Agent: Channel Distribution Planner

This is Part 12 of a 16-part series on building your AI VP of Marketing with Claude Cowork. Previous: Skill: Social Media Post Creator | Next: Measuring What Matters

From Content to Distribution

You have content. By this point in the series, you have a pipeline that produces blog posts, email copy, ad headlines, landing page sections, newsletter blurbs, and platform-specific social media posts. The Content Repurposer (Article 9) gave you multiple formats from a single source. The Social Media Post Creator (Article 11) gave you posts tailored to each platform's conventions.

That is the production side. But production without distribution is a filing cabinet. You wrote the posts. They are sitting in a document. Nobody has seen them.

Distribution is the work of getting content in front of people at the right time, on the right platform, in the right sequence. It answers the questions that production leaves open: When does the LinkedIn post go live? Does the Twitter thread run before or after the email campaign? If you are cross-posting the same core message across three platforms, do they all fire on Monday, or do you stagger them across the week so each one gets its own day of attention?

Your pipeline produces the content. Nothing in the pipeline decides when that content reaches people, on which platform first, or how the pieces sequence across the week. Without distribution logic, content ships whenever you remember to post it -- no sequence, no rhythm, and no way to tell whether timing affected performance because the timing was never intentional.

A distribution plan makes the timing intentional. It takes the content you have already produced and maps it across platforms, days, and time slots. It accounts for platform-specific best practices -- LinkedIn posts perform differently on Tuesday morning than Friday afternoon. It staggers related content so your audience does not see the same message three times in one day. It builds a weekly rhythm that your audience starts to expect and your team can actually follow.

That is what this agent does. You feed it the social media posts and campaign assets from your pipeline. It hands you back a weekly calendar.

What a Distribution Plan Includes

Before you build, get clear on what the agent produces. A distribution plan is not a list of posts. It is a schedule with reasoning behind every placement.

Platform assignments. Each piece of content goes to a specific platform. A 250-word thought leadership post goes to LinkedIn. A punchy one-liner with a link goes to Twitter/X. A visual carousel goes to Instagram. The agent should not dump everything everywhere -- it should match content to the platform where that content format performs best.

Time slots. Not just the day, but the time of day. LinkedIn engagement peaks during business hours on weekdays. Twitter/X moves faster and rewards frequency across the day. Instagram performs differently on weekends than weekdays. A good distribution plan specifies morning, midday, or afternoon for each post, based on general platform patterns and any audience data you provide.

Hashtag strategy. Each platform has different hashtag conventions. LinkedIn uses three to five targeted hashtags. Instagram supports up to thirty, but ten to fifteen focused ones outperform a wall of generic tags. Twitter/X uses one to two, or none. The agent should generate platform-appropriate hashtags for each post, not a universal list applied across the board.

Cross-posting logic. When you have the same core message going to multiple platforms, the distribution plan should stagger them. If your LinkedIn post goes out Tuesday morning, the Twitter/X version should run Wednesday or Thursday -- not the same hour. Cross-posting is about reaching different audiences at different moments, not broadcasting the same thing simultaneously to the same people who follow you everywhere.

Engagement prompts. For platforms where conversation matters -- LinkedIn especially -- the plan should include a suggested first comment or engagement prompt. The post itself delivers the content. The engagement prompt invites a response: a question, a poll, a "what has been your experience with this?" that gives your audience a reason to interact rather than scroll past.

Posting cadence. The plan should reflect a sustainable rhythm. Three posts a day across four platforms is not sustainable for a solo business owner. Two to three posts per week per platform, with one or two engagement touchpoints, is a realistic starting point. The agent should match cadence to your stated capacity, not to an idealized content calendar that falls apart by Wednesday.

Build with /skill-creator

Open your Cowork project and run:

/skill-creator

When Cowork asks what you want to build, paste the following:

Build a Channel Distribution Planner agent that takes a set of social media
posts and campaign assets as input and produces a weekly cross-channel
publishing calendar.

The agent should:

1. Read the input content and identify each piece: platform, format,
   topic, and any associated campaign or blog post it supports.

2. Reference CLAUDE.md for the business's active marketing channels
   and any stated preferences about posting frequency or timing.

3. Assign each piece of content to a specific day and time slot
   (morning, midday, or afternoon) based on platform best practices:
   - LinkedIn: weekday mornings and midday, Tuesday through Thursday
     highest engagement
   - Twitter/X: weekday mornings and early afternoon, spread across
     the week for frequency
   - Instagram: weekday lunches and evenings, weekends for lifestyle
     content
   - Email: Tuesday through Thursday mornings, avoid Mondays and Fridays
   Adjust these defaults if the business context in CLAUDE.md specifies
   different audience behavior.

