Build Social Media Content That Works for Your Small Business Using Adobe Express

11:00AM Nov 8, 2024

Speakers:

Lucy Hall

Emily O'Neill

Ange Lyons

Keywords:

Adobe Express

social media content

brand creation

color palette

content scheduling

generative AI

resize images

social media planner

content calendar

Instagram stories

LinkedIn posts

TikTok

Canva comparison

QR codes

user-generated content

All up after,

do you want that on there? Then,

yeah, love it.

And are you recording it? Are we recording

it? Says recording so I don't know.

I'll start recording. I Okay, I'm gonna let everyone in.

I'm you welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Just bear with us while we let everyone in, and we'll get started very soon. If you want to add your details to the chat, feel free pop a little note in there to say who you are and where you're From, and we will get going very, very soon you

Lucy, thank you, Emily for letting everybody in. Hello, everyone, how are you doing? Lucy, here, I'm going to be the one that's hosting the workshop today. Emily is my fabulous assistant today. Thank you very much. You were wonderful in letting everybody in. I'm sure there's a few more coming as well, because we've had a record number of people sign up to join this workshop, and it's my first one back in a while. But I'm really excited to share with you how to create incredible, branded social media content, and to show you some tips and tricks around creating content, how to schedule out your content and more, actually, I'm going to show you this content through Adobe Express, which is absolutely incredible. I think you're going to be really excited when you see the type of things that you can do and the type of content that you can create just a note to say that this workshop is being recorded. So if you miss anything, we'll be able to send it out after, and I'll be able to send you some notes after as well. Even if you don't use Adobe Express yet, it doesn't matter, because you can use it free, and we will share a link with you afterwards so that you can get started and use the free version. But there are some really kind of cool things that you can do if you have the paid version as well. But like I said, it doesn't really matter. You can still do most of this stuff anyway when you're using it for free. And so if you would please do introduce yourselves in the box below and let us know who you are, what you do and what you're most excited to learn about. There's people coming from all different communities that we run and manage here. So there's the social media planner community. I don't know if any of you are from there, and you've got a social media planner yet. There's some of you from digital women, which is our amazing community of women from all over and some of you that I know from accelerators and workshops that I've attended, and some from that you know me from kind of Instagram and LinkedIn and that kind of thing as well. So welcome. So I think let's just get cracking. Shall we please feel free to answer questions, ask questions as we go in the comments box, and at the end of the session, we'll have everybody in on video if you want to to ask questions and chat with each other as well. Hello. Liz from Somerset, good to see you there. Okay, so let's get started. Shall we I'm going to start sharing my screen with you because you don't want to see me. I think what you want to see is actually how you can create this amazing content. So first of all, I'm going to share with you my screen, and I'm going to show you Adobe Express. So this is Adobe Express. It's it's actually a really good platform to use. It's really easy to use and but the first thing I want to do, before I show you how to create some content and generate images and do all of these snazzy things that you can do with AI and and a tool like this, I want to show you the most important thing that is creating your brand. So once you've gone into Adobe Express, one of the first things I think you should do is create your brand, and I've done it here for digital women, and all I've done is I've uploaded my logo, I've uploaded the color palette header and some different templates and some images as well. And it's really, really easy to do. So if I wanted to change a color palette here, I would just go edit or add and you, if you don't know what your color palette is, but you do have something on the page that is in your color palette, something, there's something really cool that you can do. You can press plus here, and you can use the little droplet here, and you can choose a color from the page. So for example, on here, there's a few of our colors. There's a navy blue. If I click on that, add the navy blue into my palette, and I just hit save. So all of this stuff is super easy to do again, with the logo. Just upload your logo with your fonts. You just, you just go in and you choose the different fonts that you want. So just edit font, and you just hit on this one, for example, might be the font that you want to use, and ta, da, it's all done. And then you can have more than one. So if you look after clients, for example, and you create content for them