Did you know it’s super easy to make those cute thumbnails you see floating around social media yourself? Follow this tutorial and watch how I make my very own!
Check out my Facebook Group, The Goal Diggers of Online Marketing, too- for those that want to build their business online through social media, in a genuine and authentic way!
Transcript:
Kimberly Olson: 00:00 Hey Kimberly Olson here. Also known as The Goal Digger Girl, today for this episode of #getLIT, where we crush our business in less than 10 minutes, I’m going to show you how to make the cutest YouTube thumbnails and Facebook thumbnails because for the longest time I couldn’t figure it out and I thought it was going to have to hire it out and you actually don’t need to. You can do it yourself really easy. I’m going to show you how in this episode.
Kimberly Olson: 00:37 okay, so I’m going to show you, it’s super simple. You can do it for Facebook or YouTube. So what we’re looking for right here, I’m going to share my screen so you can see the finished product. When you go to my YouTube page, you will see any given video there is, it’s called a thumbnail. So obviously this isn’t what my video looks like, right? But I take a screenshot of myself at the end of the video and I can show you how I do that on here. So you’re basically just going to, if you’re gonna use your phone, you’re just going to use that timer button. Hit the three second and just smile. And you’re going to use that image for your thumbnail. So it’s not actually pulled from your video. You’re just, you just need a static image. Okay. So this is the end result of what it looks like.
Kimberly Olson: 01:18 So I’ll show you where you upload it and then we’re going to go to my phone. I’m going to show you how to actually make it. We just, you could use it on, you can probably do it on Canva, but I like having the, see how there’s font and then it’s got the background. That’s a solid block. I like that because it makes the word stand out really easily. Versus if you have images, it’s just the letters can kind of get lost in the image. So if you are on YouTube, when you go to load up the video, this is the first step. Literally, you add the video right here. It says upload thumbnail and then you would just pick your thumbnail. And I think I’ve got, um, I don’t have any right here to show you, but you just saw a bazillion of them, so you don’t need to see that.
Kimberly Olson: 01:58 And then over on Facebook, when you click the videos tab, you actually do it after the fact. So obviously with YouTube, the cool thing is with YouTube you can do it while you’re loading that video up unless you go live. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to click on your video, you have to, you have, you have to open the video up to make it big. And then in the corner it says edit video. And then right here it’s going to say thumbnail. And you can go ahead and just choose one from what they have or you can add your own, which is really cool. So I’m going to stop my screen share here and we’re going to go over to my phone and then we are going to pop on over here if I can get it to work. It’s hilarious.
Kimberly Olson: 02:39 Okay, so we’re going to go over to a word, a word swag. Okay. Word swag is what I’m going to use for this. I have the free version cause I was part of the beta when they first launched it. So I think it’s just a few dollars. Okay, so you’re going to go to library and then I actually did a training on, look at the last video I did. It was on Snapchat. How you filters to go ahead and we’ll do this one right here. I use Snapchat filters to be able to make awesome Instagram stories. So I took a thumbnail with Snapchat. So this is a perfect example. So I just took an image long ways with my cell phone to get the Snapchat here. So you’ll have to check the dimensions for Facebook or YouTube, just Google thumbnail size, thumbnail dimensions for YouTube or Facebook, whatever you’re going to use it for.
Kimberly Olson: 03:25 Well we’re going to pretend it’s this size for our demonstration, so we’re on no crop. It might even have it on here. Um, let’s see. Facebook cover Twitter. YouTube. Yeah. Okay. So there’s the YouTube size. So go to next. Double tap. Okay. So we’re going to say for this one was how do you Snapchat? Um, how, okay, how to use Snapchat. So I want to just kind of show you what I do. If you want the sentence to be long and not break, you turn this, you turn this off right here. It’s going to force it to me one line. But if you’re, and not just leave it off. So I like to kind of see how it looks. And then you can change the colors right here. I usually will use my brand colors. I use a gray and pink. I actually, if you want to, if you click the wand, you can hit that pound symbol right there and you can type in your hex code.
Kimberly Olson: 04:17 So if you have your six digit code, which I do for my colors, you can totally do that. But for demonstration, we’re going to do gray here. Okay? So we’re gonna go back to styles and then we’re looking for the ones with the block. So see how this has the block fonts. Oh, also down here, see the die roll, the die. You get five different choices there. So you might move it around and see you. Do you like any of those? Okay. Those are all too big. I don’t like those. So I’m gonna keep going. There’s more down here in the end. So this one’s pretty good one. Okay. How do you Snapchat? Oh, I’m like so excited to show you everything. Also, when you click colors, see this bar down here at the bottom, you can make it more transparent. So if it’s a little too dark for you, adjust it so that we can still see the letters. It kind of, this is such a funny thumbnail. Cracks me up. Okay. And then we’re going to add another one. Add.
Kimberly Olson: 05:13 How do you Snapchat? Um, how do you Snapchat to make your IG stories? Awesome. Oh boy. Someone was like, you shouldn’t use awesome so much. I was like, well, just, I’m pretty excitable person. Okay, here’s that pink color. Okay. So it’s a pretty long sentence there, but you can kind of get the idea. So literally that’s all you have to do is just save your image. Come on over and you can, when you’re done you can kind of move it around and see what you think. You have to kind of double tap on the other one. Look at that. Doesn’t that look awesome? And the nice thing is without people reading all of your, the post description in a Facebook video or on YouTube, they can quickly see if they want to watch the video or not. So it’s going to increase the amount of people who actually stop and look at your video.
Kimberly Olson: 06:06 So how do you Snapchats make IG stories? Awesome. Okay, that’s good to go. And then I wanted to just show you how I am doing these right here. So what I do is I use a green screen for my backdrop and then what I do is I use the snipping tool. So I’m going to share, I’ll do this on my green screen video, but I’ll show you really quick. The snipping tool right here. That’s it. That’s another one I did. I seriously just do this for pure entertainment for myself. I put a delay, I do the new button and then while I am on and we’ll go back and stop the share here. While I’m right here, I actually use the snipping tool to take a picture of me right here and I get that, that thumbnail that I need that way too, which is nice because then I can use this backdrop and I’m able to get that professional look without hiring a photographer.
Kimberly Olson: 06:53 I have a photographer, Kristy Dully, but she lives across the country so we don’t always get to be together. So in the interim I like to improvise and be able to do that as well. So what I want you to do is just check below, uh, for any links that I had to share with you. Subscribe. You do not want to miss any videos. You just don’t. I released a couple every week. They are always tactical things you can quickly in less than 10 minutes, get a practical tool implement in your business and get results right away. So subscribe like this video, please share it. Until next time, go out there and crush your goals and create the life of your dreams. Bye bye