4. Stagger cross-posted content. If the same core message appears on
   multiple platforms, space them at least one day apart. The LinkedIn
   version and the Twitter version of the same blog promotion should
   not run on the same day.

5. Generate platform-appropriate hashtags for each post:
   - LinkedIn: 3-5 industry and topic hashtags
   - Instagram: 10-15 mix of broad and niche hashtags
   - Twitter/X: 1-2 hashtags or none if the post reads better without
   Do not use generic hashtags like #business or #marketing unless they
   are genuinely relevant to the specific post.

6. For LinkedIn and Instagram posts, include a suggested engagement
   prompt -- a question or invitation to comment that relates to the
   post content.

7. Present the output as a weekly calendar table with columns for:
   Day, Time, Platform, Content Summary, Hashtags, and Notes
   (engagement prompts, cross-post references, or dependencies).

8. After the calendar, include a "Posting Notes" section with any
   sequencing rationale, dependency flags (e.g., "blog post must be
   live before Day 2 LinkedIn post"), and suggested adjustments if
   capacity is limited.

The agent should ask clarifying questions if the input content does
not specify target platforms or if CLAUDE.md does not list active
marketing channels.

Cowork builds the agent configuration. It asks a few clarifying questions -- the agent name, where to store it, file access needs. Accept the defaults or adjust for your project structure. The agent definition lands in .claude/agents/.

Generate a Weekly Calendar

Pull up the social media posts from your latest content cycle. If you built the Social Media Post Creator in Article 11, you have platform-specific posts ready to schedule. If you are working from scratch, here is a sample set for Tideway Bookkeeping based on their "5 Tax Mistakes Freelancers Make" blog post:

## Social Posts for Distribution

### LinkedIn Post
Tax season should not take freelancers 8 hours. Most of the time goes
to fixing problems that should not exist -- mixed accounts, missed
quarterly payments, uncategorized expenses.

We wrote up the five mistakes we see most often and what to do about
each one. The quarterly payment issue alone saves most freelancers a
few hundred dollars in penalties.

Link: [5 Tax Mistakes Freelancers Make]

### Twitter/X Thread
1/ Most freelancers spend 8 hours on tax prep.
Tideway clients spend 20 minutes.
The difference? Five common mistakes that are all fixable.

2/ Mistake #1: Mixing personal and business transactions.
If your Friday coffee runs and your software subscriptions live in the
same account, tax time is a sorting exercise.
Fix: Separate accounts. Takes 30 minutes to set up.

3/ Full breakdown of all five mistakes on the blog.
[link]

### Instagram Carousel
Slide 1: "5 Tax Mistakes Costing You Money"
Slide 2: Mixing personal + business expenses
Slide 3: Skipping quarterly estimated payments
Slide 4: Forgetting home office deductions
Slide 5: Ignoring mileage tracking
Slide 6: Filing sole proprietor when S-corp saves thousands
Slide 7: "Fix all five -- link in bio"

### Email Newsletter Blurb
We published a new guide this week: the five tax mistakes we see
freelancers make every single year. The one about quarterly estimated
payments alone probably saves most readers a few hundred dollars in
penalties. Worth ten minutes of your time.
CTA: Read the five mistakes

Now run the Distribution Planner agent against this content:

Run the Channel Distribution Planner agent on the following social posts
and campaign assets:
[paste the content above]

The agent reads the content, checks your CLAUDE.md for channel preferences and posting frequency, and produces a weekly calendar. Here is representative output:

Weekly Distribution Calendar

Posting Notes

Sequencing: The blog post must be live before any social promotion begins. All social posts link back to the blog, so a broken link on Tuesday morning undermines the entire week.

Cross-post stagger: The LinkedIn post and Twitter/X thread cover the same core message but run on different days. LinkedIn goes Tuesday to catch the midweek business audience. Twitter/X goes Wednesday to give each platform its own moment. Instagram runs Thursday to close the week with a visual format.

Email timing: The newsletter goes out Tuesday alongside the LinkedIn post. Subscribers and LinkedIn followers overlap, but the formats serve different purposes -- email drives a direct click, LinkedIn builds visibility. Running them the same day is acceptable because the channels do not compete for the same attention.

Capacity note: This calendar assumes you can handle one post per day plus the blog publish on Monday. If that is too much, drop the Week 2 LinkedIn reshare first and the Friday buffer becomes a real day off. The Tuesday-through-Thursday core is the minimum viable schedule.

Your version will reflect your platforms, your content, and your cadence. The structure is what matters: every post has a day, a time, a platform rationale, and supporting context. The calendar answers "what goes where and when" so you are not making those decisions at 9 AM on a Tuesday while trying to remember which post was supposed to go out today.

Adapting to Your Rhythm

The default calendar above assumes a standard content marketing rhythm: one blog post per week, three to four social posts across platforms, one email send. That works for Tideway Bookkeeping. It might not work for you.

