social-content-calendar

---
name: social-content-calendar
description: Builds a 4-week multi-platform posting calendar for a brand or social team, balancing content pillars, per-channel cadence, and real key dates into a week-by-week grid. Use when the user asks to plan, build, or audit a social content calendar or posting schedule across multiple channels (LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts), assign content pillars and ratios, or map a month of posts to launches and events. Do NOT use when planning a solo creator's single-channel video or podcast cadence and theme rotation - use creator-content-calendar instead.
metadata:
  title: "Social Content Calendar"
---
# Social Content Calendar

Turn a brand's pillars, channels, and real calendar into a 4-week multi-platform posting grid that each channel can actually sustain.

## Workflow

1. **Lock pillars and ratio first.** Demand 3-5 content pillars before scheduling anything (e.g. education, behind-the-scenes, social proof, product, point-of-view). Apply a default mix of ~40% educational/value, 30% engagement/community, 20% promotional, 10% personality. If the user hands you only promo ideas, push back: feeds over ~25% selling lose reach fast.
2. **Set per-channel cadence, not one frequency.** Default sustainable rates: LinkedIn 3-5x/week (weekday mornings), X 1-3x/day, Instagram 3-5x/week feed plus daily Stories, TikTok 1x/day minimum, YouTube Shorts 3-7x/week. Cap every channel at what the team can hold long-term - 1x forever beats 2x until burnout.
3. **Anchor to the brand's real dates.** Layer in the brand's launches, events, and announcements first, then add only culturally relevant moments. Skip generic holidays unless they fit the brand.
4. **Reserve reactive capacity.** Leave ~20% of slots open for trend/reactive posts; a fully booked calendar can't respond to what's happening.
5. **Build the grid week by week.** Output one table per week with columns: date, platform, pillar, format (carousel/Reel/thread/text/Short), working title, hook angle, CTA, asset needed, status.
6. **Plan repurposing, don't improvise it.** Sequence so a single core idea feeds multiple slots across channels and weeks. Front-load production-heavy formats early in each week.
7. **Flag capacity and dependencies.** Call out posts needing design, video, or approvals; mark which posts block others; note batching opportunities (one shoot, multiple posts).

## Quality bar
- Every week's slots map to a named pillar, and the month's pillar mix lands within ~10% of the target ratio.
- Each channel's cadence is justified by that channel's economy, not copied from another.
- Real brand dates appear before any generic cultural moment; ~20% of slots stay open.
- The grid is complete enough to hand to a producer: no slot is missing format, hook, CTA, or asset.

## Do NOT
- Do not paste one frequency across all channels.
- Do not fill the calendar to 100% - leave reactive headroom.
- Do not invent metrics or claim a mix is "proven"; if the brand has no analytics, schedule a 4-week test mix and label it a baseline to measure, not a finished system.
- Do not output a flat list of post ideas instead of a dated per-channel grid.
- Do not chase generic holidays ("National Donut Day") that don't fit the brand.

## When to diverge
- Under ~2k followers: recommend one channel done well over four done thinly, and say so explicitly.
- No analytics yet: ship the 4-week mix as a baseline experiment, with a note on what to measure before iterating.