Project: Create a Social Media Content Calendar with AI

In this project you will design a prompt-driven system that turns a single brand brief into a 30-day social media content calendar — content pillars, weekly themes, daily post ideas, hooks, and platform-specific drafts. The deliverable is a CSV / spreadsheet of 30 ready-to-publish posts plus the prompt chain you can reuse every month.

1. Introduction

The hardest part of social media is not posting — it is deciding what to post, every day, without burning out. Most teams either over-plan (a 47-tab content strategy nobody opens) or under-plan (vibes-based posting). The sweet spot is a tight monthly calendar that takes an hour to generate and another hour to humanise.

We will build that calendar for a fictional brand: RootRise, a small UK indoor-plant studio. The same chain works for any business — replace the brief.

2. The Concept Explained

A monthly calendar is built top-down. First you define content pillars (the 3–5 themes you keep coming back to). Then you split the month into weekly themes. Then daily posts. Then platform-specific copy. Skipping pillars is what makes most calendars feel random.

The calendar cascades down: one brief, four pillars, four weekly themes, thirty daily posts.

3. The Problem Without Pillars

Random post generation

Give me 30 social media post ideas for my plant shop.

You will get 30 generic ideas: "5 easy plants for beginners", "behind-the-scenes", "customer of the week", "Monday motivation". Half of them have nothing to do with each other, and audience research shows random feeds underperform thematic ones by a wide margin. The model has no anchor — so the output drifts.

4. The Solution: A Four-Prompt Cascade

Step 1 — Brand brief + pillar prompt

You are a senior social media strategist.

Read the brand brief and propose 4 content pillars for the next
30 days. Each pillar should:
- own a clear job (educate, inspire, sell, build community)
- be repeatable forever, not a one-month idea
- be specific enough that two team members would post similar
  content under it

Return:
| Pillar | Job | What it looks like | Example post idea |

Brand brief:
"""
RootRise is a Bristol-based indoor plant studio. Founder: Maya.
Audience: 25–40, urban renters in the UK, plant-curious but
intimidated. They follow lifestyle accounts on Instagram and
TikTok.
Voice: warm, slightly playful, never preachy. British English.
Goal for the next 30 days: grow IG followers from 4,200 to 5,500
and drive 50 visits to the studio's "first plant" starter kit page.
Constraints: no greenwashing claims, no plant-snobbery.
Avoid: stock photos, generic plant-care lists.
"""

Sample output: Pillar 1 — Plant-Whisperer Tips (educate). Pillar 2 — Studio Diaries (community). Pillar 3 — Starter-Kit Stories (sell). Pillar 4 — Plant Personality Pairings (inspire). Now every post has a home.

Step 2 — Weekly themes prompt

Using the 4 pillars above, design a 30-day calendar split into
4 weekly themes. Each week:
- has a one-line headline
- uses all 4 pillars at least once
- has a small narrative arc (Mon teases, Fri pays off)
- ends with a call-to-action moment that points to the starter kit

Return:
| Week | Theme | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |

Use only pillar names in the day cells, not full post ideas yet.

Step 3 — Daily post ideas prompt

For each day in the calendar, expand into a full post idea.
Return a CSV with these columns:
date, week_theme, pillar, format (carousel/reel/static),
hook (the first 1–2 lines a viewer sees),
body (3–5 lines, plain text),
cta (one short, specific call-to-action),
hashtags (5–7, niche over generic),
asset_brief (what photo/video the team needs to capture).

Rules:
- Hooks must be specific. "5 plants for beginners" is banned.
  "The plant Maya hides from customers because it dies in 2 weeks"
  is fine.
- Body must say something the audience hasn't heard before, OR
  tell a tiny story.
- No more than 2 selling posts per week.
- Mondays start a small story; Fridays close it.
- Voice: warm, slightly playful, British English.

Calendar from step 2:
"""
{paste step 2 output}
"""

Sample row: 2026-06-05, Studio Diaries, Plant-Whisperer Tips, Reel, "Maya was about to throw out a £40 monstera. Watch what she did instead.", "Most plant problems aren't death — they're sulks. Here's the three-minute revival routine we use at the studio…", "Save this — your next sulky plant will thank you.", #indoorplants #bristolplants #plantcare #monstera #plantparent, "60-sec phone reel of Maya re-potting + leaf trim, natural light."

Step 4 — Platform-specific copy prompt

Take each post above and produce platform-specific copy:

- Instagram: full caption, line breaks for readability, emoji
  used sparingly (max 2).
- TikTok / Reels: an on-screen text overlay sequence (≤6 frames)
  + caption.
- LinkedIn (optional): a slightly more grown-up version of the
  same post for Maya's personal account.

Keep the hook line identical across platforms so the brand voice
is consistent.

Paste the final output into a spreadsheet, share with whoever shoots the assets, and you have a real 30-day plan instead of a panicky daily improvisation.

5. Step-by-Step Breakdown

Write the brand brief once. Voice, audience, goal, constraints, things to avoid. A weak brief produces a weak calendar — no amount of prompt engineering fixes this.
Pillars before posts. Always. A pillar is a question the brand keeps answering forever.
Use weekly arcs. Monday teases, Friday pays off. Calendars with arcs feel curated; calendars without them feel random.
Demand specificity in hooks. "5 tips for X" is banned by your prompt. A hook should be either a contradiction, a specific number, a tiny story, or a question.
Limit selling. Two sell posts per week is plenty. The rest builds the audience that makes the selling work.
Keep humans in the loop. Read every post before scheduling. Cut anything that doesn't sound like the brand. The AI gives you 80%; the last 20% is taste.

Tip: Save the brand brief and pillar definitions in a single document called brand-bible.md. Every month you only run steps 2–4 with a fresh weekly arc. The pillars stay stable for six months at a time.

6. Practice Exercises

Exercise 1

Pick a real or imagined small business. Write the brand brief above for it — voice, audience, goal, constraints. Run step 1 and read the pillars critically. Reject any pillar that feels generic; rerun with stricter constraints.

Exercise 2

Take the daily post CSV and pick five rows at random. Read the hooks aloud. Would you stop scrolling for them? If not, ask the model to rewrite just those five with the rule: "Hook must make me curious in under 6 words."

Exercise 3

Add a "performance review" step at the end of the month: paste your top three and bottom three posts back into the model and ask,

What patterns separate the winners from the losers? Suggest 3 tweaks to next month's calendar.

This closes the loop between content and learning.

7. Key Takeaways

A content calendar without pillars is just a list of posts. Pillars create coherence.
Weekly arcs (Mon teases, Fri pays off) turn a calendar from a grid into a story.
Hooks decide whether a post is read. Force specificity in the prompt itself.
Save the brand brief and pillars once. Regenerate only the monthly arc and daily posts.
Always do a human pass before publishing. The AI delivers 80%; taste delivers the rest.

Discussion

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