Welcome back to our Freebie Fridays for Business Owners series! Our goal is to connect with business owners every Friday to provide you helpful (and professional) design work you can actually use. We specialize in working with businesses that feel "almost there" in their online presence, who are ready to get past the DIY phase and invest more in their brand.
Today we created 10 Free Social Media Templates that you can use to elevate your visuals and profile recognizability straight away. These were designed using the free version of Canva to keep them accessible - so no extra design platform costs either. Canva is a super easy to use and beginner friendly tool that specializes in helping you create social media posts quickly and without too much struggle. And, since you're using templates, it'll be extra easy!
Let's dive into how to use these templates, and why upgrading your visuals is so important to your success.
Why A Cohesive "Look" Is Necessary For Engagement
When your social media feels scattered and constantly changing, it can be confusing to viewers. You don't want to change up your entire design style with every post, and you certainly don't want to use different fonts or colors regularly either as it makes your overall presence seem disruptive and unsure of itself. Let's go over why that is.
When your social media posts have cohesive branding and a distinct design style, it opens the door for recognition. When your audience recognizes your posts mid-scroll they are more likely to trust you, follow you, and interact with your content when it appears on their feed. Suddenly you come across as a professional in your space and seemingly full of confidence (rather than seeming unsure of yourself which can scare people away).
That's why it's important to ensure your visual presence on social media is as cohesive and distinct as you can get it. Using these templates will immediately give you a great start, but if you don't yet have your own brand colors, fonts, and logos we highly recommend you establish your branding as well. If you need help, we would love to create a gorgeous custom brand identity for you!
What Are Canva Social Media Templates?
If you've never used Canva before, we highly suggest watching a few quick tutorials to familiarize yourself with the platform. We love this one by Design with Canva. It's worth the watch because even though our templates will take away the headache and struggle of needing to actually design, you will still need to be able to swap in our brand colors, fonts, pictures, and text to use these effectively. Luckily, Canva is super beginner friendly, and these tasks are usually the easiest to do!
Our 10 Free Social Media Templates are essentially pre-designed social media posts made for you to simply swap your information and branding into. This takes out the long process of coming up with a design style and allows you to hop right into content creation. Coming soon we plan to offer a few full sets of 45+ templates with even more variety so stay tuned!
Our 10 Free Social Media Templates - And How To Use Them
Finally, let's get into the templates! These are part of a full set we made using an author brand mockup to show various usage examples, but they can be morphed for any brand so don't worry.
To give you an idea of how to use these post designs with various topics, each of these templates covers a different content type you may want to post to your socials. So not only do they act as templates, they also act as content ideas! Let's go through the list:
Template Types In The Free Set:
- Announcement
- 1 Week Till Launch
- Subscriber-Only Perks/Patreon/Exclusive Group Style Promotion
- Product (or Other) Spotlight
- Join My Newsletter (Call To Action)
- Ask Me Anything
- Follow All My Socials (Call To Action)
- Something About Me
Even though these are labeled and arranged this way currently, you can use each of these templates for any content type you want! These are just starting ideas for you, but you are welcome to swap in text, images, or even remove unnecessary text or images from any of these templates to better suit your needs. The point is you have a very distinct style across all of them while the usage remains versatile.
Downloading & Usage
When you are ready to dive in, click this link to access the social media templates! Once you sign up for our newsletter (totally free, we just want to send you more freebies!), you will be provided access to the Canva templates and be taken straight into Canva to begin using them.
As mentioned before, we strongly suggest you swap in your brand colors and fonts if you have an established brand identity to keep things cohesive. Once you have done that, simply create content with these templates as your starting point and guide! You may want to rewrite text, put in your own photos, and more, but this will hopefully make the overall design process smoother and less stressful for you.
Platforms:
These can be used on most any social media platform, but are sized specifically for the most common 4:5 Instagram post size. These will work perfectly for your Instagram grid and we have been able to easily post this size to Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok (with audio, works especially well as a carousel), LinkedIn, and Bluesky as well.
Conclusion
We hope you love using our templates! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at contact@sproutotus.com and we would love to help. And keep an eye on our social media and blog for more freebies for business owners every Friday!
If you are ready to take the next step past DIY and into professional design and strategy for your business, let's schedule some time to meet. We would love to help you be the best version of yourself and your brand online, and feel confident in your visuals and presence. We can even make custom social media templates that are completely unique to your branding!
That's all for this week. Happy Designing!
