For many, the thought of managing your own social media posts can be quite daunting. Today, we are going to walk through how to create social media posts that look like a professional designed it, and I am going to walk you through how to publish those posts directly from Canva to your social media account, as well as schedule posts in advance. Let’s get to it. Click on social media from the Canva home screen and select the type of social media posting you want to create. One of the neat features of Canva is the content planner. If you want to create a calendar of events for your reference, you can click on the content planner to keep track of your planning for upcoming events and postings. Here at Elizabeth’s Candy Company, we are preparing for National Milk Chocolate Day on July 28th. I can go ahead and add this here to my content planner, and if I want to come back and look at this at a later time, I can click on it and automatically I’m getting designs that I can create to help promote this event. But for now, we’re going to go back to the main screen. Again, I’m clicking on social media and now I’m going to choose the type of social media posting I want to create. Today we are going to work on a Facebook post. You are now at your blank Canva template and we are ready to create. Go up to the magnifying glass and begin to look for a search term that is relevant for your upcoming social media post. In this case, I am going to search for milk chocolate. Whatever you type in, you’re likely to get hundreds, if not thousands of templates for you to use. Most of these are free for anyone to come onto Canva and utilize, although you will notice that some of the templates do have a crown and it says pro on it. In order to use these templates, you need to be a Canva Pro subscriber. Let’s go ahead and continue to scroll to find one that makes sense for my upcoming social media post for Milk Chocolate Day. I’m also going to use a free template for this exercise. Remember that every template on Canva can be easily customized and edited, so if not, everything makes sense, that’s okay. We’re going to go ahead and make edits. I’m happy with this image. Let’s go ahead and customize it for my upcoming social media posting. Since I want to advertise National Milk Chocolate Day, I’m going to need to make some edits to this image. The first thing I’m going to do is select any text that I might want to delete completely by clicking on it and then pressing the trash button. Here I want to continue to use this text, but I want to edit it to say National Milk Chocolate Day. If I want to change the type of font being used, you can highlight, come up to the top, and then see all of your various font options. You can click on them to get a preview of what the font looks like. Once you find one you’re happy with, you can go ahead, move the font on your page, and you can add additional colors and effects. If you want to adjust the text color, come on up here to the top, and you can click on various colors to preview. If you decide you want to go back, go ahead to the top of the screen, and click the undo arrow. I am now ready to add additional text to my page. Over here on the left-hand side, I’m going to click on text and add a subheading. You can then go ahead and type in anything you wish. In my case, I’m going to advertise that National Milk Chocolate Day is on July 28th. Similar to before, you can go ahead and highlight your text and see the types of fonts available for you. What’s handy is at the top of the screen it includes the fonts that you have previously used in this promotion. You can then again change the size, the color, bold, italicize, and underline. I also want to include what my offer that day is going to be. I’m going to add an additional subheading. Highlighting it, I can go ahead and quickly enter what my message is and then adjust the text, the size, and the color if I wish. It’s a great idea to have something clickable on your social media post so that a user can go to an external site in order to learn more about your business or promotional offer. In this case, the template already had a website address on it, but I don’t want to keep that. I’m going to go ahead highlight the text and instead type learn more. In order for this to link to an external site, you’ll need to highlight the text and then click on the link button. Here you can enter your website address or whatever external page you want it to go to and press enter. You can then go ahead and move that link up or anywhere you want on your social media image. Likewise, you can go ahead, double click on the text, adjust the font, as well as the color and size. The last step before you’re ready to save your image and share it on social media is to make any additional adjustments that you want. Go ahead, adjust the text, the size, the color, whatever you want in order to make this social media post exactly what you were thinking. Once you’re ready, go ahead to the top left of the screen, click on file, and save. This way if you want to come back at a later time to your image you can. The next step is to share it on social media. Go ahead to the top right of the screen and click on share. You have a few options for sharing and publishing your social media post. My recommendation is to link your Facebook page to your Canva account. This allows you to publish your post within the Canva environment and any links that you have included on your post are going to easily be clickable on your social media page. If you do not want to link your Facebook page to your Canva account, the other option is to click on download. You can then download the image to your computer and publish on any social media sites that you wish. Please note that once you download this image, any links that you may have added are no longer going to be accessible. Let’s go ahead and publish this directly to our Facebook page. Go ahead and click on Facebook page. If you wish to write something in your social media post, you can, otherwise you can just go ahead and publish your image by clicking publish now. It is now preparing our design and it’s going to instantly publish our social media post to our connected Facebook page. If I want to go ahead and check out my post, I can click on it. It will take me to my Facebook account and I can now see that Elizabeth’s Candy Company has published this post. If you have a Canva Pro subscription, you have a feature to schedule your social media post for a future date. Go ahead and click on schedule. It will then give you calendar options that you can pick from. In my case, let’s go ahead and schedule this for July 27th. You can adjust the time and date as many times as you wish. You can also adjust the time zone and click on next. Similar to before, you can add additional text to your post if you wish or leave it as is and click on schedule. It’s now preparing our design to be published at a future date and it’s letting us know that it’s being published on Thursday July 27th at 8 a.m. I can click on content planner in order to confirm that it’s being published on the date in which I chose. We can now see that this is a future post. If you want to make any changes, you can go to the three dots here, change the day and time of your posting or edit your design. Likewise, you can delete it all together. Hopefully we get some new customers for National Milk Chocolate Day. You are now designing social media posts just like a professional. If this video was helpful to you, please consider subscribing below.