AS Amy Sullivan

Case File 04 · Workflow Blueprint · Declassified

Social Media Operations Agent

Nothing Auto-Posts

A bespoke workflow for LinkedIn-first B2B companies: agents research your competitors, trends, and traffic, draft written, image, and video content behind hard brand gates, and stage everything in an approval queue with a scheduler — and nothing posts without a human click.

BLUEPRINT — AN EXAMPLE OF THE BESPOKE SYSTEMS I DESIGN FOR CLIENTS · ARCHITECTURE PROVEN IN MY OWN PRODUCTION PIPELINE · STATUS: NOW BEING IMPLEMENTED FOR MY OWN BRAND — RECEIPTS TO FOLLOW

Who This Is For

Companies whose founders are the brand

This workflow is designed for B2B companies of roughly 5–50 people whose pipeline runs on LinkedIn visibility — where consistent, on-brand content is the #1 marketing lever and nobody has time to be a content team.

SUBJECT PROFILE 01

Recruiting & staffing agencies

Constant posting need, public competitor content, results tied to a measurable pipeline.

SUBJECT PROFILE 02

Consultancies & fractional execs

Thought leadership literally is the funnel — the partner's voice can't go dark for a month.

SUBJECT PROFILE 03

Law, CPA & advisory firms

Compliance requires human review before anything posts — this architecture makes that a feature, not a bottleneck.

SUBJECT PROFILE 04

B2B SaaS & agencies

Already sold on AI content — what's missing is the system that keeps it on-brand at volume.

The Problem

Content is a full-time job nobody was hired for

OBSTACLE 01

The founder bottleneck

The voice that wins deals belongs to one or two busy people. Content happens in bursts when they have a free evening, then goes silent for weeks — and the algorithm punishes silence.

OBSTACLE 02

The agency trap

Outsourced content is expensive and generic — ghostwriters who don't know the business produce posts that sound like everyone else's, and every revision cycle costs days.

OBSTACLE 03

The AI slop risk

Raw AI tools generate volume without judgment: off-brand phrasing, invented claims, wrong audience. Ungated automation posting in your name is a reputation incident waiting to happen.

The Workflow

Research → strategy → creation →
gates → human approval → schedule

The same architecture as my production agent pipeline — cheap models for volume work, strong models where quality is the bottleneck, hard gates instead of vibes, and a human holding every exit — aimed at content operations.

Research Lane · Competitor + Trend Scan

Public posts · industry news

Analytics Lane · Your Traffic + Post Data

Site analytics · engagement

Weekly Intel Brief · What's Working, Gaps

Fast, cheap models condense both lanes into one brief.

Content Calendar · Week of Themes + Slots

Drafted, not decided.

Human Gate 1 · Approve the Plan

Minutes, not hours. Strategy stays human.

Brand Inputs · Built Once, in Discovery

Voice guide · visual kit · banned-topics list

Creation Lane · Routed by Task Value

Written — posts · articles · carousels  |  Image — branded graphics on templates  |  Video — scripts · short-form cuts

Quality Gates · Hard Blocks

Brand-voice rubric · source check · banned topics · platform specs. Fail = back to draft, never forward.

Human Gate 2 · Approval Queue

Approve, edit, or reject. Nothing auto-posts.

Scheduler · Timed Slots per Platform

Missed slot = skip + notify.

FEEDBACK LOOP — ENGAGEMENT DATA FLOWS BACK INTO NEXT WEEK'S INTEL BRIEF · WEEKLY DIGEST VIA TELEGRAM OR EMAIL · API BUDGET CAPS ENFORCED ON ALL KEYS

Stage by Stage

What each stage actually does

STAGE 01 · RESEARCH & ANALYTICS

Watch the field, watch your numbers

Scheduled agent runs scan competitors' public posts and industry sources, while a second lane reads your site traffic and past post performance. Both condense into a weekly intel brief: what's landing, where the gaps are, which of your topics actually drive visits. High-volume, low-stakes work — routed to fast, cheap models.

STAGE 02 · STRATEGY — HUMAN GATE 1

The agent drafts the calendar; you decide it

From the brief, the agent proposes the week: themes, angles, formats, and posting slots. The owner reviews in minutes — keep, kill, or redirect. Strategy stays human; the agent just makes the decision cheap to arrive at.

STAGE 03 · CREATION

Multi-format drafts, routed by task value

Written posts and articles go to a strong writing model grounded in your sources and voice guide — quality is the bottleneck there. Branded graphics render onto locked visual templates. Video means scripts and short-form cut plans a phone can execute. Which model handles which task class is decided by discriminator-task evaluation, per client — never by brand loyalty.

