Planning and Scheduling Client Instagram and Facebook Posts with AI

Why the calendar publishes, not the assistant

It is tempting to ask an AI to "post this every morning at 9". The more reliable split is to let the AI plan and write, and let a calendar do the publishing. When Claude, ChatGPT or Meta Muse schedules a post through content_schedule_posts, each time becomes its own scheduled post in MCP Ads, and the calendar publishes it when the time comes, whether or not any assistant is running. The calendar publishes to Facebook Pages, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Threads and WordPress. For most of my clients it is Instagram and a Facebook Page, sometimes LinkedIn for the owner.

Planning a month in one conversation

I start from the client's own material, not a blank page: their website, recent offers, photos they have sent, the questions customers ask them. I give Claude that, the number of posts per week, and the mix I want (offers, behind the scenes, answers to common questions, social proof the client has actually given me). What I ask for is a plan, not posts. A table of dates, themes and formats is easy for me and the client to change. Writing captions for a plan we then throw out is wasted effort.

Plan November for the bakery client's Instagram and Facebook Page: 3 posts a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 09:00 local time. Use their website and the notes below. Mix: seasonal products, behind the scenes, customer questions, one offer per week. Give me a table with date, theme, format (photo, carousel or Reel) and which photo or video from my list it needs. No captions yet.

Notes: [paste the client notes and photo list here]

Per-channel rules

Each channel has its own requirements, and MCP Ads checks every post against them when you schedule it. That is the useful part: a post that would fail is refused while you are still in the conversation, not silently at 9:00 on a Saturday.

• Instagram needs media: a JPEG image, or an MP4 or MOV video, which goes out as a Reel. Links in captions are not clickable there.
• Facebook Pages take text, media or both. With several Pages connected, name the Page or you will be asked which one.
• TikTok needs a video; an image alone is not enough.
• Media is given as a public URL, so I keep each client's approved photos in a shared folder with public links.
• Times are local, one per post, in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format, and up to 60 posts can be scheduled in one request.

Approval before anything is scheduled

Nothing goes on a client's calendar without the client seeing it. I ask Claude to write the captions from the approved plan, then send the client the list with the images, and only after they reply do I ask for the posts to be scheduled. In a client workspace in Agency OS, content items wait for a person's approval before they can publish, whatever else is automated. I like that as a backstop, but I still treat the client's reply as the real approval.

The client approved posts 1 to 12 from the list above, with the caption changes I made. Schedule each one on both Instagram and the bakery Facebook Page at the date and time in the plan, using the image URL next to it. Before scheduling, list anything that would fail a channel rule, and show me the final schedule.

Checking what went out and what failed

Posts fail for boring reasons: an expired login, an image link that stopped being public, a Page permission that changed. content_list_scheduled looks ahead at what is scheduled and back at what published, 14 days by default, with the link to each published post and the error for any that failed. I run that check every Friday for every client with organic posting. A failed post on Tuesday that I notice on Friday is fine; one a client notices first is not.

• Which posts failed to publish in the last 7 days across all my clients, and why?
• What is scheduled for each client next week? Flag any day with nothing on it.
• Cancel the Saturday post for the bakery; they are closed that day.

Changing plans

Plans change, and with organic posting they change often. content_cancel_scheduled does not delete a post: it goes back to an unscheduled draft, so the caption and image are kept and the post can be put back on the calendar later. A post can also be moved or cancelled directly on the Content calendar in the MCP Ads dashboard, without asking any assistant.

For a one-off post to a Facebook Page outside the calendar, such as a same-day announcement, meta_ads_create_page_post publishes to the Page directly. I still prefer the calendar for anything planned, because it keeps one record of what went out.