easy-to-use tools for creating killer visual content

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You’re familiar with BuzzFeed, right? The wildly popular media site is known for its array of eclectic content including videos, listicles, infographics, celebrity gossip, surveys, and (so many) cats. The site was founded in 2006, but skyrocketed to Internet fame over the last few of years, tripling its website traffic. In August of 2014, BuzzFeed raised more than $50 million in venture capital and is now valued at $850 million.

Why are we talking about BuzzFeed? Well, they produce an insane amount of viral content, something most businesses wish they had the time or energy to do. However, producing a large quantity of content isn’t entirely what makes BuzzFeed successful.

As Jonathan Perelman, VP of Agency Strategy and Industry Development at BuzzFeed pointed out during the PRSA Digital Impact Conference, “Content is king but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants.” Creating great content, but also knowing how and where to distribute it is key. “You have to understand how content spreads across the web,” added Perelman.

How exactly does content spread across the web? Social media is an excellent starting point. To understand how content is being distributed on social, and what garners the most engagement, let’s look at the stats:

63% of social media is made up of images according to Citrix.
Photos account for 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook according to Socialbakers.
Photos get 53% more Likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs on Facebook according to KissMetrics.
On Twitter, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets according to Buffer.
Adding a photo URL to your tweet can boost tweets by 35% according to the Twitter Media Blog.
Instagram currently has 300 million monthly active users and canada phone number list 70 million new photos are shared each day.
Now take a look at the Twitter feeds of both Mashable and BuzzFeed below. See how many images they post, and in a row?



Visual content is more important than ever for igniting engagement; you should start creating and sharing it ASAP. Don’t have any images? Make them. This is especially good for businesses who offer a service rather than a physical product, and may not have much to show in the photo department.

Creating your own images is also an excellent tactic for re-purposing text-only content into enticing images. Here are some examples: Turn quotes into an interesting slideshow, post an event announcement on a pretty picture, place stats onto eye-catching graphs, give a blog post title some pizzaz, create an infographic about the history of your biz, create a catchy, custom featured image for a video, etc. The possibilities are endless.

To help you create images that get BuzzFeed-worthy engagement, here are 13 of our favorite and easy-to-use visual content creation tools.

1. Canva

Canva is an easy, free, (and pretty darn fun) image creation tool. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting happily sucked down an image-making vortex with this tool, because it’s easy to do. They have a variety of image sizes and types to choose from, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest posts or covers. You can select from various backgrounds, layouts, banners, templates, fonts, etc. Several images are free, you can upload your own, or drop $1 for an image in the app.

I made this simple image below advertising one of our recent blog posts in just a few minutes.