5 Easy Apps to Create Stunning Visual Content in 10 Minutes or Less

As a brand active on social media, you can’t just post plain text and links and call it content anymore. Graphics, videos, GIFs, and other visuals are dominating every platform. To make your posts stand out, engage users, and encourage shares, your brand needs to produce eye-catching visual content.

Of course, not all of us have the time or resources to spend all day Photoshopping images that will be seen just for a few seconds by our fans on social media. Luckily, there are many free and very inexpensive, web and mobile apps available now that include powerful photo editing features, interesting typography, and high-quality images. These apps give you the ability to easily create visual content to share across all your social networks in just a few minutes. Here’s a list of some of our favorite apps to create highly-engaging visuals on the web and mobile.

1. Canva

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Canva is a fairly new web-based platform that makes it easy to create beautiful images for your social media pages including Twitter or Facebook headers, attractive Pinterest images, infographics, posters, and more. Canva provides a huge library of photos and clip art to use in your designs and you can create appealing visual content by simply dragging and dropping elements into place. When you’re ready to post your image, it can be downloaded as a PDF or PNG file.

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There is no cost to use Canva. It is free to upload and design with your own images. If you choose to use a professional stock image or graphic from the Canva library, the cost is $1 per graphic.

2. Pixlr-o-matic

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If you love Instagram, then Pixlr-o-matic is the perfect web-based alternative to apply fun overlays, filter effects, and borders to your images uploaded from your computer or live from your webcam. You can save your images to your desktop for easy access when sharing on social networks. Pixlr-o-matic is free and also available in the Google Chrome Store.

3. Word Swag

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With Word Swag you can add text to your photos in seconds. The Word Swag iOS app allows you to create stylish and beautiful designs with stunning typography to make your images really pop on social media. This app is the perfect solution for when you’re on the go and need to create an engaging post on the fly. Word Swag is available for $2.99 on the iPhone app store.

4. A Beautiful Mess

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A Beautiful Mess is a fully-featured photo editing app that is great for creating and sharing images. The app comes pre-loaded with filters, fonts, collage features, and even hand-drawn doodles from designers that you can apply to your images. When you’re done creating your image, it is automatically saved to your phone’s photo roll and you also have the option to share directly to social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. The app is available on the iPhone app store and for Android on Google Play for $0.99 with additional fonts, doodles, and designs available for purchase.

5. Cinemagram

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Cinemagram is a mobile app that allows you to capture short video clips and convert them into a cinemagraphs, or highly-stylized animated GIFs where only one part of the image moves. Animated GIFS are time-consuming and take some skill to create, so Cinemagram places the GIF-making power in the hands of the masses and all with the portability of an iPhone. You can even add filters to your creations and Cinemagram will then render the GIF for you so you can share it on your social networks, including Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook or Twitter. Cinemagram is available for free on the iPhone app store and for Android on Google Play.

With these easy tools your brand has no excuse not to start creating and sharing highly-engaging visual content right away.