By Princess Jones
Whatever your small business marketing plan says, the goal is to get eyeballs on your content, spread your message, and drive conversion. We all know that social media marketing is one of the best ways to do this, but it requires you to create and post interesting, eye-catching and branded social graphics on a regular basis. This can be a major challenge for small business owners who don’t have design experience or the budget to hire a professional designer.
Yala aims to solve this problem. Named after Israeli slang for “let’s go,” it combines dead simple graphic creation and integrated social sharing to help you create something awesome and easily share it with your audience. In the coming weeks, Yala will include artificial intelligence that will help you find the best timing for your messages so you can get the most possible eyes on your content.
Since it’s a new tool, Yala is free…for now. That is likely to change in the future as it gains popularity, so it’s probably best for you to try it out now rather than later. Do that now before we go on…
Sign up for a Yala account.
Now that you have an account, we’ll show you how easy it is to create and share branded social graphics with Yala.
The first step to using Yala is to login and upload your logo. You’ll use this with all of your creations. Yala will determine your colors based on the logo and give you a chance to adjust them to find the perfect color palette. Next, you’ll choose some available themes. There’s a healthy selection there, including some minimalist ones like “Serif” and “Sans” as well as some more busy ones like “Sprinkles” and “By the Bell.” You’ll need to choose three that you like and click “Next.”
On the next screen, you’ll add text to the image, choose your theme and then click “Publish and Download.”
You’ll be brought to a page where you can preview the image you just created. Here you’ll see several sizing options, based on where you’d like to share the image. You can download the image by choosing the social media icons at the bottom. (This is basically just choosing your size.) If you click the purple button, you’ll have the chance to connect to your social media accounts. After that, you’ll be able to publish your images automatically to the networks you choose with just one click.
The more you use Yala, the more it learns about the best times to post your content. To see how your posts are doing, you can log into Yala and click “Menu” on the top right side of the screen. By default, you’ll see your drafts. But if you toggle the button at the top, you can see your published posts, too. Click each published post to see analytics on them, including likes, retweets, comments, and shares.
It’s really that simple. Sure, you can do more with a freelance designer or Photoshop if you have the design skills in-house. But for small businesses looking to create engaging content on a shoestring budget with a just a few clicks, Yala is a smart option.