as well, you could actually have several brands in here with logos, colors, fonts, templates and assets. Assets is really good as well. She can create content from assets. So if you are a product based business, and you sell milkshakes, for example, you could add lots of pictures of your milkshakes here, and then you can create content around them. Okay, does that make sense to everybody? I'm going to look in the chat just to make sure everybody's joining along and and that kind of thing. So once you've got this set up, this is where the fun begins. Okay, so back to your Adobe Express dashboard, knowing that you've got your branding and everything set up, what we're going to do is we are going to start creating some templates or a campaign. So for example, I want, maybe want to create a campaign around a conference that I'm creating in March, a digital woman conference. Now, to do that, I need to create some image assets in all different sizes, for email, for social media, kind of like my Instagram Stories, for LinkedIn and that kind of thing. And my content is all going to be different sizes. So I don't just want squares. I need content in different sizes for different social media networks and in other platforms. This is really annoying, isn't it, because you resize it and you have to create a whole new board with all of your content in it. Now I don't want to, I don't want to do that, but I will start with an Instagram square paste post on this occasion. Okay, so now the next thing I'm going to do, actually, if we just go back, rather than do it like this, we'll start from our content. So I want to create a I want to create something about the conference. So I'm going to choose one of the photos from here. Can't see the networks. They're a little small on my screen. And you can see there's a nice picture from one of our digital women conferences. And I want to try and create a template if it works from this image. So it's saying, These are the templates like recommended. So it knows this picture is a business conference. That's fantastic. This looks really great. I love the look of that. Okay, so now my picture is in the template already, and it's kind of in my branding colors already. It's not completely right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to remember we created that brand earlier. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to head to brands here, my brand, my digital women brand, I'm going to press here and add my logo. Very easy, very nice. I'm going to put that there, and then I'm going to kit on the color palette and make sure it's all in my colors. Did you see that? Fantastic. And then again, I can add my own font that we added earlier here, actually to resize it a little bit to make it completely right. And now I have a nice flyer for my digital conference. And obviously it's very easy to change the text and that kind of thing as well. Now here's where the magic happens. This is where the magic happens. This is my favorite part. Okay, so now this is not the right size for Instagram, so what I want to do is I want to resize this image. So what I want is I want a Instagram square post. So I click on Instagram square posts, I hit resize, and it's going to resize the image for me with a little bit of magic. And you can see when the magic is happening, because you get all of the kind of colorful stuff around the outside, it's actually generated and expanded the image for me. I don't know if you see that, so that's a bit of the magic of AI as well. It's just generated, like, because you have, there's a different person here, for example, or there's different person there. But actually, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I don't mind that. And again, I want to resize it to make it a Instagram story. But I'm going to hit, instead of just hitting resize this time, I'm going to hit duplicate and resize. So now on our board, we have a square image and we have an Instagram story image for the same content for the same campaign. How much time is that going to save? And it's not always it's not always perfect, so you may need to just move it a little bit. But now when you look at your board, you've got all you're gonna have all your content, all branded in the same place, in various different sizes, which I think is just, just an amazing time saver. And why not? Should we do it one more time? Because, because we need a, what do we need? We need a we need a Facebook a Facebook post. So we're going to duplicate and resize and create a Facebook size post as well, which is a slightly wider square, I think, from that one. And as you can see, it's all coming together really nicely. And let's see if we can create let's see what else we can create. It with this thing template. Perhaps it's a perhaps it's a Instagram carousel, for example, duplicate and resize and again, it's going to create the image and the right size for the Instagram carousel. Okay, so Ta da, it's added a random guy in the back of there, I think, unless he was there already. But yeah, let's just have a look at that again. So look all of your content branded in one place, and I will call that the digital woman women conference,