Adjust for capacity

If you are a solo operator who does marketing in stolen hours, a five-day publishing calendar is ambitious. Tell the agent:

I can only handle two social posts per week plus one email send.
Restructure the calendar to prioritize the highest-impact placements
and drop everything else.

The agent cuts the calendar to essentials. It keeps the LinkedIn post (highest engagement for B2B) and the email send (direct to inbox), drops the Instagram carousel (time-intensive to produce), and moves the Twitter thread to the following week. Two posts and an email. Sustainable beats ambitious.

Adjust for audience behavior

The default timing -- Tuesday through Thursday, business hours -- reflects general B2B patterns. Your audience might be different. If your customers are restaurant owners who check their phones at 6 AM before the morning rush, tell the agent:

My audience is restaurant owners. They check social media early morning
(5:30-7:00 AM) and late evening (9:00-11:00 PM). Adjust the posting
times to match their schedule, not standard business hours.

The agent shifts the entire calendar. The LinkedIn post moves to 6:30 AM Tuesday. The Twitter thread moves to 9:30 PM Wednesday. The timing reflects when your specific audience is actually scrolling, not when the average professional is online.

Adjust for platform priorities

Maybe you have tested LinkedIn and Twitter/X, and LinkedIn drives five times the traffic. Tell the agent to weight accordingly:

LinkedIn drives 80% of our social traffic. Twitter/X drives almost
nothing but we maintain a presence. Prioritize LinkedIn with two posts
per week. Twitter/X gets one cross-post of the best-performing LinkedIn
content, posted two days later.

The agent restructures. LinkedIn gets Tuesday and Thursday posts -- the original plus a follow-up angle or a reshare with a new hook. Twitter/X gets one post on the following Monday, recycling whichever LinkedIn post got the most traction. The distribution plan reflects your actual data instead of treating all platforms as equals.

Save your preferences

Once you find a rhythm that works, tell Cowork to remember it:

Save my distribution preferences: two LinkedIn posts per week (Tuesday
and Thursday mornings), one email send (Tuesday), one Twitter/X
cross-post (following Monday). Instagram is paused until Q3.

The agent references these preferences on future runs. Instead of generating a full five-platform calendar every time, it produces a plan that matches your established rhythm. You still review and adjust, but the baseline is already tuned.

# Channel Distribution Planner

## Role
You are a Channel Distribution Planner. You take finished social media
posts and campaign assets and produce a weekly cross-channel publishing
calendar.

## Context
Before generating any output, read:
- CLAUDE.md for active marketing channels, posting frequency, and
  audience information
- .claude/rules/brand-voice.md for voice guidelines (applies to
  engagement prompts and hashtag tone)

## Input
A set of social media posts and campaign assets, each identified by
platform, format, and topic. The content has already been written and
voice-checked.

## Process
1. Catalog each piece of content: platform, format, topic, associated
   campaign or source blog post.
2. Assign each piece to a day and time slot based on platform defaults:
   - LinkedIn: Tue-Thu, 9-11 AM
   - Twitter/X: Mon-Fri, 8 AM and 1 PM
   - Instagram: Tue-Thu 12 PM, weekends for lifestyle
   - Email: Tue-Thu, 9-10 AM
3. Stagger cross-posted content by at least one day.
4. Generate platform-appropriate hashtags (LinkedIn 3-5, Instagram
   10-15, Twitter/X 1-2 or none).
5. Add engagement prompts for LinkedIn and Instagram posts.
6. Flag dependencies (e.g., blog must be live before social links).

## Output
Weekly calendar table: Day, Time, Platform, Content Summary, Hashtags,
Notes. Followed by a Posting Notes section with sequencing rationale
and capacity adjustments.

## Rules
- Do not assign content to platforms not listed in CLAUDE.md
- If input content does not specify platforms, ask before proceeding
- Match cadence to stated business capacity
- Never schedule more than two posts on the same platform on the
  same day

What is Next

You have content, and now you have a schedule for getting it in front of people. The pipeline produces, the distribution plan publishes. But here is the question nobody asks until months into a content marketing effort: is any of this working?

Publishing on a schedule feels productive. A full weekly calendar looks like progress. But traffic, engagement, and conversions are the only numbers that matter, and right now you are not tracking them in any structured way. You are guessing.

In Article 13, you build a measurement framework. Your VP helps you define what "working" means for your specific business, pick the metrics that actually indicate progress toward your marketing goals, and set up a review cadence so you catch what is underperforming before you have wasted a quarter on it. The distribution plan tells you what to publish and when. The measurement framework tells you whether it mattered.

This is Part 12 of 16 in the Your AI VP of Marketing series. Previous: Skill: Social Media Post Creator | Next: Measuring What Matters