If you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, or a business owner, social media should not be your #1 task. 
After all, you have a business to run.
Nevertheless, in this crazy world we live in – a strong social media presence is not an option anymore. It’s a must.
Not only is social media no longer a choice, sharing articles and writing simple status updates is no longer enough either.
You probably heard that visuals get 18% more clicks on Twitter. Not to mention you can’t even get on Instagram or Pinterest without visuals!
This creates a big problem.
Social media is very time consuming as it is, and time is a luxury most business owners can’t afford.
Now add the need to create gorgeous graphics as part of your social media strategy. Suddenly, social media management becomes a full time job if not more.
I already shared my love for Canva on my last Social Quant post, 11 Crucial Tools To Grow Your Podcast (Or Blog) With Twitter.
As I wrote:
“Canva is simply the best graphics tool on the net, Period. You don’t need to install anything. You don’t need any background in design. You just need 10 minutes, and you can now create gorgeous graphics.”
But even with a tool like Canva, creating graphics, especially well-branded graphics, remains a time consuming task.
Canva is also personal, meaning it’s hard to collaborate with others. And while it comes with brilliant templates, I often need to make quite a lot of tweaks to make it fit my needs.
This all changed this past August.
Canva now opened the doors to ‘Canva For Work’, bloggers, entrepreneurs and small-business owners were able to join massive brands like Huffington Post, Lonely Planet, Hubspot and Yelp – who have been using the platform to create their social media graphics for the last few months.
In fact, here’s what Travis Bernard, senior manager at TechCrunch had to say about ‘Canva For Work’:
“Canva For Work’ is a must-have for every publisher or site that produces blog content. We’ve been able to create beautiful and shareable content within a few minutes, and we’ve seen a huge boost in engagement on the stories, tweets, and Tumblr posts that include Canva-created content.” –Travis Bernard, Techcrunch
Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Yelp… these are pretty huge brands that are excited about using ‘Canva For Work’.
As you’ll soon see – there’s a very good reason.
If you find yourself drowning in tasks and struggling to get your social media efforts on track… I truly believe that these 5 new Canva features could be your lifeboat.
So… what’s so great about the new Canva?
1: Get Your Branding Right With The New ‘Brand Kit’ Feature
Let’s get things straight. I’m not a gifted designer. I’m not even a mediocre designer. In fact, I’m pretty terrible with design.
Always have been, and if there’s one thing I’m especially bad with, it would be colors. To save my life, I can’t figure what goes well with what.
And this led to a somewhat inconsistent brand presence on all my social media activities. Any marketer worth his salt (or any beginner marketer who read a decent book about it) will tell you that if your branding ain’t consistent – you’ve already lost the battle.
We want our Twitter followers not only to enjoy, favorite and retweet our shared images, but we want them to connect those images to us and to our brand. We want them to recognize us throughout the noise that’s going on in their feeds (and lives).
But how do you create graphics with consistent and pleasing colors when you can’t distinguish “gold” tone from “sand”, or “navy” from “teal”? (Seriously, who comes up with this stuff?!)
Enter: The Brand Kit
‘Canva For Work’ now allows you (or preferably, your designer…) to set up your “Brand Kit”.
This kit includes all the various colors and shades you’re allowed to use from now on. It also defines the fonts and colors of your titles, subtitles, and paragraphs.
Here’s an example of what it could look like:
Let your designer spends 5 minutes setting your brand kit up.
Once he or she is done – you can start using Canva’s beautiful templates – this time with consistent branding.
Any time you need to pick a color for any element, your kit’s colors will automatically be loaded into the color picker.
Any time you add text – it will default to your brand’s styling guide as set by your designer. Pure bliss.
(Quick tip: if you don’t have a styling guide, brand kit or a designer, you can easily get one done for dirt-cheap on Fiverr, Upwork, or 99Designs!)
2: Centralized Logos
It always happens. You’re in the middle of creating a sharable quote image, artwork for your landing page, or a visual testimonial.
It looks perfect… but one thing is missing…… Your logo.
Panic hits.
Cold sweat is running down your back. Your hair feels like it’s on fire. “WHERE DID I SAVE THAT DAMN LOGO?!”, you ask yourself. (Okay, maybe the panic part is just me).
But really, where is that logo?
You start searching for it. Dropbox. Email. Desktop. Evernote.
“Found it!”, you exclaim victoriously… only to realize that you found an old, pixelated, non-transparent version of your logo.
Sophie’s Choice has got nothing compared to your conundrum now: Do you keep searching, do you use a bad logo, or do you skip the logo, “just this time?”
Wouldn’t it be easier if your brilliant graphic design software kept all your logos in one place, always at the ready? It would. And that’s exactly what Canva’s new Centralized Logos feature is all about.