and save it like this. Now, once you've got all of this content in one place you can go about scheduling out, and I'm going to show you that a bit a little bit later. But before I do that, I want to show you some more of these really fun and funky, cool tools that you can use to create your content as well. So this is the easiest thing that you can do. I think you can just upload an image. It can help you to create content for you, and then you can resize the images to have lots of different images and flyers and that kind of thing, all in one board that or project that you then use for various different social media channels, which is really, really amazing. Okay. What did you think of that so far, before I move on to the next thing, can I please show this again? This is being recorded, so you will be able to watch it back. Does anybody have any questions? Patricia says it looks good. Is the Resize option available on the free account? I think it is, but it's worth having a look. It's worth just going to we'll send you a link afterwards. I think there's like a free trial and that kind of thing as well. So you'll be able to try it out. Isn't it so great how they resize the image? It's just like amazing. And these tools are just coming on and on and on, and they're working on them all the time, which is really fantastic. And of course, you can do more than just create this branded content, but for a small business, I think just having the ability to have different sizes in one place is amazing, and it's not in the other platforms at all. Anna, you're right. So this is something unique to this platform at the moment. Okay, now, something else I want to show you, which I think, again, is amazing, and it is to do with generative AI, okay, so one of the things I do, if you know me, I know is I create social media planners. And this is, this is one of the social media planners that is impressed at the moment that we're printing out. And I create these social media planners because although all of this online stuff is absolutely amazing, I like to plan away from the computer, because I get distracted. I'm very easily distracted. So I like to write down what I'm going to create and plan it all out on my customer avatars and that kind of thing, and then come online to Adobe express to actually put the content together that I'm going to create, and then I schedule it into the calendar that's in here as well. So everything's in here. So it's super good, and it's a massive time saver. This couldn't create any result for me here. So what we'll do is we'll just start a new we'll just, we'll just start a new project here with my with my own photo. So I'm going to upload my photo here, and what I want to do with my picture is I want to add something fun to it. So, so there's my planner, and it's Christmas, right? Christmas is coming up soon, just so I want to make my pictures a little bit more like Christmasy, because at the moment, I think they just look a bit I mean, they're fine, but it's not, you know, it's not great for Christmas campaign. So if you have products and that kind of thing. You might just want to make it look a little bit more kind of themes, Halloween, Christmas, that kind of thing. So I want to add to this photo some Christmas, Christmas, stars and baubles. And then I choose my brush size, and I go over the image where I want to add these Christmas stars and bubbles. Obviously can resize it to make it about size as well. And I want to add it here. I know this is very, very rough, just bear with me here. And then I'm going to hit Insert. And then you can see the magic is happening because you see these like rainbow colors coming around the edges, which I love that as well. I love the esthetic of this. It does look really good while we're generating the results. And I mean, sometimes these things don't work, okay, but a lot of the time they do. So look right here. Now we have some baubles and some Christmasy things in our picture. Now, like it might not look 100% right, you might want to change it a little bit. So if you do, you just hit discard and you just sort of go again. So I might want some sketchy stars and moons, which is very Christmassy, and then I'm just going to add here where I want them to go. I'm going to hit insert. I'm going to cross my fingers because it's generative AI, and hope for the best. Yes, dobi Express, I believe, is included in the Adobe Suite. So if you do have it, then you can, you can get access to it already. It's in the creative I think it's in the Creative Suite. Yeah. So here you go. Look at that lovely star. It's a very sketchy little star here, which I think just adds a lovely little bit of a touch of Christmas to the picture. What do you think? I mean, how amazing is that? And you can do it with almost anything. So anything. So say, you have a product and you want to add, you know, kind of like, copies in the background, or something like that. You can just put something where you want, you know, like, color it in where you want it to go, type what you want to create, and it generates it, and it looks like it belongs there. That one, right? I think it looks quite good. So what I'd probably do is I'll keep that and and then on this same board again, I can create more images if I want to. So that's just one of the tools that I absolutely love, is to be able to create, to generate content, really easily, without having to worry about hiring designer. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't hire designers, because I hire designers, and I think that absolutely amazing shout out to like Amy who and some other people that I use. I think it's, I think it's great to use designers, because they you can't replace them. But what this does is, if you're a small business, you need something done quickly, or you want to create a campaign and get the content out quickly, you can do it really quickly and really easily, and it's really cost effective as well. It's just about putting that time aside to sit down and plan the content that you want to create and the reason you want to create it, and then put it together as well. Liz says that it's such a time saver, and she loves how you can use the same one for each platform. Yeah, it's absolutely amazing. I really love that feature as well. So let's have a look at some other cool things that you can do. We go back home. One of the things that I love about this is this writing that this balloon like writing, that you can create generative text. So for example, I'm going to write 2025, because, you know, we're getting to that. I'm afraid to say we are getting to that time of year. This year's gone really fast, and at some point we do know that it is going to be 2025 and perhaps on New Year's Eve, or coming up to New Year's Eve, we might want to put some content out saying we wish all our customers a Happy New Year, 2025 and then, therefore you might need a nice image for that, perhaps with some nice text on it. So I want this text to be gold foil balloon text. So I'm going to hit generate and wait for it. Here you go. So here's a gold foil balloon. There we go. And then perhaps, for the background, I might want to add an image, so a photo, so I don't actually just I could find a photo, like New Year photo here, and drag something in so I could put that in the background if I wanted, like so and just along the side here you can see you can change the layers. So it's really easy, actually, to move your layers up and down of where you want things to go. I could do that. I could add that as a layer, or I could do something fun. And I could, I could create my own I could create my own background so I can generate an image. It's a square in this case. And I want to create a New Year's Eve party scene, party

