7 Claude prompts that run a week of social media

Connecting Claude to a scheduler over MCP takes about a minute. Knowing what to actually say to it afterwards is the part nobody writes down, so most people ask "what's in my queue?", get an answer, and never come back. Below are the seven prompts we'd hand a solo creator on day one, in the order you'd use them across a week, each with what it does, why it's worded that way, and where it stops.

A quick note on scope. These are written for Smart Post Studio's MCP connector because that's the one we can describe precisely, limits included. Most of the wording carries over to any scheduler with an MCP server; the guardrails won't, so check what yours permits before you paste prompt five.

Before the prompts: set the permissions you'll actually use

When you connect, you choose what the assistant may do: read (see your queue and results), draft (write drafts for your review) and schedule (put posts on the calendar). Start with read and draft. Add schedule after a week of drafts you didn't need to rewrite, not before.

One thing doesn't change whichever boxes you tick: there is no "post now" tool. Anything an assistant schedules has to be at least ten minutes out, appears in your Queue with an AI badge, and is written to your account history. That's a window to intervene, not an approval step. A scheduled post goes out at its time whether or not you looked at it. The full setup is on our MCP page, and the step-by-step version is here.

Prompt 1 — Monday: get the lay of the land

This is read-only, so it's safe to run with the narrowest permissions. The useful part isn't the list. It's "flag any day with nothing on it", because gaps are what you're actually looking for on a Monday. Asking for the platform per post also surfaces the post you meant for Instagram and Threads that's only going to Instagram.

Prompt 2 — Find out what you can reach

Run it once, and again whenever you connect something new. The assistant can only post to accounts you've already connected; it can never add one itself. The cloud/desktop split matters for one rule: a single post can't mix cloud-published and desktop-published platforms. If you ask for one that does, the assistant is told to split it in two, and it helps to know why that's happening before it does.

Prompt 3 — Turn one idea into platform-shaped drafts

Three things are doing work here. "Different openings" stops the copy-paste effect that makes cross-posting obvious (we went deeper on that in this guide). The explicit character cap matters because models are bad at counting; if a limit is critical, check it yourself in our character counter before it ships. And "don't schedule anything" is belt-and-braces: even with schedule permission granted, you want this step to end in your drafts.

If you have an image or video, include a link to it in the prompt. Media goes in by link, up to 25 MB per file.

Prompt 4 — Edit in plain language

"Show me before saving" is the habit worth building. You're reviewing in the chat where it's cheap, rather than in the queue after the fact. If the edits keep being the same kind of edit, that's a signal to put your style rules at the top of every session instead. We wrote about which rules actually hold in using AI without sounding like it.

Prompt 5 — Schedule with the time zone spelled out

Always name the time zone. "Tuesday at ten" is ambiguous to a model in a way it isn't to you, and the confirm-back step catches the mistake before it's on your calendar. If your audience is spread across zones, work out the overlap first. Our post time planner does it without a signup. This prompt also needs schedule permission; it fails cleanly without it, which is the point of granting it late.

Prompt 6 — Move and cancel without opening the app

This is where conversational scheduling earns its keep over a calendar UI. Rescheduling a whole day is one sentence. "Cancel" returns the post to your drafts rather than deleting it, so you don't lose the copy if the sale comes back.

Prompt 7 — Friday: check what actually went out

This closes the loop. What comes back is the per-platform publish result. It isn't an analytics report: it tells you whether a post went out, not how it did. For performance, use each platform's own insights, or plug the numbers into our engagement calculator. One common reason a desktop-published post didn't go out: the desktop app wasn't running at that time. Cloud-published platforms don't have that dependency.

Three prompts we'd avoid

"Run my social media this week." Too open. You'll get volume, not judgement, and you'll spend longer reviewing it than writing three good posts yourself.

"Post this now." It can't. The earliest anything goes out is ten minutes from the request, and that's deliberate.

"Schedule 50 posts for next month." It's technically possible within the limits (100 AI-created posts a day, 30 requests a minute), but bulk-generating a month in one go is how accounts start to sound like nobody. Draft in batches you'll actually read.

What this costs, and what it doesn't do

MCP access is included on every paid Smart Post Studio plan, from the $8/month Scheduler plan up. It isn't on the free plan. It's in beta: built, tested and live, but new. If you only want the cheapest possible way to point an AI at a scheduler, we're not it, and our MCP comparison says who is. What you get here is the ten-minute floor, the AI badge and the audit trail, which matter more the longer you leave an assistant running.

If you want to see what a month of this looks like in practice, including the part that went wrong, we wrote it up: we let Claude run a social account for a month.

TL;DR: Seven prompts cover a week: survey the queue (1), check reachable platforms (2), draft per platform without scheduling (3), edit with a preview (4), schedule with the time zone named and confirmed (5), move or cancel in one sentence (6), and check publish results on Friday (7). Start with read and draft permissions, add schedule last, and remember the assistant can't publish instantly. That's by design.