Canva is amazing
With Canva, it’s simple to engage your target audience, develop your brand, and produce stunning visual content with others – no prior design knowledge is required. Here I will take you through some of the best ways to use Canva on your Instagram account.
How to make an animated Story for Instagram
This was the first reason I downloaded Canva, I wanted to make a short clip to bring people from my Insta to YouTube to grow my subscribers.
I have a travel account called Travel Around the Country that has new videos every few days, I get lots of views on Instagram but not many were finding my videos on YouTube, SO I thought I could use links within stories to send people to my YouTube channel.
The example here is a few of my stories playing one after another, see the consistency of my branding and each story has both an active link and a location, these buttons or stickers were added in Instagram at the end of the process.
- Step 1: Get Canva
Canva is free to download and use, there is a Pro option that lets you access more templates and stock photography if you find this tool is something you want to use a lot.
- Step 2: Make a design from a Template
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Find a template
In Canva go to the Social Media top Category, then select Instagram, click Instagram Story. This will narrow down all the templates that are the correct size for a Instagram Story.
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Choose a design
Browse through all the options and find one you like, click the design you want to modify.
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Edit the template
Now you can customize how the design will look, what text do you need? All the parts of the design are clickable to edit or drag around the screen.
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Insert a video
Once you have the background part of your design done, now you can insert a clip of a video. Go to the large + symbol and click Upload > Upload Files , once your file is there click it and insert. I insert a short clip from my YouTube video so people want to click to view the full video.
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Trim the video
Use the trim clip tool by clicking on your video > trim > then drag the sides of the video to be shorter, between 5 - 10 seconds should be enough. This will be the length of your Instagram Story once uploaded. * Note the sound from your video will come through into Canva.
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Export/Download the video
Once you are happy with how everything looks, go to the top right "Share" Icon > choose download > MP4 Video > download. It will prepare the file and may prompt you to save to "save video". Your file is now on your phone/device and ready to use.
- Step 3: Upload to Instagram
- Open Instagram and create a new Story.
- Select your new video file
- Click the stickers icon
- Click link
- Paste in your YouTube link
- Click Sticker text if you want to change what the button says.
- Position your link button
- Share to your story
- I’d also recommend saving your story to a Story Archive (the circles at the top of my profile), this will pin all your videos to the top of your Instagram page and they will stay there forever, instead of the usual 24 hours for a story.
That’s it, you have created a nice looking story template you can use over and over with just replacing the YouTube clip each time in Canva,
The finished Product
This is the video file that Canva exports, notice how I have left off any call to action links as you can add real active links to any page in Instagram Stories.
- Interested To Try?
Create content more quickly with time-saving tools
Without the correct tools, it takes time and effort to develop great marketing and social media content. With Canva, you can accelerate the design process with easy-to-use tools for creating quality content quickly.