the and with dogs,

because you can be that random, and don't we all love, well, I love dogs anyway. And you can choose the type of style that you want it to be in. So it could be art style, photo style. So it could be like photo realistic, and that kind of thing. Can choose different types, like chaotic, neon, layered paper, that kind of thing, they just hit generate and wait for it. The thing I love about generative AI is you just don't know what you're going to get, and you do have to, kind of like, reframe your prompt, re refine your prompting a little bit. So for example, this one just, just wants me to try again. New Year's Eve party scene with dogs. So again, waiting for it, waiting for it. Oh, look at this. How lovely is that? So now we can put our doggies in the picture. Don't want that one anymore. Got a 2025, here, and a little New Year's party with our dogs and our foil balloons, we created all of these from generative AI, do you see how fun that is? I mean, just literally anything, anything that comes into your mind, you can create. And then perhaps you've got this 2025, post now, and you're really happy with it, I'm not that happy with it because I can't really see the 2025 that much. So you could, you know, you could change the text and that kind of thing if you wanted to. But essentially, like, if you when you are happy with it, you can just get, you know, 2025 for coming up. Let's just, let's just create that post now, because we know it's going to be New Year's Eve next month, right? So why don't we hit Share up in the corner and share to social now this is, this is where it gets really great and really fun, because we have a content calendar here that we can now post our content to. We don't have to schedule it to go out. We can schedule it as a draft as well. So if we've created, like, a load of content in our social media plan, or load of ideas in our social media plan, we can then put all of those ideas, sit down and put all of those ideas into our calendar without having to schedule it and for it to publish. Now it's just in there, so we can see when it's going like, what we want to create, when it's going to go out. And you can select your channel. So I want this to go out on my LinkedIn page, and I'm going to add a caption. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Everyone, everyone from my family and dogs

