most brands need to post at least 3x per week per platform (though no more than once per day per platform) to keep engagement up. 

That’s a lot on its own for an ongoing basis, but the fact that you need to do this for Facebook, Instagram, Stories, Pinterest, Twitter, and any other currently-popular app becomes overwhelming. Because of course it’s not just about quantity; the quality needs to be there, too.

And that’s where diversity in social media images comes in. You want to include more images into your posts, since they’ll result in an average of a 37% increase in engagement on Facebook and can’t even be shared on Pinterest and Instagram without them. So you need enough images to keep your audience engaged, but you also need diversity so that they stay interested and you’re able to generate enough content without grasping for straws.

We’re here to make that a little simpler for you. In this post, we’re going to look at 8 types of social media marketing images you should include into your social calendars to mix it up for everyone involved.

Video is the hottest thing on social media right now. Businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes are relying on video to better connect with their target audience, delivering their messages in new, user-friendly mediums that are engaging and dynamic.

There is, however, a lot that goes into video creation– more so than just uploading images or conventional text posts. Video takes longer to create, and you have to consider factors like the best length, formatting, and much more. It’s no surprise that sometimes small-but-crucial details get overlooked. 

One of these details is social video thumbnail images.

Many social media platforms that have native video allow you to set an image that will be displayed before the video starts, including both YouTube and Facebook, and every business, brand, or marketer should be taking advantage of this. 

If you aren’t sure where to start (or if you’re looking for some new tricks!), keep reading; we’re going to take a look at 7 easy design tips for social video thumbnails that will increase your clicks. 

YouTube has content that’s been created from bursts of creativity alongside carefully calculated strategy. People come to watch videos meant to entertain them and educate them alike, and brands put an endless amount of effort into doing just that.

There’s a gap in YouTube marketing, however, that many marketers and businesses are missing, which is weakening their overall effort, and that’s their YouTube descriptions.

Even though the focus is geared towards the videos you’re creating on YouTube, the descriptions still matter a great deal and for several different reasons. In this post, we’re going to take a look at the best YouTube description template you should be using, how to alter it to fit your channel, and description tips to get more views. 

Back in the good ol’ days, brands only really needed to worry about one image on social media: their profile picture. Images were used in posts, but not often, and header images either didn’t exist yet or weren’t popular.

We’ve come a long way since then, and header images are now a must-have for all businesses and organizations using social media. Profiles look downright empty without them, and the last thing you want your audience to see when they visit your pages is “wow, they’re not really trying all that hard.” 

Designing the perfect cover photos for social media isn’t all that difficult with the right tools and ideas in place. In this post, we’ll take you step-by-step through the process so that you can immediately give your profiles a visual and branding boost. 

Your Facebook videos require a lot of creativity and a lot of time to make, especially once you start looking at creating multiple videos back to back. They’re easily worth it, as 71% of Facebook users increased their social video viewing in the last year, and 60% more are expected to do within the next. Native videos are also prioritized in the algorithm more than other content, and are given much higher reach than outbound links or potentially even text-only posts from your Page.

We’re enormous fans of Facebook video marketing here at Snappa, but we’ve always noticed that after all the work it takes to create a great Facebook video campaign, there’s one place that businesses often forget to pay attention. That’s the video ad format.

In this post, we’re going to take a close look at the best Facebook video format that you can use, why it matters, and how to get the best results from your videos every time. [continue reading…]

My entire career wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the gig economy. I work full-time from home, running my own business, selling writing services to clients literally all over the world. I’m far from the only one, and as the gig economy continues to thrive (which it will), we’re going to see the number of people making money online continue to skyrocket.

Plenty of sites and companies have caught onto this, and offer platforms and services that are designed to help independent creators find new ways to make money off of their work– even if they aren’t selling it directly to someone else.

Patreon is one of these sites, which allows account holders to offer paid subscriptions to interested users who love what they’re doing. Everyone from poets to video game streamers to podcast hosts to nonprofit organizers have set up Patreons, with the goal of earning enough income from interested users that they can spend more time creating great content without the need to bog their viewers/listeners/readers down with annoying advertisements.

Patreon therefore offers a valuable chance for semi-regular, predictable streams of income that allows the creators to keep doing what they love, all while getting sponsored. It goes without saying, however, that most people won’t part with their money so easily, so having a solid channel that looks reputable is almost as important as great content. And of course, the Patreon banner is an important part of that. [continue reading…]

YouTube admittedly takes a little more work than most other social media marketing platforms. Here, long-form video content, similar to IGTV, dominates, and video takes a significant amount of time to plan, create, and edit, even before you factor in things like keyword research or adding in closed captions. With so many big details to tackle before you can even upload a single video, it’s easy to overlook one tiny detail that may seem inconsequential but that actually has a big impact on your content: the best YouTube video format.

With YouTube supporting so many different file formats, it’s easy to overlook this detail and just choose the first option that looks good, but this can impact the quality of the video once uploaded. We don’t want your content or your campaigns to be negatively impacted, so in this post, we’re going to take a look at the best YouTube video format and everything technical that you need to be keeping in mind. [continue reading…]