Social Media Mockups – An Easy Way to Automate Social Posts Mockups

Social media mockups come in handy when you’re showcasing work to your clients. With an online social media mockup, you can easily preview what your work looks like, make small tweaks or large-scale changes anytime and work on your design before presenting it to existing or potential customers. Keep on reading to learn how to easily create social media mockups in seconds (and ditch test pages, screenshots, and Photoshop).

Whether you’re creating social media mockups on the go on your phone for Twitter or Google My Business or taking your time at your desktop for Linkedin, TikTok or Youtube mockups, here’s a couple of examples of what you can achieve with Planable: a Facebook social media feed mockup or an Instagram grid mockup:

Facebook and Instagram social media mockups made with Planable

Why do we build social media mockups?

Why are social media mockups built in the first place?

It all comes down to the visual nature of social media. Just how you can’t explain a painting (ok, actually, you can, I’m just very bad at art), social media falls in the “shower, not teller” realm. 

“The entire purpose for which social media was created, was to give people a way to connect with one another. You MUST keep this principle in mind with every move you make while marketing on social media if you ever want it to work for you.” says Antonio Thornton from MoneyMouthMarketing.

Plus, a social media campaign can span several months, and clients need to know how things will look, say, six months from the point the campaign starts. So designers start sketching social media post mockups, content specialists write copy, and then the entire marketing team pieces a year’s worth of mockups together like a deranged cartoonist.

It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done. Partially.

How to create a social media mockup with Planable

Say you have to present your work to a client, or simply want to see how your content will actually look like in action. What can you do to accommodate that? Whip up a PowerPoint presentation? Set up a test page? Create a life-sized cardboard cut-out of your social media posts? As cool as the last option may seem, it’s hardly practical.

No, the answer is much more straightforward — you use Planable’s social media mockup feature.

A mockup (or custom) social media page is a page you create to showcase your social media posts, whether to a client or your team.

In Planable, you can create a custom page for any of the 7 platforms we support — Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Google My Business, Facebook and Pinterest — without the inconvenience of having to connect an account.

Here’s how you make social media mockups:

1. Sign up to Planable. No credit card is required and signup only takes 30 seconds. 

2. Configure your company and workspace: add collaborators (optional), connect your social media profiles (optional), set an approval workflow (optional).

3. Select “Create a mockup page” under the desired social media platform (you can choose from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Tiktok, YouTube, and Google My Business).

4. Fill in the required information for each platform:

• page name
• profile picture (optional)
• username (optional)
• cover photo (optional)
• page description (optional)
• location (optional)

And that’s it, welcome to the exciting world of custom social media mockup pages!

You can now see exactly what your social media posts will look like on our 7 supported platforms. And you can create stunning presentations to impress potential clients and win them over.

Creating a mockup Instagram grid with Planable

You get to test Planable and all the features it has to offer.

Ready to go from mockup social media post to live post?

If at some point you decide that a piece of content created within a custom page is worthy of joining the official league, you can connect it to a real account. You can find this option in the settings of the page:

 

What’s the downside of manual social media mockups?

See, social media mockups are a very counterintuitive way to do things. One might think designers and copywriters would get a kick out of playing fantasy social media. Still, in reality, it wastes precious time that could’ve been spent on more productive endeavors. Like creating content.

“What’s more, content marketing will allow you to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise on a subject. If your readers get to the point where they respect what you have to say and they start seeking you out for answers to questions, then you’ll be able to sell to them more easily when you recommend an informational product you’ve made, or perhaps an affiliate product you’re getting commission on.” 

says  Scott Douglas Clary,  SVP Sales & Marketing at ExciteM.

Here are a few reasons why social media mockups (including social media branding mockups) are not as great as you might think:

• They’re a huge resource and time sink. 
• Social media mockups don’t do justice to the amount of work and effort that goes into a social media campaign. Social media management pricing does that.
• Social media platforms are changing all the time. Imagine having your designers create 100 Instagram mockups, only for them to be rendered obsolete the next day following an update. Of course, this issue could be prevented by planning ahead, but that doesn’t really address the root problem: that they have to create mockups. 
• They’re a logistical nightmare. I think you can visualize the amount of back-and-forth and endless email chains this entails for yourself. 
• They’re not entirely representative of reality. No matter how Photoshop savvy you are, it just won’t live up to the real thing.

But don’t close the tab just yet – I have a solution for you.

OK, so what’s the best alternative? 

Let me propose the following scenario – what if, instead of creating social media marketing mockups manually, there was an app or something that allowed you to, like, automate mockups? 21st-century style. 

via GIPHY

Well, I got just the thing for you – it’s called Planable. Again, the name’s literally on the door, so don’t you act so surprised.

Social media mockups begone – Planable to the rescue

In case you don’t know us, Planable is a social media collaboration tool that allows social media teams to plan, create and collaborate on social media content, and showcase their work to clients in a straightforward and intuitive way.