to yours,

we wish you an amazing time. Now, this is a terrible caption anyway, but some of us are better at writing caption than others, right, writing captions and others. And then I'll and then, if you want to make your captions sound better, you can hit generate new caption, or you can rewrite your existing one. As we bid farewell to 2021 perhaps we should have written in that 2025 but as you can see, it's giving you a little bit of a template here. So you would just need to decide if it's good or bad. If you think it's bad, thumbs down. If you think it's good, thumbs up. Or you can try again. So it's generating again a new caption. Happy New Year. From our family and dogs to yours. As we usher in the new year, we were taking moment to wish our LinkedIn family are fantastic ones. It's been quite a year now, this doesn't probably sound very much like you, so we always need to make sure that we're remaining authentic. But it's a great start, right? It's a really good, you know, start of creating some content that's going to help you make it easier and faster for you. I'm not 100% sure if it's free, but definitely, I'll send you a link afterwards so you can have a look. Do you know it's it doesn't cost very much at all, Adobe Express anyway, so I think it's like 10 pound a month, or something like that. So it's a really, really low price. And so that's like, I don't know how much that works out a day, but when you think a bit about it versus the cost of spending a lot of time trying to create content. This is really, really going to save you so much time and offer effort. So actually, I like this. I like this one, so I'm going to insert it into my caption, but I'm going to change a little bit, and I'm going to make it sound a little bit more like me. I'm going to change some of the content and that kind of thing. And I've got my image here, well, I don't have my image in here, so I'm just going to put my image in that I created earlier this one upload and add it to my image, and then I should get a preview here so I can see what it's going to look like. Unfortunately, it's not the platform. It's my internet connection that's actually terrible at the moment. So for you, if your internet connection is working really well, you should be able to see a preview of your post right now, which is really good. Here we go, loading, loading, loading. At what point do do we give uploading when the internet's not working very well? Okay, so we'll come back to that in a minute. But as you can see, you should be able to see a preview of this when your internet's working roughly, unlike mine, you can either choose to schedule that post now or to publish it now. So it goes that right away, which we don't want to, because this is a 2025, post, right? This is New Year's Eve, 2024 post, but we can hit Save as Draft, and we can choose the date that we want to schedule it for, which is the 31st of December, New Year's Eve, done, done, done and done, which means now we've created a piece of content over like almost two months into the future, scheduled out for New Year's Eve, and now we don't need to worry about that New Year's Eve post on New Year's Eve, when we're actually partying and having loads of fun. So I'm going to just try and add that picture again, this one that we created a minute ago with generative AI.

And,

oh, there you go. Here you go. And so we can actually should be able to see the preview of that image now. Here it is. You see amazing. And we're going to hit Add draft, and it's going to schedule into our calendar, but it's not going to schedule to go out. So if we go through to our calendar, which is here, this is my personal calendar here, just going to refresh it, you can see that you all of these ones that are in there already. Are just some ideas of things that you can post. Adobe Express has added them in already, and you can obviously add your own ideas. So one of the things that I'm going to give you, if you stay till the end, is I'm going to give you the digital social media planner for free. I think it's 25 pound on the website. And with that planner, it does give you loads of different ideas for content that you can create and post. And so you could put some of those ideas into here that you intend to actually create and and then go away and create it if you want to. So for example, you know, it gives you some ideas about share top five tips and that kind of thing. Share a Black Friday. I mean, Black Friday is coming up, so if you haven't created your campaign content around that, then you could certainly do that now. Um, perhaps you already have. So looking to the future for next month, Christmas, if you haven't created your Christmas content, I would just really recommend going back into these and creating all of your content on one board, working out what you're going to create and why you're going to create it. It's really important. That's why you know. That's why the plan is so good, because you can write everything down before you actually go online about what you're going to create. Create these amazing items of content all in different sizes on the same board. For those of you who have just joined, I just want to remind you of that it doesn't all have to be the same size, and you can have different content as well, and you can resize everything. Like I said. You will be able to watch the replay of this if you missed it, because I've seen a few of you join later. And then you can just put it in here, and you can schedule that content now, because now the content has been saved in your Adobe Express, you can now go into your calendar. It's all there. It's all organized for you. And okay, in terms of connections as well, you can add face several Facebook accounts. You can add several X accounts. You can so add several Instagram accounts. You can see, I've got them there. You can add LinkedIn accounts, Pinterest accounts, and Tiktok as well. So you're covering pretty much one of the things that people are like, oh, you know, I can't schedule to Pinterest. Well, you can schedule to Pinterest with this, and you can schedule to tick tock with this, and you can schedule to various different Instagram channels and Twitter extra channels. I still call it Twitter and Facebook as well, which is really, really good. So I'm going to show you a couple of other fun things that you can do. And then I think I'd like to open up to a Q, a for anybody to ask questions they want to ask about either Adobe Express or the type of content they create and that kind of thing as well. Does it do stories too? That's a really good question. Okay, so let's see. So if we was gonna connect, if we're gonna say I was gonna I don't know if it's gonna work. Let's have a look. See if I can connect this up to you.

