The best tool I’ve discovered for creating social media graphics is Canva.
There’s no need to use Photoshop or other complicated tools.
It’s also FREE!
Canva has tons of templates and layouts that look fantastic and professional.
You just drag/drop your own photos, enter in your own text, and suddenly you have a magical and beautiful social media graphic – without any graphic design experience!
Major props to those who have graphic design experience, I don’t know how you make such beautiful things. The rest of us have to resort to finding tools like this to help us get by!
HOW TO USE CANVA
When you open Canva, you can create a new design.
Depending on what your use case is, you can pick if you’re creating an Instagram post, a Facebook ad, a LinkedIn cover photo, blog header image, infographic, flyer, or a multitude of other options.
It’ll lay out a canvas for you at the appropriate dimensions – so helpful because the variation of image dimensions for each social media platform drives me nuts.
CREATE A NEW DESIGN
I clicked on “Instagram post” so here’s a blank square canvas for me to work with. I can choose from various Canva layouts. There’s a lot of great options for free, while some options cost money.
Once you select a layout, it gets added to your canvas. Then you can start editing the text, photos, and drag/drop to move elements around – change the color / font / etc…
You can upload your own images and drag them onto the canvas. Below is a history of images I’ve uploaded for my past graphics.
You can also search for photos or illustrations that Canva provides. Some are free and some are paid.
Once you finish your design, you can download it in the format you want and use it wherever you need.
ALL YOUR DESIGNS
Canva also keeps a collection of all your past designs. That’s handy when I want to use a similar format / font from something I created before. Make a copy of a design and then edit from there.
EXAMPLE
This is a recent graphic I created for a YouTube video thumbnail.
Side note: I like how preparing my own graphic for the thumbnail makes the video look a lot better (top two video thumbnails), as compared to a random still frame taken from the YouTube video (rest of thumbnails). 
To promote the video on my Instagram page, I couldn’t use the above thumbnail because some of the text would get cut off. Hence I copied all the elements over and created a new square Instagram graphic. Download the image and then post it!
By now, you’re probably getting the idea that there’s many use cases for these graphics. If you’re building your own brand, it’s important to have strong visuals. I’m still working on making a cohesive visual brand for myself, but Canva is allowing me to experiment with different styles in an easy way.
For more examples of what I’ve created with Canva, check out my Instagram @kat.kuan.
PREMIUM VERSION
There’s also a paid premium version, which I haven’t tried yet. If you work on a team, then multiple users can collaborate together. You can setup a brand color scheme, logos, fonts, etc.. so that these preset defaults are easily accessible when you’re creating your graphics.
Overall, I highly recommend this tool for beginners. It makes you feel powerful *arm flex* and capable of doing graphic design!
Now go make your social media accounts pretty with Canva!