 

Online social media mockups at your fingertips

So what does all this have to do with social media mockups? Planable is, essentially, a highly-engineered mockup generator. It will also do wonders in terms of your social media workflow.

“I would suggest creating a pseudo-editorial calendar. Here’s what I mean – and something that I coach people to do all the time:

• Sit down and figure out how many days per week you want to post, and on what days

• Identify which platforms you want to post on

Create themes for each day you want to post”  – Tabitha Naylor.

So you can forget about wasting your laptop’s processing power on designing mockups in Photoshop. Or scouring those shady template websites for mockups that resemble Instagram’s latest iteration the closest. Here’s why:

Create posts in a natural environment

Say that big presentation with your clients is looming. You round up your team in the war room and start putting together, like, I don’t know, 30 mock-ups and dump them into a Powerpoint presentation. Right from the get-go, we can identify two problems with this hypothetical situation that I just made up:

• That’s 30 more mockups than you’d ever have to make.
• Mockups are fine when your posts consist of static images and a bit of copy, but what about gifs? Videos? How do you show that? Make a cardboard cutout of an Instagram post and attach it to the tv? Or a photo-stand in, or whatever they call those things from cheap amusement parks?

Ok, ok, I know, I’m being needlessly facetious – of course, there are tons of workarounds for this. But you shouldn’t have to do that when Planable exists.

Planable provides an intuitive workspace where teams can collaborate and create posts in the most natural environment possible. What’s a “workspace,” you ask? Oh, nothing – just the command center of your social media campaign. Where magic literally happens. Ok, not literally, but we’re pretty proud of it.

 

A workspace is a collaborative space where you can neatly organize all the brands and social pages you manage. In Planable’s workspace, you can:

• Create custom time slots, and labels for your content topics.
• Invite everyone involved in the content for that particular brand
• Create, review, collaborate, publish posts and keep team members in the flow.

In terms of post-creation, this is one of the most useful features of Planable. And it’s so easy, your cat could do it:

At the moment, Planable has integrations for the following social media platforms: 

• Facebook. You can add text, (multiple) images, tag pages, video carousels, GIFs, videos. 
• Twitter, you can add text, image, multiple images, URL, video, GIFs, and tag other accounts. Add text, images, links, videos, GIFs, and the good old tag. 
• Linkedin. Same as Facebook and Twitter. 
• Instagram. Add images, text, stories. 
• Google My Business. Write posts, add images, launch promotions and let fans know about your latest offers. 
• Youtube. Schedule your videos.
• Tiktok. Schedule your posts and start planning.

But believe it or not, that’s not all…

See social media mockups instantly

Think fast: what does Planable have and social media mockups lack? I’ll answer that for you: instantaneity. This fancy word that I have just learned perfectly captures the advantages Planable has over social media mockups.

Planable allows for multiple ways to view content:

• Feed view. It’s exactly how it sounds like – you can see your content exactly as it would appear on social media feeds. 
• List view. For marketing teams that want a short overview of their posts. Entries include a short description, the status of the posts, author, page, date, the time the content is scheduled to go live, as well as the assigned labels. 
• Calendar view. Remember what I said earlier about clients wanting to see how their campaigns will play out long-term? Calendar view is perfect for that. It’s designed to cater to teams that want a birds-eye view of their campaigns. Teams can also use Planable’s calendar mode to strategize and make last-minute changes to their campaigns.
• Grid view. Instagram grids are still cool. You know it, and I know it. They’re also a drag to create and showcase. Don’t worry – Planable has you covered. Creating those awesome, symmetrically-pleasing grids is as simple as, well, let me just show you…

Share them with your team members & get feedback and approval

Feedback is an oft-overlooked element of social media content creation. As many of these things go, it usually involves a tonne of tiring back and forths. Add the inherent clunkiness of using social media mockups to the equation, and yeah, I think you get it.

Not with Planable. Since it’s built with collaboration first in mind, by extension, it also facilitates the feedback and approval process. But don’t take my word for it – here are my words, but in bullet-form format:

• Want to get feedback on your fresh-from-the-oven piece of content? Your team can drop their thoughts right next to the post.
• Want to share your own thoughts on the feedback that you got? There’s a “reply” feature for that. While you’re at it, tag team members and invite them to do the same thing. Preferably by reacting with emojis (we have those too).
• Once the feedback is implemented, simply click “Resolve” so that everybody knows that you’re a team player and their feedback matters. 
• If your team needs additional assets, you can attach files to the comments.

Another neat feature that I purposely left for last involves guest sharing. Planable guest sharing links allow external collaborators to leave feedback on content scheduled via our solution. Simply share the link to the post, and collaborators will be able to preview & review.

Wrap up

That’ll be it for today. Social media mockups may be helpful in some situations, but one can’t deny they’re a clunky and counterintuitive way to do things. Often enough, a solution built around collaboration and content creation is the way to go. For that, there’s Planable. Try it out – it’s free. And you’ll never have to create a social media mockup ever again.