If you are going to work in freelance writing, sooner or later someone is going to ask you to take care of some adjacent work, like social media graphics. If you don’t get paid for this writing-like activities, that’s called scope creep, and it’s bad. If you do get paid for it, that’s called opportunity, and it’s good.
Social media graphic design is one of these interesting opportunities.
Writing Social Media Content
Usually, as an online freelance writer, the content you write is website content. Whether it is articles for a webpage, posts for a forum, or anecdotes for an email newsletter, it is your ability to write that the freelance writing customer pays for.
For many companies, however, the website, newsletter, and forums don’t complete their online presence. They also need bite-sized content for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. It is no heavy ask for a writer to find and punch up a pithy line or two for these platforms.
Image-Based Social Media Content
The catch is that some social media platforms are primarily image based. For top-tier images, large companies will turn to graphic designers and artists. For many freelance writing clients, their favorite freelance writer may be the first choice to just handle all of the social media content, even that which is image based.
That means an online writing professional needs to know how to make social media graphics to fulfil their clients’ needs.
How To Create Simple Images and Graphics for Social Media
When working as a freelance writer for social media content that relies on images it is important to remember two factors.
- Images for social media content do not need to be the Mona Lisa. – These images are typically consumed in seconds. No one will notice the tiny background image you spent hours building from scratch.
- Big and Loud is how you stand out on social media.
Remember the key of all social media platforms is the ability to consume interesting content quickly and easily. Users scroll through their Instagram feed with a flick of their finger. Twitter users speed read as their thumb swipes ever upward.
Tools for Creating Social Media Images for Freelance Writers
The best apps for social media graphics aren’t necessarily the same as the best applications for creating professional stand alone graphics.
As a professional writer, your first instinct may be to reach for Adobe Illustrator, or Microsoft Publisher. These heavy hitting graphic design tools are likely too much for what you are trying to crank out. Unless you know these tools like the back of your hand, consider simpler alternatives.
Microsoft Word is actually a powerful graphics program if you know what you are doing, especially when all you need is a snazzy background, and interesting fonts for a Pinterest post.
Even easier than that are tools specifically designed to crank out social media-ready graphics. Consider Canva, which has a free tier for individuals and small businesses. The free tier of Canva has an annoying habit of watermarking the images in its social media graphic templates.
If you are going to be creating Pinterest and Instagram-style pictures, their templates and images are fast and easy, so just bite the bullet and pay for the pro tier. You’ll earn more than you pay by making high-quality social media graphics faster than mucking around to find free stuff.
To make professional social media pictures, you’ll need to delete any watermarked graphics or templates and replace them with free alternatives from your own media library, stock photo subscription plan, or free sources such as Pixabay. When you are done, you have your own free social media graphics to use.
Watch the Clock
Remember, everything you do as a freelance writer is a race against the clock. Taking three hours to create an article that they pay you $200 for works out to billing your time at $67 per hour. If the same article takes five hours, you are down to just $40 per hour.
The same is true for social media image promotion. A freelancer getting $100 per social media post should expect to spend some real time creating truly impressive images. A freelancer including social media content promotion as part of the agreed freelance writing rate in a deliverable needs to add the time spent on image creation to the amount of time spent creating the content deliverable.
In the example above, the author taking three hours to create an article that also includes graphical social media promotion might include the required social media picture in the freelance writing rate, charging $250 instead.
If the freelancer spends an additional hour on social media graphic design, then his rate actually drops to $62.50 an hour, despite the higher rate. Should this freelance writing business require $67 an hour to succeed, the writer will need to reduce the amount of time spent working on the image.
Creating social media images faster is usually nothing more than a matter of eliminating perfectionism in favor of accepting the good.
I created a very nice Canva image in around 30 minutes for content about the different ways websites and online services offer to log in. The same image can be used within the content, as well as on social media like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook, all without breaking down the financial model of the client relationship.
I created a similar image above for this post, using the voice of this publication, and the concept that faster is cheaper, for my own freelance writing blog post here 🙂
Learn the Craft of Making Graphics for Social Media
As with anything skill and speed come with time and experience. Take it upon yourself while doing freelance content generation to make images and graphics using tools like Canva and Microsoft Word. Each new creation brings more skill. Each social media post that garners increased interaction brings more ideas about what does and doesn’t work online.
And, when the time comes, both you and your clients can happily add social media creation and promotion to your work product.