content-calendar — social media skill for AI agents

frontmatter · SKILL.md+

name: content-calendar
description: >
  Turn content pillars, target platforms, and an honest posting cadence into a
  realistic 2-week content plan for LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky,
  and Facebook. Use when the user asks for a "content calendar", says "plan my
  week", "plan my next two weeks", or "what should I post this month". It
  balances pillars against formats (post, thread, carousel), anchors entries to
  real dates like launches and events, and deliberately leaves slack for
  reactive posting. It reads social-context.md for the user's brand voice,
  pillars, platforms, and stated cadence before planning anything. The output
  is a plan the user executes themselves — a markdown schedule of ideas with
  working hooks, not a queue of finished posts.
metadata:
  version: 1.0.0
  category: Plan
  topics: [planning]
  examplePrompt: "Plan my next two weeks of LinkedIn and X content"

Build a realistic 2-week content plan from the user's pillars, platforms, and honest cadence — a plan, not a scheduler.

Context

Read social-context.md at the project root (also check .agents/social-context.md) for brand voice, content pillars, target platforms, audience, and the ## Cadence section. If the file is missing, offer to run the social-context skill first, but don't block — ask 2–3 quick inline questions and proceed:

What are your 2–4 content pillars?
Which platforms, and which one matters most?
How many posts per week have you actually sustained in the last month?

Workflow

Confirm cadence reality before anything else. Take the number in ## Cadence at face value — it's the user's honest count, so respect it. If the user asks for more volume than their stated cadence ("give me daily posts" when cadence says 3/week), push back once, explicitly: an unrealistic calendar is worse than none, because missed slots train the user to ignore the whole plan. Plan to the cadence they will actually keep, or to a new number they re-confirm out loud.
Fix the date range. Two weeks starting from the next natural posting day — usually tomorrow, or the coming Monday if today is late in the week. Ask about timezone only if an anchor date makes it genuinely ambiguous.
Collect anchors. Ask whether anything real lands in the window: a launch, event, webinar, release, or a holiday their audience actually observes. Anchored content is placed first; the rest of the plan flows around it. Anything significant gets a small arc, not a single slot:
- one warm-up post 2–4 days before (tease the problem, not the announcement),
- the anchor-day post itself,
- one follow-through 1–3 days after (result, lesson, or behind-the-scenes).
Distribute pillars. Spread pillars across the slots so no pillar appears twice in a row on the same platform, and no pillar exceeds ~40% of total slots unless the user says one pillar deliberately dominates. If they have 4+ pillars and few slots, don't shave every pillar to one token post — bench the weakest pillar for this fortnight and tell them which one and why.
Distribute formats. Rotate the formats each platform actually supports, and match format to pillar — teaching content suits threads, carousels, and document posts; opinion and story content suits single text posts:
- LinkedIn: text post, document/carousel post, image post
- X: single post, thread, image post
- Instagram: carousel, Reel idea, single image
- Threads / Bluesky: short text post, small thread
- Facebook: text post, image post, link post Never assign a format the platform doesn't support, and never let one platform run a single format for the whole fortnight.
Write a working title or hook for every slot. Not a topic label — an actual first line the user could open with. "Why we killed our best feature" beats "product lessons". If the brand voice is in context, write hooks in that voice; if a Never-list exists, honor it here too.
Reserve reactive slack. Leave roughly 20% of slots — at least 2 across the fortnight — labelled reactive with no assigned topic. These absorb trending conversations, a reply that deserves to become a post, and news in the user's niche. Say this explicitly in the plan notes so the user reads them as capacity, not gaps.
Sequence for energy, not neatness. Front-load week 1 with the strongest hooks — early wins keep the plan alive. Put heavy-prep formats (carousel, long thread) on days the user likely has time; ask if you don't know. If one idea suits two platforms, stagger it 1–3 days apart with a reworked hook — never a same-day copy-paste.
Do a final realism pass. Before presenting, verify:
- posts per platform per week ≤ stated cadence,
- no back-to-back same-pillar entries on any platform,
- every anchor date covered, arcs intact,
- every slot has a real hook, not a topic label. Cut before you cram — a 9-slot plan the user completes beats a 14-slot plan they abandon.
Offer, but don't produce unprompted, an .ics export. If the user wants calendar entries, generate a .ics file with one all-day event per slot titled [platform] hook, so the plan lands in whatever calendar they already look at.

Quality bar

Check	Constraint
Volume	Matches stated cadence exactly — never exceeds it
Pillar spacing	No pillar twice in a row per platform; no pillar > ~40% of slots
Format mix	At least 2 distinct formats per platform across the fortnight
Hooks	Every slot has a usable first line, not a topic label
Slack	~20% of slots marked `reactive`, minimum 2
Anchors	Every user-mentioned date has a slot; big ones get a warm-up and follow-through
Cross-posting	Same idea on two platforms is staggered 1–3 days with a reworked hook

Every hook must pass the "would I stop scrolling?" test — specific, concrete, carrying a claim or tension:

Fails	Passes
"Thoughts on productivity"	"I tracked every meeting for 30 days. 11 hours were pure theater."
"Our launch story"	"We launched to 4 signups. Here's the email that turned it around."
"Tips for founders"	"The advice that cost us six months: 'talk to more users.'"

Deliverable

| Date | Platform | Pillar | Format | Working title / hook | Status | | ---------- | -------- | --------------- | --------- | ----------------------------------------------------- | ------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Mon Jul 20 | LinkedIn | Build-in-public | Text post | "We shipped the wrong feature first. On purpose." | idea | | Tue Jul 21 | X | Teaching | Thread | "7 pricing-page mistakes I keep seeing (with fixes):" | idea | | Wed Jul 22 | X | — | — | reactive | idea | Below the table, a short Notes section covering: the cadence you planned to and why, which pillar (if any) was benched, and how to use the reactive slots. Offer the .ics export as an option. This is a plan for the user to execute themselves — hand it back and stop. |