Social media templates

How social media get generated

The work in social graphics is rarely the design — it is the twentieth variant of it. One announcement becomes a square post, a story, a LinkedIn banner and a cover image; one campaign becomes the same layout in six languages with six different prices. Every one of those is the same template with different values, which is exactly what a variable-bound design handles. Teams running a content calendar tend to keep one locked template per format, then feed it a spreadsheet where each row is a post — headline, subhead, image, handle. The design stays on-brand because nobody can move anything, and the person filling in the sheet never opens a design tool.

In practice: Marketing teams usually batch a week or a campaign at a time from CSV. Products that generate posts on their users' behalf call the API and take back a hosted URL to drop straight into a scheduling tool.

Fields you'd usually bind

{{headline}}

The main line of copy. Auto-fit text keeps long headlines inside the frame.

{{background_image}}

Swap the photo per post without touching the layout.

{{handle}}

Account name or campaign tag, usually constant within one batch.

{{cta_text}}

The call to action — often the only thing that changes between variants.

Any text, image, QR code or barcode on the canvas can become a variable — these are just the ones this category tends to use.