Oh yes, of course. I will send you the social media plan afterwards as a PDF. For those of you who can't, who's not able to use good notes. Okay, so I'm just connecting that up return. So okay, now I'm going to create a post for digital women here and see, yes, you can. So was it Zahara Zara, you can use, we can create a post, a reel or a story. So that's great news for everyone, isn't it, because now if you just use Instagram and you want to create a So again, going back to that board that we created, we can create that post as a story. We can create it as a reel, because you can create reels here as well, and posts and that kind of thing as well. Um, Stella says, can I connect the LinkedIn from my client as well? I have all rights. That's a good question. So should we try it here and now and see if we can? Okay, so LinkedIn, so there's connection for LinkedIn. We want to manage our connections. We want to add a new LinkedIn connection. New connect. Now I am not sure if you can add the LinkedIn for a personal client or if it's going to be for a company page. So obviously you're the one that's going to be logged in. So perhaps I want to post to digital women. I don't think you can do to individual people. You might what you might need to do is, if you want to connect to your client, is you might need to log out of your LinkedIn and log into your clients LinkedIn and then connect it that way. But you can definitely connect several pages right as well, so that you can schedule content to the pages and stuff, which I think is super helpful. Stella says, yeah, it connects always with my private. Yeah, exactly. And hi. Ang says, do you know she can tag people in the scheduler. That's a good question. Let's have a look. Shall we see? Okay, so I want to tag Ange. Doesn't look like it Ange, not on LinkedIn anyway. Perhaps, if we're doing it as a live post, it doesn't look like you can do that, that you can do it on LinkedIn. Plug in people. So it might be a job that you have to do afterwards, after you've posted the content out, I imagine it's much easier to tag on an Instagram post, because, you know, you can just use the app to tag them. So let's try it. Let's give that a go. Shall we? So add a picture quickly. We'll just do this lovely little picture that we made. And I just want to do digital woman. I don't need to open the connection, and I want to do a post, and I just want to tag. And it be, I suppose, if you know someone's, if you know what somebody's actual tag is, it will be fine, because that will happen automatically, but it hasn't got that would be really, really good. That would be really, really good, wouldn't it? If you would, if you could actually tag someone like you can in some of the other platforms. So that's probably a good bit of feedback to give them that we want to be able to tag people. So at the moment, it doesn't look like it, but you should be able to do it on Instagram just by using the tag like that, and it would tag like that, and it would tag someone automatically. So yeah, is anybody? Yeah, you can do it after. And also you could, if you saw on that Instagram post that I was just creating there, you can also add the first comment as well. So you may be able to tag someone in the first comment or do it afterwards if you want to. So that's probably the only thing that I don't think is super efficient at the moment as well. So do you want me to show you any more fun stuff? Let's go back to the start again. Have a look at a little bit more things that you can do. So obviously, I showed you. I showed you now how to create your brand so that it's all there already, and you can create kind of like templates and images and posters and all kinds of stuff just from your brand colors and images and that kind of thing. I mean, it was super clever, wasn't it? Because all I did was I uploaded a photo of one of the conferences that we've done, and it knew that it was a digital conference and and it just showed templates that would be super relevant. And then I press the button, and it changed the colors to my brand colors, and I could just easily press a button, add my logo, and change the fonts and that kind of thing as well. So that was that was really super good. And then you could press resize, and it could resize the image of the template to all of the different social media sizes and that kind of thing. And then you can schedule them out in your calendar for when you want them to go out. And you can use generative AI then to create the captions and that kind of thing and edit as well. And one of the most fun things I thought, was when I put my social media planner image, yes, Charlie is a physical we do have a physical planner, and they've just gone to press and they're on my social media planner.co.uk, they've just gone to press now, so they'll be here next week, ready to be posted off and at the moment, because it's moment, you can still save 10 pound on the planners, and they include all of that stuff in it as well. Is being able to schedule out that content and then not have to worry about it anymore. And the way that I would go about that, like I said, is I would plan the content offline. I would sit down and make sure that my content was aligning to my business goals. I understand what kind of campaigns I need to create. So if I've got an event coming up, I know a few weeks before, a few months before that event, and start tripping content. So I need to create all of the content beforehand and schedule it all out so I know when it's going to happen. And then I can sit back and I don't have to worry, because I know, oh, don't worry. I know the contents going out. I can leave time now to actually do things that are going to move my business forward, and I can make sure that I'm engaging with people, because I don't have to worry about what I'm going to post each day, right? And we also looked at, like I said, we looked at those planners, and we added some really nice, like Christmas effects to the background. So if you have images, so So you have product images already, and you want it's Halloween, or it's Black Friday, or it's Christmas, and you just want to make the background look slightly different, or something like that. You can literally add a prompt, and I was able to add baubles in the background of my planners. In one case, I'm able to add a Christmas tree and that kind of thing as well. Definitely wants to know how far in advance do you plan or schedule content. So this is a complete personal preference, depending on how far you can plan ahead and if you know and if you know like what's coming up. So if you know that you have a big event in March next year or in May next year, you can start planning your content and creating it for that time in the future, whereas, if you don't really have anything to sell or promote, you might just be creating top of funnel engaging content, like memes and that kind of thing, and that might just be stuff that's trending now. So you can't really schedule something like that six months into the future. So it really does depend on the type of business that you have. So you just work out when you're going to be running a campaign, like, when you're going to be having a push for sales, for example, that might be around Christmas time. And then you would schedule content in advance for that. Some people schedule their content six months in advance because they're selling the same thing, or they're talking about the same thing, or they know the kind of content that's going to engage and interest people, so they, they create, keep on, re sharing that content. So it really does depend definitely, and like, with most of these things, um, like, What time should I post my content? What channel should I post on? Really, is dependent on the business, the content you have, the products or services that you have, and also your own time, because not everybody has time to sit there and create a month's content in advance. If you want to know how far I schedule content in advance, I had scheduled the social media content on Instagram content six months in advance. And the reason is, is because they mostly sell at Christmas time, because it's a it's a product that people want in the new year. So when it comes to October, November, December, I'm really in the moment creating content, and I'm talking to people, but I just want content to go out and keep the channel ticking over, to show people that I still exist throughout the year, and that content I schedule throughout the year, and it's very easy to, you know, to create and schedule, because it's kind of educational, helpful content and that kind of thing. And although I know it's not going to get much engagement, because I won't be there, I'll be doing working on other parts of my business, digital, women, social day and that kind of thing, I know, it gives me peace of mind to know that content is going out and it's happening for me, which is which can sometimes be really useful for a small business. So I hope that answers your question in long, roundabout way. Sarah says, Do you recommend using all apps, including Tiktok, as a small week on this business? I don't recommend using everything. I recommend setting yourself up on everything so it's there, and if you don't intend to use a channel, just put a holding post on there to say we're not active on this channel at the moment. But you can, you know we're active on Tiktok, for example. So for example, with X, I used to go on it all the time, a bit of a good following of about 6006 16,000 followers on x, and had a really engaged community. But a lot of that community started moving over to threads, or decided they didn't want to use x anymore, just because it was kind of getting a bit political or, you know, for personal reasons and that kind of thing, or because it was a bit much of a platform to be on. And so I think that happened to a lot of people. And so one of the things that you could do if you're not using x anymore, but you're signed up onto it, is you could just add an image to the top and say, I'm not using this channel anymore, but you can find me on this platform. So if somebody does happen to come across you,

