Content and socials
A content engine for two brands: research, images, video, social packs and one review sheet
Every week a scheduled job researches the stories worth covering, checks each claim against at least five recent sources, makes the hero images and charts, and cuts every piece into a Medium copy, an X post, a LinkedIn version and an Instagram square. The store gets its own version for short video. Everything waits in one review sheet. Nothing ships without my yes.
Publishing every week is a lot of production. So that side got its own system, with one rule that never bends: nothing goes out under my name, or the store’s, until I have looked at it and said yes.
Four slots a week
The calendar has a fixed shape, so the research never has to guess what it is looking for:
- Monday, AI this week. The one story that matters, every claim checked against at least five sources from the last seven days.
- Tuesday, do this with AI. Something a reader can set up that evening: the prompt, the settings, the traps.
- Thursday, hot topic. The argument of the week and a short take.
- Friday, what I’m building. Real numbers from my own systems. Never invented. If there is nothing new, the job says so and asks me for one.
What a week produces
For each piece: a source pack, a hero image, a chart where the story has numbers, a Medium copy with the canonical link back here, an X post, a LinkedIn version I post myself and an Instagram square. Images come from Higgsfield when the credits are there and from a code-drawn template when they are not. Every file is stripped of hidden metadata, and every line goes through a cleaner that flags long dashes, emojis and stock phrases before anything reaches the sheet.
Each piece gets its own Drive folder and one row in the review sheet. I read, comment and set a status. A comment is a rework brief: the next run picks it up and bumps the version.
The store’s version
Tail Friends runs the same pattern for short video. Clips start from real product photos and are animated with Higgsfield. Every Reel gets an original instrumental from ElevenLabs, mixed to the same loudness. Captions follow one format. Metricool posts to Instagram, TikTok and Facebook twice a day, but only rows marked Approved.
Publishing
At 07:30 every morning a job on the Mac mini picks up anything Approved for today, rebuilds this site, deploys it, imports the post to Medium with the canonical link, ticks the row and files the folder under Published. The X post goes out the same morning.
What broke
- Too long, too polite. Early drafts read like press releases. The fix was shorter slots, a clearer take, and a rule that any paragraph a stranger would skip gets cut.
- Credits that ran out mid-run. The image step now checks the balance first and falls back to the code-drawn template instead of failing.
- Two pieces booked for one day. The job now finds the first empty week before it starts.
What I would tell you
Automate the production, never the approval. The review is ten minutes a day, and it is the reason any of this is worth reading.