As we were building the Golfoholics community on Facebook (facebook.com/golfoholics), we quickly became aware that the posts that generated the most engagement – by far – were static images. So we did some homework to see if that’s what other brands were experiencing and found a study by SocialBakers that looked at the top 100 pages on Facebook and found that static images generated 87% of all engagement.

And when we sat in on a Twitter webinar last year, they told us that tweets with images generated 313% more engagement than those without. But we’re Mad Men by trade, and our advertising instincts told us that if that is so, we damn well better be branding those images or we were missing out on a huge opportunity.

Now in advertising, you usually work in creative teams that consist of a copywriter and an art director. More often than not, the copywriter comes up with the words, and the art director is responsible for the design of the ad. But in social media, that’s terribly inefficient, particularly for small businesses. Content creation for social is often a one-man or woman job, and you don’t have the luxury of an art director spending weeks crafting a well-designed post. So you’ve got to do it yourself.

And I’m not one of those folks who is well-versed in Adobe InDesign. I needed a tool that would let me quickly and easily brand our social visuals. So I put together a brief business plan, went out and raised some friends and family funding, and found myself a good development partner. Months later we gave birth to a prototype of what we called PostCreator, and put it up on Facebook for free to see if people might like it.

Turns out they did, so we raised a bit more money and developed a pro version that lets you upload an image, overlay a headline, embed your logo and post directly to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Today, PostCreator has more than 5,000 subscribers, creating engaging branded social visuals for authors, bands, realtors and eye doctors to national retailers like Brooks Brothers.

And our Golfoholics community has swelled to more than 68,000 golf addicts who are highly engaged in the content we create and post through PostCreator. You can take a look at the types of posts subscribers are creating here

PostCreator in Action