Running social media with Plank

Running social media with Plank

The Social media template sets up a workspace where your assistant runs Instagram, a Telegram channel and Threads for your business. You decide what goes out; the assistant writes, adapts, schedules, publishes and watches that the connections stay alive.

Everything is in place before the first message: the tables, the scripts and six pages in the social/ folder.

One idea, three posts

A post starts as one idea — a new service, a client story, useful advice, a piece of news. The assistant writes a version for each channel, because the same text rarely works in all three: Instagram leads with the picture and hides everything after the first ~125 characters, a Telegram channel is read like a letter and can carry a button, and a Threads post is capped at 500 bytes — about 250 Russian letters — so a longer thought becomes a short chain.

The four rubrics — product, case, expert post, news — with ready caption templates are in social/rubrics.md. Your brand voice, audience and the things you never say go in social/brand.md; the assistant reads it before writing.

Nothing goes out without your approval

Each post moves through Черновик → На согласовании → Запланировано → Опубликовано. The assistant can take a post as far as На согласовании. Only you move it to Запланировано — with Одобрить и запланировать on the content plan, or by telling the assistant in chat. A draft is never published just because its time came, and approval is tied to the text you saw: if a post is edited after you approved it, the approval is withdrawn and it waits for you again.

Once approved, the post goes out at its time. No platform lets an outside service schedule posts, so Plank keeps its own queue and checks it every hour. If you need it out right now, ask — the assistant does a dry run first and shows you exactly what will be published.

If something fails, the post is marked Ошибка with a plain sentence saying why, and the scheduled run says so in its chat. One case is handled carefully on purpose: if the connection dropped in the middle of publishing, Plank cannot know whether the post went out. It is marked as unknown, and it is not retried until someone has looked at the channel — posting twice on a public account is worse than posting late.

Access that expires

Instagram and Threads give access for about 60 days. It can be renewed only while it still works; once it has expired, only the account owner can reconnect. This is the most common reason social posting "suddenly stops" — our own Threads access once expired and nothing said so for months.

So the Каналы page leads with it. Every morning the assistant checks each channel, renews access automatically when fewer than 14 days are left, and warns you 7 days before expiry. If renewal failed, the warning names the account owner — the person who will need to sign in.

A Telegram bot has no expiry; what the check verifies there is that the bot is still an administrator of the channel.

Comments

The assistant collects new comments from Instagram and Threads (and from the discussion group of your Telegram channel, if it has one) and drafts replies. On Комментарии you edit a draft and press Одобрить ответ; approved replies are sent together. Complaints go На эскалацию — a person answers those, not the assistant.

The weekly report

Отчёт shows, per channel and week: followers and the change, reach, impressions, engagement and engagement rate, and how many posts went out. The numbers arrive through the assistant: tell it the week's figures in chat, or send screenshots of Instagram's, Threads' or Telegram's own statistics, and it records them for the right week. A channel with no numbers for the week shows Попросить ассистента внести цифры, which asks it in chat for exactly that channel and week. The page has no form for entering a new week; to correct numbers already there, press Изменить on the channel's card and edit them in place. The table is already shaped for loading the numbers automatically later.

Competitors: what goes viral

Name the Instagram accounts you want to learn from — competitors, or simply accounts whose content you like — and the assistant reads their recent posts through Instagram's official API, together with your own account. Конкуренты shows each account's usual numbers and the posts that did much better than usual: «×4,2» means four times the views (for a video) or likes and comments (for anything else) that THIS account usually gets, so you see an idea that worked rather than a big audience. Each post shows its cover; Instagram's picture links expire after a few days, so an old one reads «превью устарело» until the next refresh. Below the list the page counts what those posts share — format, weekday, hour, hashtags.

On any post, Сценарий по мотивам asks the assistant for a script for your business in the same mould: second by second (a hook in the first three seconds, the build, the turn, the call to action), about your product in your words, saved to the content plan as a draft with a link to the original. It borrows the mechanics — the hook, the structure, the format — never the text or the video. Расшифровать и разобрать has the assistant download the video, transcribe it and note why it worked. Nothing is published without your approval, as with every other post.

What it cannot see: a competitor's reach, audience or private statistics — Instagram gives those only to the account's owner. Private and personal accounts cannot be read. It needs Instagram connected through Facebook (or your Meta ads connection, which it only reads from). Reels with licensed music come without a downloadable file and are analysed from their caption. Searching by hashtag needs an extra approval from Meta. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are not covered.

Connecting your accounts

Подключение walks through it, and the assistant does most of it with you:

• Telegram — create a bot with @BotFather, send the token to the assistant, and make the bot an administrator of your channel with permission to post. See Connecting Telegram.
• Instagram — the account must be a Professional one (Business or Creator). See Posting to Instagram.
• Threads — connected through a Meta app with the Threads use case; access lasts 60 days and is renewed as described above. See Posting to Threads.

Limits worth knowing

Pictures and videos have to be reachable by a public link at the moment of publishing — the platforms download them themselves. The assistant shares the file from your workspace for that.

What it does not do (yet)

• Instagram Direct. Replying to direct messages needs a separate Meta approval process.
• Replies without approval. Every reply waits for you.
• Automatic statistics. For now the assistant records the numbers you give it.
• Polls and Threads carousels. The platforms have them; the kit does not yet.