STAGE 04 · QUALITY GATES

Hard blocks, not vibes

Every draft must clear deterministic gates before a human ever sees it: a brand-voice rubric score with anchored scales, a source check that flags any claim without grounding, the banned-topics list, and platform-spec checks (length, dimensions, hashtags). Failing drafts go back, never forward — the same soft-heuristics-fail lesson my production pipeline learned the hard way.

STAGE 05 · APPROVAL — HUMAN GATE 2

Nothing posts without a person

Everything that survives the gates stages to an approval queue the owner can clear from a phone: approve, edit, or reject, with the draft, its sources, and its gate scores in one view. A post published in your name is a reputation-carrying action — it gets the same human finish as my own pipeline's applications. For regulated firms, this queue is the compliance record.

STAGE 06 · SCHEDULE & LEARN

Timed slots, honest failures, closed loop

Approved content flows into per-platform slots and posts via API or scheduling tool — or stays in click-to-post mode if you want full manual control. A missed slot skips and notifies; the system never improvises. Engagement data feeds next week's intel brief, and a weekly Telegram or email digest shows what ran and what it did.

Model Routing

Cheapest model that clears the bar,
per task class

Task class Model class Why
Flagship written content Frontier writing model This is the output that carries the founder's name. Quality is the bottleneck — it gets the strongest model, grounded in sources and the voice guide.
Trend & competitor scanning Fast extraction model Runs constantly across many sources. Volume is the bottleneck; cheap per call matters more than eloquence.
Rubric scoring & gate checks Mid-tier model Judging against an anchored rubric is easier than writing — a mid-tier model clears the bar at a fraction of the cost.
Branded graphics Image model + locked templates Generation happens inside brand templates — fonts, colors, and layout are constraints, not suggestions.
Scheduling & digests No model — deterministic code Posting at 9:15 Tuesday is not a judgment call. Anything that can be plain code, is.

Specific models are chosen per client through discriminator-task evaluation on your actual content, with API budget caps on every key — so the stack is an evidence-based decision that gets re-tested as models improve, not a subscription that quietly renews.

Deployment Options

Two ways to run it — including on the subscription you already pay for

OPTION A · LIGHTEST FOOTPRINT

On your existing Claude subscription

The entire pipeline runs as scheduled Claude Code sessions (Routines) in the cloud: an orchestrator model coordinates cheaper worker models, research runs on built-in web tools, state lives in a private repo, and drafts stage to your review queue.

  • No API keys, no per-token billing
  • Flat cost: the Claude plan your team already has
  • Subject to your plan's usage limits — fine for a weekly cadence
OPTION B · HIGHEST HEADROOM

Multi-model API build on your infrastructure

For higher volume, non-Claude models in the routing mix, or pipelines that must run inside your own environment: an agent framework on a small server with per-call API access — the same architecture as my production pipeline.

  • Any model from any provider, routed by benchmark
  • Scales past subscription limits
  • Budget caps enforced on every key

Which option fits is a cost question with real numbers — posting cadence × content volume × model mix — estimated in discovery, not guessed.

Positioning

Where this sits against the alternatives

VS. DOING IT YOURSELF

The founder's judgment stays in the two places it matters — the calendar and the approval queue — and stops being spent on blank pages, resizing graphics, and remembering to post.

VS. AN AGENCY RETAINER

The system is built once, documented, and owned by you — grounded in your sources and voice rather than a ghostwriter's best guess, with revision cycles measured in minutes in a queue.

VS. RAW AI TOOLS

The difference is everything around the model: grounding, brand gates, an audit trail, budget caps, and a human between the draft and your reputation. Tools generate; systems are accountable.

How It Gets Built

Trust is dialed up, not assumed

PHASE 01

Discovery

Build the brand inputs once: voice guide from your best existing content, visual kit, banned-topics list, competitor set, and the quality rubric your gates will enforce.

PHASE 02

Pilot, heavily gated

The pipeline runs with every gate at maximum and a human reviewing everything. Early rejections aren't failures — they're the training data that tunes the rubric and the templates.

PHASE 03

Handoff

Your team owns the queue, the calendar gate, and the documented system. Oversight eases where the gates have earned it — the human click on publishing never goes away.

What gets measured is instrumented from day one: hours spent per post before and after, drafts produced per week, gate rejection rate, and engagement per post — so the system's value is a number you read, not a claim you're asked to believe.

Cleared for Adaptation

Want this built for your company?

This blueprint is the starting point — discovery tunes it to your brand, your compliance needs, and the platforms your buyers actually read.

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