then they can go through. They can go through to your channels that you do use. So just make sure you buy, you know, you get your name for every single do not buy it. You take it. Just make sure you get your name, and then you can test things later. So what I would tend to do personally, I would go all in on one or two platforms to start with. So for small businesses, if you're a product, Tiktok is amazing. And so creating and testing content on Tiktok is a really, really good idea. Sorry, Melissa is 99 pound a year. That's amazing, right? 99 pound 80 a year. And if you're a student, it's even cheaper than that. I believe it's eight pound 31 a month. Okay? I think there is a monthly payment that you can get. So I have a look at it. Might be part of the Creative Cloud. I'll have a look, and I'll send all the information to all of you afterwards as well. 99 pound 80, that's such a good deal, isn't it? For the whole year for this, I'm trying to sell it to you. I feel like I sounded like a market trader or something like, that's such a good deal. You should buy it. Because I'm not actually trying to sell it to you. Just actually, just try and teach you how to use it. What a brilliant platform. Love AI from the balloon text, they've got a young pop up. You still got Zoe. We'll catch up with you soon. Anyway. Yeah, so with the social media platforms, I would just keep testing and learning. And then if you see a new platform come up and you think, you know, I could do really well on this channel, you can always use, like, maybe 10% of your time allocated to social media month, just testing on that platform. You don't have to go all in on it. You can just test on it a little bit to see if it works for you. And sometimes you might find that that platform is better for you than Tik Tok. For example, you might find like Facebook, Facebook is still a good platform, especially for small businesses, especially with ads and that kind of thing. And you might find because there lot of buyers there, and especially a lot of older buyers who have the money as well. So you might find that that's even better for you than Tik Tok. Or you might find Tiktok is better than Instagram, but it's just spent, like, putting 5% or 10% of your time aside to try those channels every single month, but not letting it take over your life, because doesn't, doesn't sometimes social media, like, completely take over your life. There's so much, there's so much to do. Caroline Gibson, how does Adobe Express, compare to Canva? Okay, that's a really good question. I'm not here to make it comparisons. I've used both. I actually prefer Adobe Express for creating campaigns so So, as I showed you before, when you can, when you create an image, you can create them in all different sizes in the same place. And I think that's amazing, because one of the things on the other platforms that you can't do is that you can only do is just to create like all your posts are square. You can create lots of different posters a square. Great. But what we want is we want the right size for Instagram. We want the right size for our stories. We want the right size for all of our different platforms, and we just want to press a button to have that created for us to save us time. So for time saving, I think Adobe Express is much better. And I also think for the generative AI stuff, and for adding the bits in, and for doing quick things like I hadn't showed you this yet, but you can do things really quickly, like generate QR codes. You can generate, I know you can do all of this in other platforms as well, like presentations and that kind of thing. But generating QR codes quickly editing PDFs, putting in a PDF and being able to edit it really quickly. I mean, that is amazing, because do you remember the old days when you had a PDF and you wanted to edit it, and then you had to go through all had to go through all of these, like different platforms that you didn't know how to use to create in that Linda says, use platforms your potential client uses. That is such a good tip. It's such a simple tip, but such a good one. Linda. Thank you. Annabelle says, Canva does have Gen a options. Also Adobe Firefly is free. If that helps anyone. That's a great tip. Annabelle, they do have Gen Ed AI, they do Adobe fire flight is at is free, and it is built into this platform as well. For teams, 35% of a five pound a month. Melissa, thank you. That's really good. So if you have a team, it's even cheaper. So this platform is not expensive. It's cheap as chips to you, and it's, it's not, I wouldn't say it's cheap. It's just really, really good value for money. So is there anything else you'd like me to show you to do, how to do, or would you like to come on screen and do a bit of network in the Q, a and share any kind of thoughts you have for me, or anything, anything more that you'd like to learn about? I uh, another good thing is actually as well, if you want to share things with colleagues and that kind of thing, you can actually hit a button. You can actually go onto your design here, and you can hit share again, and you can make it into a template or a view only link. So if you just want someone to have a look at it, off, or you can just create a link. And if you want to allow others to use this template as well, you could hit, allow others to use this, create a link, and I could share it with you, and you can use this via was a template as well. So this is really good. So one of the things I do for events is I always create an image that people can share so, like really good user generated content, and what I do is I create an image, and then I let people add their own name and pull their own picture in, and I share this link with them. I'll share it with you too, that you can maybe have a go at, you know, doing something with this image, or making a copy of this image and trying something yourself as well, if you want to. Let's see. Is there any more questions? Has anybody else got any more questions? Do you want to get into having a chat and some networking now? Or would you like me to show you anything else i