It’s dead-simple. You upload all the versions of your logos once.
From that moment on, you (or anyone else on your team) can simply drag & drop them into any Canva design, by simply clicking on “Uploads, -> Logos”.
Watch this video to see the new Brand Kit and Centralized Logos features in action:
3: Templates, Templates, Templates
Your time is valuable, so why are you still wasting it on designing things from scratch?
I used to hate creating featured images for my blog posts. Being fairly design-challenged, facing the empty canvas is rough. It’s hard for me to figure out where to start, what to use, and how to lay everything out.
What’s worse – I’d try to reinvent the wheel. Sure, I’d start from some Canva default layout, but then I’d tweak the hell out of it… only to realize I need to start over. What. A. Waste.
Canva’s “Branded Template” feature puts an end to this time sucker.
Similar to the Brand Kit, you ask your designer to sit down once, and create the templates you need on a day-to-day basis.
Once he’s done, you no longer need to rely on Canva templates – you have your own custom tailored ones!
Now I have templates that are in the right size, format, and color. My designer already set them up with my colors and logo.
The structure – everything I need in each template – is already all in place.
So creating graphics has dropped from a 60 minutes task to a 5 minutes task.
But it gets better. Because (as you’ll see in the next item), ‘Canva For Work’ let’s you (finally!) delegate with ease.
4: Teamwork Makes The Dreamwork
Now that your Canva account is set with your brand kit, logos, and templates, creating great graphics becomes a simple drag-and-drop job. It’s so streamlined that now almost anyone can do it!
‘Canva For Work’ makes this so simple and straight forward, that you should start considering to delegate all this work instead of doing it by yourself.
With a flick of a button Canva lets you add new team members, who immediately get access to your brand kit, templates and logos.
The team feature provides a way to collaborate by adding a “publish to team” button, that turns personal designs into a team-wide project. Spice it up with an internal commenting system and you’ve got a time-saving recipe!
It does come at a cost, though.
Currently, you’re looking at $9.95 a month for every team member. But here’s how I look at it:
Before ‘Canva For Work’, you could either do things yourself, or pay a designer to do it for you. With ‘Canva For Work’, any general VA, intern or existing employee can have similar results at a fraction of the cost.
The monthly cost of adding a team member to your Canva account is negligible compared to paying a graphical designer!
5: Magic Resize (So magical you’d think Apple created it!)
Up till now, creating good-looking sharable images was time consuming.
And creating one for your blog, one for Twitter, one for Facebook, one for Instagram, one for Pinterest, one for Tumblr, one for Google+, one for Snapchat, and one for your email…can get quite overwhelming.
Not to mention – an extreme time waste.
Since every platform has its own sizes and ratios, if you follow the best practices, you’d be creating 9 different graphics from scratch for every piece of content.
There’s no way around it. The title that fits Twitter’s wide image aspect will never fit Pinterest’s narrow format, and both would look different than Instagram’s square format.
What a nuisance!
But no more. It’s time to reveal my favorite ‘Canva For Work’ feature. This feature alone will save you HOURS every single month.
Presenting: Magic Resize
Magic Resize lets you quickly resize any graphic you made in Canva into all the formats you need – with one single click. I kid you not when I tell you – this is truly amazing!
From now on, you create a design once. You then click File, -> Magic Resize, select the different social media channels you want to reach, and BAM! Canva creates an optimized version of your graphic for each social media platform.
It will move objects around, resize graphics, change font sizes, and quite simply – make it work. It’s pretty hard to believe, so let me show you
Here’s a shareable image I created a few months ago. It was optimized for Facebook, and I never bothered with creating accompanying formats for other social channels:
When I click on File, -> Magic Resize, I’m presented with a dialog asking me what channels would I like to optimize my graphic for.
I chose Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. I clicked “Resize”, and voilà: Canva produced optimized versions for each platform in under 7 seconds!
Here’s what they look like:
Pretty sweet for 7 seconds worth of work, huh?
The bottom line, and what’s next for Canva
These 5 new features are only a few of dozens of powerful upgrades ‘Canva For Work’ provides to your Canva experience.
‘Canva For Work’ will soon allow you to upload your own brand fonts, set up multiple brands, and (this is a big one!) download designs with transparent backgrounds.
If you’re someone who could benefit from a way to create fantastic graphics at low cost and in no-time, why not go give ‘Canva For Work’ a try at www.canva.com?
And now, back to you: What do you think about Canva’s new features? Excited? Underwhelmed? Will you give it a test, or pass? I’d love to know, so leave a comment below!
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Canva in any way, and neither I nor Social Quant will receive any benefits from you testing ‘Canva For Work’. To be fully transparent though, I will share that my experience with ‘Canva For Work’ is based on free access I’ve received to the platform before it was released to the general public, and ongoing use since.