Hello and I can see you.

Hi, Lucy, hello, everyone. I was just gonna ask, I don't know. I'm sure, obviously, you've mentioned the Canva word on I know we were talking about Adobe, but, you know, creating lead magnets and things like, how do they have templates set up for that too?

Yes, you can create templates for those as well. So sorry, my dogs come in here. It's like, what happens, isn't it? When you're working from home, you guys get a dog or a child come in. Okay, random. Yes, you can. So you can create, like documents and that kind of thing that you can share as well. You can actually create presentations that you can share, and uses lead magnets, all kinds of different things, and the storage built in as well. So it's really good. I know you can do it with other platforms, but again, one of the things I really like is so obviously, I make the social media planner, and it's quite thick. It's like, it's 200 pages, right? And if I want to, I don't want to edit the whole thing, because some of the pages I just want to keep. So I just upload the whole PDF into Adobe Express, and I can just edit, even though I created it in a different channel, I can just edit the PDF in Adobe Express and then export it for print, which is really good. I

didn't know you could do that. That's really cool. Yeah, you can

do up to 100 pages. So what I'll do is I'll create 100 and then another 100, but they are increasing the pages that will be coming soon.

Thanks, Lucy. I learned quite a few things there today. Thank you very much. Brilliant. I

know you. Are you an Adobe user already? And yeah, I

use it every day, because obviously, for I do so I use InDesign, and I've got, actually, I was looking at Adobe the scheduler the other day because I was thinking of either using a paying for one, yeah, or using Adobe, but thinking, Oh, it's actually in there, and it's free. Exactly. It's part of my Creative Cloud. So I get it for free. So exactly.

So you're saving heap of money just by just like using this tool. And I know probably as well, you might have clients that want their content via Canva, because it's easy for them to edit. Well, this is just, you know, this, you can do that now. So you and you can also move some of your content through the cloud from Adobe into Adobe Express templates for clients like that as well. So it just for designers. It's like almost a no brainer.

No, I agree. I agree. Thank you very good. Thank

you, Ange. Has anybody else got any questions as well? So great info. Thank you. Emily says, any questions, just looking in what I normally do. Patricia says, Great info. Thank you. Rasheen says, I'm in library, so I'm able to put my camera on to chat. And she's an events and Training Specialist, yeah. Well, like, if you, if you want to, you know, comment with any questions. Now's the time to ask if there's anything you're not sure on. Now is the time to ask if there's anything you want to know how to do. Then again, now's the time to ask. There's no you know, don't be shy. Don't be worried about asking anything. Don't be shy about sharing your products or services as well, so that we can connect with each other. And if you learnt something or you enjoyed this session, I would really appreciate it if you could share like something online, or a quick testimonial to say what you learned, and that kind of thing, and based on the feedback that you supply and that you share online, if you if you did like this, then what I'll do is I will do more, and I'll show you different things, more detailed things that you can do with social media and some of the tools that you can use some of the AI stuff as well, especially like that content creation side of things and that actually content planning side as well, but we don't have time to do everything within this hour. Basically. Sarah says, so proud of you both. Thank you. Thank you, Sarah, that's really kind of you. Rachel says, Thanks. Thank you. Linda says, Where can I download the planner? So if you want the planner, I'm going to send an email to everybody who joined this session afterwards with a link to it's the website is on my social media planner.co.uk, and I'll and there is a digital planner that you can purchase on there, and I will just give you the code so that you can get it for free, basically. But if you do want to get the physical planner, because you like, like me, you like having the explicit This is a 2021 one. I've been doing this for a long time, but it just gives you an example with the sun behind me as well, on the wall as you can see. Planners everywhere you can see their planners and diaries. So there's like, a digital version of this, basically, that you can create and plant gold. I'm going to give it to you for free today. Yes, it's the PDF. I'll send it to you as a PDF so that you can try it. The only thing I would ask is, please don't share it with anybody else, because it is a product that I do sell. And, yeah, Anna says she's this has been a really great into Troy to Adobe, great. I'll do more of these, because there is some other really cool stuff that you do. Like I said, Shivani, thank you to Shivani, Sarah, thank you. That's, that's absolutely it's such a pleasure to do it. It's my first workshop back in a while with you all, and I really enjoyed it as well, and I hope that you did too. You can follow me on Instagram. It's Lucy dot show or go and find digital women, because we're going to be sharing. We share lots of lunch and learns. And it's not me normally sharing the content on there. It's everybody else, like, there's so many amazing lunch and learns Emily will be able to tell you and yeah, or on LinkedIn. Lucy Hall, so thank you very much. Everybody. Good to connect with you and to see you. Flora says, Thank you so much. I learned a lot. Thank you that that's so amazing to hear. I really appreciate it. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. This has been recorded, so I'll share the recording with you afterwards as well, so you can well, so you can have a look. Stella says, Thanks for the workshop. It's really helpful, especially the possibility to ask questions. Really great idea. Amazing. Thank you, Annabelle, Thank you, Laura. I'm really pleased. Okay, so it looks like we are kind of done. Now, like I said, I'm going to email you afterwards with the link to with the link to the PDF, or the good notes, if you have good notes planner, which will be a code that you go on the website and add in. And I'll also send you all the links to Adobe express as well. So if you want to try it out, or you want to create something fun, then you can do and I'm looking forward to seeing all of your amazing designs and all of your amazing campaigns that you create for social media, especially your New Year's post. So before you go actually, I should have set you a challenge. Create your New Year's Eve post and show and show it to us, share it like in your story or something, so that we can see it and perhaps tag us, because it is actually really easy to do, and that is one post that you can create and schedule now. Schedule now another post that you could probably create and schedule now is that Christmas Eve post and that Christmas Day post and that kind of thing. So good luck with all your designing and good luck with all of your social media content creation. And I will come back soon with possibly another workshop for you if you enjoyed this one. So thank you very much. Guys. Take care. Thanks, Ange.

Thank you, everyone. You